Negotiating a Lasting Peace in Ukraine
Reprinted from Common Dreams.
There should be little doubt about how a lasting peace can be established in Ukraine. In April 2022, Russia and Ukraine were on the verge of signing a peace agreement in Istanbul, with the Turkish Government acting as mediator. The U.S. and U.K. talked Ukraine out of signing the agreement, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have since died or been seriously injured. Yet the framework of the Istanbul Process still provides the basis of peace today.
The draft peace agreement (dated April 15, 2022) and the Istanbul Communique (dated March 29, 2022) on which it was based, offered a sensible and straightforward way to end the conflict. It’s true that three years after Ukraine broke off the negotiations, during which time Ukraine has incurred major losses, Ukraine will eventually cede more territory than it would have in April 2022 — yet it will gain the essentials: sovereignty, international security arrangements, and peace.
In the 2022 negotiations, the agreed issues were Ukraine’s permanent neutrality and international security guarantees for Ukraine. The final disposition of the contested territories was to be decided over time, based on negotiations between the parties, during which both sides committed to refrain from using force to change boundaries. Given the current realities, Ukraine will cede Crimea and parts of southern and eastern Ukraine, reflecting the battlefield outcomes of the past three years.
Such an agreement can be signed almost immediately and in fact is likely to be signed in the coming months. As the U.S. is no longer going to underwrite the war, in which Ukraine would suffer yet more casualties, destruction, and loss of territory, Zelensky is recognizing that it’s time to negotiate. In his address to Congress, President Donald Trump quoted Zelensky as saying “Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace closer.”
The pending issues in April 2022 involved the specifics of security guarantees for Ukraine and the revised boundaries of Ukraine and Russia. The main issue regarding the guarantees involved the role of Russia as a co-guarantor of the agreement. Ukraine insisted that the Western co-guarantors should be able to act with or without Russia’s assent, so as not to give Russia a veto over the Ukraine’s security. Russia sought to avoid a situation where Ukraine and its Western co-guarantors would manipulate the agreement to justify renewed force against Russia. Both sides have a point.
The best resolution, in my view, is to put the security guarantees under the authority of the UN Security Council. This means that the U.S., China, Russia, U.K., and France would all be co-guarantors, together with the rest of the UN Security Council. This would subject the security guarantees to global scrutiny. Yes, Russia could veto a subsequent UN Security Council resolution regarding Ukraine, but it would then face China’s opprobrium and the world’s if Russia were to act arbitrarily in defiance of the will of the rest of the UN.
Regarding the final disposition of borders, some background is very important. Before the violent overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014, Russia did not make any territorial demands vis-à-vis Ukraine. Yanukovych favored neutrality for Ukraine, opposed NATO membership, and peacefully negotiated with Russia a 20-year lease for Russia’s naval base in Sevastopol, Crimea, home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet since 1783. After Yanukovych was toppled and replaced by a U.S.-backed, pro-NATO government, Russia moved quickly to retake Crimea, to prevent the naval base from falling into NATO hands. During 2014 to 2021, Russia did not push for annexing any other Ukrainian territory. Russia called for the political autonomy of the ethnic Russian regions of eastern Ukraine (Donetsk and Luhansk) that broke away from Kyiv immediately after Yanukovych was toppled.
The Minsk II agreement was to implement autonomy. The Minsk framework was inspired in part by the autonomy of the ethnic Germany region of South Tyrol in Italy. German Chancellor Angela Merkel knew the South Tyrol experience and viewed it as a precedent for similar autonomy in the Donbas. Unfortunately, Ukraine strongly resisted autonomy for the Donbas, and the U.S. backed Ukraine in rejecting autonomy. Germany and France, which ostensibly were guarantors of Minsk II, stood by silently as the agreement was thrown aside by Ukraine and the United States.
Following six years in which Minsk II was not implemented, during which the U.S.-armed Ukrainian military continued to shell the Donbas in an attempt to subdue and recover the breakaway provinces, Russia recognized Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states on February 21, 2022. The status of Donetsk and Luhansk in the Istanbul process was still to be finalized. Perhaps a return to Minsk II and its actual implementation by Ukraine (recognizing the autonomy of the two regions in the Ukrainian constitution) could have been ultimately agreed. When Ukraine walked away from the negotiating table, alas, the issue was moot. A few months later, on September 30, 2022, Russia annexed the two oblasts as well as two others, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
The sad lesson is this. Ukraine’s loss of territory would have been averted entirely but for the violent coup that toppled Yanukovych and brought in a U.S.-backed regime intent on NATO membership. The loss of territory in eastern Ukraine could have been averted had the U.S. pushed Ukraine to implement the UN Security Council-backed Minsk II agreement. The loss of territory in eastern Ukraine could probably have been averted as late as April 2022 in the Istanbul Process, but the U.S. blocked the peace agreement. Now, after 11 years of war since the overthrow of Yanukovych, and as a result of Ukraine’s losses on the battlefield, Ukraine will cede Crimea and other territories of eastern and southern Ukraine in the coming negotiations.
Europe has other interests that it should be negotiating with Russia, notably security for the Baltic States and for European-Russian security arrangements more generally. The Baltic States feel very vulnerable to Russia, understandably so given their history, but they are also gravely and unnecessarily adding to their vulnerability by a stream of repressive measures taken against their ethnic Russian citizenry, including measures to repress the use of the Russian language and measures to cut their citizens’ ties with the Russian Orthodox Church. Baltic state leaders are also provocatively engaging in remarkable Russophobic rhetoric. Ethnic Russians are about 25% of the population of both Estonia and Latvia, and around 5% in Lithuania. Security for the Baltic States should be achieved through security-enhancing measures taken on both sides, including the respect for minority rights of the ethnic Russian populations, and by refraining from vitriolic rhetoric.
The time has arrived for diplomacy that brings collective security to Europe, Ukraine, and Russia. Europe should open direct talks with Russia and should urge Russia and Ukraine to sign a peace agreement based on the March 29 Istanbul Communique and the April 15, 2022 draft peace agreement. Peace in Ukraine should by followed by the creation of a new system of collective security for all of Europe, stretching from Britain to the Urals, and indeed beyond.
Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author, most recently, of A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism (2020). Other books include: Building the New American Economy: Smart, Fair, and Sustainable (2017), and The Age of Sustainable Development, (2015) with Ban Ki-moon.
The Economics of Ukraine’s War Overshadow the Quest for Peace
Photograph Source: Ministry of Defense of Ukraine – CC BY-SA 2.0
The American disaster in Vietnam was supposed to have put to rest the folly of US military interventions to shore up tottering regimes abroad. The so-called Vietnam “syndrome” held that America might make quick “surgical” strikes without the use of ground troops – with pinpoint air attacks, or rapidly-deployed special operations forces, for example – but the cost to blood and treasure of prolonged invasions with regular military units was deemed too high to be contemplated again. And yet in Iraq, and then Afghanistan, the United States did just that – with predictably disastrous results. Given this well-worn track record, the Biden administration’s overnight success in drumming up public support for a massive military campaign against Russia in Ukraine would seem surprising. In the tense weeks of failed diplomacy to avert a Russian invasion, and even more so after Putin decided to move forward, voices of dissent raised questions about the origins and history of the conflict and Western motives for intervention. They included venerable scholars and strategists like John Mearsheimer, and even the illustrious George Kennan of early Cold War fame, both of whom warned that the United States was overstating Russia’s aggressive intentions while underestimating Putin’s staying power.
If regime change was the secret objective, it wouldn’t work, they warned. Even worse, ignoring Russia’s legitimate need for a buffer zone on the edge of its European “sphere of influence,” and insisting on Ukraine’s entry into NATO, could threaten an all-out conflagration. They were right, of course. Biden & Co. missed opportunities to negotiate an accord to appease and deflect Russia’s concerns and in retrospect. seemed hell-bent on provoking Putin to invade – which he did, with disastrous results for Ukraine, and indeed, the United States.
We now know that Biden repeatedly lied to the American public about Ukraine’s alleged “progress” in the war and has consistently underestimated Russia’s resilience. Biden has also lied about the full extent of US involvement in support of Ukraine’s own defense forces. While publicly drawing the line against supplying US jet fighters to conduct air combat with Russia, the administration appears to have provided extensive satellite intelligence as well as clandestine paramilitary support to bolster – and in some cases – direct Ukraine’s ground campaign. Though the war appears at present to be a stalemate, voices in the West are continuing to insist, recklessly, that further pressure on Russia, perhaps fueled by a higher level US intervention, could push Putin to collapse.
We may one day learn – through the release of secret national intelligence estimates and other classified documents – why Biden & Co. decided to gamble on another unwinnable ground war at such an enormous human and fiscal cost. But there are other visible signs of the real stakes that might have driven the American gamble. One is the opportunity that the Ukraine war has provided to test out a brand new technology of warfare – military drones – that the Pentagon is clearly counting on as the fulcrum of its global war readiness and deployment. In its earliest stages, the Ukraine war may have resembled battlefields from the past, with both sides employing conventional weaponry, including tanks, artillery and mortars that allowed them to slog at a snail’s pace in ground offensives and pitched battles resembling World War II. But within a year, drones provided by Russia, the United States as well as by Turkey and Iran, have transformed the tactics and the pace of the war. Now, some 70-80% of the war casualties are due to aerial drone attacks. As the New York Times reported just last week: “The Ukrainians make use of a wide range of explosives to arm drones. They drop grenades, mortar rounds or mines on enemy positions. They repurpose anti-tank weapons and cluster munitions to fit onto drones, or they use anti-personnel fragmentation warheads and others with thermobaric charges to destroy buildings and bunkers.”
This is hardly new: Much the same dynamic unfolded during the Iraq War in the early 2000s. Once the invasion got underway, Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon planners began deploying a panoply of new air weaponry that had yet to be tested in battle and also began experimenting with operational techniques on the ground for eventual use elsewhere. Of course, having the hapless Iraqi defense forces as adversaries was a bit like shooting fish in a barrel – but as always, making progress as a foreign invader – which naturally stokes nationalist resentment – still proved more difficult than expected. For a much larger war against a more formidable adversary – Russia or China – the odds would not be stacked so clearly in America’s favor. But in the Pentagon’s view, proxy wars involving regional powers like Iraq or Iran – or now Ukraine – are the most likely war-fighting scenarios America needs to prepare for. As In Iraq – and before in Vietnam – testing grounds — “living laboratories,” some planners call them — are needed to ensure that a new generation of military weaponry can actually do the job beyond mere training and mock warfare exercises.
And so it is with drones, which are now being envisioned as the centerpiece of future remotely-controlled electronic battlefields. While the American public’s overall awareness of drones remains low – and largely limited to periodic media reports about their role in delivering pizzas or aiding local law enforcement – drones are the focus of Pentagon planning for strategic and tactical surveillance and for combat and combat support nearly everywhere now – from the depths of the oceans to the far reaches and heights of outer space. These next-generation drones are not the controversial ones Americans may have first heard about during the Iraq War: the large “Predator” and “Reaper” drones that launched missile strikes on enemy command posts and secret meetings of rebel jihad commanders. Supposedly laser-like in their precision, they sometimes killed large numbers of civilians, including on a few occasions, US citizens, inspiring outrage from the likes of Sen, Rand Paul. President Obama massively escalated those strikes during the Afghan war, from an ever-expanding number of global bases. Arguably they helped keep Afghani forces in the game against the Taliban and allowed the United States to keep ISIS and its allies on the run, but in those conflicts, drones were still viewed as a critical tactical component of a larger strategic war effort – not its key fulcrum and means of execution, as the Ukraine effort now seems to foreshadow.
It’s worth considering, by official estimates, just how much the drone industry has grown over the past decade – and to appreciate projections for its growth through 2035 and beyond. As with civilian commercial aviation after World War II, military innovation – though much of it classified, and invisible – is largely driving the drone industry’s commercial expansion. The military drone marketwas valued at roughly $22 billion in 2024, but is expected to nearly triple to $57 billion by 2033. The commercial market – which includes drones for law enforcement, real estate infrastructure inspection, medical aid and consumer goods delivery and even conservation – is already larger, and also growing exponentially fast, reaching about $65 billion by 2032. But in the United States, there are lots of “dual use” federal contracts, usually beginning with military applications, that will fuel the growth of both markets. And in fact, official military estimates are misleading: much of the nation’s military drone development is highly classified and its budget remains hidden in other “official” appropriations – for the CIA and other agencies – that may be reported to selected congressional subcommittees, but are never acknowledged publicly.
The Ukraine war is not the only spur to the ever escalating worldwide drone arms race. China, Russia and North Korea are all pushing forward with major drone space war initiatives, including the positioning of permanent drone satellites in deep space, as well as new drone technologies for fighting AI-driven ground wars completely autonomously – that is, without the need for remote pilots directing their operations. The US air force is also experimenting with autonomous unmanned jet aircraft that can engage enemy fighters without remote pilots. In theory, within 20 years or more, the Pentagon envisions waging wars – or threatening them – on completely autonomous battlefields – in space, on land, at sea, and even underwater. It’s a Brave New World, where ground troops are no longer needed even for tactical support operations, and in theory, the cost of these wars will also be greatly reduced.
Presently, though, the Ukraine war remains the center of drone development – with Russia, Turkey, Iran, Israel and other countries using the country as a testing ground – and ever expanding market – for their own drone industry development. No one probably expected this dynamic to unfold in the immediate aftermath of the Russian invasion, but it’s an inevitable one. As in the past, the Ukraine war has become – and not just for the US – a crucible and laboratory for weapons innovation, and once that dynamic takes hold, it’s self-perpetuating, and more importantly, without policy restraint, it can easily become an impediment to achieving peace. Ukraine, in fact, is fashioning a fledgling drone industry of its own, and not just for domestic use. The country’s up-and-coming native suppliers want to export not just their technology but also their expertise fighting against one of the world’s great superpowers, which will soon place them in demand on the world market. In short, the more the Ukraine war is allowed to gurgle on – and indeed to escalate to more reckless heights – the more difficult it will be to end. Trump, for all his “America First” bombast, is right about one thing: this war should end now, and not be prolonged indefinitely, a goal that Zelensky and his neocon allies – and the ever burgeoning arms industry – seem intent on promoting for reasons of their own.
Ukraine’s Untapped Mineral Wealth
Trump’s support for “peace now” – as self-serving ads it is – exposes another key strategic motive that has driven this senseless war from the start: access to Ukraine’s untapped mineral wealth, including huge deposits of uranium (the largest in Europe, critical for nuclear reactors) and lithium but also rare earth metals that could prove vital to the future of the electronics and defense industry. Trump, ever the rapacious and unabashed capitalist, has made no secret of America’s desire to covet these resources for US-based companies and to keep them out of Russian and Chinese hands – which makes him something of a national security truth teller, in fact. It seems to be one of the long-standing semi-secret codicils of US foreign and defense policy to downplay and gaslight the US public about the venal economic motives that so often underlie America’s foreign adventurism. Iraq had abundantreserves of oil and natural gas – which made it a prime target for US intervention– and Afghanistan – scene of another bloody American quagmire – is one of the world’s leading sources of untapped lithium reserves as well as diamonds, rubies and emeralds. Libya, whose oil has long fueled European industrial production, and which contains one of the world’s largest supplies of oil reserves, was another coveted prize which led France to beg the Obama administration to launch an ill-advised intervention to help topple the regime of Moammar Ghadafi.
But here’s the rub: These lucrative mineral reserves remain almost completely untapped and for the foreseeable future at least, untappable. All of these countries – and now including Ukraine – have virtually no extractive infrastructure of their own to exploit their natural wealth. Which leaves a host of greedy foreign powers looking to get their hooks into them, with war and political instability the perfect pretext to intervene to try to arrange things to their own advantage – in the US case, of course, under the rubric of establishing “peace” and a friendly, pro-Western “democracy.”
It’s not quite clear just how extensive Ukraine’s various mineral resources might be, but the magnitude of its mineral “prize” may be one of the greatest of all. Now that Trump, in his own inimitable fashion, has decided to “break the code” on this issue by openly discussing the negotiation of US mineral rights as a condition for possible American security guarantees, the media, in a spate of stories published over the past two weeks, seems intent on gaslighting the American public and downplaying what is widely known about the extent of these reserves. In fact, Ukraine has long been celebrated for them, with some experts calling the country a strategic minerals “powerhouse.” According to an authoritative report produced by the Center for International Relations and Sustainable Development (CIRSD): “Prior to the 2022 Russian invasion, Ukraine registered 20,000 deposits of ore-bearing minerals, including 117 of the 120 most globally used metals and minerals. Ukrainian and international authorities reported that the country was home to the world’s top recoverable coal, gas, iron, manganese, nickel, ore, titanium, and uranium reserves. Before the war, Ukraine was among the largest suppliers of noble gasses such as neon (for microchip-making) and boasted the most significant known lithium and rare earth deposits in Europe.”
The way the minerals issue plays – or could play – in the future of the Ukraine war could be tricky, however. For Trump and global multinationals, it’s a major reason for seeking a favorable peace settlement that could force Russia to cede part of the occupied areas of Ukraine that contain some of those vast mineral deposits – freeing up Western access – in exchange for a demilitarized zone that protects Russian security interests. But for Zelensky and the current regime, guaranteeing Western – or even Russian– access to those same mineral resources is a bargaining chip to keep his regime afloat and generous US aid flowing, thus prolonging the war. Zelensky and his backers still think they can force Putin to concede – against all evidence to the contrary. Meanwhile, even some Western companies are hedging their bet – by providing backdoor satellite intelligence to Russia to improve Putin’s war-fighting operations. In this fashion, a war seemingly without end may be destined to sputter on still further.
The upshot? It’s still not clear whether the powerful, though largely hidden, or at least hushed-up, economic drivers of the Ukraine war will ultimately lead all powers involved to arrive at something resembling “peace.” The outlines of a settlement are abundantly clear – a cease-fire, a Russian pull-back, a mineral rights deal, a treaty over still-contested territory, and the exclusion of Ukraine from NATO. But getting there requires a shift from the reckless neo-conservative paradigm that sees the United States promoting democracy and regime change everywhere in the world to the more old-fashioned “realist” paradigm that places primary emphasis on regional balances of power and the achievement of regional peace and stability. Biden, ever the ardent neocon, aided and abetted by aides addicted to liberal regime-change fantasies, managed to whip up the nation’s patriotic fervor to cast the battle in Ukraine as one of “good versus evil,” depicting Putin as a latter-day Hitler bent on European territorial conquest, and the United States as the heroic defender of world freedom. We’ve seen this movie before – though on this scale, not since World War II perhaps, and certainly not since the heyday of the Cold War. While no one should have any illusions about the venality of the Putin regime, there are other strategic concerns here – namely, containing China, which by any reasonable standard is America’s – and the West’s – chief adversary, and is already implementing its own plan for global expansion and ultimately, hegemony. The real issue for peace-loving people isn’t whether Putin will be overthrown and tried for war crimes and punished for his “naked aggression” – which, with proper strategic judgment, might have been forestalled all along It’s whether Ukrainians will ever manage to achieve something for themselves, including a viable economy that can provide for self-sustaining development and a political system free of foreign manipulation.
Biden and the West never had clean hands here – and neither did his predecessors. The US-backed coup approved by the Obama administration in 2014 ushered in the very regime that now insists on fighting an endless Holy War that is anything but holy. The intense spotlight focused on the inevitable carnage of this war is partly a reflection of the deliberate psychological operations devised by national security planners – and justified as a response to Russia’s own “disinformation” – to whip up patriotic fervor in support of an enormous military expenditure– about $300 billion, and counting – that might have been avoided at the outset. These operations also serve to distract the public from the war’s less obvious – and unseemly – economic stakes and motives. But beneath the frothings of patriotic gore and the crocodile tears shed daily by war planners over the bloody toll they’ve helped sponsor, their venality and naked greed – and that of the bigger corporate players standing behind them – isn’t that hard to find. You just just have to be willing to look. The mainstream “liberal”: media – schooled in the high-minded rationales for this war and so many others – probably never will.
Right now, war economics – short- and long-term – is driving the prolongation of the bloody conflict in Ukraine. But it may well be that some version of capitalist “peace” economics will also drive it to a more rapid conclusion – or at least a significant cessation – so that Ukraine’s great prize” – the country’s largely untapped mineral wealth – can finally be plundered. Carving up Ukraine, like carving up Africa in a bygone era – is what superpowers do when they want to divvy up their shares of global influence. What will the people of Ukraine receive in return? Probably not much more than what Africa or other nations of the one-time “Third World” received. A subordinate position in the global division of labor and trade and a form of “development” conducted at the behest of and for the benefit of foreign-owned multinationals. Maybe Ukraine, with Europe’s assistance, can establish extractive industries that cede more significant domestic control to Ukraine– and not just to the country’s notoriously corrupt elites. One can hope and the world must indeed insist. It’s the least we can do after all the bloody slaughter and destruction its people have suffered these past three years. There’s an old African proverb: “When the elephants play, the grass gets trampled.” Isn’t it time for everyone involved – including so many still parading their false “humanitarian” piety – to simply end this grotesque trampling of Ukraine? That’s not Russian propaganda – it’s a plea for peace amid the collective madness that is war.
The Oval Office, Kyiv and the Kremlin
Some world events can look different to those of us on this side of the Atlantic, also, more precisely, in Berlin. God knows, here too I’m frightened at what Trump, Vance and Musk are doing and planning. Nor do I love Putin. But what I hate above all else is war, which is looks – and is closer over here. I’m not a total pacifist, I see the need to fight back against Francos and against Hitlers. And yet I must always rejoice whenever slaughter and destruction can be stopped! Right now that means that I am hoping – yes, damn near praying – for a ceasefire and a negotiated end to the Ukraine war.
I can well understand the feelings of many patriotic Ukrainians on fighting back. And I can empathize with Americans and all the others who were appalled at the conduct of that dangerous clown Trump and his sidekick at their meeting with Zelenskyy, a meeting which looked carefully prepared.
Yes, one could certainly feel scorn for Trump at that moment and sympathize with poor Zelenskyy. And yet, such sympathy has limits. I can neither forget nor forgive him for leading the cheers for old Yaroslav Hunka in the Canadian Parliament in September 2023. Few Canadians may have known it, but Zelenskyy knew full well that Hunka had once volunteered for the Ukrainian Division of the Nazi SS in World War II. At the same time American and Canadian troops were fighting on Normandy beaches in 1944 their Red Army allies, in a huge, bitter battle in Ukrainian Brody, were defeating a major Nazi army which included Hunka’s unit, with its mass killers of Russian, Polish and especially Jewish civilians. I have never heard a word of regret from such veterans, or from Hunka. Or Zelenskyy.
Nor can I forget how Andrij Melnyk, then Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, when presented by a journalist with a wartime leaflet of Ukraine’s legendary hero Stepan Bandera, saying “Moscovites, Poles, Hungarians and Jews are your enemies. Destroy them!” first tried vainly to deny the validity of the leaflet but then snapped back, “I will not say today that I distance myself from it. And that’s that!”
That was too embarrassing; Melnyk had to be withdrawn from Berlin. After a brief stay out of the limelight as ambassador to Brazil he is now due to become Ukraine’s UN ambassador!
It is absurd to call Zelenskyy a fascist. But what about all too many of those around him?
This same Melnyk also mixed directly in German politics – like Elon Musk. “Personally I trust Friedrich Merz, whom I know well,” he said. “Merz could advance an ambitious European defense program if he can find coalition partners who support the same plans.”
Merz found them – and will soon be Germany’s new chancellor. Dictatorial, widely unpopular, some refer to him as “Dr. Blackrock”. While his moderate nemesis Angela Merkel led his party (and the government) he took a break from direct politics, became a millionaire lobbyist and, from 2016 to 2020, headed the German section of BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager, which holds key financial assets in Lockheed Martin ($9.7 bl), Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman and holds second place financially in Germany’s main arms company, Rheinmetall. Even a hint of peace in any conflict zone is followed by a slump in those companies’ shares values. When Merz stated “Freedom is more important for us than peace. You can find peace in every graveyard” it is easy to understand what he, or Blackrock, mean with “freedom”!
Merz often expresses such principles: “We must do everything to support the Ukraine in its struggle against the Russian aggressor…in order to defend its freedom but also our own. Because their commitment is part of the commitment of all of us for a world of freedom and justice.” He also extends such longings elsewhere: “A government led by me will strengthen our relations with Israel.“
The new government now shaping up in Berlin will be based on all such commitments. The ill-starred Greens, most bellicose of all parties, cannot become junior partners of Merz’s CDU-CSU; they lost too many Bundestag seats to be useful. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which won a frightening second place, is still taboo (for now). Only the Social Democrats remain. Their election results were the worst in their entire history but still supply just enough deputy seats to permit a joint government – after they hastily eliminated the few courageous but weak voices in their ranks who had spoken up for peace, including Olaf Scholz, who had see-sawed on such issues, opposed giving giant Taurus missiles to Kyiv and was not a gung-ho vanguard crusader. In his stead, the Social Democrat most likely to keep his job as Minister of Defense is Boris Pistorius, loudest of all in demanding more and more billions for Ukraine and “to defend” Germany from that imminent danger he is constantly warning about. Russia, of course, although the two countries have no mutual borders, any Russian idea of attacking Germany, or any NATO member, would amount to total insanity – and would be a total reversal of over 200 years of historic invasions.
Few Americans can have an idea of the current militarist build-up in Germany, based on the mass media’s constant attempts to spread fear. Test alarms, talk of air-raid cellars, growing pressure for conscription, male and female, and a military expense account zooming down like a typhoon, more and more hundreds of billions, to the joy of giants like Rheinmetall and the fears of those low on the economic ladder, for it is they who will pay for it. Echoes of past hubris grow ever louder; the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm, of Adolf Hitler, of Konrad Adenauer, the constant talk of “defense,” a thin camouflage for growing projects of eastward expansion, already encompassing German troops stationed in Lithuania, naval bases in the Baltic and war games in Poland, strengthening those rail lines, highways and ports which are suitable for heavy clanking tanks and artillery, and more swift aircraft for carrying Hiroshima10 bombs – plus calls for a German share in atomic weapon decisions. With Trump seeming to back away from Europe, hitherto less open calls for a strong European army, led by its strongest member, Germany, are now loud and frequent; we can almost hear the clicking of military heels and shouts of “Achtung”!
As for freedom, its defense always seemed to require a diabolic Beelzebub to arouse popular rage, if possible an easy target for media caricaturists. No matter whether he was truly evil, truly good, or some mixture, for anyone in the way the spiked tail and horns were ready at hand: Stalin, Fidel, Gaddafi, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Assad – and since about 2000 “Vlad.”
How many know that Putin and his diplomats had warned since 2008 that, in spite of US and German promises that “if Germany is united NATO will not move an one inch eastward” NATO did advance more than inches; it was country by country right up to the Russian borders. Disarmament agreements were abandoned (always blaming Russia), Russian pleas for negotiations to avoid confrontation were rejected in December 2021 as “no-starters.” As for the promising peace agreement at Minsk, ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel later revealed (in “Die Zeit”) that it had been a NATO ruse, “an attempt to buy time for the Ukraine to build up military strength.” In Istanbul, a cease-fire and agreement to negotiate were almost ready for signing when UK’s Boris Johnson flew in to stymie them.
The whole tragedy can best be understood by reading the confidential State Department cable titled “Nyet Means Nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargement Redlines,” sent in 2008 to Washington from Moscow by then US Ambassador William Burns (who later became CIA boss). Here is an official summary:
“Following a muted first reaction to Ukraine’s intent to seek a NATO Membership Action Plan at the Bucharest summit, Foreign Minister Lavrov and other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition, stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion as a potential military threat. NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains ‘an emotional and neuralgic’ issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene. Additionally, the Russian experts continue to claim that Ukrainian NATO membership would have a major impact on Russia’s defense industry, Russian-Ukrainian family connections, and bilateral relations generally. In Georgia, the Russian government fears continued instability and “provocative acts” in the separatist regions.” (MFA: NATO Enlargement “Potential Military Threat to Russia” )
And that is exactly what happened. As Putin saw it, “Nobody planned to live up to these Minsk agreements… They lied to us, and the only reason for these processes was to pump Ukraine up with weapons and get it ready for military action.”
These facts do not exculpate Putin from the tank invasion of February 2022, nor of the shelling and bombing in the terrible months since then. But they might balance the picture presented by US and German media and politicians. The destruction and death of civilians in the Ukraine hardly compares with the nearly total destruction of housing and calculated killing of 70,000, perhaps far more civilians, the destruction of schools, universities, hospitals and mosques in Gaza. But any condemnation of that is denounced as “anti-Semitic” and can cost one’s job.
As for the abduction of Ukrainian children; the Russians say these were mostly orphans, lost or abandoned children. True or not, should one forget the ten thousands of Native American children forcibly abducted until the 1960s to schools where they were miserably treated, sexually abused, robbed of their language and often allowed to die and be buried in unmarked graves?
Should we forget three million Koreans killed by American bombers, two to three million Vietnamese, hundreds of thousands of Guatemalan Indios and Iraqis, thousands in all of Central America? Or the CIA’s ”black sites,“ from Afghanistan and Poland to Thailand and Guantanamo, where “enhanced interrogation techniques” were described in a US Senate report as “a euphemism for torture, including such abuses as waterboarding, sleep deprivation, keeping prisoners in small boxes for up to 18 hours, stress positions, forced nudity, sexual threats, and so-called “rectal rehydration.” Have any US presidents ever been called to accounts for those crimes?
For me the demand to protect freedom and democracy, so often repeated when alluding to Ukraine, seems pure hypocrisy when I think of US and German support for apartheid, for Saudi boss Mohammed bin Salman, for 32 years with kleptomaniac dictator Mobutu in Congo, Papa and Baby Doc in Haiti, Scheich Hamad in Bahrein, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Pinochet in Chile and so many others. And the stress on Putin’s scorn for international law regarding borders and national sovereignty in Crimea or Donbas raises questions on double standards when recalling Croatian and Slovenian breakaway from Yugoslavia, Kosovo’s break away from Serbia, (or, further back, the seizure of half of Mexico, of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam and Hawai’i. Or the illegal blockade of Cuba, despite the condemnation of all UN members except for USA and Israel. Or the seizure of all of Jerusalem and all of Palestine despite repeated UN resolutions. Few idealistic words seem to hold water these days.
Is it possible that Putin recalled the fates of any leaders who rejected US hegemony? Allende, in his bombed residential palace, Lumumba, tortured, dismembered and dissolved in acid, Saddam Hussein hanged, Ghaddafi, sodomized with a bayonet, Mohammad Najibullah, castrated and dragged by a truck through the streets of Kabul, Osama bin Laden, shot down in his home and thrown into the ocean. (But despite countless attempts, Fidel escaped such a fate.)
The man in the White House represents a giant danger to all Americans except for the wealthiest at the top, now often at his side (even literally). But even at the rude Oval Room bullying session, one question stuck out, despite the rubbish: Trump’s words to Zelenskyy: “You’re gambling with World War III!”
Aside from all questions as to who bears the most blame, those who did the provoking or the side which felt provoked and sent in the tanks – like a cornered bear, surrounded by a narrowing circle of snarling dogs, being the first to slash out first a heavy-clawed paw. I see a continuation of the war as only bringing misery to all those affected and a course which can lead only to more deaths – and explosion. In Germany it has already led to almost total rule of the “Deutschland über alles” crusaders, with France and Britain rivaling for second place. They all want to regain past strength and glory, and stay in office. In Bibi’s related war against Palestine even more is at stake: Keep on killing or “go directly to jail.”
Marco Rubio added later: “I think both sides must come to an understanding; there can be no military solution …The Russians can’t conquer all of Ukraine, and obviously it will be very difficult for Ukraine in any reasonable period to force the Russians all the way back to where they were in 2014.”
Indeed, the only remaining routes I can see are either more weapons, more countries involved, more death and destruction, leading almost unavoidably to escalation and all too possibly to annihilation! Or the other route: No more weapons! Cease fire combined with negotiation! Peace!
Why has Trump opened a door to peace? I don’t know. Maybe to get at those mineral riches. Maybe to clear things with Russia so as to move on to China, after splitting the two adversaries. Maybe this guy, in his twisted thinking (and seemingly total ignorance of the world outside his golden towers), actually prefers peace to war. Anything is possible with him. All of it bad, indeed evil – with that one possible exception! Every day the scene changes, the odds seem to roller-coaster – even with news just heard a few hours ago? Will Putin meet Trump? Will Russia agree to a cease fire? Is it – this time – a meaningful offer? Will they move towards peace? Both sides are unpredictable. But hope remains – for good people everywhere! And the need for popular pressure!
At least one thing was clear. The prospect of possible peace scared the daylights out of war-lovers on both sides of the Atlantic, especially the bosses of Rheinmetall, Lockheed Martin and their like, who rejoice at shoveling in billions but salivate for more! Assisting them are those crusading pundits who roundly condemn all of Trump’s sins but never forget to include his alleged kowtowing to Putin. They often dig up “appeasement,” misusing the story of Hitler and Chamberlain at Munich in 1938 to accelerate their rush to get more armament billions approved before peace negotiations can undermine their phony alarm calls. 600 billion may soon get the OK of the new government, plus the Greens. (At Munich in 1938 Britain and France willingly agreed to let Hitler move German regiments closer to Russian borders. They knew why! Are there perhaps current analogies after all?)
So the politicians and pundits debate on how the Ukraine can be kept fighting, no matter what it costs, with Honor and Freedom their words of choice! And some quite good folks, also old friends, still support the war and denigrate anyone calling for peace. Some are even within the LINKE party, which was always proud to be the “Peace Party.” Luckily their positions do not go unchallenged.
But for US Americans a major dilemma arises: it is vitally necessary to fight back against Trump’s terrible threats in every field: union rights, defense of immigrants, schools, environment, science, racism, LGBTQ rights, even Greenland and Panama. But with one exception, at least for now. Any potential move to achieve peace, no matter how motivated, must not be attacked – but supported! War or peace; this remains, by far, the most crucial question of all in today’s threatened world.
Image by Glib Albovsky.
It was the imperial bitch fest heard round the world. Two of Babylon’s finest Frankenstein monsters dueling it out on live tv over a mythic peace deal that neither creature seemed to prioritize over their respective egos. In one corner of the Oval Office, we had Volodymyr Zelensky, sulking and rolling his eyes in an ill-fitting black muscle shirt like a sullen teen caught masturbating in the family gym. In the other corner, we had Donald Trump and his almost deliriously sycophantic toady, JD Vance, taking turns blowing each other for saving the world.
It was supposed to be a photo-op, a press conference celebrating a supposedly agreed upon deal for Ukraine to fork over half of their embattled nation’s rare mineral rights as a thank you to the United States for talking them in and out of World War 3. How this strange colonial tax was supposed to lead to lasting peace is beyond me, but Zelensky clearly wasn’t interested in bootlicking for the cameras that day.
He came out swinging with a barely coherent diatribe about the evils of diplomacy that included the usual CNN approved revisionist history of Putin’s invasion that carefully deleted all the NATO provocations that inspired it. Donald Trump and his Wall Street rent boy responded exactly the way Zelensky probably hoped they would, by lecturing the Ukrainian strongman like the help caught pocketing the silver, browbeating another world leader for over ten minutes for disrespecting his imperial masters with the inconvenience of a dissenting opinion and just generally making complete and total asses of themselves.
By the time this embarrassing shitshow was finally over, Volodymyr Zelensky was being hurled out of the White House like a common hooligan and Donald Trump was badmouthing him on social media like a scorned middle school debutante. Apparently, this is American diplomacy in 2025. Somehow, I’m less than shocked that I’m less than shocked.
The really fucked up thing here is that the ceasefire itself was actually a really good idea for everyone regardless of how the war in Ukraine started. Its continuation in perpetuity solves nothing for the legions of young conscripts dying daily on both sides over a quarter mile of bloody trenches and bombed out ruins. Donald Trump ended up leaving this episode stinking like a soiled conquistador with Tourette’s syndrome but most of his criticisms of Volodymyr Zelensky were more true than false.
This handsome kid isn’t the Joan of Arc of liberal democracy that the progressive universe sells him as. He is an increasingly authoritarian kleptocrat who hasn’t just held off elections indefinitely under martial law but has banned most of his nation’s formidable opposition parties and essentially nationalized Ukraine’s media under a single heavily censored government conglomeration. The real reason this asshole is allergic to the peace table is that he knows that without a war and the torrential slush fund of dissent crushing weaponry that comes with it he won’t last a week before being overthrown by his own goddamn generals.
But peace was never the real motivation here. It very rarely is with Trump. As if his demand for a bounty of shiny things weren’t suspect enough, Trump made this fact even more obscenely clear right in the middle of his screaming match with Zelensky when he jumped from warning about the dangers of World War 3 to bragging about initiating it by sending Ukraine Javelin missiles at a time when even Barack Obama felt this was going too far. These were the first offensive weapons shipped to Kiev, $47 million dollars of them to be exact, and it wasn’t the only assistance Trump provided to provoking the war he suddenly wants to end either.
The Donald also dutifully approved the continued build-up of NATO forces on Russia’s borders started by Obama after his Maiden coup led to the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. This included the Cuban-Missile-style Navy patrols on the Black Sea using battleships capable of carrying nuclear warheads. Trump spent 82 days off Russia’s shores in 2020 alone, provocatively buzzing Sevastopol’s Black Sea Fleet like a teenage greaser playing chicken with doomsday.
Trump further highlighted his less than peaceful motives in this region by endorsing the UK’s recent insane suggestion of putting British troops on the ground in Ukraine and has even flirted with the possibility of sending in US troops as well to secure his precious goddamn minerals which is what he’s really after here. Donald Trump may put on a big show of aping like Pat Buchanan with dick jokes, but his foul-mouthed isolationism usually amounts to little more than a hustle. The fucker is basically just against any war that he can’t personally profit from, and Trump’s ties aren’t made in sweatshops in Kharkiv.
What Trump really wants to do is to strip Ukraine of the copper wiring before he shifts the American Empire towards consolidating its flagging control over the Western Hemisphere with a new Monroe Doctrine on Drug-War steroids then launching his own world war against Russia’s sponsors in China.
His Fox approved Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, has said as much: “Stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe… the US is prioritizing deterring war with China in the Pacific, reorganizing the reality of scarcity and making the resourcing trade-offs.”
But not all of the Donald’s fellow imperialists agree. Many are heavily invested in turning the war in Ukraine into an endless gauntlet of grotesque horrors simply so they can justify handing forklifts full of American tax dollars over to their friends in Raytheon while they keep churning out more toys that blow up the moment they land on Ukrainian soil.
Volodymyr Zelensky has become the figure head of this deeply sick set, a sexy Semitic action figure regurgitating neoliberal talking points in roguish broken English while he sells one generation of Ukrainians after another into forced military prostitution. The man has become a monster but unlike Trump he didn’t start out that way.
The biggest lie Donald Trump barked at Zelensky was the absurd notion that he started this war. Russia didn’t even start this war, America did. We started it by promising Ukraine NATO membership in 2008 before using romper-stomping skinheads to overthrow the country’s democratically elected government in 2014. This is when the Donbass, whose citizens had overwhelmingly voted for that government, seceded and the US encouraged their puppets in Kiev to launch a glorified race war to root out the regions ethnic Russians with a driving rain of indiscriminate artillery fire.
Zelensky was actually elected specifically on the promise to end this madness by granting the Donbass autonomy and reigning in the neo-Nazi battalions reenacting Operation Barbarossa on Russia’s borders. Zelensky would chicken out on the frontlines of this civil war before Russia invaded but returned to reason during negotiations held by Israel and Turkey in Istanbul a few months into that disastrous imperial excursion.
Volodymyr had essentially signed off on the outline of an agreement that would have seen Russia withdraw back to the Donbass in exchange for Ukraine’s neutrality. It was the United States and the United Kingdom that convinced him to rip it up. Trump’s old buddy, then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson actually travelled to Kiev in person during these talks in April 2022 to tell Zelensky himself that he couldn’t expect western support if he signed on to the ceasefire, but he would receive an endless allowance of Atlantic artillery if he kept the war burning indefinitely.
The result was Zelensky taking the momentum from his victory against Putin’s initial invasion of Ukraine and investing it into his own invasion of the same regions in the Donbass that he was elected to let go of, and the result of this insane crusade within a crusade was the seemingly impossible feat of Russia successfully annexing nearly every other Russian speaking region of Ukraine over the last two years, the same regions that ferociously resisted Russia’s initial rapacious advances and helped Zelensky, a man they overwhelmingly voted for, to humiliate the nearly undefeated Putin the Terrible without a single goddamn ATACMS.
Now the entirety of those border-fluid bloodlands face certain conquest regardless of who wins, or which deal does or doesn’t get signed. If Donald Trump’s heavily televised flogging of Volodymyr Zelensky doesn’t convince the Ukrainian people that NATO is a glorified protection racket on a good day, then I don’t know what will. It’s also increasingly impossible to ignore the fact that regardless of his initial intentions, the longer Zelensky rules the more like Putin he becomes. So, how can peace be a solution when it’s being decided by such despicable despots?
This isn’t to say that all is lost for Ukraine and the Donbass, but I believe that the quickest way out of World War 3 might actually be the kind of mutinies that helped bring an end to World War 1. People forget that the Bolsheviks came to power on a promise to end Russia’s involvement in that imperial shitshow and that the German Empire was dissolved almost simultaneously by a conspiracy of “soldier’s councils” formed to resist their own officers. Both of these bold campaigns would end tragically in capitulation and another world war, but Ukraine was always the last region to fall in line.
These are the Wild Steppes after all. The home of the Zaporizhian Sich, a stateless polity of renegade Cossack mercenaries and escaped serfs who challenged the authority of every other state in the neighborhood for centuries and ruled like honorable thieves on the high seas of an ungovernable wasteland. So why should world wars be the only chapters of history to repeat themselves?
Both Ukraine and the Donbass deserve better than to be the follies of a nest of lecherous hoodlums wrestling over borders and minerals. My only advice as a shit-talking armchair anarchist is to stop shooting each other and turn your guns against the real enemies in the wheelhouse. Kill the captain, save the ship. The Sich lives when the bitch dies, and we all know who the bitch is.
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