How the US Brought War to Ukraine

by David Swanson | Nov 13, 2026 | 

Reprinted from World BEYOND War: 

If there is still someone out there who has persisted until now in the idea that Ukrainian history began in 2022, and that wiser members of the U.S. establishment didn’t warn against, and more conniving members strategize for, each U.S. step toward war from the NATO enlargement of the 1990s through the U.S.-backed coup of 2014, the U.S.-backed war that began in 2014, Obama’s military training and base building, Trump’s weapons shipments, Biden’s hostility toward diplomacy, the fantastic horror fables of Russiagate, the reduction of Germany and France to mindless puppets treating the Minsk agreements as a trick, and the U.S. blocking of negotiation or peace just before and just after the Russian invasion — and if such a someone has reached a point of open-mindedness to information, there’s a new book that might really help.

And it sure is badly needed in this moment of Democratic candidates rising on public opposition to wars, even while promising to escalate the war in Ukraine the moment they’re able to.

But the value of this new book to me lies in how it takes the story of the Ukraine War back, not just to the 1990s but to the 1940s. In Boiling Point: How America Brought War to Ukraine, Stephen Kinzer gives us deeper understanding of roots and motivations, establishing beyond any possible dispute that the U.S. government began a project of using Ukraine to weaken Russia and pursued it across generations, through changes in individual actors, through failure after failure, and through U.S. presidents who themselves may have lacked a decent understanding of the project they were continuing — so that, as open hostility toward the Soviet Union became supposed friendliness toward Russia, the public face of obliviousness regarding Russia’s inscrutable opposition to the unchanging project of bringing Ukraine into NATO may in fact have involved some actual obliviousness.

Kinzer opens his book claiming to be presenting just the facts, ma’am, and to in no sense be denying the role that Ukrainians have played in their own history. He takes no position on Russia’s criminal and murderous actions, but simply includes them as part of the story. Nonetheless, it is a story of a major project aimed at influencing Ukraine and Russia from Washington, Langley, and Manhattan — sometimes secretly, for example by parachuting would-be revolutionaries into Ukraine to meet their deaths, and sometimes openly, for example celebrating U.S. efforts to interfere in a Russian election to ensure that a drunken buffoon remain in charge of Russia. Even the interference in Ukraine during the eight years leading up to 2022 was generally a point of pride to be openly bragged about right up until it wasn’t. Not just U.S. officials like Victoria Nuland but private foundations such as George Soros’ couldn’t help crowing about how much they’d spent and how responsible they were for overthrowing and manipulating the government of Ukraine. Even now, Nuland goes on camera and openly admits to the U.S. blocking of a peace agreement just weeks after the Russian invasion, and NATO’s top officials can’t stop themselves from pointing out that the insistence on NATO membership was the cause of the war. But the rest of us aren’t supposed to repeat these things.

In Ukraine we have polls now showing large majority support for compromising and ending the war, whereas for a couple of years we we badgered with our supposed responsibility to risk nuclear apocalypse because Ukrainians wanted it. The story of U.S. government behavior from the 1940s on, during which the desires of Ukrainians mattered to U.S. policy makers exactly never, makes clear what an odd and fleeting pretense it was to claim that keeping Ukraine at war was a sacred duty to the people of Ukraine who were insisting upon it.

When World War II ended and the U.S. government was able to jump right back to treating the Soviet Union as its primary enemy, some in the incipient U.S. spy-sabotage-assassination complex that would become the CIA saw Ukraine as the most powerful tool available to threaten Russia, just as Russia saw Ukraine as the pathway for a threatening invasion. Frank Wisner was an early driving force. He would witness a murderous Soviet takeover in Romania. Other key individuals over the decades would themselves or their families have histories of resentment toward Russia. Stalin had starved millions. Soviets had abused and humiliated on a large scale. People like Frank Wisner, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Madeleine Albright, “Masha” Yovanovitch, Evelyn Farkas, Alexander Vindman, Victoria Nuland, Antony Blinken, and many more seem to have taken their Russophobia very personally, while others like Dwight Eisenhower, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, Hillary Clinton, or Joe Biden had more general policies of preferring brute force to words.

The U.S. erased the Nazi history of hundreds of Ukrainians in order to illegally bring them — including the usual quota of Soviet spies — to the United States. Hundreds more were put to work in Germany. Mass murderers of Jews and Poles were protected from both Nuremberg and Soviet justice in order to engage in the Cold War game of spying and counter-spying, propagandizing, infiltrating, and fantasizing about overthrows. For years, Ukrainians were sacrificed to the dream by being sent into Ukraine to the waiting arms of the well-informed Soviets. Fighting for Ukraine to the last Ukrainian is not a new idea.

I was surprised to learn from Kinzer that up through 1992, in a residential apartment building in New York City, immediately nextdoor to the one I lived in around 1990-1991, the CIA had maintained the headquarters of its Ukrainian nationalist propaganda production for 40 years beginning in 1952. This was a publishing house called Prolog at 875 West End Avenue led by Stepan Bandera’s buddy Mykola Lebed (whom the CIA was actively keeping out of reports on unprosecuted Nazis as late as 1991). The apartment building ought to be on hidden history tours of the Columbia University area. Kinzer credits its pamphlets, magazines, newspapers, and books with having kept anti-Russian Ukrainian nationalism alive for decades. Radio stations were added, broadcasting from Germany and Greece. Unsuccessful but major efforts were made to recruit Ukrainian athletes at each Olympics, in hopes of putting a non-Nazi face on the campaign.

When the Soviet Union was dismantled and U.S. policy generally rolled on as if nothing had changed, those who saw global domination as the driving force in U.S. policy found this unremarkable. Those who had believed that the U.S. military existed because of the evil Soviets, and NATO existed because of the now-nonexistent Warsaw Pact, were bewildered. Historians generally struggle to blame everything before 1990 on the Soviets and everything after on Russia. Kinzer points out the inconvenient facts, the U.S. approach perhaps best encapsulated in a comment President Bill Clinton made about Boris Yeltsin:

“We keep telling Ol’ Boris, Okay now, here’s what you’ve got to do next. Here’s some more shit for your face.”

Yet even Yeltsin drew the line at Ukraine joining NATO. And despite, or because of, that clear and critical Russian demand from virtually every Russian official for decades, the U.S. altered course not at all. NATO even went to war in Yugoslavia, declared its right to launch wars at will, and suggested that Ukraine might be on the list. Brzezinski had it at the top of his list. Dubya tore up the ABM treaty. NATO declared it would add Ukraine. The U.S. took its secretive activities out of the CIA and made them public through the NED, dumping more money over the 30 years since Ukrainian independence from the Soviets into Ukraine than anywhere else, and funded an “Orange Revolution” that actually used what U.S. media would soon begin accusing the U.S. public of: hired protesters. Despite the majority of Ukrainians opposing joining NATO, despite Ukraine’s neutrality serving it well, and despite the future pretense of wanting to follow the will of the Ukrainian people, the U.S. just kept hammering away at the supposed need to get Ukraine into NATO. But as long as countries like Germany and France were still maintaining their own foreign policies not wholly subservient to Washington, NATO could only threaten to add Ukraine (and Georgia) at some future date.

Eventually, in 2013, the U.S. added television channels to its repertoire. U.S. taxpayers and George Soros paid to tell Ukrainians to assemble in the Maidan along with EU nations’ ambassadors, Victoria Nuland, John McCain, Nazi paramilitaries, and half a million other people — and paid to supply them with food and camping supplies. With a Nuland phone call recording publicly advertising U.S. support for the coup, with Senator Chris Murphy and Soros’s organization publicly taking credit, a new Ukrainian government began restricting the use of the Russian language and threatening the NATO takeover of the Russian military base in Crimea.

The rest, as they say, is so-called “history.”

Major investment and forces put to work on both propaganda and structural momentum-building for the better part of a century may seem unstoppable. But not only does the non-U.S.-government world have a say in events, but there always remains available the option of changing course, or what we might call the five-word option. Just as Kamala Harris would now be president if she has said the five words “No more weapons to Israel,” a great many Ukrainians and Russians would still be alive if Joe Biden had said the five words “Ukraine will not join NATO.”

Breaking The Ice, Breaking The Myth? The Northern Sea Route In Systemiq’s Arctic Report – Analysis


Photo Credit: Александр Велигура, Pexels

November 11, 2026

By K.M. Seethi

Key Takeaways:

A Systemiq–Oxford report finds Arctic routes offer only modest savings (about $95–100 million a year) and would still carry under 1% of global trade by 2090, mainly via the Northeast Passage.

Ice-class costs, slow speeds, escort fees and thin infrastructure erase most distance advantages, while black-carbon emissions and impacts on Indigenous communities raise irreversible environmental risks.

Russia and China treat the routes as strategic hedges, but the EU is urged to adopt a precautionary stance, as the commercial case remains weak and the politics are driven by security rather than volume.

In August 2026, a Chinese container ship left for Felixstowe by way of the Arctic, a trip said to take about half the time of the Suez route. Two months earlier, the European Union had adopted a new Arctic strategy that puts security and shipping at its centre. Then, on 5 November, Systemiq and the University of Oxford published a report. The 2026 report Breaking the Ice? The Future of Trans-Arctic Shipping and Implications for the EU, prepared by Systemiq in collaboration with the University of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute, challenges the assumption that the opening of Arctic waters will necessarily produce a commercially viable shipping revolution.

The report’s central argument is that the potential economic benefits of trans-Arctic shipping are surprisingly modest, while its environmental, social and geopolitical consequences could be substantial and potentially irreversible. Using the University of Oxford’s Global Marine Trans-Shipping Model (OxMarTrans), it evaluates the commercial prospects of Arctic routes through the end of the century and argues for a precautionary approach to their development.

The Emerging Arctic Shipping Economy

The opening of Arctic shipping routes has generated considerable interest as climate change reduces sea ice and creates possibilities for shorter maritime connections between Asia, Europe and North America. However, the report Breaking the Ice? suggests that the commercial potential of these routes remains limited despite their growing geopolitical importance.


Global container shipping reached 192.9 million TEUs in 2025, while the principal Asia–Europe corridor through the Strait of Malacca and Suez Canal handled approximately 24 million TEUs annually. By comparison, Arctic shipping carried less than 40 million tonnes in 2024, representing under 0.3% of global seaborne trade. Nearly 90% of Arctic cargo was associated with resource extraction, particularly Russian oil and liquefied natural gas, rather than international transit.

Nevertheless, Arctic maritime activity is expanding. The total distance travelled by vessels in Arctic waters increased from approximately 6 million nautical miles in 2013 to nearly 12 million in 2025. The number of vessels operating in the region rose by 35%, reaching 1,812 in 2025. Fishing accounted for approximately 75% of the increase in distance travelled.

Three potential Arctic corridors are attracting attention: the Northeast Passage along Russia’s northern coastline, the Northwest Passage through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, and the Transpolar Route across the Central Arctic Ocean. The Northeast Passage is currently the most commercially promising. Arctic routes could shorten Asia–Europe shipping distances by 30–40% and Asia–eastern North America distances by 15–20%. The Shanghai–Rotterdam journey, for example, could be shortened by approximately 2,500 nautical miles compared with the conventional 10,600-nautical-mile Suez route.


However, shorter distances do not necessarily guarantee lower operating costs. Arctic vessels generally travel at 13–14 knots, compared with approximately 20 knots in open waters. Ice-class ships cost around 20% more to construct, while Russian icebreaker escort charges range between $300,000 and $700,000 per transit. Higher insurance premiums, specialised crews, seasonal restrictions and inadequate rescue infrastructure further undermine profitability.

The report’s long-term projections are particularly revealing. Assuming global warming of 2.5–3°C by 2100, Arctic routes could become navigable for 175–225 days annually during 2050–2070 and 240–270 days during 2070–2090. Yet the projected diversion of global maritime trade remains marginal:

Approximately 85% of diverted trade would use the Northeast Passage. The Transpolar Route would account for only 0.02% of global trade by 2050 and 0.06% by 2090. The estimated annual savings for the shipping industry would amount to merely $95–100 million, raising serious questions about the economic justification for extensive Arctic shipping development.

Geopolitical competition further complicates the situation. Russia possesses 57 icebreakers and has reopened or modernised more than 50 military facilities in its Arctic territories. China, which operates four polar icebreakers, with another under construction, is expanding cooperation with Russia through its proposed Polar Silk Road. Chinese operators completed 14 commercial transits through the Northeast Passage in 2025. However, all three Arctic corridors depend on the approximately 50-mile-wide Bering Strait, creating another potential geopolitical chokepoint involving Russia and the United States.

The environmental implications are equally serious. Black carbon emissions, icebreaking, underwater noise, oil pollution and disturbances to marine ecosystems could accelerate ecological degradation. Approximately 400,000 Indigenous people living across the Arctic depend on these fragile ecosystems for their livelihoods and cultural survival. Existing international regulations remain inadequate, particularly concerning black carbon, underwater noise and heavy fuel oil. Although restrictions on heavy fuel oil were introduced in 2024, exemptions may continue until 2034. The report consequently recommends a precautionary moratorium on commercial shipping through the Central Arctic Ocean’s Transpolar Route until adequate scientific knowledge, environmental safeguards and emergency-response infrastructure are established. It also calls for stronger international regulation, expanded scientific research, improved rescue facilities and meaningful participation by Indigenous communities in Arctic governance.


The central conclusion is that Arctic shipping is acquiring strategic importance without becoming a commercially significant alternative to established maritime corridors. Even by 2090, its projected share of global trade would be only 0.55%. The fundamental question is whether such limited economic benefits justify potentially irreversible environmental damage in one of the world’s most vulnerable regions.

Does this report the older debate? Mostly, yes, because Systemiq’s pessimism is not new. Jeroen Pruyn studied dry bulk shipping in 2016 and found the Northern Sea Route (NSR) better in geography than in commerce. Icebreaker fees of $13–33 per gross ton, slow speeds and size limits ate the savings, and only an extreme scenario, with no pilotage and a $4 fee, gave a slight gain. The UK government’s Foresight review of 2017 said Arctic routes would supplement the canals, not replace them. Ship Technology in 2024 quoted a King’s College London academic saying the NSR is “not yet a viable alternative.”

The Gulf Research Center, in March 2026, called the route a complement for summer and special cargo; in its figures, only 2.1 million of the NSR’s 36 million tonnes in 2023 was true Asia–Europe transit. Coface, a month later, found the Arctic would stay peripheral, especially for container ships. There was also an optimistic camp. A 2013 PNAS study, reported by Maritime Executive, expected expanded navigation by mid-century. Systemiq does not deny that ice will retreat. It denies that retreat equals profit. Its freshness lies elsewhere: it puts numbers on the whole century, and it turns an economic doubt into a policy demand for the EU, precaution first and shipping later.

A critical reader should still push on the report in three places. First, it has a purpose. Systemiq is an environmental consultancy, and it released the report weeks after the EU strategy, which promises its own Arctic shipping study; Systemiq says it is “liaising closely” with the Commission. That does not make the findings wrong, but it means they should be read as an argument as well as a forecast. Second, the model holds today’s trade patterns fixed, so it cannot capture shocks such as the Red Sea attacks or the 2026 war in the Middle East, both of which pushed shippers to look north. The dollar figures also show the value of goods rerouted, not profit or new output, and the report’s own 2050 figure appears twice, as $25.9 billion in the table and $19.1 billion in one paragraph. Third, the present is moving. By 30 September 2026, researchers had counted 104 NSR transits, already above the 103 of all of 2025, and Rosatom expects transit cargo above 7 million tonnes this year, nearly double 2025. Yet 103 transits equal about three days of Suez traffic. Growth could be real, but the base is small. Systemiq looks closer to right than its critics, though its century-long numbers are guesses.

The three powers read the matter differently. Russia treats the NSR as sovereign infrastructure, not an experiment. Rosatom’s baseline is 150 million tonnes a year by 2035, with 70–109 million tonnes by 2030. Earlier plans were bolder: Moscow aimed for 80 million tonnes in 2024 and 30 million tonnes of transit by 2030. Actual 2024 cargo was about 38 million tonnes, and transit was about 3 million tonnes. The development plan, worth about 1.8 trillion rubles, rests on cargo from Russia’s own Arctic oil and gas.

For Moscow, the route is a way to move energy east, link with China, and gain leverage over sea lanes that sanctions cannot easily close. Russia’s own experts, however, are more careful than its leaders. A TASS report of 10 November 2026 says Svetlana Lipina, an expert linked to Russian ministries, thinks the route needs 10–20 years of reform and less dependence on state subsidy, which sounds close to Systemiq’s view. An older analysis said Russian experts doubted the country had the infrastructure and people to make the NSR popular with shippers.


China sees opportunity more than trade. Its 2018 white paper called China a “near-Arctic state” and promoted a “Polar Silk Road,” and Chinese state firms hold 29.9% of Yamal LNG. In 2026, Sea Legend began a seasonal container service to Rotterdam in roughly twenty days. The logic is strategic. An Arctic route could ease what analysts call the “Malacca Dilemma, ” China’s lack of control over its sea lanes. China can accept a small, subsidised route because the goal is a hedge, not volume.

The EU does not want to depend on the route. Reporting in the South China Morning Post describes Brussels as opposing the commercialisation of Arctic transit while Beijing and Moscow press ahead, and big liner companies such as MSC, CMA CGM and Hapag-Lloyd have pledged to avoid Arctic routes. The NSR runs under Russian control, and sanctions make it unusable for Europeans. The new strategy therefore leans on security, icebreakers and a study of Arctic shipping. Europe’s own position is not entirely clean. A Clingendael brief notes that French, Spanish and Dutch ports, Rotterdam among them, kept receiving Arctic LNG cargoes even as the EU planned to phase out Russian LNG from 2027, and it calls the route a strategic matter for the Netherlands, not a commercial one. The EU can call the route a threat, yet European ports are part of what keeps Russian Arctic energy moving.

On balance, Systemiq lines up with Pruyn, the UK Foresight review and the Gulf Research Center on the economics. Its different note is moral and political: even a small gain may not be worth the damage to a fragile ocean. That is a fair argument, but it is a judgment about values, and a model cannot prove it. The three powers are also asking different questions. Moscow asks how to build a corridor it controls. Beijing asks how to avoid depending on others. Brussels asks how to avoid depending on Russia. Systemiq asks whether the corridor is worth building at all. For now, the numbers favour the sceptics, but the politics do not wait for the numbers.



About K.M. Seethi
K.M. Seethi is Director, Inter University Centre for Social Science Research and Extension (IUCSSRE), Mahatma Gandhi University (MGU), Kerala. He also served as ICSSR Senior Fellow, Senior Professor of International Relations and Dean of Social Sciences at MGU. One of his latest works is "ENDURING DILEMMA Flashpoints in Kashmir and India-Pakistan Relations."
View all posts by K.M. Seethi →

PIMPING FOR PUTIN

US offers Ukraine NATO-like guarantee in exchange for Donbas

Washington is floating a redrawn Donbas border and a Nato-like pledge for Kyiv, but nobody has yet said what the guarantee would commit Ukraine's partners to do. / bne IntelliNewsFacebook

TwitterLinkedInTelegramFlipboardFeedly

By Ben Aris in Berlin November 11, 2026

The US is offering Ukraine a Nato-like security guarantee in return for ceding the rest of the Donbas, as the second day of talks in Abu Dhabi turn to territory on November 11.

Washington has formally asked Moscow to accept "an Article 4 and an Article 5-like security guarantee" for Ukraine, a senior US official told reporters on November 9, Politico reported. US officials tie the territorial question to that guarantee and want the two settled together. The first day of talks on November 10 was given over to ceasefire monitoring and postwar security arrangements, Bloomberg reported, citing a US official.

Donbas for security is the trade at the heart of any settlement, and neither half of it has yet been defined. Nobody has said what a "Nato-like" pledge would oblige the US and Europe to do if Russia attacked again, and Kyiv is being asked to give up the fortress cities it still holds in Donetsk region for a currently very vague promise. 

Even if the deal is struck, growing doubts over the effectiveness of Nato support in Europe is growing thanks to the Trump administration pull back after he spelled out a reduced US commitment to European security in his National Security Strategy (NSS) in December, when the Pentagon committed itself to a “hard deadline” pull out of Europe, which will have to take over its on conventional forces security by 2027.

It is in this context that Zelenskiy has to decide if any security guarantee deal offered by his Western allies will be strong enough to deter a second Russian invasion in the near future.  

US envoy Jared Kushner, who leads Washington's mediation with special envoy Steve Witkoff, said the aim was a "sovereign, secure, and prosperous Ukraine and lasting peace across Europe". "We are encouraged by the constructive discussions today," he wrote on X on November 10. After meeting Putin, he and Witkoff believe the Russian president is ready for peace "under the right conditions", Kushner said.

What security?

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has made the vagueness of the offer his main objection, and set out the exchange with the Americans in a post on X.

"Ceding Ukrainian land for peace is just abstract words. It's not only about reality, even more about philosophy… This is why when Americans asked, 'Can you exchange Donbas for security?' I said right there, 'Can you tell me what it means? What security? Nato?' 'Not Nato, but similar to Nato.' 'Similar? But you don't want the answer about Donbas to be 'similar'. You want a clear answer about Donbas. This is your goal. And this is Putin's goal, for today. What will you do if we have security guarantees but not Nato?' … Nobody trusts Putin to stop if we leave Donbas. He will pause. Then he will come back in one year, two years, or five years. And who will be guilty?"

Zelenskiy has said any guarantee must be "ironclad". It is the word Moscow used in January 2022, when Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov demanded ironclad guarantees that Ukraine would never join Nato at talks with the US in Geneva, weeks before the invasion. Ryabkov is in Russia's delegation in Abu Dhabi. The US refused to offer those guarentees and the war started a month later. 

Kyiv's worry is that the guarantee will be bundled into a wider deal over Europe. "A new European security architecture is on the American agenda for the Abu Dhabi talks," Tymofiy Mylovanov, president of the Kyiv School of Economics and a former economy minister, wrote on X, summarising Zelenskiy. "This is the same idea Putin raised with Biden in 2021. It is dangerous."

Witkoff said after a meeting of US, Ukrainian and European delegations on November 10 that any agreement must respect Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity and include credible security guarantees. The meeting, which included the UK, France, Germany, Italy, the European Commission and Nato, discussed a "practical" security framework for Ukraine after the war, the future of European security and ways to stop the fighting from flaring again. A strong Nato will remain central to Euro-Atlantic collective defence, Witkoff said.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has left open whether the guarantee would be modelled on Article 5, and said it could be written into a separate US treaty, while pointing to the difficulty of winning Senate approval. It has to deter another attack and be acceptable to Moscow, he said.

That is the weak point, according to Eric Ciaramella in a commentary for RUSI published on November 10. No country has been willing to send combat forces to Ukraine, and the UK- and France-led coalition of the willing has set such conditions on a postwar deployment - a total ceasefire, Russia's agreement and an American backstop - that it may never happen. Article 5 is credible because of forward-deployed troops, an integrated command and contingency planning, not the treaty text.

"It is time for Kyiv and its partners to abandon the fiction of recreating Article 5 and instead focus on what will deter Russia: a strong Ukrainian military, supported by partners in a coherent and sustainable manner," Ciaramella wrote.

Neutrality again

The Kremlin has accepted the principle before. At the Istanbul talks in March 2022 Kyiv offered permanent neutrality - no military blocs, no nuclear weapons and no foreign bases - in exchange for international legal guarantees from a list of states that included Russia, the US, the UK, China, France and Turkey. Russia's objection was to Ukraine in Nato, not to security pledges as such. In March this year Kyrylo Budanov, now head of the presidential office and a member of Kyiv's delegation, said Russia had explicitly accepted the guarantees the US was offering.

The US first put an Article 5-like guarantee on paper in the 28-point plan in November 2025, the first time Washington had offered one, but the terms were vague and the plan was later reworked. Whatever form the guarantee takes, Moscow still rejects any foreign troops on Ukrainian soil.

Ukraine's 1990 declaration of state sovereignty committed it to becoming a permanently neutral state. Parliament dropped its non-aligned status in December 2014, and in February 2019 then-president Petro Poroshenko signed a constitutional amendment making Nato and EU membership a "national goal," written into the country's basic law. Putin cites Nato's eastward expansion, which began when Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined in 1999, as the "root cause" of the war - which translates to a demand Ukraine returns to neutrality.

"Russia existed beside Nato and beside an independent Ukraine with very little tension, incl when Ukraine had fiercely pro-Western leader after Orange Revolution. This was possible so long as Ukraine was neutral. It should be neutral again," British commentator Mary Dejevsky wrote on X.

Redrawing the Donbas

But a compromise on the map may be taking shape. US negotiators have proposed redrawing the administrative boundaries of Donetsk and Luhansk regions so that Russia could declare it had taken the whole Donbas without capturing the cities Ukraine still holds, The Economist reported, citing people involved in the talks. It is not clear whether the idea is a formal US proposal, and neither side has confirmed they are considering it. Russia holds most of Luhansk and about 70% of Donetsk region. Zelenskiy confirmed in October that Washington had also proposed a buffer zone on both sides of the line of contact.

Both sides have shown some flexibility in private, which is new, although any territorial deal is likely to come right at the end of the negotiations at a mooted meeting between Putin and Zelenskiy, a US official told Reuters on November 10.

Kyiv's opening position hasn't changed: freeze the war on the current front line and then do talks - a position the Kremlin has rejected out of hand since the start of negotiations.

"The second issue was territory, which was raised by the Russians. This is an issue for the leaders to discuss - our negotiators have that mandate," Zelenskiy told a press conference on November 11, Ukrainska Pravda reported.

Ukraine's constitution bans ceding territory, but in a little remembered story, last December Zelenskiy floated the idea of a referendum that would give him the authority to give away unoccupied land to Russia. That poll was never held.

The possibility of meeting between Putin and Zelenskiy is increasing as both side signal they are ready. Ukraine's UN ambassador Andriy Melnyk told the Security Council on November 9 that Zelenskiy was ready to meet Putin "anywhere except Moscow." Putin has repeatedly invivted Zelenskiy - to Moscow. The step-by-step process currenlty underway is meant to  close this gap and facilitate a meeting of the two leaders somewhere neutral. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has already thrown his hat into the ring and said he is willing to host a meeting again – an option that should be acceptable to both Moscow and Kyiv. But no one is expecting a breakthrough in the first round in Abu Dhabi; there are only "expectations" for the next steps, said Davyd Arakhamia, parliamentary leader of the ruling Servant of the People party and a member of the delegation.

Talking while fighting

Both sides are turning the military torniquet, while their envoys fence, in an effort to apply added pressure for compromise. The fighting on the battlefield remains brutal as their armies press for advantage while the delegations talk. Russia struck Ukraine's energy and oil and gas sectors 128 times between November 2 and November 8, up from 94 times the week before, First Deputy Energy Minister Artem Nekrasov said on November 9. Strikes on November 7-8 forced emergency power cuts in Kyiv and left more than 600,000 customers without electricity in Dnipropetrovsk region, as Moscow presses its campaign to freeze Ukraine into submission by hitting power plants and high-voltage substations.

Putin has threatened to completely destroy Ukraine's bridges, ports, railways and power plants by next year unless Kyiv accepts Moscow's ceasefire terms, the Financial Times reported. He has said Kyiv opened a "Pandora's box" by striking the Russian economy, and Ukraine's drones have kept up their attacks on Russian refineries.

Zelenskiy says Ukraine's battlefield gains are strengthening its hand. Operation Vivaldi, the 3rd Army Corps counteroffensive near Lyman, has been a surprising success, retaking 176 sq km by late September and pushed Russian troops back from the Donbas fortress belt giving up almost all the gains they made this year.  Kyiv's defence ministry put Russian personnel losses at 54,400 in October alone - the highest monthly figure it has reported since the full-scale invasion began.

 

MOSCOW BLOG: The Interregnum is here and this is what it looks like

/ bne IntelliNewsFacebook

TwitterLinkedInTelegramFlipboardFeedly

By Ben Aris in Berlin November 6, 2026

The post-Pax Americana Interregnum is here and it is starting to become clearer what it looks like.

We have been arguing this year that the result of the East-West clash and the “rise of the rest” from the Global South in general, and the Ukraine war in particular, has led to an end of the unipolar “rules-based” order and ushered in a multipolar world.

Just how badly those rules are being eroded in the West was demonstrated by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy decision to bring treason charges on November 4 against Iuliia Mendel, Zelenskiy’s former press secretary, while all of his best friends have been charged with stealing tens of millions of dollars – during a war – and remain untouched. Likewise, Latvia’s decision to PNG journalist and IntelliNews columnist Leonid Ragozin is a repressive move that Russian President Vladimir Putin would be proud of.

From this perspective Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping have already won in their face off with Washington and Brussels. Now Putin needs to get his war done, and with Kyiv now entirely blacked out as Russian missiles very effectively target substations to destroy the links to the three remaining nuclear power stations, that is looking increasingly likely. The upcoming meeting in Abu Dhabi will be very interesting indeed.

One of the classic features of an interregnum is political and trade chaos. But in this modern version it has a new dimension: hackers and greed.

Two big banks have gone bust in the last two weeks: Alta Banka collapsed in the days after the Serbian electoral revolution that ousted Serbian President Aleksander Vucic that held pretty much all the accounts of Russians living there. The owners tried to escape to Moscow, but authorities forced their plane to turn around and they are now in jail.

Then two days ago the Ueno bank in Paraguay blew up, holding 60% of all deposits in the country. The country is now on fire after demonstrations turned into riots. Some 3mn people don’t know how to pay for food today. And the pensioners are even worse off as with a $10,000 deposit insurance cap many will lose the bulk of their life savings.

However, even more worryingly, France's Credit Mutuel Arkea has confirmed that hackers used a supplier's platform to reach the bank and steal over a hundred million dollars. They got into the bank’s system and used its own system to transfer the money and turn it into crypto which immediately disappeared. This comes on top of North Korean hackers stealing a mind boggling $6bn from Binance, the world’s biggest crypto-exchange.

This is the downside from the AI revolution. Previously, hackers used their nous and superior knowledge of coding to get into your machine. Now they have a tool that can win a Fields Medal to solve never solved before Millenium Prize maths problems. Hybrid attacks as the tectonic geopolitical tension shifts so rapidly they are literally “earthquakes” in their own spheres has already seen a rapid rise in hybrid attacks that are a new feature of an interregnum. Bomb threats hit about 20 flights across Europe on November 5, the third wave in four days, forcing diversions to France, Bulgaria and Austria, but searches found no explosives. Multiple supermarket freezers were turned off this week, causing the food to spoil. And in a really bizarre one, hackers targeted blood banks in France, attempting to raise plasma freezer temperatures to a boiling 110°C – what freezer even has a 110°C setting?!

At IntelliNews, we have also seen the rise of AI bots explode this year, where bot hits have gone from hundreds to tens of thousands that overload the server as they try and steal our archive. We have had to spend thousands on beefing up our security but at the same time face a quandary as google searches are in rapid decline, a major source of traffic, as AI searches take over. That has left us (and all press) in a quandary: how do you distinguish between benign enquiries and malicious ones?

As part of the same interregnum story, democracy is falling apart. We have already written extensively about how the boomerang effect of sanctions is causing an economic crisis in Europe, that has led to the rise of the right, but it has also now wrecked the US and the consequences for the midterm rout of the Republicans will have big consequences for trade, the wars and geopolitical relations. As we have written before, the Washington consensus that underpinned the rules-based order, is giving away to the Moscow consensus, where government’s put the fate of the state ahead of individual freedoms. Serbia just went in the other direction, but across Europe it’s clearly headed right to a nationalist populist model that is fragmenting the EU – another classic interregnum phenomena.

I suspect that the US will now get bogged down in a warring deadlock between the Democrat Houses and a lame duck Trump, who will focus more on foreign policy as that is the only thing he still controls. He will also use his standard tactic of trying to overwhelm the checks and balances system by issuing so many executive orders (decrees) that Congress’ legal machine to counter them can’t keep up. This was how he defeated media scrutiny when he was campaigning: he said so many bonkers things the media didn’t have enough time to debunk them before he said something else equally outrageous.

Given the new team on the Capital doesn’t take over until January 3, Putin has one last window to leverage his hold over Trump to force Zelenskiy to capitulate. Ukraine is currently facing Zelenskiy’s worst nightmare and I don’t think the coverage is panicking enough. Putin threatened to open Pandora’s box after Ukraine hit the Wildberries warehouse in July and he has done just that with the snows about a month away or less. We always knew exactly what was going to happen – and now it's happening. To take one example, Kyiv is now in total darkness. Only a month ago the assessment was that thanks to Russian attacks there would be 8 hours of blackouts a day; currently there are 17 hours, just one hour away from the worst case scenario, and Kyiv’s mayor Klitschko said yesterday soon the blackouts will be “complete”. Without ammo there is nothing Zelenskiy can do to stop this; the US offer to sell 500 interceptors – that won’t begin to arrive until 2030 – is a joke, a piece of propaganda to appease the pro-Ukraine lobby.

Even in Ukraine the democratic project is falling to pieces. Zelenskiy has cut a Churchillian figure for most of the last four years, but ironically (on purpose?) The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) has chosen now to conclude its pre-trial Energoatom corruption scandal investigation results. And it also released details of Operation Carthage where top Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) officials were protecting 52 scam centres, drug running and murdering a journalist by dousing her with concentrated acid. The investigators are saying this has gone beyond “corruption” and they are treating it as “organized criminal group” investigations. The scale of this scandal is staggering as it's not a scam but institutional. Everyone in Bankova has now been implicated. There is now a very good chance that even Zelenskiy will go to jail as soon as he leaves office.

Again the western coverage has been pulling its punches. Brussels just released its EU accession progress report which is clearly fully aware of all these problems but dressed up its criticism in the mildest language possible. I recommend you have a look at the report, as it’s a classic example of obfuscation where no one in Brussels wants to undermine Bankova, but also can’t lie about the severity of the problems. Then there was the National Guard secret prison story this week that is just icing on the cake as a wrong-direction indicator.

In the meantime, China continues to build the high speed railways that are missing from Europe and the US, shaving nanometres off its chip sizes and expanding its ties within the Global South. The CRINK (China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea) technology swap is growing increasingly effected as aptly demonstrated by the military tech Iran now has access to in its war with America. And the evolving CRINK military alliance is something that should scare the bejesus out of Western military analysts. These relations are another classic feature of an interregnum, as those in the second tier club together to challenge the waning imperialists. The expanding BRICS+, G20 and the recent third Russia-Africa summit in October are all examples of how well this plan is going. In an interregnum, these are marriages of convenience until the new world order emerges, but currently they are very convenient indeed.

This article originally appeared in Editor’s Picks, a free daily email digest of bne IntelliNews’ best stories from the last 24 hours. Sign up for free here.

https://to989.infusionsoft.com/app/form/editors-picks-subscribers

 

Victor Serge’s revolutionary literature On the anniversary of the October Revolution, we revisit Victor Serge’s life and work. Caught between revolutionary hope and Stalinist betrayal, his writings illuminate Europe’s turbulent twentieth century. Jacobin magazine Nov 7 By Ian Birchall A 1913 courtroom sketch of Victor Serge by Paul Charles Delaroche. (Bibliothèque Nationale de France) Review of Victor Serge: Unruly Revolutionary by Mitchell Abidor (Pluto Press, 2025) Many readers will be familiar with Victor Serge’s literary work: his novels, notably The Case of Comrade Tulayev, and his fascinating autobiography Memoirs of a Revolutionary. All his work centers around the great historical events of the first half of the twentieth century, the hopes aroused by the Russian Revolution of 1917, and its subsequent disastrous outcome. Now Mitchell Abidor has written a biography of Serge, based on extensive research and using documentation collected by the great Serge scholar and translator, Richard Greeman. While Abidor does not fundamentally challenge the account Serge himself presented in the Memoirs, he does add much fascinating detail that places Serge’s political evolution in context. Anarchism and Bolshevism Born to a Russian family in Belgium with the name Viktor Lvovich Kibalchich, Serge went through a remarkable process of intellectual development while still a teenager (he never went to school). He moved to Paris and became active as a writer and editor in the anarchist milieu, ending up in jail for five years. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the vital turning point in Serge’s development. Abidor devotes the first quarter of the book to Serge’s time as an anarchist. Revolutionaries are not born such, but make themselves, often through a path marked by difficulties and contradictions. Though Serge always retained a certain sympathy for anarchism, Abidor shows that there were some deeply reactionary elements in the Parisian anarchist scene. The influence of radical individualism and a marked pessimism about the possibility of social change meant that Serge was very skeptical about the viability of collective action. It was his later experiences of mass action, first in Spain and then in Russia, that would lead to a fundamental reorientation of his political activity. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was the vital turning point in Serge’s development. For Serge, as for a whole generation devastated by the horrific mass slaughter of World War I, the rise to power of the Bolshevik Party was a moment of hope — hope that it would be possible to construct a quite different social order. The young Serge had engaged in speculation about the possibility of revolution. Now a real revolution had happened, and even if it diverged from his earlier ideas, he was determined to play his part in it. With great difficulty, he made his way across Europe and put himself at the service of the Bolsheviks. Postrevolutionary Russia was no paradise. The main reason — and one which Abidor might have stressed more — was the efforts made by the great powers of the West (Britain, France, the United States, etc.) to subvert and overthrow the new regime and to prevent the hope it embodied from infecting working people elsewhere in the world. Foreign armies invaded Russia to join up with native counterrevolutionaries; the so-called civil war was a war of national defense. Serge, who fought in the armed defense of Petrograd and wrote a powerful history, Year One of the Russian Revolution, understood this well. Certainly Serge had, as Abidor shows, criticisms and reservations about the earliest years of the revolution. But there is no doubt that his main motivation in these years was a commitment to defend and propagate the revolution. He even supported the suppression of the Kronstadt revolt against the Bolsheviks in 1921 (though he changed his mind about this later). Serge developed the concept of “double duty”: the need to confront the external enemies of the revolution but also at the same time the negative factors within the revolution. Like Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, Serge was convinced that the revolution could only survive and develop if it spread westward. In the mid-1920s, he moved to central Europe, aiming to play his part in the hoped-for German revolution that would have transformed the balance of forces throughout Europe. However illusory the hopes of a German revolution may appear to have been in retrospect, the Germany of 1923, described by Serge in a series of press reports, was on the verge of social and economic collapse — it really did look like a society on the brink of revolution. Midnight in the Century The ten years of revolutionary commitment were, in a sense, the most important years of Serge’s life. They gave him an ideal and a vision of hope against which subsequent deformations and betrayals of the revolution could be measured. By the late 1920s, things had changed catastrophically. Lenin was dead, Trotsky had been sent into exile, and Joseph Stalin was increasingly in control of the USSR. Serge’s sympathies were with Trotsky, a figure whom, despite differences between them, he always admired. But the regime could not tolerate Serge’s support for the Left Opposition, despite — indeed because of — his record as a supporter of the revolution. He was arrested, savagely interrogated, and sent into exile over nine hundred miles from Moscow. In a sense Serge was lucky: he was exiled, but not sent to a concentration camp. Most of his contemporaries who had oppositional sympathies ended up dead. One of the main reasons Serge avoided this fate was the fact that a significant group of friends and comrades in France waged a vigorous campaign for his release. Stalin, who needed allies on the French left, decided to exile him rather than put him on trial. The ten years of revolutionary commitment were, in a sense, the most important years of Serge’s life. Like many people, I have often been asked to express support for people imprisoned in foreign countries, and wondered if there was any point to it. Serge’s release shows that such campaigns can work, sometimes at least. Serge returned to Belgium, then France. He continued to write copiously, both journalism and novels. While he had escaped Stalinism, other threats remained. Throughout Western Europe, fascism was on the rise. After Francisco Franco’s triumphal march into Madrid and Barcelona in 1939, France was surrounded on three sides by fascist regimes in Germany, Italy, and Spain. It was, in a phrase Serge coined as the title for one of his novels, “midnight in the century.” When France was occupied by German troops the following year and a viciously right-wing, antisemitic regime established, Serge aimed to get out of Europe and escape to North America. This was the phase of Serge the asylum seeker. Perhaps few asylum seekers have a political past like Serge’s, or a literary talent like his. But in his efforts to find a place on a boat bound across the Atlantic, Serge reminds us of the problems and torments faced by all refugees from his time to our own. Serge found sanctuary in Mexico, which welcomed many refugees from Europe. Leon Trotsky had been exiled (and murdered by a Stalinist agent) there. Serge spent his last years surrounded by European exiles, with a variety of hopes and aspirations for the postwar world. He continued to write, both for publication and in his notebooks. He died in 1947, aged only fifty-six, in deep poverty (there were holes in his shoes), worn out by a life of struggle and persecution. Unanswered Questions For those like myself who have long admired Serge, the concluding section of Abidor’s book is perhaps the saddest. Abidor has carefully examined Serge’s published and unpublished writings from his last years, and he convincingly concludes that in his last years, Serge saw communism as the “main enemy.” For those like myself who have long admired Serge, the concluding section of Abidor’s book is perhaps the saddest. In one sense, this is scarcely surprising. Stalinist violence was not confined to the USSR: the pro-Stalin Communists in Mexico had physically attacked Serge and may even have tried to kill him. It was small wonder that he would come to see them as his principal enemy. In fact, it is difficult to know how Serge would have developed had he lived longer. He died in the autumn of 1947; the Cold War had begun only earlier that year, with the proclamation of the Truman Doctrine as the US president promised material support to nations resisting communism and the turn to militant strikes by the Communist Parties of Western Europe. For the next forty years, world politics would be dominated by the confrontation between the US and Soviet blocs. Some ex-Communists, like Arthur Koestler, became loyal and enthusiastic supporters of the Western camp. But there was also a much smaller current, represented by figures such as C. L. R. James, Hal Draper, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Tony Cliff, who took a different view. While arguing that Stalinism had nothing in common with socialism, they sought a political path that would be independent of both Washington and Moscow. Would Serge have backed the Americans in Korea and Vietnam, or would he have stood by the spirit of revolutionary independence that had characterized his life so far? We can only speculate. The range of choices facing Serge can be illustrated by looking at some of the companions who shared his exile in Mexico. Marceau Pivert had been the leader of the French Socialist Party’s far-left faction during the 1930s before breaking away to form a group of his own. In 1945, he returned to France and rejoined the Socialist Party. While he opposed all cooperation with the French Communist Party, Pivert became increasingly dissatisfied with the Socialist Party’s rightward drift. In particular, he remained committed to the cause of colonial liberation and strongly opposed the repression of the movement for Algerian independence; this led to his final break with the Socialist Party leadership shortly before his death in 1958. Another of Serge’s close associates, Julián Gorkin, followed a different path. During the Spanish Civil War, he had been a leader of the POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unity), which confronted the Communist Party of Spain from the left. Exiled in Mexico, he helped Serge obtain a Mexican visa, and together with him had faced violence from Mexican Stalinists. However, by the time he moved to Paris in 1948, Gorkin had firmly aligned himself as an anti-communist in the Cold War. He became editor of a Spanish-language journal, Cuadernos, on behalf of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which (as became widely known) was financed and controlled by the US Central Intelligence Agency. Hope and Betrayal One thing is clear: Serge’s perspective is primarily European. Although he had written a very perceptive article on the Chinese rising of 1927, he otherwise showed little interest in Africa and Asia. Yet the collapse of the old colonial empires was one of the most important developments after 1945. Britain was forced out of India, while France fought two bloody and disastrous wars in Indochina and Algeria. How Serge would have responded we cannot know. If Serge’s death left unanswered questions, his life was a remarkable contribution to the politics of the socialist left. If Serge’s death left unanswered questions, his life was a remarkable contribution to the politics of the socialist left. Abidor’s account is a fascinating and well-documented story; it deserves to be read and hopefully will encourage more people to read Serge’s own writings. All of Serge’s life and work was dominated by a contradiction — the way the very real hope inspired by 1917 gave way to the betrayal of Stalinism. As Serge summed it up: “Out of a magnificent workers’ victory we have seen the rise, on the basis of the socialist ownership of the means of production, of an inhuman regime, profoundly anti-socialist in the way it treats human beings.” It was this contradiction that shaped the world of the twentieth century. The heritage is still with us, as we face midnight in our own century. Thus rebels against the system are labeled “Marxists,” often by people who know little or nothing of what Marxism is. The memory of the Cold War and McCarthyite anti-communism remains with us. There is still much to be learned from the life and work of Victor Serge. Ian Birchall is the author of Sartre Against Stalinism and many articles and essays on the twentieth-century French left.