As Aaron Mate' demonstrates in his excellent article, Zelensky lost his chance to be the independent peacemaker he campaigned as, and the U.S. forewent its chance--actually never had any intention--to ally with him in such a project. They both--Zelensky under U.S. pressure--chose the instrumental alliance with the adamantly anti-Russian fascist fighters. It's all about--it was always all about--the U.S./NATO plan of aggression against Russia, nothing about a peaceful Ukraine. As Chomsky says, the "explicit" policy of the United States has been "rejection of any form of negotiations."
Russia knows this, and knows that "negotiations" with Zelensky are Kabuki theater that will be replaced by a table laid with terms of surrender when the decisive fighting behind the stage is resolved. One way or the other.
If it sounds like I'm denying the agency of Ukraine and of Zelensky in this situation, that's because I am. Since Ukraine's democratically elected leader was overthrown and Victoria Nuland decided who would be the new Prime Minister, and a U.S. citizen and venture capitalist became Ukraine's Finance Minister (quickly granted Ukrainian citizenship by presidential decree); and since Vice President Joe Biden coerced the firing of the Ukrainian state prosecutor who was investigating the company that was paying his son a handsome sum that Joe was taking half of; and since the U.S./NATO started sending military officers and arming and training and organizing military exercises, and things like that, Ukraine has been a dependent, compliant client state, and tool, of the U.S.
Right now, you would have to be very naà ¯ve not to understand that Zelensky is, every day, in contact U.S. political, military, and intelligence officers--personally in Kiev, and on the Zoom with Washington--who are, effectively, telling him what to do. I promise you Vladimir Putin knows it. Just as he knows what came as a surprise to this French reporter, that "the Americans are in charge":
I really hate to say it, but the question in this battle between Russia and the U.S. is not "What compromise can we negotiate?" but "Who is going to accept defeat?"
I hate to say it because it is hard to imagine what would make either party do that.
Bad Example
It's worth remarking the difference between this situation and the most dangerous previous standoff between the nuclear superpowers, the U.S. and Russia/the Soviet Union. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, there was a compromise solution: In exchange for Khrushchev removing Soviet missiles from Cuba, John Kennedy then agreed to remove the American missiles he had previously placed in Turkey, right on Russia's border. Part of that deal was that Khrushchev kept quiet about Kennedy's concession, allowing the U.S. to claim a "win." In other words, the United States acknowledged and reversed its provocative action, sotto voce.
In today's case, there is, first of all, nothing to exchange. Russia has no military presence on America's borders. In exchange for what is Russia going to leave Ukraine as a NATO military base? Sanctions relief? Ha. The U.S. is never going to stop sanctioning Russia and Russia knows it. That's been going on since long before Ukraine, at least since the ridiculous Magnitsky Act sanctions imposed by Obama on the back of an utterly fraudulent pretext by the con-man, Bill Browder.
Neither the military threats nor sanctions on Russia will ever stop, until and unless--the neocons' fevered dream--some kind of neo-Yeltsin-ish U.S.-compliant regime is resurrected in Moscow. Which there will not be. Behind Vladimir Putin are politicians and a populace more disgusted and angry with American arrogance, contempt, and hypocrisy.
Second of all, and perhaps even harder for U.S. n-dimensional think-tankers to accept, there will be no secret or implicit deals that hide what really happened. No more: We''ll let you look like the winner. No more: Not one inch further. Pinky swear. Russia has put its terms on the table in writing to the U.S., which ignored them. It will insist on a resolution with Ukraine and its controllers that is written, explicitly agreed to by all involved parties, with some mechanism of verification and enforcement satisfactory to Russia, all terms of which are known to the entire, real international community. Can U.S. foreign policy wonks even fathom such a thing?
Most important, Kennedy and Khrushchev were working in a mutually accepted balance-of-power framework in which each accepted the power and interests of the other. Their compromise avoided a disruption of that status quo arrangement. In today's case, the United States has been working for thirty years in a self-defined framework where it is the sole superpower, whose "first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere." The expansion of NATO and politico-military capture of Ukraine is precisely part of that project, which the U.S. considers the "normal" status quo. It is that status quo that Russia is fighting to disrupt and which the U.S. will fight to preserve--because the arrogant clowns running U.S. foreign policy cannot recognize that it's already gone to ghost. They're still partying like it's 1999. (A more deeply delusive moment than 1962.)
The imminent Russian offensive to destroy the bulk of the Ukrainian army that's effectively encircled in the east will be a decisive turning point. One can never be certain about such things, but, absent a transformative military intervention by the U.S., it is highly likely that Russia will prevail in that action.
In light of both the persistent suggestion in the Western narrative that, because it withdrew from some cities, Russia has been losing this battle, and the new rumblings about the possible use of nuclear weapons, there's another historical moment worth remembering. In the dominant popular history of WWII, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki forced Japan to surrender. But, as many historians have pointed out, per Peter Kuznick : "The US had firebombed more than 100 Japanese cities. Destruction reached as high as 99.5 percent of the city of Toyama. Japanese leaders accepted that the US could wipe out their cities. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were two more cities that had to be sacrificed. What changed the equation for them was the Soviet invasion that started at midnight on August 8th."
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