We’ve been talking about the Ukraine endgame—what is it, and what direction should we run in to get away from it? Some say the conflict will just go on forever. I don’t buy that. I’ve assembled some commentary from a pair of smart guys who lay out what’s going on behind the scenes. However, before we get to that, I want to recommend a substack article:
We can't get there from here, anymore.
What’s good about this article is that it places the American war against Russia—which is being fought in Ukraine—within an overall context taken from military history. The author contrasts ‘normal’ warfare, in which neighbors get together to kill each other, with expeditionary warfare—in which countries travel great distances to kill other people. He traces this distinction back to the Athenian Empire’s catastrophic Sicilian Expedition, but his point is to place America’s wars within a context. In a sense there’s not much new. The big problem with expeditionary wars is always logistics. It’s why our rulers keep telling us that there won’t be American boots on the ground in Ukraine—it’s simply because shifting the necessary forces with which to wage effective war against Russia in Russia is not possible. Even if our forces in Europe were sufficient for the purpose—which they’re not— beyond a certain and very time limited point, resupply would be impossible. That point would arrive long before Russia could be placed in serious difficulties. Read up on the Sicilian Expedition to get an idea of the possible consequences.
Of course there are other problems, as well, with expeditionary warfare. The author deals with those, as well. Among others, there’s the fact that our weapons systems are totally unsuited for that type of warfare, and that it’s doubtful that we could construct a military that would be able to conduct effective expeditionary warfare against highly capable opponents—like Russia and China. Woops! That’s right. Those considerations lead to the endgame.
What we’re witnessing now is the Neocon last ditch warfare tactic—we win with our narrative! Our narrative beats Putin’s military! The pen is mightier than the sword. The trick with that approach is that you need to convince the guy with the sword to put his sword down. Awkward.
Let’s turn first to Alastair Crooke, speaking with Judge Napolitano. The video actually begins with a discussion of Crooke’s recent article that we discussed in Thinking Some More About Impeachment. Crooke’s thesis there was that he sees a “counter-revolution brewing in America, and part of the mix behind that brew is the Ukraine war. More relevant to our current topic is another recent post featuring Crooke’s ideas: Alastair Crooke On The Neocon Ban On Negotiations. At any rate, halfway through the Judge Nap video the discussion turns to the Ukraine endgame. I’ve taken liberties with this transcript to make it read well. I’ve pruned it, but I believe I’ve been faithful to the meaning:
A Counter Revolution & the Ukraine Russian War w/Alastair Crooke
Judge Nap plays some video clips and asks Crooke to comment:
Zhou in Helsinki the day after the NATO conference in Vilnius: “Putin has already lost the war. Putin has a real problem--how does he move from here. He could end the war tomorrow, he could just say: I'm out. But what agreement is ultimately reached depends upon Putin and what he decides to do. But there is no possibility of him winning the war in Ukraine. He's already lost that war. Imagine if even, anyway, he's already lost that war.”
Got that? Putin’s losing.
AC: It's not just Zhou saying these absurd things. It's the head of CIA, the head of MI6, it's Blinken, it's Sullivan--the entire team. The team is sticking to the narrative: Russia, Putin is losing. Some might ask, Are they completely deluded? Are they being misled, given the wrong briefing, or is something else going on? I think there is something else. I think there's a pattern in what they're trying to do. Otherwise it's almost inexplicable, that they should be chanting the same mantra, all of them together, without any sort of qualification.
Jake Sullivan: “I can't speak to what's in the mind of President Putin. All I can say is that the basic US position in this comes down to a single clear point, which is, We're going to support Ukraine without having US boots on the ground and American soldiers fighting Russian soldiers, and that will remain consistent throughout the course of this conflict.”
As if. As if Putin hasn’t told us—and the world—exactly what’s on his mind.
William Burns, CIA Director and former US ambassador to Russia at the Aspen Institute: “Weaknesses have been exposed by Prigozhin's mutiny, but I think even more deeply than that they've been exposed by Putin's misjudgment since he launched this invasion, as well. I think there's a relationship between the Battleground in Ukraine and what's going on inside Russia in the sense that, if and when the Ukrainians make further advances on the battlefield, I think what that's going to do is cause more and more Russians in the elite and outside the elite to pay attention to Prigozhin's critique of the war. …”
The focus, as above, is strictly on Putin. The Neocons are desperately seeking regime change, grasping at whatever straws they think are at hand. Note, too, the appeal to Russian “elites”. That will come up later. Putin has an 80-90% approval rating, so a popular uprising seems out of the cards. Ah, but the elites! Spreading democracy through elite led color revolutions. That’s our game.
I think there's a pattern here that explains it. If we look first at the Biden corruption allegations what see is absolutely no acknowledgment of anything, no budging from the narrative at all. And then, as Jonathan Turley has pointed out, you get a "scandal implosion" system being produced. Suddenly a year later, [discusses the Hunter wrist slap plea, etc.] and then the chorus from the White House, from the Press, is: 'Move on, forget it, it's over, no scandal, let's move on!'
I don't think it's working, particularly, because things are are changing, events on the ground are changing. We had the same with Nordstream: no admission, nothing. The narrative was held fully and then finally the CIA comes up with a scandal imploder: 'Oh, we found the yacht with a few Aqualung experts on it who blew up the pipeline.’ And now we have with Ukraine, which is so significant and so disastrous a failure for the West as a whole. Again, stick to the narrative, keep it going preparing for the sort of scandal implosion to come to shift the blame: 'Look, we gave those people everything and they failed to follow our advice. They're the ones at fault.' But not yet, because they need a few more months to try and get to the point where you say: 'You know, Ukraine, let's move on from there, let's go to a different conversation, find a way out of this.' Because they know, ultimately, when all this talk about, 'Oh, we could speak to Putin, we could have a negotiation,’ they know what Putin's position would be: 'I want capitulation, I want complete capitulation from Kiev. That is my bottom line, and that's what I intend to get—with your help or without it.’
But with that everything implodes, the whole narrative implodes. NATO is shown up to be impotent--not an omnipotent power. Western weapons are shown up to be pretty useless. NATO is not even very competent at running a war. America, it's a major disaster in the making.
Well, Putin has said it very clearly: ‘This war ends when there are no Ukrainian forces in the field and no NATO weapons in the field.’ None of those people from team Biden [in the video clips] are going to be able to negotiate on that basis. It would be impossible. That's why I think they're sticking with the narrative that Russia is losing. Because it's an embarrassment and is going to become a worse embarrassment. I think the focus is now on how to get out of this without the humiliation becoming too evident.
This is my thinking. The Biden Administration has made such a mess of this, and the American public is so sick and tired of 'let's move on, let's move on,' the president is so desperate to change the narrative from his reprehensible, incompetent leadership, that he might cause something to happen which will allow him to argue, 'you need me now.' Some sort of false flag emergency type event. God forbid people die in order to induce the American public to rally around them. I don't know what else he possibly has left of his decrepit administration and terrible leadership.
Now keep all that in mind—the idea of a narrative, the use of Putin as the boogey man, the argument that Russia is losing but we’re going to be the magnanimous winners. We turn to Alexander Mercouris, discussing the Moscow Times article that I referred to in Rebranding A Frozen Conflict. As Mercouris explains, this idea of secret and unofficial negotiations are supposed to be a follow-on to the reports of such talks that we’ve previously discussed:
Big Ukr Defeat Relaunch Offensive; Rus Missile Strike; US-Rus Secret Talks, US Ready to Abandon Ukr
36:00
There's been a most interesting article in a newspaper called Moscow Times about what is supposed to be negotiations that are allegedly underway between the Americans and the Russians. Before I discuss this article I think I should say a little about what Moscow times is.
Moscow times is a newspaper that it used to be freely available in Moscow. It's an English language newspaper that primarily targeted the expat community in Moscow, which at one time was fairly large Of course a few English-speaking Russians, particularly elite Russians, also read it read it. It followed a rigidly pro-western line. It was extremely critical of President Putin and his government. It supported the liberal opposition in Russia. It's very very critical of Russian Economic Policy of Russian foreign policy and it basically supported and supported in its entirety every aspect of Western foreign policy.
It's now published in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Essentially what we're talking about is an English language website.
This article purports to be an article based on information provided to Moscow Times by an ex US diplomat. It discusses a back channel that is supposed to be taking place between the Russians and the Americans as they look to find some way out of the conflict. The article shares details of secret track 1.5 diplomacy with Moscow. Now, the point about track 1.5 diplomacy with Moscow is that of course these are unofficial contacts. These are supposed to be informal contacts and the article says that secret diplomatic talks are ongoing between former senior U.S national security officials and high-ranking members of the Kremlin.
A former U.S official directly involved in the talks has confirmed to the Moscow Times that these are follow-up to the talks that took place in New York between Sergey Lavrov and Richard Hass and his team.
…
That already makes me suspicious. These are obviously not official government negotiations, nor are they unofficial expert dialogues. So who is speaking to him precisely? I mean, to me that's already a red light about this particular article. As you read this article it becomes increasingly difficult to understand exactly what is going on.
The former official said that "it was apparent that the greatest issue was that the Russians were unable to articulate what exactly they wanted and needed. They don't know how to define victory or defeat. In fact, some of the elites to whom we spoke had never wanted the war in the first place even saying it had been a complete mistake. But now they're at War, and suffering a humiliating defeat is not an option for these guys."
I have to say this makes me very suspicious. Senior Kremlin officials and advisors are not prepared to say how Russia defines defeat or Victory? Why should they? Why would they want to disclose Russia's plans? The Russians have repeatedly stated publicly what they want to see achieved. They want Ukraine to become neutral outside NATO, they want de-Nazification, demilitarization, denuclearization, and they want Ukraine to acknowledge the new geographical realities: the loss of Crimea, of Donbass, of Zaporozhye. These are publicly stated positions, so what is the actual ambiguity about this, the inability to articulate what they wanted and needed?
It also seems to me really implausible at this time that Russian officials, senior members of the Kremlin, would say that they regarded the decision to launch the special military operation as a complete mistake. Is that what they would actually do? If these people who have been spoken to even exist, we're not talking here about Kremlin officials and experts. We're perhaps talking about Western oriented business people--oligarchs perhaps--some of whom are known to be unhappy about the war for all sorts of reasons. If so, it's interesting that even these people apparently are not prepared to even contemplate the issue of a possible Russian defeat. In other words, they're fully on board with the war, whatever misgivings they might have had about it at the outset.
This former official then goes on to say, "it was here that we made clear that the U.S was prepared to work constructively with Russian national security interests. This breaks with the official U.S line of squeezing Russia financially and isolating it internationally, so as to prevent it from continuing its war against Ukraine. An attempt to isolate and Russia to the point of humiliation or collapse would make negotiation almost impossible. We're already seeing this in the reticence from Moscow officials. In fact, we emphasized that the U.S needs and will continue to need a strong enough Russia to create stability along its periphery."
The U.S wants Russia with strategic autonomy in order for the U.S to advance diplomatic opportunities in Central Asia:
"We in the U.S have to recognize that total victory in Europe could harm our interests in other areas of the world. Russian power is not necessarily A Bad Thing. The former official acknowledged that completely severing ties between Moscow and Beijing was unrealistic, however efforts should be made to limit the extent of this relationship. Washington's goal is to strike a balance that prevents an overwhelming consolidation of Russian power whilst fostering diplomatic opportunities in Asia where Moscow plays a significant role. This does not mean we are abandoning Ukraine and Europe. Rather, we want to find ways of guaranteeing Ukraine's independence whilst bringing Russia back as a more creative player in European security."
Come let us reason together! Trust us! And that goes for you, too, Zelensky. Just cuz we’re now ready to do a deal with Vlad through separate channels that don’t include you, doesn’t mean we’d cut you loose. Does it?
The former official goes on to say that there's been
"a severe lack of sustained U.S Russia dialogue on European security. Our negotiations in early 2022 prior to the full scale invasion should have remained confidential but the Russians proceeded to leak the details. This made the negotiation process far more difficult and we suggested setting up a number of diplomatic channels in order to satisfy the desires of all the parties involved. The first needs to be a serious U.S - Russia channel, as there are only two countries powerful enough to negotiate security in Europe. There must of course be a channel between Ukraine and Russia, another between Russia and the EU, and one between Russia and the global South."
Right. The bad Putin told the whole world exactly what Russia wants. Bad Putin! But now let’s you and us come up with a new security agreement—for Europe, our vassals.
The official went on to say that during the discussions
"it became evident that Ukraine's chances of regaining its occupied territories were extremely slim. Crimea remains a particularly contentious issue, as Ukraine asserts its intent to reclaim the region which Russia annexed in 2024."
The former official talks about staging "fair referendums" in Russian areas that were formerly part of Ukraine. The Russians flatly rejected this proposal when it was put to them as part of these secret talks. The former official expressed a sense that the ongoing secret talks in Russian diplomacy have reached an impasse. The war makes it impossible to do any productive form of diplomacy.
And then we hear that Putin is the major block to all progress. "The U.S Administration has made at least one attempt to speak with the Kremlin but Putin himself refused, and for this reason Washington should begin reaching out to the anti-war Russian Elite and begin making progress with them. If there was support amongst the elite for another leader, ousting Putin would not be impossible."
Now this is a most extraordinary article and, of course, the first question that immediately springs to my mind is: Is it describing anything that is really happening? It did occur to me that perhaps this is an article which does not discuss real discussions in Moscow. People in Russia, officials in Russia, do read the Moscow Times. It could be that this is an article intended to sow dissension in Moscow, to try to get people in Russia to think that there is some kind of Western intrigue underway, trigger an investigation in the Kremlin about who it is exactly who's talking to these ex-US officials, telling them that the war was a mistake, implying that Putin is the problem and should be removed.
All of those things did occur to me that this is perhaps that kind of destabilization initiative. But on balance I think that this does describe some kind of talks that might actually be taking place, though I do wonder whether the Russians these ex-diplomats are talking to are quite as well connected and as important in the Kremlin as they imagine.
Anyway, the reason I say this is because this is so consistent with the kind of policy lines one might expect from people like Richard Haass and the Council on Foreign Relations. These are people who are not in any conceivable sense moderates--or even truly realists. They're people who are fully committed to the project of keeping the United States as the world leader, the Hegemon if you wish. The difference between them and other Neocons in Washington is that these people are more focused on the deal with China than they are on the deal with Russia. Once again it comes back to an issue of trying to prise Russia away from China, of disrupting the Chinese Russian strategic partnership, and also--by the way--avoiding a debacle in Ukraine. We can see what these people are trying to do. They're coming to the Russians and they're saying to them, 'Look, we're not really hostile to you. It might seem like we are but, actually, we are not. We understand that your country has an important role to play in the world. We understand that you have concerns about the security situation in Europe. We also understand that you're not prepared to contemplate the surrender of any of the four regions to Ukraine. Nevertheless, we do want to come to some kind of modus vivendi with you. But our plan is to do so in a way that separates you, distances you from your Chinese friends.’
Now, that is exactly the kind of line that I would imagine Richard Haass and his friends at the Council on Foreign Relations to be taking. But their proposals are incredibly nebulous. They seem to be prepared to revisit the negotiations that took place in December 2021 and the early part of 2022, based on the two Russian draft treaties. They criticize the Russians for the failure of those negotiations because the Russians insisted on making part of those negotiations open--they leaked information about them. That's not my understanding of why the negotiations fell apart at all. However, they're not prepared to say that the United States is prepared to actually agree to the two draft treaties. There's no reference to NATO or its future status, but there is some suggestion that the United States and Russia should come together and decide the security situation in Europe between them--even if the EU and Ukraine would be able to conduct some dialogue with Russia as well. In return, presumably, there's going to be some sort of sanctions relief and the Russians are supposed to step aside and allow the US to re-enter Central Asia, obviously the area on China's Western flank, and thereby put pressure on China.
As I said, this is totally unrealistic. I think it is completely unacceptable in Moscow. I think it is completely unacceptable in the United States at the moment. Also, Ukrainians reading this, if they take it seriously, if they ever thought that it would evolve into some kind of outright negotiation process would say that the United States is preparing to sell them down the river. And the Russians would be looking at all of these proposals and would be saying to themselves that, yet again, they're being asked to make major concessions to the United States, allow the United States back into Central Asia, realigning with the United States against China in return for proposals about European security which are far from being concrete.
So it is completely understandable why these talks are now are now at an impasse, why these people--Richard Haass and company from the Council o Foreign Relations--are making no progress with them. But I think that this article in Moscow Times does, perhaps, give us some insight as to some of the thinking that is taking place in the United States at some level within the US government. They're trying to find a way out. They're still hoping to achieve something that they could call a positive from this conflict. They're back at the old game of trying to detach the Russians from the Chinese. They're offering what are clearly going to be concessions at Ukraine's expense. They're making vague offers to revisit the issue of security in Europe.
Even though this is hardly helpful hardly material that the Russians can realistically work with it does suggest that an American pull out from Ukraine is now only a matter of time. And I suspect that this is the view those reticent Russian officials listening to all of this will take away. It's important, however, to stress again that these are informal talks--if they're even taking place. The administration is not formally involved in them and the Russians, for their part, will not take kindly at all to the suggestions that have been floated once more by Americans: that problem is President Putin and that the solution to everything is to remove him from the scene.
So first, perhaps, a glimmer of some kind of a negotiating strategy beginning to emerge. Richard Haass and his people, perhaps, are trying to speak to the Russians but at the moment the proposals that they are making are not really proposals at all. The ideas that they are floating are not of a sort that the Russians would consider attractive. Anyway there we are.
For my part, I believe that Mercouris is largely correct. The US is looking for a way out, but is not yet ready to give up on the project. They are offering carrots, but they are also suggesting that the process could be helped along if “Russian elites” applied the stick to Putin. Then a deal could be made—you rid us of bad Putin and we toss you some “concessions” to make you look good to dumb Russians. The concessions will, of course, only be as good as the paper they may or may not be written on.
The problem is, from my standpoint, that Putin holds all the cards.
However the game plays out, the cover story is always going to be "Russia thought they could take Kiev in three days and ha ha they never did, retreated with their tails between their legs, WE WIN!! We're great. That showed them."
Ideally without too many (or any) slo-mo vids of crappy overpriced NATO hardware smouldering in fields or, worse, displayed more-or-less intact in squares near foreign embassies.
It's just how long it takes to get there. IMHO: 6 -9 months depending on how the US election cycle pans out.
Two more observations:
1/ Wasn't it Mark Millivanilli the rainbow warrior who started all this "...in three days..." bullshit in the first place?
2/ Big ups to Mark for the consistently brilliant articles but especially for the transcript-style pieces which save me the time of sitting through the lengthy videos that I don;t have the patience for. You the man.
On point: "Ah, but the elites! Spreading democracy through elite led color revolutions. That’s our game.". The neocons go with this approach because it is what ’works' in the West. The amount of high-level narrative projection & BS is telling: next step, end-game #NATO_got_nuthin