How Can Russia Take the Idea of Negotiation with Ukraine and the West Seriously?

Negotiations, negotiations

There is a curious wave of Western analysts’ opining, including earlier today from Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, and also in a recent Quincy Institute paper by Lieven and Bebe, that concede that Ukraine is losing - Wilkerson goes so far as to say that Ukraine has already lost, and that every day that passes now will mean that it will lose more - and then go on to assert that now Ukraine must negotiate or must be forced by the Western powers into negotiation with Russia (with Lieven and Bebe insisting that in the meantime the West must provide more arms to Ukraine).

Putin also has one other major objective, and that is to secure Western participation in reconfiguring Europe in such a way that Russia’s security interests are at last respected and observed by NATO and EU powers. Since Western powers have demonstrated that only a fool would take their word or treaties remotely seriously - these are the powers that told Gorbachev that NATO would not move further east after the reunification of West and East Germany, these are the powers that signed and then reneged on the Minsk accords, these are the powers that allowed Ukraine to negotiate peace with Russia in March 2022 and then stopped Zelenskiy from proceeding - Russia has nobody that it can negotiate with, however much innocents such as Wilkerson, Lieven or Bebe wish that it was otherwise.

If Putin does decide he can negotiate with a crew such as this, then indeed Russia has lost.

The West has now put Russia into a position where Russia can only secure a real peace by fighting until it can dictate terms that will endure. And that, my friends, requires something much more than four oblasts and Crimea. Putin has been saying for a long time that Odessa is a Russian city and Medvedev has just said that there can be no Russian security that does not include Kiev and Kharkiv. I envisage a rump steak served raw for Poland, Romania and Germany to chew over.

Battlefields

The main news from the battlefields today concentrates on Russian movements in the villages and settlements close to Avdiivka which, notwithstanding some remaining pockets of Ukrainian resistance in Avdiivka itself, is under Russian control. This is very important because if Russia is successful in doing this then it may very well find little by way of further resistance as it moves further West towards the Dnieper. But if it gets bogged down in this area, then that will not be encouraging for the prospects of what might eventually transition from a slow, grinding war of attrition by Russia on Ukraine to a fast invasion over relatively unoccupied and unprotected territory.

Dima of the Military Summary Channel at midday today, February 23, reported that the village of Stepove, north of Avdiivka and west of the Russian-occupied railway, is now under full Russian control. Russians came under fire from one or more Ukrainian Abram tanks, which had arrived from Berdychi direction to the west of the settlement. Further south, Russian forces have moved in the direction of Ukrainian-held Orlivka, and have met resistance along the way. Ukraine used cluster munitions and captured some Russian tanks. Further south, Russia has moved on and has now reportedly taken Sieverne, to the southwest of Lastochkyne - which appears to be still held by Ukraine (news flash - Russia took control of it at 9:00 pm local time on Feb 23) - forcing Ukrainian troops to retreat to Tonenke to the West which is also under pressure from Russian forces moving south. Dima does not consider that Ukraine will hold on to Tonenke for very long. In this location, Russia has the advantage of high ground overlooking Ukrainian positions in or near villages in lower ground. Russia is also moving on the town of Krasnohorivka, subjecting it to heavy FAV bombing. Russia expects that Ukraine will soon abandon the settlement. South of Marinka, Russia has taken Pobieda and will likely move on to Kostiantynivka.

It does appear that despite the defeat of Ukraine in Avdiivka it is still possible for Ukraine to wreak revenge on innocent citizens in Donetsk City, as it has been doing now for almost ten years. Patrick Lancaster reported yesterday that there was no evidence of additional pressure on Donetsk hospitals following the Avdiivka battle, suggesting that Western claims of very heavy Russian casualties (20,000) are bunkum.

In the Bakhmut area, Russia has entered the settlement of Ivanivksa. Russia continues to bomb Chasiv Yar to the northwest. To the north of Bakhmut Russia is consolidating its position in the Soledar area, and moving north from Vesele towards the village of Vyimka. Further north to northeast, Russia is subjecting the settlement of Spirne to heavy bombing. Still further north Russia is continuing to subject the settlement of Bilohorivka to heavy bombing, in particular the landfill, and is advancing on the village from the north and from the east, attacks that appear to have been resisted successfully by Ukraine for the time being. In the Kupyansk direction, there is no further news, but Dima appears to expect a Russian initiative in this zone very soon when it will become, he says, the most active and “noisiest” in the SMO combat line.

South, in the Robotyne area it appears that Russia has now regained half of the settlement. Much further west,, in Kherson, there is Russian FPV drone activity aimed at Ukrainian boats in the vicinity of Krynky. Russia has returned to regular bombing of Ukrainian settlements on the west bank of the Dnieper.

Demobs Mobs

A ballyhooed interview by Fox News with President Zelenskiy appears to have cratered, with a mere 24,000 hits in the same period after the interview compared with the million that greeted the Carlson interview with Putin (going on afterward to achieve a worldwide audience of around a billion).

To solve Ukraine’s chronic manpower shortage for the armed forces, Zelenskiy is introducing next month a program of demobilization of forces that have been in the field now for up to two years - in itself a popular move - for the purposes of increasing the numbers of experienced male soldiers for the mobilization that Ukraine still plans (was aiming for 500,000 but is now down to 250,000) to push through RADA but where it has been stuck for many weeks. In effect therefore this presumably means that some soldiers will get some well-earned rest before being called up one more time. Ukraine may be having more immediate success in overcoming its manpower shortage by bringing in mercenaries from Poland, France and the USA. No such measures come close to repairing a shell imbalance between Russia and Ukraine of 10 to 1 (Russia producing 4 to 5 million a year while the US and Europe can barely manage one million), or a population imbalance of 5 to 1, or between a rising and a sinking economy, of a rapidly expanding weapons production capability against one that is totally dependent on the charity of others, those others being less and less inclined to continue giving.

Russia has been firing large numbers of drones and achieving some hits on Ukraine’s military-industrial complex in Dnipro and Zapporizhzhia areas.

Economic Warfare

The effete leaders of the Western World stubbornly persist in repeating all their mistakes. So, knowing that their obsessive craving for a sanctions regime that might work the way they think it should work is actually a rather pathetic delusion which only makes Russia more independent and more prosperous than ever, and which diminishes Western trade and profitability and pushes up the cost of energy for Western industry and is right now pushing Europe into recession and deindustrialization, what do they do? Even the IMF has told Washington and Europe that its sanctions packages are counterproductive.

The latest sanctions impact 500 Russian individuals, and I believe there are secondary sanctions that may for a time depress economic activity between Russia and China, and between China and India. Past experience suggests that such troughs in the immediate wake of sanctions packages disappear very quickly as the sanctioned people and activities work around the new obstacles and restore relations to as good a position or better than before.

The economic forces of convergence between Russia, China, India and other members of the BRICS are now so powerful that Western sanctions mainly work to enhance their inevitability and their power - they are bringing forward the day, ever more rapidly, when the BRICS creates its own financial and economic monetary system and ditches the dollar. The reason why Saudi Arabia is in that club is because the Saudis finally abandoned the collective West in the face of the West’s insistence on oil price caps (that have had only a miserable impact so far on the activities they were designed to depress).

In addition to its lunatic obsession with sanctions the West persists in the hope that it can find a way of seizing frozen Russian assets, or at least the interest earned by such assets, so as to help finance more military aid for Ukraine. These measures are utterly illegal. We will soon hear whether that attempt at daylight robbery will continue and, if it does, how soon it will invite equivalent reprisal ($300bn) against the many Western corporations still in Russia and destroy the remaining bonds of trust between the financial institutions of the Collective West and the countries of the Global South. And how more quickly the Collective West will find itself staring through a pungent cloud of arrogance and hubris upon the Nemesis that it has itself created.