by Paul Dragu, The New American:
The Trump administration’s peace plan for Ukraine has hit a wall. After a five-hour negotiation session on Tuesday, the Russians rejected the proposal, which was revised multiple times by the time it got to Moscow. And just before those talks, Russian head of state Vladimir Putin told reporters that his country is ready for a fight with NATO if that’s where the war is heading.
Putin’s comments follow those by NATO officials who openly suggested they were thinking of attacking Russia. Italian Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone said NATO may take a “more ‘aggressive’ approach to deter Moscow from continuing its campaign of drone incursions and cyberattacks in Europe,” according to reports.
On Tuesday at an investment forum in Moscow, Putin was asked if Russia was preparing for war with NATO. He said Russia didn’t want to fight Europe, but if it came to that, the Kremlin’s strategy will be different from the one it’s using in Ukraine:
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We are not planning to go to war against Europe. I have said that a hundred times. But if Europe wants to wage a war against us and suddenly starts a war with us, we are ready. There should be no doubt about that. The only question is if Europe suddenly starts a war against us.… Europe is not Ukraine. In Ukraine, we are acting with surgical precision. You see my point, don’t you? It is not a war in the direct, modern sense of the word. If Europe suddenly decides to go to war against us and actually follows through with it, then a situation may arise very quickly where we will be left with no one to negotiate with.
Europeans vs. Peace
Earlier, Putin accused the Europeans of subverting the Trump administration’s peace proposal. “Seeing that the outcome does not please them either, they have begun to sabotage the efforts of the current United States administration and President [Donald] Trump to achieve peace through negotiation,” he said. He added that the revisions they made were intended to “obstruct this entire peace process” by putting forth demands they know “are utterly unacceptable to Russia.”
This view has been echoed even by some in the West, including journalist Gerry Nolan, whose impassioned opinion was featured on the Ron Paul Institute’s website:
Europe’s “peace plan” is pure fan fiction: unlimited Ukrainian army, NATO doors wide open, foreign troops invited in, sanctions snapped on and off like Christmas lights — and not one inch of territory ceded. In other words, the exact blueprint that created the war … now repackaged as the path to end it.…
The Europeans have finally placed their “rival plan” on the table and it reads like a suicide pact masquerading as diplomacy. Not a roadmap to peace, but the most dangerous piece of political fiction since the Iraq WMD dossier. It wasn’t written to end the war. It was crafted to re-ignite it, by technocrats who’ve never seen a trench, never buried a son, yet now presume to redraw a battlefield they’ve never fought on. This plan would destroy what’s left of Ukraine and plunge Europe into permanent instability.
After Tuesday’s comments at the investment forum, Putin met with U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who appear genuinely interested in ending the war. Also present in the meeting was Kremlin foreign-policy aide Yuri Ushakov and Kremlin confidant Kirill Dmitriev, who is reported to have had a major say in crafting the original proposal.
Land the Major Obstacle to an Agreement
Reports suggest Ukrainian territorial concessions are among the major obstacles to an agreement. Russia wants the entire Donbas region (it controls all but 14 percent of it), and the portion of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions that it controls. The Americans’ plan calls for the Russians to give some of it back.
The Russians are not likely to walk away from any land they have won. The closest the Ukrainians have ever come to warming up to the idea of territorial concessions was just before Putin’s visit with Trump this summer in Alaska. But they appear to have reverted back to an absolutist position, despite already having lost complete control of about 20 percent of the country’s landmass.
But even if Ukrainian head of state Volodymyr Zelensky and his European whisperers agree to territorial concessions, there’s no guarantee the military will follow orders and walk away. Certain Ukrainian hardliners in politics and the military have openly said that Zelensky has no authority to concede any land. Zelensky has said this too. Some experts on the matter have suggested that even if he agrees to land concessions, certain elements of the military will not only refuse to pull back, but likely overthrow him, maybe even try to kill him. You can read more about that in our previous report here.
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