Vladimir putin

If I had a penny for every time I have been told that Russian president Vladimir Putin only wants respect. Or that he is only interested in eastern Ukraine. Or that if Kyiv is only denied NATO membership, then he will call off the tanks. Well, in the last seven days President Donald Trump has given Putin all this and more. And, though it is still early days, so far the war is showing no sign of slowing. And what has the man who wrote The Art of the Deal asked for in exchange for all this diplomatic largesse? Absolutely nothing. In fact, the only substantive demand Trump has made so far is of the Ukrainians. Last week Washington sent Treasury secretary Scott Bessent to Kyiv with an extraordinary demand.

President Donald Trump called Russian president Vladimir Putin yesterday and discussed various topics, including the war in Ukraine, for an hour and a half. According to Trump, the two agreed to begin negotiations on ending the three year-long conflict immediately and even set up preliminary talks about traveling to one another’s capitals. Shortly after the call with Putin, Trump dialed Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky for yet another conversation that reportedly went ”very well.” Trump’s call with Zelensky, of course, wasn’t the controversial part. Nobody had a problem with it. The dialogue with Putin, however, was apparently blasphemy, akin to violating all of the Ten Commandments on the same day.

On the back of President Trump’s victory November 5, the end of the election season will open an interesting eleven-week window. President Biden will assume lame-duck status and be freed from any concern that a more aggressive posture toward Russia might hurt Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. Biden might also be considering the implication of handing over Ukraine policy to an individual who has repeatedly signaled his pro-Putin views. Both of these factors argue for Biden breaking from his self-imposed restrictions and supporting Ukraine striking targets in Russian territory during this lame-duck period. Imagine a moderately successful Ukraine attack now, after the November 5 election, on a moderately relevant target, such as a railroad terminal fifty miles inside of Russia.

Ukraine’s President Zelensky was in Downing Street last week – as well as Paris, Rome, Berlin and Dubrovnik – asking for Nato membership. In every city, he heard the same ‘not yet’ as he’d received in Washington last month. Some of Kyiv’s western allies believe membership is the only way to guarantee Ukraine’s independence. Russia has never attacked a Nato country, because of the Article 5 guarantee that an attack against one is an attack against all. Therefore, Ukraine will never be safe from Russia unless it joins. The US government wants to avoid the war that Ukrainian membership would oblige it to fight But there’s a fundamental flaw to this logic: Ukraine cannot join Nato in the foreseeable future.

Two Russian ships docked Tuesday in Venezuela’s La Guaira port, twenty miles away from Caracas. The stop comes after military exercises were conducted in the Atlantic, with four vessels stopping in Havana late last month. This is all part of a decades-long “look-at-us” operation, also known as a “show the flag” move, as Russia’s defense ministry puts it. While Russia’s presence in Cuba and Venezuela is not a new phenomenon, conflict in the East has only accelerated their muscle-flexing in the West. These movements mark Russia’s first extensive military exercises in the hemisphere in five years, as well as their first deployment of a nuclear submarine in close proximity to the US since the Cold War.

On 1 September 2021, six months before his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin was speaking at the All-Russian Children’s Centre, known as ‘Ocean’, near the harbour city of Vladivostok. He turned to a topic that obviously haunted him during his long Covid-19 isolation. He told his audience of children that Russia’s population could have been about half a billion today, rather than the current 146 million, if it hadn’t been for the shocks of the past century: two world wars, the Bolshevik Revolution and the collapse of the Soviet Union.