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Fighting for Peace and Fighting for War in Ukraine

More importantly, Kiev also rejected Russia’s key demand, thus maintaining the root, main cause of the war: NATO’s and Kiev’s attempts to have Ukraine become a NATO member

Russian and Eurasian Politics, by Gordonhahn, November 26, 2025, https://gordonhahn.com/2025/11/26/fighting-for-peace-and-fighting-for-war-in-ukraine/

We are witnessing another failed effort by U.S. President Donald Trump to make peace in Ukraine. Europe, perhaps along with the Deep State, has helped Kiev reject yet another Trump diplomatic effort. This leaves in place the threat of a Europe-wide war with Russia. Europe very possibly will spark a larger war with Russia.

The effort for peace spawned by the 28-point plan drafted by Steve Witkoff in consultation with Moscow has failed because Kiev again has refused to accept Russia’s key demands: Ukrainian neutrality, territorial concessions, and demilitarization. Denazification appears to a less key demand for Moscow or at least Kiev is willing to make concessions on this point.

Rather than accepting its imminent defeat the Ukrainians joined with their European allies in once again drafting an alternative, completely countervaling and counter-productive peace proposal, which Moscow immediately rejected, having already accepted the Trump document, as „a basis for a future agreement,“ as Russian President Vladimir Putin put it.

This could have led to the beginning of a three-way give and take, but Kiev rejected abandoning the 20 percent of Donetsk Oblast territory its forces still hold and demands an 800,000-man army. More importantly, it also rejected Russia’s key demand, thus maintaining the root, main cause of the war: NATO’s and Kiev’s attempts to have Ukraine become a NATO member, despite the objective threat this poses to Russian national security and Moscow’s opposition to NATO expansion spanning three decades.

Europe immediately declared its opposition to the plan and raced to draft the alternative, Kievan plan to undercut the Trump plan, repeating an exercise they undertook in summer when another Trump diplomatic effort seemed might make some headway. Furthermore, it appears that the Deep State and/or MI6 have helped to spearhead the Eurpean effort to derail the Trump peace train.

The bugging and leak to Bloomberg of a less than compromising conversation between Steven Witkoff and Russian President’s chief foreign policy advisor Yurii Ushakov has been used as was intended: to discredit the peace plan, which neocon propagandists like Michael Weiss have claimed was a purely Russian creation that Trump and other ‚Putin agents‘ dutifully pushed on tot he agenda, doing the Kremlin’s bidding.

Trump’s only hope of acheiving an agreement is to force one by pulling out all the stops in order to pressure Kiev to accede to Moscow’s demands, which are backed up strongly by Russia’s mounting advance across eastern Ukraine towards the Dnieper River.

Only depriving Kiev of all US assistance has a chance of forcing Ukrainian leader Volodomyr Zelenskiy to agree to a neutrality, a small army, and territorial losses. But Trump does not want to be blamed for helping Russia to achieve its war goals and to be able to claim a military victory over both Ukraine and NATO. Trump cannot abode a semi-credible propaganda campaign tot he effect that it was he is a loser, that he lost the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War, imagined by most in the West as ‚Putin’s full-scale, unprovoked war against Ukraine.‘ This is the stalement – one between Trump’s political needs and personal weaknesses, European and Kievan elites political-survival needs requiring Russia’s defeat, and Russia’s realistic perceptions of its national security’s min imal requirements – there is no stalement on the battlefield.

Only two outcomes are possible immediately – that is, during Trump’s presidency: (1) Russia takes all of Ukraine east of the Dniester or (2) a European-wide war begins when some Europeans deploy forces to western Ukraine and they are attacked by Russia and/or when Ukraine or its Western partners orchestrate some false flag operation to justify an escalation. These two outcomes both can occur sequentially.

The first outcome is already underway prompting panic and desparate steps in global neocon circles from Washington to Stanford to London and Paris. Russian forces are taking Kupyansk in the north on their way to Kharkov. After Kharkov, the road is open to western Kiev. Russian troops are finishing the capture of the important conglomeration and hub of Pokrovsk and Myrnograd, which opens the way to the last significant Ukrainian strong point of Pavlograd, located a mere 15 miles from the major industrial city of Dnipro on the Dnieper.

Further to the south, Russian forces have already entered Guliapole after having finished up sweeping through several small towns in the wake of capturing Vugledar 13 months ago. The southern city of Zaporozhia on the Dnieper also is now in site. Gulaipole is halfway from Vugledar to Zaporozhia, with Russian forces moving twice as fast as they were moving immediately after taking Vugledar. In addition to these forces marching west, other Russian forces are fighting towards the city from the south. That is the Russia will be at the Dnieper in force along a broad front in a matter of months, with Dnipro and Zaporozhia likely to fall in 1-3 months. There is no stopping the Russian army now. Its manpower, weapons superiority, and morale are increasing, while those of Kiev are in persistent decline.

The second outcome, which becomes more possible, as European and Kievan elites scramble to avoid political, professional and even personal disaster for themselves, is a European provocation of a larger European war. The French are making more and more insistent noises about sending troops to Odessa and elsewhere in Ukraine. And the voices calling for the deployment of European troops to Ukraine are becoming increasingly shrill.

Most recently, Gen. Fabien Mandon, French army’s new chief-of-staff, told a congress of mayors that France’s must muster will to fight:

“We have the know-how, and we have the economic and demographic strength to dissuade the regime in Moscow.”

“What we are lacking – and this is where you [the mayors] have a role to play – is the spirit. The spirit which accepts that we will have to suffer if we are to protect what we are.

“If our country wavers because it is not ready to lose its children … or to suffer economically because the priority has to be military production, then we are indeed at risk.

“You must speak of this in your towns and villages” (www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/world/europe/france-voluntary-military-service.html). 

Simultaneously, former NATO Secreytary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen declared: „Europe must stop waiting for signals from Washington and take the initiative in Ukraine. Paper guarantees mean nothing to Putin. Only concrete commitments matter. That’s why I now call for Europe to deploy up to 20,000 troops behind Ukraine’s front lines, establish an air shield with around 150 combat aircraft, and unlock frozen Russian assets. Europe earns its seat at the table by bringing real capability, not by asking for permission“ (https://x.com/AndersFoghR/status/1993221555166310410?s=20).

Europe’s ruling neocon-neoliberal elite are ‚simulacrats‘; they believe they can create reality on the basis of an the old world long dead and a new world it imagines, attempts to construct, make real by way of propaganda and the fear and hate it can induce. The old war of different glorious national pasts is mixed with the fictional new world of a Europe with perfect, pure democracies, histories, cultures, motives, and policies facing a putrid, barbarian Russia driven by an inexhaustible thirst for domination, power, and violence. Reality can be instantly reconfigured. First, Russia is a weak authoritarian regime with clay feet of oil and terror and an army that captures an uninhabited Ukrainian village or two per month. Then it is capable of conquering Europe, being at your front door virtually any day now.

The choice between war and peace should be an easy one. To be sure, Mr. Putin seems to have chosen war back in February 2022. However, there was good cause, and he softened the blow by conducting not the full-fledged massive invasion of Western mythology but a limited invasion force of some 100,000 troops and using little of Russia’s monumental air power. Moreover, he immediately contacted Kiev for peace talks, seeking an end to NATO expansion in Ukraine and the massive military buildup there equipped and trained by NATO. Mr. Zelenskiy immediately agreed to talk, and the ensuing Istanbul process yielded a treaty initialed by both sides in late March.

But the West chose a more serious war. The Bucha false flag ‘Russian massacre‘ was organized and Washington sent its British minion, then PM Boris Johnson to inform Kiev that the West would not provide the security guarantees, upon which much of Kiev’s agreement to the treaty rested and promised military and other assistance ‘for as long as it takes.‘ Putin’s short war for Russian nationals security became Ukraine’s long war for NATO. Now it is one for the survival of the Maidan regime and perhaps of NATO and the EU.

Some in the West have changed the nature of its assistance, struggling to build an offramp from destruction for Kiev, but others appear ready to offer in full the Ukrainian sacrificial lamb on the altar of NATO expansion ‘for as long as it takes‘ for Trump to leave the Oval Office and a new proponent of war for dying, democratic Ukraine‘ takes his place.

November 29, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international, Ukraine | Leave a comment

What? Peace in Our Time in Ukraine?

Whad’ya mean we don’t get to dictate a settlement just because we’re the losers?

This, in a single sentence, is the position shared across the West and in Kiev. Trump’s latest sin — and this plan counts as another in many quarters — is that what he and his people now propose favors simple realities over elaborate illusions. 

The Trump regime’s 28–point Ukraine peace plan accepts Moscow’s core concerns as legitimate. That’s essential for any possible settlement of the war, or the broader crisis between Russia and the West.

by Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News, November 26, 2025, https://consortiumnews.com/2025/11/24/patrick-lawrence-what-peace-in-our-time/

There are any number of reasons you may not like, or may even condemn, the 28–point peace plan the Trump regime has drafted to advance toward a settlement of the war in Ukraine. 

You may be among those many all across the Western capitals who simply cannot accept defeat on the reasoning — is this my word? — that the West never loses anything, and it certainly cannot lose anything to “Putin’s Russia.” 

You may think that President Donald Trump and those who produced this interesting document, which leaked out in the course of some days last week, have once again “caved” to the Kremlin.

The outstanding contribution in this line comes from the ever-mixed-up Tom Friedman, who argued in last Sunday’s editions of The New York Times that Trump is to be compared with Neville Chamberlain and Trump’s plan with the much-reviled British prime minister’s “appeasement” of Hitler via the Munich Agreement of September 1938. 

I cannot think of a klutzier interpretation of history or a more useless comparison, given it sheds not one sliver of light on what the document to hand is about.

Or you may stand on principle and attempt the well-worn case that Ukraine is a liberal democracy — let me write that phrase again just for fun — Ukraine is a liberal democracy, altogether “just like us,” and must be defended at all costs in the name of freedom, the rights of the individual, free markets, etc.

Or you may think this is no time for the United States and its European clients to relent in their unceasing effort to destabilize the Russian Federation. Those of this persuasion cannot, of course, acknowledge that Ukraine is nothing more than a battering ram in this dreadful cause, at this point much-bloodied. This dodge tends to swell the ranks of those professing the defense of democracy against autocracy as their creed. 

Anyone paying attention to the reactions to the Trump plan among the trans–Atlantic policy cliques and the media that serve them has heard all of this and more these past few days. I find it all somewhere between pitiful and amusing.  

Pitiful because those who so wildly overinvested in the corrupt, Nazi-infested regime in Kiev prove incapable of acknowledging that Ukraine lost its war with Russia long ago, and this attempt to subvert Russia now proves a bust.

Amusing because those who so wildly over-invested in the corrupt, Nazi-infested regime in Kiev now squirm at the thought that the victor will have more to say about the terms of peace than the vanquished. 

Whad’ya mean we don’t get to dictate a settlement just because we’re the losers?

This, in a single sentence, is the position shared across the West and in Kiev. Trump’s latest sin — and this plan counts as another in many quarters — is that what he and his people now propose favors simple realities over elaborate illusions. 

Those asserting that the Trump plan caters to the Kremlin are not altogether wrong, to put this point another way. They are merely wrong in their objections. These 28 points, with many elaborations —No. 12 is followed by 12a, 12b, 12c and so on — indeed give Russia a lot — but not all — of what it has spent years attempting to negotiate.  

The missed point is plainly stated: It is a very wise and fine thing finally to recognize the legitimacy of Russia’s perspective. At this point what will serve Russia’s interests will also serve Ukraine’s and the interests of anyone who thinks an orderly world is a good idea.

 couple of things to note before briefly considering the contents of the Trump plan. I am working from a copy of the text apparently leaked to the Financial Times last Thursday. 

One, it is a working document, nothing more. Trump’s people, notably Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state, and Steve Witkoff, the New York property investor now serving as Trump’s special envoy, had extensive negotiations with Ukrainian and European delegations in Geneva over the weekend. These are to continue.

Trump earlier gave the Kiev regime until Thanksgiving, this Thursday, to accept or reject its terms, and he has not since said anything differently. But the Trumpster has already stated that if things are going well this deadline can be superseded. All is subjective. 

Two, Rubio and Witkoff take credit for drafting this plan, reportedly in consultation with Kirill Dmitriev, the chief executive of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, who seems sometimes to serve as a diplomat close to the Kremlin. But it has Trump’s name on it, and anything with the Trumpster’s name on it is subject to radical and unpredictable revision or withdrawal at any time.  

Promise of Enduring Settlement

Setting these matters aside:

There are numerous on-the-ground provisions among its 28 clauses. No. 19 specifies that the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant along the Dnieper River, controlled by Russian forces since March 2022, less than a month into the war, will be restarted under the authority of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the electricity it generates will go equally to Russia and Ukraine. Russia is to allow Ukrainians to use the Dnieper “for commercial activities” (No. 23). 

There is to be a prisoner swap (No. 24a) and, a family reunion program (24c). A general amnesty will extend to “all parties involved in the conflict” (No. 26). “Measures will be taken,” No. 24d states, “to alleviate the suffering of victims of the conflict.”

These clauses, boilerplate humanitarian provisions and low-hanging fruit, are worthy enough, but read to me as greeting-card niceties next to the weightier items in this plan. 

There is the much-discussed, much-disputed question of territory. Crimea and the Donbas — Luhansk and Donetsk — will be recognized as Russian territory, but de facto as against de jure. Why this distinction, the Russians would be perfectly right to ask. 

The land from which Ukrainian forces will be required to withdraw will be designated a demilitarized zone that belongs to Russia, but the Russians will not be permitted to enter it. Again, what is this all about? As to Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, the southerly provinces Russia and Ukraine each partially control, they are to be divided and fixed at the current line of contact. 

No. 22: “After agreeing on future territorial arrangements, the Russian Federation and Ukraine undertake not to change these arrangements by force.”

It is hard to say how either side will view these proposed divisions of territory. They award Moscow much of what it has demanded for some time, but in qualified fashion, and take away from Kiev much of what it has long said it will never surrender. So: Not enough for the Russians? Too much for the Ukrainians? 

In my read the drafters’ intent here is to set down working language on the territory question as the basis of a lot of horse-trading. If I am correct, the U.S. side is not saying Kiev must accept or reject these terms as written so much as Kiev must agree finally to stop striking poses and do serious business at the mahogany table.

To be noted in this connection: It is long past time to dismiss all the rubbish of the past three years to the effect that Moscow’s intent has been to seize and occupy all of Ukraine. It is as ridiculous as the Europeans’ preposterous assertions — more cynical than paranoiac —that if the Russians are not stopped in Ukraine they will soon be in London and Lisbon. 

November 28, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international, Ukraine | Leave a comment