Majorityrights Central > Category: Russian Politics

One of Ukraine’s small and cheap but highly effective designs of anti-Shaheed drone.

The Easter ceasefire is over, and the fighting has resumed where it left off.  It left off at a very interesting point.  Something almost impossible to credit is taking shape in Ukraine.  Its potential seems wholly at odds with the narrative of Russian inevitability which we have grown used to hearing from Moscow and its allies, including the White House and the State Department.  Yet it hasn’t come out of nowhere.  By the second-half of last year it was already apparent that Moscow could not bring to bear sufficient military force to realise its maximalist aims.  Far from granting an inevitable victory as the adversary with the larger economy and population, the favoured Russian strategy of attrition was not producing the expected results.  Then, as winter set in, Russia’s employment of unmanned aerial warfare in the form of terror attacks on Ukrainian civilians and on civilian power generation targets likewise did not yield the expected general demoralisation of the Ukrainian people and the sapping of their war-will.

This characteristically crude twin approach was failing because the Ukrainian command (a) avoided the meat-grinder tactic by giving-up territory when necessary to preserve Ukrainian soldiers’ lives, and (b) found ways to nullify the most effective weapon the Russian forces could deploy on the contact line, the glide bomb or KAB.  The Ukrainian strategy throughout 2025 was to bleed the enemy while conducting deep strikes against Russian military-industrial and economic targets (the most famous of which was Operation Spiderweb, of course).  Though effective enough to slow the Russian advance to a snail’s pace, it was still only a containing measure.  But with the turn of the new year that all began to change.  There was a step-change in Ukrainian tactical capacity involving more sophisticated, more integrated, and more numerous drones.  The term “drone swarm” became a reality.

At the same time an extraordinary array of new Ukrainian short-range, surveillance, and cruise weapons began arriving in theatre, much of it enhanced by unjammable AI.  Over three hundred AI-related developments are registered with Brave1, Ukraine’s centralized defense-tech platform platform.  More than seventy systems based on AI and computer vision are already in active use on the battlefield.  The American AI company Shield is working with Ukrainian drone developers to incorporate its HiveMind AI into new Ukrainian drones.  On top of all that a ballistic weapon is undergoing live combat trials.  A home-grown Patriot missile replacement is now planned.  The pace of innovation is staggering.

All taken together, the Russian rear, which reaches between fifteen and sixty miles behind the contact line, is now under sustained pressure.  Russian forces can’t effectively organise because the logistics can’t be secured, particularly given that four hundred and ninety-two Russian air defense systems were recorded destroyed between June last year and early March this year.  Add the loss of Starlink and the Telegram shut-down and those difficulties are greatly compounded.  Moreover, new Ukrainian weapons are striking ports, pumping stations, oil storage depots, and pipelines.  Some targets are over 1000 kilometres away from the fighting.  With or without US sanctions Moscow can’t earn what it needs to pay for its war.

The next major Ukrainian development on the battlefield is the most significant of all.  It’s ground robotics, first introduced by Ukraine in trial numbers as early as 2023.  They were then introduced systematically and on an ever widening scale.  The current range of mostly FPV fibre-optic machines are already far in advance of Russia’s efforts, and have been undertaking a variety of support actions - 22,000 in the first quarter of 2026 according to Zelensky.  These include autonomous combat missions.  Again the pace of development has been frenetic.  Subject to the challenges of scaling up manufacture, they have the potential to resolve Ukraine’s structural deficit in manpower.  Commercially, the global sales potential of these systems is vast, and are likely to play a significant role in the reconstruction of the Ukrainian economy.  Here is the excellent Paul Warburg explaining both the military and economic potential of these systems:

The upshot of Ukraine’s drone development has been threefold.  First, the Russian Spring offensive has been nullified.  It is already a failure.  Russian casualties have reached the point where more soldiers are being taken out of the fight than Moscow can recruit.  Far from being pushed further back, Ukrainian forces are actually advancing in four areas.  A sense of foreboding is setting in among Russian milbloggers.  As the Kiev Post reports:

Some pro-Russian bloggers are predicting the situation will worsen. Oleg Tsaryov, a political scientist born in Ukraine who joined Russia’s first invasion in 2014, in a Wednesday review of the situation on the front, said the next Ukrainian drone upgrade will be bigger swarms.

“A lot has changed. The Ukrainians said they would significantly increase the number of drones at the front…they have managed to achieve much of what they set out to do…Ukraine has managed to double the number of drones it uses to strike our rear areas. We can see it…according to the military, that’s the situation on the front line is similar…and according to the information we see from Ukraine, right now their production capacity is at 30%, notwithstanding all the drones they produce,” Tsayrov said.“This [the way Ukraine is manufacturing drones] doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. It’s cutting-edge. This is where we come up short,” he said.

Second, Donald Trump’s precipitate action in Iran has made very public the IRGC’s exact drone and missile capabilities, which are not inconsiderable. The Saudis and the Gulf States along with the Europeans have also now witnessed modern assymetric warfare, which is making redundant the old model of high cost machinery and the doctrine of force concentration.  Both the Ukrainian success against Russian armour and their daily experience of drone and missile bombardment offer powerful commercial arguments for the extraordinary innovativeness of the Ukrainians.  It has made them the undisputed world-leader in all these technologies; and suddenly everyone wants either to buy from them or manufacture products on a joint-venture basis.  Kiev’s desperation for money and weapons, which Trump was able to leverage for Putin’s benefit, can now become a thing of the past.  Trump is losing his power to bully and blackmail Kiev.

Third, this is a time of growing optimism in Ukraine’s military strategy.  There is a sense that Trump’s call for the surrender of all Donetsk was a bluff that has now been trumped.  The MAGA hostility has been borne with patience and grace, and seen off.  Europe has not caved.  Western and Arab governments are coming to Kiev’s door for weapons tech.  The prospect, finally, of money flows from commerce and not just from charity and loans has materialised.  A peacetime future as the world’s leading manufacturing nation of affordable advanced drones and battlefield robotics is beckoning.  Some housewives!

Which, of course, begs the question as to what kind of peace that might be.  From Kiev’s perspective the only peace Putin will observe is one of abject Russian military defeat.  He can be given no opportunity to return in a few years time to his expansionism and to realising his geopolitical ambitions.  He must fail.

Three versions of that failure, and thus of the Ukrainian’s place in history, suggest themselves:

1. Expulsion of Russian Army from all Ukraine. Putin holds his nerve, gathers his forces, and goes for a strategy of blaming the army and “elements” in Moscow.  There are sweeping arrests and the lid is just about kept on the situation.  Longer-term, the FSB ratchets up political oppression.  Putin’s rivals are scattered and hunted.  But the Eurasianist dream is over.  All thought of expansionism is sacrificed to the struggle to keep the Federation intact.  But after that?

2. Expulsion of Russian Army from all Ukraine.  The defeat is too structural for Putin to survive.  He is arrested by his own security service. The militarisation of the economy proves disastrous now the war is over.  Rapid de-industrialisation is the cost.  The release onto the streets of three-quarters of a million embittered and unemployable soldiers creates further instability.  A power struggle ensues between the various oligarchic factions picking hungrily over the bones of Putin’s Kremlin until, by some mysterious means, a unifying figure - a strongman, of course - takes up the reins. The tzar-isation of Russia begins anew.  Kiev and all Europe wait and watch.

3. Expulsion of Russian Army from all Ukraine.  The shock brings not just the end of Putin’s long reign but the collapse of the Russian Federation itself.  The eastern republics convulse in nationalism and seize the moment to break away.  Some terrible revenge on local FSB personnel is taken by armed groups, many of whom are soldiers returned from Ukraine.  Inevitably, strongmen barge to the fore, not a few noisily Islamist.  But fifteen or even twenty old nations arise anew from the ashes of the Federation, some of them nuclear-armed. Even west of the Urals there are regional efforts to achieve independence.  The ancient colonial drive of Muscovy is dead.  In Minsk, Lukashenko boards a flight and flees the country.  The miniscule army of Moldova walks into Transnistria unopposed. Warsaw waits to find out with whom it will negotiate its re-absorption of Königsberg.  An age of European peace lies in prospect.

And Ukraine?  At a minimum, the fruits of victory (be it simply military, military and fatal to Putin, or military and fatal to Putin and the Federation too): a secure peace and a prosperous future as the world-leader in the arts of asymmetric warfare and modern arms supply, plus entry to the west as its people so desire and deserve.

A rules-based order or the rule of mafia states?  Not really a difficult choice, is it?

The analyst Jason Smart on Russia and the fate of unlucky elites:

Chapters:
00:00 The Kremlin’s Purges
02:36 Intro
02:58 The Russian military vs Russian FSB’s fight.
05:28 Russian Minister of Transports’ “suicide”
10:19 Why does Russia rely on such brutality?
10:37 Key to understanding the Kremlin

Where the great appetite for Russian empire began.

It is now clear that Vladimir Putin has been forced by the British, German, French and Polish leaders’ combined visit to Kiev, and their drive for a 30-day ceasefire, to cobble together a response, which came at 2.00 am this morning.  Putin avoided all mention of a ceasefire.  In fact, his proposal of picking up the talks in Istanbul that took place during the months immediately following the invasion also avoids the all-too-solid reason that Kiev shut them down, namely that the Russian Army’s Kiev offensive had been defeated.  The Russians retreated on 7th April 2022.  The gravest threat was past.  Istanbul was rendered unnecessary, even unhelpful; and Kiev duly withdrew in May.

The subsequent Russian retreats from Kharkiv, Kherson, and Sumi reduced the area under occupation by the Russian Army from 25% to 18% today.  The situation is completely different from Spring 2022 - but apparently not for Putin.  He wants to return to Istanbul next Thursday, 15th May for direct talks about what he perceives as “the root causes” of his invasion.  He said:

The point of such talks is to eliminate the root causes of the conflict and to establish a long-term, durable peace that will stand the test of time. We don’t rule out the possibility that, in the course of these negotiations, it might be possible to agree on new ceasefires — on a real truce

He is saying that the war must continue while, diplomatically, the Ukrainian democratic will to independence and autonomy is suppressed and the Russian will to empire is affirmed.  Istanbul served this purpose before, and Putin wants to return to it now.  By way of a reminder, this is ISW’s summation of the Istanbul Communiqué:

The draft agreement was never completed, and published versions contain Russian demands and Ukrainian counterproposals. The conditions below reflect the Russian demands, which stipulated that:

• Russia be treated as a neutral security “guarantor state” of Ukraine along with the other permanent members of the UN Security Council, repeating the premise of the Minsk II Accords that did not treat Russia as a belligerent in the war.
• Ukraine be forbidden to invite partner forces to conduct military exercises in Ukrainian territory, airspace, territorial waters, and exclusive economic zone without the consent of China and Russia.
• China and Russia have a veto over the mechanism for responding to future armed conflict in Ukraine by making China and Russia Ukraine’s security guarantors and granting the United Nations Security Council the authority to take “measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.” China and Russia are permanent members of the UNSC and can use their veto power to block responses to future Russian aggression under these conditions.
• Ukraine amend its constitution to make Russian an official state language in Ukraine on an equal footing with the Ukrainian language and change a number of its internal laws, including Ukraine’s decommunization laws.
• Ukraine lift all Ukrainian sanctions against Russia imposed since 2014 and withdraw criminal cases against Russia in the International Criminal Court for war crimes against Ukraine.
• Ukraine amend its constitution to remove the provision committing Ukraine to NATO membership and to add a neutrality provision that would ban Ukraine from joining any military alliances, concluding military agreements, or hosting foreign military personnel, trainers, or weapon systems in Ukraine. Ukraine disarm almost completely and commit never to fielding a military capable of defending the country. The draft agreement specifically imposed the following caps on the Ukrainian Armed Forces:
[the ISW pdf then details the full scale of the neutering of the Ukrainian armed forces which Putin required - Ed.]

Emmanuel Macron has already said that, although a step in the right direction, Putin’s proposal is “not enough”.  Donald Tusk has said, “the world is waiting for a clear decision on an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.”  Zelensky, emboldened by his growing influence on Donald Trump, has stated that Ukraine expects the Russian Federation to confirm the ceasefire from 12th May.  The European and Ukrainian fix is in.  Putin is striving to persist with his line, but he has been losing traction internationally; and is surely fearful of pushing Trump further into Zelensky’s embrace.  It gets worse.  According to Jade McGlynn, even if there is a ceasefire it cannot lead to peace for structural reasons inside Russia:

even if Putin were to seek peace, it is far from clear that the Russian state, economy, or social fabric could withstand it.

Over the past two years, the Russian economy has become militarised and sanctioned into dependency on war. Military production now drives GDP. Defence-sector employment, direct budget subsidies, and sanctioned parallel markets all hinge on continued conflict. A halt in military spending would risk mass unemployment, inflationary collapse, and the exposure of long-suppressed structural vulnerabilities in banking, logistics, and industrial supply chains.

The Russian security apparatus, already expanded and emboldened, would have no credible peacetime role. Hundreds of thousands of demobilised soldiers—many traumatised, others radicalised—would return to a society that neither values nor accommodates them. Veterans are not treated as heroes by a society that has tried its hardest to ignore the horror of a war conducted in their name and with their acquiescence. For many Russian soldiers, continued war would offer more meaning, stability, and income than any peacetime future.

Put simply, Russia is not ready for peace—economically, politically, or psychologically. Any ceasefire would be used not to end the war, but to reconstitute the means to continue it.

If Dr McGlynn is right, Trump will eventually be forced to institute secondary sanctions against customers for Russian oil and gas.  Down the line from there is not just Russian military and economic failure but the collapse of the Russian Federation itself, and a messy and dangerous series of internal political and ethnic struggles.  But perhaps that is what it would take to cleanse Muscovy of its centuries-old addiction to empire.

Kharkiv, where Putin pursues his regional goals

In central Kharkiv, amid the frequent Russian missile attacks, lives a young British woman with a sharp mind and a clear geopolitical understanding.  Her name is Jade McGlynn.  She has a PhD from Oxford in Russian, and today she is a researcher and lecturer producing academic work, books and journalism on the Russo-Ukrainian war since 2014, particularly through the filters of identity and memory.  She has a substack which holds her already copious body of work.  At the beginning of April she published there a long and detailed piece titled Blueprints, from which I will quote.  It begins:

In 2021, the Russian Federation released its National Security Strategy, followed in 2023 by its Foreign Policy Concept. At the time—especially in 2021—one might have dismissed these documents as paranoid, backward-looking, or self-aggrandising. But they were not relics. They were roadmaps—not only for how Russia intended to act, but for the kind of world it imagined was coming: a world where might makes right, where transactionalism reigns, and where the last of the three big ideologies—liberalism—finally falls.

This world is no longer speculative. It is reality. The Trump administration is gleefully dismantling the last scaffolding of U.S. global leadership. Europe is fragmented, fatigued, and fearful. Many pretend that American leadership is merely going through a rough patch. It isn’t. A new world order is upon us. And we can either fight for the right to live as we choose—or prepare to live under the terms of a new, illiberal order. Since Western Europe appears unwilling to do the former, what follows may prove useful: a guide to the world we now inhabit, through the lens of the Russian doctrine that foresaw it.

So this is a writer after my own heart.  She knows that not just the western rules-based order but the liberalism which underpins it is falling.  This is not something the European political class, or Kiev, have yet grasped.  They know that the world is changing in dangerous ways.  But Dr Glynn has gone beyond that, and is only too aware that the philosophical ground on which the west stands, and on which America is wholly constructed, has been cut away.

Her essay then addresses the delusion much fostered by Vladimir Putin and the Russian intellectual, media, and security cadres – and let it be said, shamefully and uncritically internalised by dissenters in the west.  That delusion is that traditional living and the general good is returning in the wake of Russia’s painful advance on the ground in Ukraine:

These [ie, Russian] values are closely tied to patriotism, religion, family, and historical identity. Liberal ideals—such as gender equality, LGBTQ rights, secularism, and multiculturalism—are not just viewed as policy disagreements, but as threats to civilisational integrity. Yet the reality behind this rhetoric is deeply contradictory. Just as Donald Trump—so often cast as a defender of Christian America—is far removed from the Christian values he claims to uphold, Russia’s invocation of traditionalism is hollow. Divorce and abortion rates remain among the highest in the world. The Russian Orthodox Church, far from being a moral guide, glorifies war and incites murder. Minority faiths, particularly Protestants, are harassed and repressed.

Russia’s so-called values are not principles—they are instruments. They serve as political weapons, used to stir up illiberal sentiment among those fearful of modernity and globalism. This moral framing is not about shaping Russia’s domestic future; it is about presenting an alternative global pole to liberalism, designed to appeal to like-minded governments and disillusioned publics. It is not moral renewal, but ideological realignment, grounded in authoritarian control.

All of this leads naturally to the rejection of universal rights in favour of power-based legitimacy. Russia explicitly opposes the liberal conception of human rights as defined by the UN and Western democracies. Instead, it calls for a return to the Westphalian model: a world in which states set their own rules, and legitimacy is derived not from moral claims, but from strength.

Thus Dr McGlynn finds for the position I have argued for the last three years, long before we knew that Donald Trump would be re-elected, let alone that he would support Putin so actively.  True, there are too many ways in which the post-1945 rules-based order has been manipulated against the interests of Europeans.  But that is a separate issue from the order as such, which – as Dr McGlynn makes clear – is the alternative to Great Power predation:

… I would rather live in a world of hypocrites than nihilists. If norms and law are stripped of moral weight, then force becomes the final arbiter. At its core, Russia’s doctrine is unapologetically militarised. It sees power—not treaties—as the guarantor of sovereignty, identity, and survival.

I, too, would rather fight within a system I know, against weak, predictable men bound by its moral and historical conventions … a system, moreover, that cannot for long accommodate within itself the arbitrary power it came into being to banish.  For liberalism is the mortal enemy of all entrenched or concentrated power.  Obviously, there is the unwelcome complication that as a secularised form of Christianity it stands in the Judaic line.  It apprehends the “sovereignty, identity, and survival” of Europe’s peoples as just such a concentration.

I would not, of course, expect Dr McGlynn to share that understanding.  She abides within the historical and intellectual constraints of the western academy, not in our domain of profound separation, and the freedom of mind which that bestows.  She does not think as a nationalist thinks.  She very likely subscribes to the view that the dead politics of National Socialism and Italian fascism … forms of expansionist nationalism …  speak reliably for nationalists today.  She then assumes, or appears to assume, that socialism/communism is separate from liberalism.  This is a chiefly American view which I do not accept because, as practised in the 20th century, socialism functioned as an extension of, and massification within, the liberal system.  It pursued the same unfettered will and, ultimately, genuflected before the same Judaic G-d.

I would very much prefer that decent, thinking people like Dr McGlynn understand how and why we Europeans are still waiting for a nationalism of our life and rights and interests, and that one small part of making the space for it is to order history accordingly.

Trump in an age of innocence, when a deal would be done in a day.

“Peace” is a versatile concept.  It has a spiritual context, of course, and a funereal and memorial one.  Then since the sixties it has had a vee-signed, marijuana-driven usage originally followed by the word “man” but these days by “bro”, which more or less sums up the depth of consideration thus far given it by Donald Trump.

Not everyone on the international stage is so blasé.  The honest ones, of whom there are far too few, employ it in the proper humanistic sense of a just deliverance from conflict into a longed-for and enduring state of safety and such concord as is possible when the guns have fallen silent but there is still a lot of hatred in the air.  As the hatred subsides so the meaning of peace matures into the one given generally to civic life in times of ease and gentility, which is only what all peoples expect and deserve from life.

But there are individuals in the charmed circles of power … liars and ambitious men, “men of force” ... who hold the expectations of the common man in contempt, and who talk of peace as something quite other than his expectation.  Their meanings tend to be party to the same struggle as the wars they also engage in when they can.  Thus in the Kremlin’s case peace is as much a weapon as any rocket or gun:

During a telephone conversation with US President Donald Trump on March 18, Russian leader Vladimir Putin put forward a number of conditions for the introduction of a 30-day ceasefire with Ukraine. In particular, to stop mobilization in Ukraine and the rearmament of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the Kremlin reported.

Trump seems to have been blissfully unaware that Putin’s peace is not at all a shallow and instant thing like his.  It is ideological, public, formal, structured, and purposive.  Its purpose is the expansion of Russia:

“Russkiy Mir” is a Russian quasi-ideology aimed at the expansion of influence abroad and uniting the states considered by the Kremlin as its backyard on the basis of Russian language common history in the Moscow’s perception and Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). As a political concept it gained some importance in 2000s, particularly after Vladimir Putin started using it in his public speeches, making an appeal to the “compatriots” abroad.
...
With “Russkiy Mir” Putin’s Russia attempts to establish itself as a civilization-forming state and as a leading geopolitical actor.
...
It is also worth mentioning that as the concept, first of all, serves political interests of the Russian authorities, it is populist and adaptive. In such a way under the umbrella of “Russkiy Mir” a number of cultural and historical narratives are united, even though they initially may seem to have no relation to it. Still, in the end, rewriting history with the focus on whitewashing the image of USSR, appropriating the victory over Nazism, labeling every attempt to critically evaluate history as “fascist” also work in favor of “Russkiy Mir”. Putin’s Russia grants itself with the messianic title of the vanquisher of absolute evil – and with the opportunity to fight against what it considers fascism again. Systemic cultural appropriation also adds to the picture. It enables the portrayal of formerly colonized states as having a poor culture, with is partially appropriated and partially discredited, while “Russkiy Mir” is pictured as a culturally rich opposite. The Kremlin consistently discredits pro-democratic policies in target societies, employing disinformation and promotion of destructive narratives, then attempting to offer “Russkiy Mir” as an appealing alternative to such policies.

This is the “peace” which, within the framework of Russia’s war on the Ukrainian people’s will to independence and autonomy, is Vladimir Putin’s guiding light.  Even allowing that the Americans are providing him with a helping hand, nothing Donald Trump can say would steer him away from it.  But does Trump want to say anything anyway?  What evidence is there that he and his government are moved to defend the all too western moralities of the post-1945 settlement?  His denial last week of intelligence and satellite imagery to the Ukrainian military – shocking in its suddenness and effect – was perfectly timed for the Russian and North Korean push in Kursk.  It removed Zelensky’s hard-won bargaining chip and cost hundreds of Ukrainian lives.  Taken with the shameful staged assault on the Ukrainian president in the Oval Office it speaks of “right-wing” America’s near-total moral collapse.

It was on display again in Tuesday’s 90 minute telephone call between Trump and Putin, summarised thus by David Blair in the Telegraph:

Putin has played his familiar trick of agreeing to something that binds Ukraine’s hands much more tightly than his own.

But the relative lack of substance in the readout must itself raise suspicions. Two presidents do not need to talk for 90 minutes to serve up the thin gruel in the public account of their call. What else did Mr Trump and Putin discuss and what private agreements might they have made? Ukraine and the rest of Europe are not party to these talks: they can only guess at what could be happening behind the scenes.

The only certainty is that the dismal pattern whereby Putin concedes nothing and offers nothing, while Trump declines to respond with any hint of steel, remains the order of the day.

If the Americans continue in this vein, disavowing any firm, suppressive action to raise the ante against Russia, one will have to conclude that they, too, mouth words of peace when they really only mean conquest, and do so because they believe that the global contest of power requires such immorality.

In that belief Donald Trump’s America will have friends besides Putin: others with visions of a similarly “peaceful” dominion.  For example, as a counterpoint to Putin’s Russkiy mir, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government are advancing the doctrine of Mavi Vatan.  Should Putin achieve his maximalist aims in Ukraine one then waits to see if Viktor Orban can pull together an integralist cohort from among Hungary’s six other neighbours in Middle Europe and the Balkans.  I think it quite likely, given the level of pro-Russian sentiment there, as well as the desire to annex parts of Ukraine that Putin may deign to gift them for the purpose of dividing Europe.  I think humanity is moving ... being pushed, actually ... ever further from the nationalist desideratum of an age of the people’s will, which is a will to peace, yes, but not at the cost of national dissolution and foreign dominion.  It is doing so because it is moving further from democratisation’s fatal, very 20th century transformation of that people into a bloodless demos, a mere electorate governed by a permanent political class.  We are moving once again into an age when “greatness” is sought among the nations of men; but it is a greatness expressed in power over other nations when power is the possession of an untouchable and imperial, authoritarian few.

If that view of the historical process is wrong then we should now see Donald Trump understand the complete humiliation he has suffered at Putin’s hands.  Being useful to Putin only makes him Putin’s idiot - an idiot whom Putin is, of course, pleased to parade before the dictators and big men of the southern hemisphere.  The situation has clarified, perhaps even for Trump.  The debasement of America is fundamental to Putin and Xi’s global Great Game, and no American president can play it and win.  American greatness will not come via American humiliation, but Putin’s and Xi’s greatness will.  They know it, and they will not be separated in their pursuit of it.  Trump’s vanity alone ought to provoke the necessary reaction.  We should then see him double-down on his determination that peace shall prevail, but only if he switches tack to bring Putin to heel before turning to face Xi’s challenge in the Pacific.  That means a full-hearted and massive re-arming of the Ukrainians with the best equipment the American arsenal possesses.  Then, perhaps, another kind of negotiation will be possible.

But, of course, for that to become a reality Trump and his administration must grasp that Ukraine’s strength is America’s strength, and it is first and foremost a moral strength.

It would be charitable to conclude that the 45th and 47th president of the United States of America is a regular if inordinately successful guy and a great and fearless patriot with an instinct for the wants and interests of the common man.  OK, he’s not a very subtle person.  He can deliver himself of some quite surprising, not to say shocking, public statements.  His dedication to the security of Israel is fawning and slavish if politically necessary, probably.  But he’s the first US president in decades to speak the language of ordinary Americans.  So in the vernacular, cut the guy some slack while he blows away the whole friggin’ mess that is Dems in federal government, right?

But with Trump we are not just talking about pulling down the progressive order in federal government.  He is seeking a new order internationally as well as domestically.  It turns out that his new international order has nothing to do with “peace”, and is not directly concerned with Ukraine at all.  It turns out that his vaunted economic nationalism, always assumed to be just a domestic, blue-collar cause, is also economic imperialism.  It is, from a Russian imperialist perspective, also an opportunity to throw Trump a hydro-carbon or two to bind him to his and Xi’s grand strategy, and not the other way round.  Which would make this less Nixon and Mao than Molotov and Ribbentrop, with Putin playing the role of Ribbentrop.  As of today Beijing is plainly betting on that, because it has given its support to the “peace negotiations”.

The big reveal

From Day 1 of his second term the reborn Donald Trump has been pursuing a politics for the world which, it seems, none outside his own circle in the Republican Party saw coming, and very few if any have fully grasped even now.  This politics has three broad goals:

i) To put a stop to the decades of progressive marxisation and malaise in American life, especially economically, and thereby to ring in a new dawn of American power, prestige, and prosperity.

ii) To force the European states to address their post-Berlin Wall political, moral, and fiscal decadence and weakness, so that they may shift from that same destructive trajectory of mass immigration and marxisation to one of political self-rediscovery and self-preservation (crucially, the “self” here being the state, not the natives of the state).

Thus freeing Washington to pivot towards ...

iii) Ending China’s long march towards global military, economic, and political hegemony, principally by confronting it in the Indo-Pacific Ocean.

The start-point for the Trump administration is Ukraine.  Hence the unwelcome energy with which it has distanced itself from the expectations of the European democracies and NATO, while showering Putin with outrageous largesse under the rubric of peace negotiations.  It was the big reveal.  The deceit and childishness which has characterised the campaigns of Trump and Musk against the Ukrainians is pure theatre, but in the scheme of things they’re nothing more important than positioning.  Ukraine itself is not important except as a bargaining chip, its sacrifice a clear signal to Putin that he could even create his fourth Russian empire in the West if he can defeat the Europeans and keep the American military quiet.  BUT ... he can’t have his new world order with himself and Beijing at the apex.  America will remain the hegemon in a force-based Glazyevian system of empires.  The post-war rules-based order is dead.  Starmer’s love object of international law is without a point.  Democracy is no longer the international standard for good and just government.  A force-based system doesn’t have to care about good or justice.  It’s just the wrong metric.  NATO, meanwhile, will be left without the American guarantee, which effectively guts it and leaves Europe militarily defenceless.  Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference now makes perfect sense, warning the European political elites that their three decades of spending the so-called peace dividend on weak and sickly liberal-universalist causes has to change, and change now.  Virtue signalling elitism is done for.  Universalism has drained European politics of all moral authority.  The old values will have to be rediscovered if self-defence is to mean anything or to have any hope of success on a future battlefield.

Likewise, Trump’s alarming expansionist talk about annexing Canada and Greenland, and sending the military to take control of the Panama Canal, also now makes sense.  The global order of an empire of empires isn’t a fanciful confection of a few Russian dreamers like Glazyev.  It is the alternative order to the west’s model, and as the once and future hegemon America, too, must have its empire, albeit principally an empire of corporate expansion.  Nixon’s week in China also had a pay-off for corporate America (if at a terrible cost to the American working man).  Eventually it led via neoliberalism to the Davosian technocracy we encounter today.  The Trump administration, mindful that it is weaker than the people and must maintain the institutions of democracy, will hope that Americans actually benefit this time.  But any such good will be incidental.  The politics are fatally vested in the maintenance of American corporate and hegemonic power, not in Americans per se.  Trump is not a real nationalist.  The Republican Party cannot encompass real nationalism because the liberal project which is America is wholly antithetical to it.

Further, the eastern imperial model is oligarchic and elitist, intending state dictate and socialism for the masses of the world.  It is also worth emphasising that it does not at all preclude the Davos corporate and financial elites from its Great Game.  The dissenting right, in its lumpen way, has assumed that Davos is western, and its globalism with it.  No, it is only the politicians who are western.  The rest is worldwide because the Money Power behind it is worldwide.  With the one exception of Israel, it will adapt itself to any polity provided racial universalism obtains or could obtain therein.

All that said, there are points of potential push-back against the Trump agenda. Ukrainian fighters for one (the Ukrainian media is already relaying intelligence reports that Putin plans to announce his victory over NATO on the 24th February anniversary of his invasion).  American voters for another.  Resistance in the established order for another, and from anyone else who does not relish a political betrayal which benefits the murderers of Moscow.  Perhaps the Russophile civic nationalists in Germany and elsewhere will not be able to show their faces once Moscow’s gaze falls on Ukraine’s fellow Europeans to the north and west; and we might get some real nationalism in Europe.

Three Russian dolls and one other emerging but not yet not fully in view.

We mere citizens of the West, we voters for the Uniparty, we victims of propaganda do not get to hear the words spoken in the highest geo-strategic reaches of the US State Department, or in the Pentagon, or in the CIA, much less in the rival bodies in Moscow and Beijing.  What trickles out of the mouths of presidents and ministers is the usual finessed, platitudinous semaphore by which vast power structures publicly communicate with one another.  Sometimes a “government source” or someone “close to such-and-such” will add vital context, on or off the record, which is presumably then pored over by analysts a world away.  But precious little of the resultant analysis ever reaches the mass of Americans or Russians or Chinese.  Every leader’s statecraft and long and short-term geopolitical strategies are locked away in the black box that is government.  Basically, the masses are only required to think one simple thing at a time.  We must support our leaders in “difficult” (ie, costly) decisions.  We are to be compliant workers and consumers.  Under no circumstances are we to make domestic difficulties.

If opacity is necessary in certain (obvious) respects, nonetheless it is a primary cause of the fine mess which is “right-wing” opinion on Moscow’s war in Ukraine.  Many, many people still operate from the mechanical assumption that, no matter how inhuman the Russian military’s deeds, “the West” … meaning Washington + NATO …  is the real evil-doer in this world.  So Moscow gets a free pass.  Scarcely anyone troubles to analyse the geopolitics.  Russia as an historical geopolitical dynamic … expansionist Russia, therefore … the Russia which has bloody borders, and whose small neighbours can never be entirely safe … that Russia goes unexamined while the past excesses of American power are held up for ritual condemnation and blamed for everything.  It’s a wilful blindness.

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Bakhmut under fire [Daily Aviation]

As anyone who isn’t a Stone Age, bone-in-the-nose, bow-and-arrow tribesman in some patch of the Andamans must now know, last Friday was the anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s misconceived 3-day conquest of Ukraine.  By a year ago on Saturday the Spetznaz squads roaming Kiev were meant to have decapitated the government.  By a year ago yesterday the designated Putin puppet was meant to have made the short flight from Minsk to Hostomel for the drive through cheering crowds to the city centre for his victory broadcast from the president’s office.  Putin’s masterly use of surprise would be taught at military colleges for generations.

Where we are, instead, has been summed up by countless opinion pieces across what, in military speak, is now called “the information space”.  One pithy and accurate piece was published on Friday’s anniversary at Geopolitical Monitor by occasional contributor Nicholas Velasquez.

He summed up the current disposition at the front in a single sentence:

The stockpile phase of the Russo-Ukraine war has ended and it is clear that the conflict is now attrition based.

The stockpile, it should be noted, was always expected to be the likely deliverer of Russian victory.  Western military specialists spoke from the beginning about the several million shells and deep stores of missiles of all kinds available to the invader.  After Kiev, when the Russian command’s focus was scaled back to the east, Russian shell consumption was estimated during the successful artillery battles for Lysychansk and Sievierodonetsk at 20,000 shells a day.  But, ultimately, the stockpile was not deep enough.  The old Soviet artillery strategy of soaking the ground, allied to the widespread employment of missiles on civilian targets, has resulted in shell starvation and reliance on ageing and non-optimal missiles plus the forty or so that Russian manufacturers can actually produce each month.  The result is the switch to attrition (which is, of course, also a traditional Russian military strategy).

Accordingly, the world waited for the grand offensive to begin, and Russian numbers to overwhelm the defenders.  It now transpires that it did, in fact, begin about a fortnight ago, which one can see in the jump in Russian dead reported by the defenders.  Of course the losses render the generation of the required mass much slower than intended.  Yes, there is a build up, and pressure is increasing on the defenders entrenched in and around Bakhmut.  But so far meaningful advances remain elusive, in part surely because the dead tend to be experienced soldiers while their replacements are green mobiks who are not particularly sure why they are fighting.  Western media are reporting that Putin “is considering” mobilising another 500,000 men.  But his army doesn’t have the capacity to train that number for an offensive operation in much under a year.  It also doesn’t have the hardware to support them.  All it can do is to continue the same asymmetrical attritional process and hope that an exhausted West is driven to, in turn, drive the Ukrainians to the negotiating table.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainians are able to hold on so far, and are organising for an offensive when Western weapon and ammunition supplies allow – thought to be late spring/early summer, when the spring rains, the rasputitsa, are over and the ground is baked hard.  Their language is of a victory before winter comes again in which case, if it holds now, the fortress of Bakhmut will have survived more than a year under siege.  Unsurprisingly, this prospect is concentrating minds in Europe’s capitals and in the Kremlin about the consequences of defeat for Russia.  In his GM article Velasquez lays out what is at stake:

If the West, led by the United States, supports a peace deal where Russia gets even a mile of land in Eastern Ukraine, it sends a message to authoritarian regimes with designs on foreign lands that they can seize land by force of arms with impunity so long as the invaded state acquiesces. If the United States supports any peace settlement featuring any territorial concession it will serve as a tacit acknowledgment that the post-World War Two international order is dead.

… with the consequence that ...

Though international peace and stability should always be the object of the security policy of the West and the United States, peace in it of itself is not a noble aspiration if it can produce a world where malign states may wage war on their weaker neighbors with impunity. The Western states, as the primary architects of the rules-based international order, are responsible for its maintenance. As a result, the West must ensure that Russia’s revisionist aspirations are defeated in Ukraine and at the negotiating table.

All that is true enough.  However, I do think it stops short of the real motivation of Washington, which is to defend not the rules-based order per se but the Western investor, central banking and corporate elites’ geo-economic model for the Globality.  In that respect, internationally recognised legal restraints on the ambitions and predations of military powers are a fundamental precondition (not, of course, through any intent on the part of the Allies after WW2, but certainly by the effect of those restraints today).  Why, because the Western elites have to escape the limitations of “the West” in order to become the economic masters of the whole globe.  So Washington - the political arm of those elites - must re-engineer all the machinery of its own global hegemony in a multipolar environment secured by every other national elite consenting to leave the conflicts of history and borders behind forever.  At least that’s the expectation.  But, as stated on several MR threads, there are two other models for the Globality in play, and both are geopolitical in kind.  One, sometimes denied, subtly hidden from the historical light, is the CCP’s.  The other is Putin’s eurasianist model.  A nightmare of only superficially economic blocs, each ruled over by a single militarily dominant force, it is the polar opposite of the Western elites’ idea and an absolute challenge to the rules-based order.  The war in Ukraine is precisely a battle, and probably the final battle, in the existential conflict of these two models.  Defeat will be terminal for one of them, and it will be the Russian one.

As Velasquez puts it:

Putin, though a liar on most issues, is correct to fear that the West wants to “inflict a strategic defeat” on Russia. The West should inflict a strategic defeat on Russia that echoes throughout the Russian decision-making apparatus, such that it changes Moscow’s strategic culture from here on out.

In other words, while Russia’s future is without doubt as a part of the international architecture, perhaps even sharing in China’s economic hegemony, in military defeat there can be no eurasianism, none of the imperial adventurism, land grabs, frozen conflicts, and satrapy of old.  It is likely that Russia will be stripped of Kaliningrad and Transnistria, and Crimea too, if the Ukrainians do not take it themselves.  Across the southern republics borders will be re-drawn.  For the first time in four and half centuries Muscovy must find sufficiency in the peoples and the immensity of its own landmass.

That being so, only one question remains for the Western elites to ponder: can they really constrain Chinese ambitions, particularly in the southern hemisphere, within a geo-economic globalist corset?  In essence, is the very idea of a multipolar world an impossibility and a blind denial of the nature of men?