by Yves Smith
The reading that John Helmer highlights is so out of left field that it’s hard to know what to make of it. Aside from being a spook, David Ignatius of the Washington Post is too high profile a reporter to err in recounting a one-on-one interview with Blinken.
For the first time since the special military operation began last year, the war party in Washington is offering terms of concession to Russia’s security objectives explicitly and directly, without the Ukrainians in the way.
The terms Blinken has told Ignatius to print appeared in the January 25 edition of the Washington Post. The paywall can be avoided by reading on.
The territorial concessions Blinken is tabling include Crimea, the Donbass, and the Zaporozhe, Kherson “land bridge that connects Crimea and Russia”. West of the Dnieper River, north around Kharkov, and south around Odessa and Nikolaev, Blinken has tabled for the first time US acceptance of “a demilitarized status” for the Ukraine. Also, US agreement to restrict the deployment of HIMARS, US and NATO infantry fighting vehicles, and the Abrams and Leopard tanks to a point in western Ukraine from which they can “manoeuvre…as a deterrent against future Russian attacks.”
This is an offer for a tradeoff – partition through a demilitarized zone (DMZ) in the east of the Ukraine in exchange for a halt to the planned Russian offensive destroying the fortifications, rail hubs, troop cantonments, and airfields in the west, between the Polish and Romanian borders, Kiev and Lvov, and an outcome Blinken proposes for both sides to call “a just and durable peace that upholds Ukraine’s territorial integrity”.
Also in the proposed Blinken deal there is the offer of a direct US-Russian agreement on “an eventual postwar military balance”; “no World War III”; and no Ukrainian membership of NATO with “security guarantees similar to NATO’s Article 5.”
Blinken has also told the Washington Post to announce the US will respect “Putin’s tripwire for nuclear escalation”, and accept the Russian “reserve force includ[ing] strategic bombers, certain precision-guided weapons and, of course, tactical and strategic nuclear weapons.”Helmer takes this interview to be the US offering “terms of concession”. The problem is that if that is what it is meant to be, it is so procedurally irregular as to be an obvious red herring. If the US really wanted to talk, it would go through channels. And there is no evidence that has happened. Senior Russian officials have repeatedly said they have not only not gotten any proposals from the US, the Russians have made a point of stating that there has been virtually no senior level communication between the US and Russia for months. One of the sort of recent exceptions was the mid-November meeting in Istanbul between CIA chief William Burn and the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergey Naryshkin. Russia later stated that Burns said nothing new with respect to Ukraine.
The second, as Helmer points out, isthat the collective West has shown itself to be not agreement capable and even proud of its cheatin’ ways.
But on top of that, if Blinken is actually willing to trade the Donbass, Crimea and Zaporzhizhia on a short-term basis for a cessation of hostilities, which the Washington Post piece does not say anywhere. If it’s coded, I can’t see where; perhaps some of Helmer’s Russian interlocutors discern that but again, I would like to know how exactly. It may be that the admission that Ukraine can’t take Crimea is so radical that Russian tea-leaf readers see that as signifying more.
But if that’s the point, Blinken underscores that any concession is not expected to be lasting. From the Washington Post:The administration shares Ukraine’s insistence that Crimea, which was seized by Russia in 2014, must eventually be returned.
In other words, in a piece meant to convince…somebody…the US is still admitting that it fully intends to retake the territory is claims it might be willing to admit it can’t have now. I don’t read this as a sweetener for the Ukraine government and the “on to Moscow” types like the Poles and Baltic states.
In any event, things have gone too far for Russia to stop and accept facts on the ground when it is clearly on the cusp of being able to greatly improve its position, first by further destroying Ukraine’s fight force and NATO weapons and then by taking further territory.
Helmer infers that the West is worried about the economic viability of Ukraine and does not want Russia taking the rich agricultural land east of the Dnieper. That presumably goes double for Odessa.
But this article nevertheless comes off as enshrining the view that US can dictate the end game in Ukraine, which is clearly nuts. And per the Crimea remark flagged above, Blinken signaling that territorial concessions are temporary makes even a supposedly limited offer a non-starter to Russia, and presumably allows for plausible deniability with allies.
So who is the audience for this piece? Is it to start lowering expectations in the US of the long-predicted Ukraine total victory? It can’t be Russia despite pretenses otherwise. China, India, Turkey, and the Global South, to show the West isn’t being unreasonable? The Poles and Balts, to signal they need to moderate their demands in light of Ukraine’s inability to perform?
A further comment: Helmer notes that:Highlighted in bold type in Blinken’s text is the phrase, “a strong, noncorrupt economy and membership in the European Union”…. It is also Blinken’s acknowledgement that Vladimir Zelensky’s move early this week to force the resignations and dismissals of senior officials means the US is calling the shots in Kiev and Lvov.
This is at best what the Biden Administration is trying to sell House Republicans. With Zelensky having been outed in the Panama Papers less than two years ago, his position at the helm belies any claims regarding a clean up. Ukraine is too fabulously corrupt for anyone in a position of influence to have clean hands.
But the US likely is making sure that some heads are rolling so as to be able to claim when it’s become undeniable that an awful lot of cash and goodies sent to Ukraine went astray that the perps were found and have been sent packing or worse. The purge at a minimum is meant to throw a great big blanket over that problem.
But the US is likely also of the belief that it can orchestrate a house-cleaning so as to get outcomes they desire. That is delusional. I sincerely doubt the US has remotely a good enough grip on what is happening within the Ukraine government so as not to be snookered. It’s not hard to see one faction successfully undermining another with cherry picked and fabricated evidence.