The Game is Up: Putin has the upper hand, Trump and his advisers are on the back foot
Perhaps I have been too subtle in my latest remarks earlier today on the context for Putin's congratulatory words to the 'brave' Trump having won the election in the United States. I made those remarks in the last paragraphs of a lengthy account of the Valdai Discussion Club meetings, past and present. Accordingly, I call out here the salient point because it is fundamental to any understanding of what comes ahead in US-Russian relations at the outset of the Trump administration and in particular to how the Russian-Ukraine war may end, with or without American 'assistance.'
Putin's congratulatory remarks have been taken out of context by all Western media and by Trump's advisors speaking to the press. He DID NOT call Trump to wish him well. He only was answering a question about his view of the American election posed by a participant in the Valdai gathering that took place in Sochi on Thursday, already a day after other world leaders had phoned Trump to express their congratulations. Moreover, Russian spokesmen for Putin made it clear that he had no intention of speaking to Trump until TRUMP calls him.
To anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear, which already excludes all of the journalists in American mainstream media, Putin's message is clear: Russia is winning this war and will settle the war on its own terms, which explicitly exclude most everything the chattering classes in Washington and the alleged advisors to Trump are now saying. Russia will not graciously agree that they may keep Crimea but should cede all or any of the territorial grains on the ground that they have made in the Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporozhye oblasts which were part of Ukraine in 1992 but declared their independence from Ukraine in the autumn of 2021 and voted in referendums to join the Russian Federation. The referendums were binding and corresponded to the provisions for self-determination of peoples enshrined in the UN Charter, which the Russians claim to understand very well since they were the original authors at the end of WWII.
Otherwise, Putin has consistently said that the terms set out in a draft peace treaty which Kiev's representatives initialed in Istanbul in April 2022 remain in force, namely that Ukraine must be declared neutral, has no possibility of entering NATO, will not host foreign military forces or installations on its territory. In effect, Putin is demanding regime change in Kiev and since military victory on the ground becomes more feasible day by day, there is no reason for Russia to negotiate away its demands whatever they may think in Washington or Brussels.
Moving back from the Ukraine issue, the bigger point is that the mindset of global domination, the mindset that everyone will bend the knee and acquiesce in whatever the incumbent of the Oval Office may wish to impose, is as the Germans say vorbei, it is history. The sooner Washingtonians get that message, the better.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024