Putin in Tianjin:
The Pavane is Over
The Diplomatic Dance is Done
writes Martin Sieff
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The journalist Martin Sieff has received three Pulitzer Prize nominations for international reporting. Mr. Sieff served as Chief Political Correspondent at United Press International (UPI) from 1999 to 2009.
Once again he made clear that Moscow rejected every "statesmanlike compromise" that President Donald Trump and his spin doctors came up with in Washington, as well as those dreamt up by the leaders of NATO and the European Union who are eager to appease their real Master, Volodymyr Zelensky.
The Russian-speaking former provinces of Ukraine (including Crimea) are going to stay in Russia. Ukraine will never be allowed to join NATO. All NATO, and neo-Nazi influence and militia paramilitary groups are going to be expunged. No amount of weasel wriggling by Zelensky and his pet poodles Starmer, Macron, Rutte, Mertz and Van Der Leyen is going to change that. The Russians have not lost up to 100,000 dead soldiers in the past three and half years while militarily winning the war in order to surrender on any of that. At this late date, Putin has no intention of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Most Western major media outlets, lying desperately as usual, described Putin's speech and appearance at the SCO summit as an attempt to break the diplomatic isolation they imagine he has been in since the war started in February 2022.
But, of course, Putin and Russia have never been isolated: Russia along with China has been the dominant leader of the SCO, the largest and most powerful diplomatic grouping and military association in the history of the human race, ever since it was founded on June 15, 2001. And India joined it more than eight years ago in June 2017. Iran and Pakistan are members too. And now India, which has enjoyed security alliances and tight ties with Moscow for the past 70 years, is pruning its previous 25 years of ties with the United States in the face of President Donald Trump's wildly erratic attempts at using tariffs to bully New Delhi.
All Trump has succeeded in doing is to drive Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the most pro-American leader India has ever had, into Putin's arms. Modi actually held hands with Russia's president to emphasize the point in the glare of world publicity at Tianjin.
So who has really isolated whom?
Most of all, what Putin's calm and measured speech at the SCO summit showed that Donald Trump's shameful kowtowing to the dictates of the NATO and European leaders in Washington on August 18, killed stone dead the briefly revived hopes of a quick end the Ukraine War through his talks with Putin at the US Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson on August 15.
While the Europeans groveled before Zelensky and Trump yielded to them, Putin did not moderate his demands one iota.
In other words, the Trump administration and the Great and Good Leaders of NATO have run out of wriggle room, and they have run out of time.
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The Pavane is Over; the diplomatic dance is done.
Formal Pavane dances are almost entirely forgotten in Western popular and even elite culture, but they dominated the high society and diplomatic mindsets and rituals of Europe for at least 400 years.
Like so much else in the culture and rituals of our modern world, Pavane dances were products of the brilliant Italian Renaissance in the 16th century and originated in Venice, the most sophisticated, powerful, influential and successful diplomatic capital of Europe for more than half a millennium.
Pavane dances, whose musical scores were first published in 1508 in Venice by Ottaviano Petrucci are long, slow, and stately. They have multiple participants and were originally performed quite fast and dynamically. But as they grew more prestigious, popular and complicated and spread across Europe, they slowed in their pace.
So haunting is the spectacle and the attraction of a stately performance of the Pavane that the great British science fiction writer Keith Roberts, sadly passed away in 2000, used the dance as his metaphor for the derailing and destruction of the progress of European civilization in his 1968 masterpiece simply entitled "Pavane."
Now Zelensky and the European NATO leaders are again seeking to entangle Putin and Russia in another Pavane. It would be comparable to the interminable 2014-15 Minsk processes which former German Chancellor Angela Merkel admitted were never meant to end the US-backed terror attacks on the Russian-speaking inhabitants of Lugansk and Donetsk, the two provinces that seceded from Kiev's control following the Western-backed Maidan Coup of February 2014.
For more than 6 years the Russians were led by the nose in endless, fruitless negotiations with the West. None of the agreements reached in the years prior to February 2022 were honored by Ukraine.
Even as Zelensky, and his dupes danced their latest Pavane first movement, or "measure," with Trump and Secretary State Marco Rubio in the White House on August 18, Putin unleashed a new series of Russian air strikes on Ukraine.
As the respected One India news source reported, Russia launched powerful airstrikes across eastern Ukraine just minutes before Zelensky and his supporters Starmer, Macron and Rutte met with Trump.
"Moscow’s Aerospace Forces struck temporary deployment zones of Ukrainian brigades near Mirnograd and Ivanpolye, using FAB-3000 and FAB-500 aerial bombs fitted with gliding and correction modules," One India said. "The attack obliterated positions of Ukraine’s 15th National Guard Brigade and heavily damaged the 100th Separate Mechanized Brigade."
One India's assessment of the significance of the strikes was clear and unequivocal - unlike the statements of Zelensky and his allies.
"The timing of the strikes sends a chilling message, intensifying tensions as Trump pushes Zelensky toward a controversial peace deal that could force Ukraine to cede territory. With European leaders watching closely, the simultaneous escalation on the battlefield and in Washington underscores the razor’s-edge stakes of the moment."
That was exactly the point.
Trump, Zelensky and the European leaders are even now still trying to sound upbeat about the prospects of finally ending the Ukraine War. But they are just yet again playing for time.
They are just dancing yet another diplomatic Pavane.
Trump clearly does not realize he has erased the credibility he had so painstakingly won so briefly with Putin at their Alaska meeting.
But it's even worse than that: Trump 's retreat from his Elmendorf commitments have confirmed the conviction held throughout the Russian government - not just by Putin - over the past 11 years of trying to negotiate with three successive US presidents to end the Ukraine conflict.
It is that all assurances by every US president, including Trump, are worthless and that therefore no US leader, including Trump, can be trusted.
The Pavane is over. The diplomatic dance is done. Only unlimited war - for North America as well as all of Europe - now looms ahead.
And soon.
A guest post by
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