On Monday, on the occasion of the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told Russia’s RIA agency :
- “A ceasefire without a long-term solution is the path to a rapid resumption of fighting and a resumption of conflict with even more serious consequences, including consequences for US-Russian relations. We don’t want that. We need a long-term solution that needs to include an element of overcoming the root causes of what is happening in and around Ukraine.”
Ryabkov has been in this position since 2008. Previously, he worked for four years at the Russian Embassy in Washington.
Just a month and a half before Putin ordered his troops to cross the border into Ukraine and occupy Kyiv, Sergei Ryabkov led the Russian delegation which held last-minute talks with the Americans in Geneva.
In the same period, Ryabkov was among the high-ranking liars in Moscow, tasked with the tactical effort of misleading Kyiv, Europeans and Americans about the Kremlin’s real plans.
There is “no intention to attack or invade Ukraine,” Ryabkov said at the time, even though the Biden administration already had all the data to the contrary, and had warned Ukraine, US allies, and also international public opinion .
The attack and invasion took place.
I mentioned the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister’ the recent statement and several contextual elements regarding his activity and the position occupied in the chain of Russian diplomacy in order to underline both the particular relevance of his intervention, as well as the special situation in which the American President, Donald Trump, finds himself.
And the special situation in which Trump finds himself with regards to Ukraine file, is the following:
- Interested in achieving peace in Ukraine quickly, Donald Trump fully aligned, himself immediately after his inauguration, with Russia’s position, in order to exert pressure on Ukraine, that in Trump’s mind, would crush Kiev’s will, would discourage the support of European allies and would stimulate Putin to comply with an agreement, given that that agreement at all would be extremely beneficial to Moscow.
The rapid achievement of peace could not logically be done without preventing the Ukrainians from fighting and without preventing the Europeans from helping the Ukrainians continue to defend their country. As geopolitical and moral considerations are worth nothing to Donald Trump, Donald Trump has stepped on the road to “peace” sure of himself and his transactional logic.
- But what happened as soon as Trump opened the door to the Russians (pulling them out of diplomatic isolation, making huge concessions to them even before they sat down at the negotiating table, obscenely parroting their narrative, blackmailing the Ukrainians and Europeans, but also excluding them from direct talks) threw Trump into chaos.
- In true Mafia style, Russia suddenly began to pressure the American leader, showing him the blackest scenario that an eventual procrastination of the talks was a possibility, as such it is also possible to reach peace much later than Trump had imagined, than he had bragged about; or it will not be reached at all. In fact, Russia has had Trump in its hands since the day when, during the campaign, the simplistic billionaire pledged to stop the war in 24 hours. Only the Russians can stop the war this quickly, but putting down their weapons. And the Russians will not do this because Putin cannot afford this luxury. A few days ago, Putin only resuscitated Trump once again with his hand behind his back, through the voice of Deputy Minister Ryabkov. For Sergei Ryabkov’s statement on Monday codified precisely the threat of delaying the talks, as well as Russia’s primary intentions – for example, pushing NATO back to the alignment of three decades ago. For the Russians, an aspect that Trump is limited enough to understand, although the Kremlin, through Ryabkov’s voice, reiterated it in black and white in Monday’s statement, peace in Ukraine is a secondary issue as long as it does not lead to the total domination of Ukraine by Russia and to the leaving of Eastern Europeans unprotected, from the point of view of NATO and American security guarantees. Of course, an interesting and quite urgent aspect for Moscow would be some pause in fighting, but only enough to allow its economy and army a respite from the colossal rate of attrition that affects them.
I would say that, first of all, in the light of the above, we must look at the geopolitical pornography exercise carried out by the US President and Vice President right there in the Oval Office.
The two organized an ambush for Zelensky straight out of the Russian special operations manual. They did it because they can only move forward (from grotesque to even more grotesque and by inventing a scapegoat), as long as Trump does not go back on his initial goal – quick peace. And as long as Trump does not give up the idiocy of quick peace, he will not be able to get out of the trap which Putin has laid for him and in which the American leader allows himself to be exploited, because he basically has no choice.
Of course, the million-point question is this: Why did Trump promise to bring peace between Ukrainians and Russians in 24 hours?
There are several possible answers.
Of these, some seem obvious (electoral campaign reasons, a play for easy votes); we can only guess at others (a lack of foreign policy skills and lack of knowledge of Russia). Others seem obvious again (admiration for dictators), others have not been proven, but are being speculated more and more (his eventual recruitment by the Russian secret services).
In any case, promising to bring peace quickly to Ukraine is one of three faults: lying, stupidity or a sincere desire to serve Russia.
After the first month of his presidential term, Donald Trump has proven that he is guilty of all three faults.
Admittedly, the geopolitical pornography, carried out by Trump and Vance on the occasion of Zelensky’s visit, gave a glimpse of a bad temperedness that is difficult to imagine at such a high level.
Humanly and politically, the US president has every reason to feel he’s on the brink of a nervous breakdown, given that Ukraine is not the only big issue where things are not going great for Donald Trump.
In addition to the blockage generated by Kiev leadership’s determination to honestly serve its country (the Ukrainian president enjoys a comfortable majority contrary to the fake news spread by the billionaire in the White House), Trump is running up other arrears that are likely to expose more and more emphatically the emptiness of his bombastic campaign promises.
One is related to the price increases in the supermarket: egg prices are a humiliatingly eloquent one.
Because in 24 hours Trump has not only promised to make peace in Ukraine, but he has also promised that prices will go down the next day he is president.
The economic situation, for consumers, is likely to worsen in the near future if Trump behaves like a bull with the trade wars with which he has threatened Europe, China, Mexico and Canada.
And he is probably becoming more and more aware of the risk of being hit by the boomerang on the Ukraine file that is not advancing brilliantly, and could go extremely badly.
Finally, the third axis that does not work in the fairy tales spread by Trump during the campaign, but which may have had its contribution to the bad temper displayed shown by Trump in the Oval Office, with Zelensky, are the spending cuts, of streamlining the federal state apparatus.
He entrusted this mission to an individual, Elon Musk, who has been hugely successful in business (but much depends on contracts with the federal state), but who tends to male a farce of legitimate reform.
It is symptomatic, for example, that in Donald Trump’s first month in the White House and Elon Musk at the helm of waste reduction operations, spending was higher than in the same period last year, when Joe Biden was president.
It is emblematic that in order to gloss over the modest return which is well below expectations, Musk acts like Trump, aggressively publicizing his activity and sometimes presenting erroneous figures (for example, a contract that DOGE claimed had incurred expenses of eight billion dollars turned out to be A THOUSAND TIMES LOWER).
No less insignificant is the fact that for a while Musk has been talking about what a performance it would be if he saves a trillion dollars. Yes, it would be a performance, but the figure represents only half of the promise made. What happened? Has Elon come to the conclusion that he is not even going to be able to save two trillion, and then he confuses people with the new informal target of only one trillion?
The fact is, however, that there is a real chance that the two trillion target will be impossible to achieve through the primitive but deeply disruptive methods used by Elon Musk.
In November, the Economist carried out an analysis of what can be done to make the American state more efficient, what cannot be done and what should not be done (the application of the Musk method).
The article is HERE. It’s worth reading, but I’ll leave you the conclusion: a competent and genuinely interested administration can achieve savings of $5 trillion instead of venturing down the bumpy and dangerous road of cutting two trillion.
In the White House there is currently an administration run by people who, although they plagiarized Reagan’s slogan, are bringing shame on the America of the Reagan era. People who have come to sell and tear down while overwhelming the public space with the fake news that they are here only to build and rebuild.
On Friday, in the Oval Office, Zelenskyy and all of Ukraine were the innocent victims not only of unscrupulous individuals, but especially of the growing fears of failure of these unscrupulous individuals.
Trump and his team are not only about to abandon Ukraine and Europe: they are about to abandon and betray America itself.
Trump was extremely irritable in the Oval Office (Vance was just a lapdog). He was extremely angry about Zelensky, but he was also extremely angry because of the signs of f failure on all the other major files apart from Ukraine.
It is not out of the question that the obscene outpouring of joy, recorded on Friday evening in Moscow, according to the geopolitical prognosis in the Oval Office, had its origins not just seeing Zelensky cornered, but also the light bulb moment that the Trump administration has put America on a much broader collision course a big wall. For the Russians, this is also a natural choice.
