Steve Witkoff’s fulsome – some would say creepy – declaration of thanks to Vladimir Putin, for his “humanitarian” gesture in releasing a retired American teacher, seemed designed to herald the era of new chumocracy between his boss Donald Trump and the Russian dictator.
It has led to an agreement to hold three-way technical talks between Russia, Ukraine and the US to bring peace to Ukraine. But this just means officials talking about talks. Major players won’t be present and Volodymyr Zelensky’s government most probably won’t be represented at all.
Trump, having gone full Russian in the past few weeks, to the dismay of even a core of Republican Congress members, will follow Moscow’s lead.
Putin’s terms for peace with Ukraine have been plain since his full-scale invasion in February 2022: Kyiv’s surrender, the Zelensky “Nazified” regime replaced by another pro-Moscow puppet, Ukraine’s armed forces neutralised and a pledge in perpetuity that the country will not join Nato or the EU.
“You talk so much about my president, President Trump, being a humanitarian,” said Witkoff in full oleaginous mode. “You are a humanitarian, and I salute that.” The cue for this was the release of 74-year-old Stephen Hubbard, who had been a Russian prisoner after capture in eastern Ukraine, where he was living a civilian life, four years ago. He was tortured and deprived of food, according to fellow prisoners.
He was released without any swap of a Russian, or pro-Russian, detainee being released. Some detect a distinct odour of rat here. Putin seems to think he has got what he wants with Witkoff’s blandishments. Even so, within 24 hours of Hubbard’s release, a German journalist was arrested for spying. The game of hostage leverage goes on.
Overnight, Russia again bombarded Ukraine with ballistic missiles as it continues its nightly attacks on the country. Zelensky pointedly said three waves of missiles had been sent at the capital by “Russian humanitarians” since Tuesday evening, with two confirmed dead across the country and 34 injured, including five children.
Trump’s switch to Moscow, starting with the release of 300,000 tonnes of Russian diesel to the international market, the proposed partial unblocking of sanctions – against the wishes of much American public opinion – and now the suspension of Patriot missile deliveries to Ukraine, marks one of the biggest presidential handbrake turns in recent American history.
“The reason it’s hard to think of a precedent of America switching sides in a conflict like this,” the veteran US diplomat Richard Haass told The New York Times this week, “is there really isn’t one.” Richard Nixon’s overture to China and Mao in 1972 was a huge policy change, but that wasn’t a time of active war. This time, the world is having to deal with an inconsistent, fickle and chaotic presidency – at a moment when America’s military prowess has reached a new low of credibility.
This is no caper by two good fellas bent on exploiting peace in Ukraine to their mutual advantage. Putin and Trump want very different things. In the end, Trump wants a peace that profits his team. Putin seems to think he has the advantage. There may be temporary ceasefires and the personal defeat of Zelensky, but the war will go on.
The constant probing and challenging of Nato allies suggest Putin’s ambitions go beyond the subjugation of Ukraine. This was the conclusion of a remarkable seminar in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London this week, which looked at hybrid warfare from Ukraine across Europe.
The Sahaidachnyi Security Centre of Ukraine was launching its web tool tracking conflict and incidents across Europe over the past five years, “The Everywhere War – the sub-threshold war tracker”, which shows hundreds of data points across a map. Analysis was provided on ground, air, sea, space, cyber and “cognitive” confrontation and warfare, which includes information and media manipulation, especially social media and underground networks.
The visual impact of the mapping was startling – hundreds of provocations and unexplained incidents, incursions, cyber strikes and drone activity. The conclusion was that many of these recorded incidents seemed to be making a pattern of “shaping operations” for Putin’s wider war. The closure of the Narva border with Estonia and Russian drone strikes on grain ships within the territorial waters of Bulgaria and Romania – both Nato partners – were two recent examples.
The commentary from frequent visitors to and students of the region was stark. The regime shaped by Putin these past 26 years is geared to a military economy and a war footing. This will not change in the foreseeable future, even if Putin himself were to disappear. The silovki, the securitocracy fashioned round the security and intelligence services, the FSB, GRU and SVR, would perpetuate rule by their elite. One Kremlin watcher, however, did conjecture that Putin might be chucked out for his brutal incompetence – and that a technocrat such as the Moscow mayor Sergey Sobyanin might be brought in to make the military machine run on time.
Putin has built his presidency on border wars: Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine. Now three border areas are in his sights – Belarus, Moldova and the three Baltic states, which Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister, has claimed aren’t real states at all but rightfully provinces of Russia. Rather more extravagantly, Poland and Finland have been mentioned as possible targets. Certainly, there is evidence of the building of huge bases and barracks in the rear of the Russian borderlands with these two frontline states.
Many Ukrainians suggested that Europe and the alliances of European powers was the main target of Putin in his fantastic vision of Russia and his role in its destiny. “He just doesn’t want to live alongside a prosperous Europe, as the poor neighbour. Russia should be the leading power of Europe.”
Putin must sense he can exploit Trump’s indifference to Europe, aided by the clownish antics of his sorcerer’s apprentice, Elon Musk. By fiddling with the on-off switch of Starlink and Starshield for Ukraine, he must have lost billions of dollars in potential sales. No western military wants to rely on SpaceX/Tesla equipment in the future.
Putin has done colossal damage to Russia’s people and economy. No advanced nation today can sustain the loss of a million and a half soldiers in an inconclusive war – with the prospect of many more deaths to come. Russia’s actual and future wars will be dependent on China – and so far the Witkoff–Kushner pro-am diplomats have allocated only a walk-on part to Xi Jinping.
Faced with the conflicting plans for war and peace of the two monster egos of Trump and Putin, the medium nation allies (as Mark Carney of Canada puts it) – including Europe, the Gulf states, Japan, Australia and Canada – have to make their own plans for security and cooperation. Trump’s main priority is himself: extravagances in the theatre of Narcissus that might make even the Emperor Nero blush. Putin will smile and promise as little as possible, but deliver nothing.
In their agenda, the lives of most Russians, Americans and Ukrainians don’t figure much. A new linkage of multilateral alliances and friendships is needed, and quickly.