Oreshnik is a different beast from its predecessors.

There is a mounting campaign by Ukraine and its Western supporters to make certain that any peace accord ending NATO’s proxy war against Russia contains reliable “security guarantees” for Kyiv. A settlement without such binding assurances, they argue, would amount to a surrender that rewarded Russia’s aggression against its neighbor.

Why does he want to join the alliance if he believes Russia plans to attack it?

Donald Trump’s first term as president shook smug European certainty about continued U.S. protection, but his NATO warnings ultimately turned out to be a little more insistent (and abrasive) than those of his predecessors.

Excluding Ukraine and Europe from peace talks with Russia, Trump reminds his proxies that Washington runs the war.

The evidence from the Soviet archives shows that Stalin’s policy during the 1947 pivot to Cold War was largely defensive and reactive. But even that departure from the cooperative modus operandi of the wartime alliance arose from what might well be described as an unforced error in Washington.

Are the allied forces helping or hurting the prospects of a sustainable peace? This retired Royal Navy commodore has some thoughts.

Westerners are fond of citing a statement falsely attributed to Russian President Vladimir Putin that “Ukraine is not even a state.” This quote is marshaled in order to support the equally false and truly absurd claim that Putin’s decision to undertake his ‘special military operation’ and invade Ukraine on February 24, 2022 was intended to conquer all of Ukraine in an effort to conquer all of the former Soviet states and Russian Imperial territories before moving into Europe. In actuality, the West has treated Ukraine as a less than sovereign, independent state and as a tool – a sacrificial lamb — for the attainment of maximum U.S./Western hegemony in Eurasia by way of NATO expansion. Now, as the fateful and potentially fatal war for Ukraine – the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War – approaches its end game, the statement attributed to Putin may become a simple, if sad, statement of fact. And the wiping of the Ukrainian state off the map of eastern Europe, western Eurasia, and the world is more likely to come as a result of Western actions as it is of Russian forces’ drive westward.

25 years in the making

The present severed from the past is easily misunderstood. In discussions of the Russia-Ukraine war, not enough is made of the historical facts that, at the end of the Cold War, the newly independent Ukraine promised not to join NATO, and NATO promised not to expand to Ukraine.