From the start of the “Special Military Operation” launched last year by President V.V. Putin against Ukraine, it was clear that there was no chance of Kiev prevailing on the battlefield against Moscow, given the disparity in size and forces. As a consequence of the influence of completely onesided media and embedded western commentary on the conflict, it has taken a year more than would normally be expected for the unwinnability of the war to become obvious to the population of key NATO member states.
As yet, the way in which much of the economic woes that they are enduring could be traced not to the war but to the western sanctions that followed remains unclear to most in countries such as the US, the UK, Germany and France. While the Baltic states together with Poland and Finland have justification to worry about a possible Russian invasion of their territory, given their history with the USSR, the major boosters of the Zelensky reclamation drive ( the US and the UK) were never at risk of being invaded by the Russians, even during the most tension-filled phases of Cold War 1.0.
It was in many ways a crime against humanity for UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to rush to Kiev in March 2022, hardly a month into the war, to convince President Zelenskyy not to accept the status quo that Putin was proposing, but to fight on in order to regain territories lost since 2014. In his zeal to fight Putin to the last Ukrainian soldier left standing, Johnson was joined by US President Joe Biden, who has as big a phobia about Putin as George W. Bush had about Saddam Hussein.
While Boris Johnson gambled that the Ukraine war would rescue him from the consequences of his Partygate tipples during the Covid-19 lockdown, Biden believed that Putin tried to get him defeated in the 2020 Presidential election, and was presumably eager to ensure that the Russian strongman was no longer around to meddle with the 2024 election as well.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy appears to have an even more outsize view of current western capabilities than leaders from the bloc, and was instrumental in getting Ukrainian forces to fight on. His surrender proposals masked as “conditions for peace” include (i) full Russian withdrawal from all Ukrainian territory including Crimea, (ii) full payment to Ukraine for all damage caused during the conflict and (iii) Putin agreeing to a war crimes trial in which he himself would almost certainly end up as the lead defendant.
The Zelenskyy peace plan resembles the suggestion of CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping that all countries that have been bearing the impact of CCP expansionism should accept such losses and any more in future, so as to co-exist “peacefully” with a PRC that would thereby be given a licence not just to hold on to illicit gains but to expand further in a Zero Sum manner.
Given that Russia’s RT has the same class of “unbiased” coverage of the war in Ukraine that the British BBC or CNN in the US does, it must be assumed that its claim that President Biden handed over $200 million of taxpayer dollars to Zelenskyy during the latter’s latest Washington sojourn because of fear that the Ukrainian President would reveal past payoffs to his family is part of the disinformation that is raining as plentifully as munitions in the war.
The latest Biden initiative to shower Kiev with $60 billion taxpayer dollars has been blocked by House Speaker Mike Johnson. Were such a request approved by the US Congress in the way Biden wants it to be, every lawmaker who voted for it would pay a steep price in votes lost during the coming elections.
As Zelenskyy has just days ago found to his dismay, US taxpayers are finally demanding that such big cheques handed out by the US President should be written out in their names rather than in Zelenskyy’s. In Donald Trump, they have a Presidential candidate who has assured them that such wishes will be carried out, in contrast to Biden, who acts as though it is Ukrainian rather than US voters who will matter in the 2024 Presidential polls. Biden needs to thank House Speaker Johnson for rescuing him from the folly of continuing to try and prolong a war that from the start was doomed to fail.
By March 2024, it is likely that a new “peace plan” will be presented by Putin in the way the Russian side did in March 2022. Only, this time around, he is likely to insist that the Ukrainian army be disarmed and the country go the way of Belarus where foreign policy is concerned. Agreeing to anything less after such a loss of blood and treasure by the Russian Federation would open the spectre of the Russophobes within Ukraine carrying out a repeat performance of what Putin was certain they were about to launch in early 2022, which was an invasion by the Ukrainian military of the territories controlled by pro-Moscow elements, and which he sought to forestall by invading first.
It needs to be investigated as to how much of the threats of invasion made by President Maduro of Venezuela against Guyana has been based on covert encouragement by Xi. Such a move would of course be getting carried out via the Russian Federation, which as a consequence of the unwisdom of Biden and some European leaders is at risk of becoming a satellite of Beijing in the way that GHQ Rawalpindi became.
Were Prime Minister Narendra Modi to succeed in making Washington aware of the folly of pushing Russia down such a course, and to engineer an entente between Moscow and Washington, it would qualify him for a Peace Prize. Of course, given Biden’s Putin Phobia, such diplomacy may have to await an increasingly possible Trump re-installation in the White House.
Just as India has gone forward with a Taiwan-India-US cybersecurity initiative, what is needed for the safety of the Indo-Pacific in particular is for diplomacy designed to engineer a Russia-US-India triumvirate to replace the Sino-Russian alliance. During most of Cold War 1.0, the PRC stood with the US against the USSR. In an era of Cold War 2.0, the logic of security dictates the coming together of Delhi, Washington and Moscow to deal with the expansionism of the CCP in Eurasia and the waters of the Indo-Pacific.