Peskov: No Peace Deal Possible At This Time

But Trump might change that.

Was anybody seriously expecting a cease-fire or some sort of negotiated settlement?

Bah!

“Bah”, I say!

Here:

As of today, there are no prerequisites for negotiations on Ukraine, so the special operation will continue until the set goals are achieved. This was stated by the press secretary of the Russian president Dmitry Peskov in an interview with journalist Pavel Zarubin.

The West does not seek negotiations with Russia, although some politicians make statements about the need to sit down at the negotiating table. The recent NATO summit showed that the alliance has chosen the path of confrontation with Russia, they are not going to end the conflict in Ukraine. Therefore, the special military operation will continue until all the goals previously announced by the Russian president are achieved.

Earlier, Russia expressed its readiness to sit down at the negotiating table and discuss ending the conflict, while setting a number of indispensable conditions for this, including the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the territory of the new regions, recognition of them as Russian, lifting sanctions against Russia and non-aligned Ukraine. Moscow warned that the conditions proposed now will not be in effect for long, the next ones may be even tougher.

The West decided that they can dictate their conditions to us, so they decided to continue the conflict, which should lead to "Russia's defeat."

As far as I can tell, about 80% of the significant stuff being negotiated over is backroom stuff about Putin and his cabals future governing in Russia. A prominent faction of the Deep State in America seems to think that his time has come. grimreaperknockingondoors.jpg.

There is another, less powerful faction that wants to wind this thing down against Putin because they rightly understand that Putin is their man in Moscow. Sure, ideally, the American Deep State would prefer to set up a political system comparable to Ukraine, where you have rival oligarchs vying for power and where Western NGOs and the State Department work with big city local Liberals to hammer out policy and to rule from abroad.

But, if the people that we have discussed before (Tucker, Burns, Sachs, Mearsheimer) who want a war with Iran or China next and reconcilement with Russia make it to power, well then maybe there is a chance for some sort of deal to be hammered out.

As far as Putin’s visible goals are, they’re quite simple:

• to extract himself from this trap that he got himself mired in but

• to save face by getting some of his guarantees which aren’t that much because

• he is focused on kicking the can down the road and keeping the status quo as best as possible

As we have discovered previously, Putin was willing to sign on to the Istanbul peace deals, which were essentially Minsk III. The eastern territories would be put back into Ukraine and given more autonomy. This translates into the oligarch mafia there being able to continue participating in politics in Ukraine as a counter-weight to the Kiev Liberals (Sorosites).

It also had some promises by Kiev to limit the amount of weapons allowed on Ukrainian territory. No nukes, and no giant mechanized divisions, essentially.

The kicker is that in April of this year, Putin indicated that he was holding out for a return to the Istanbul terms. Here:

On April 11, President Putin held a long meeting with the head of Belarus, during which Lukashenko proposed returning to the draft Istanbul Treaty with Kiev, while emphasizing that these Russian initiatives for the peaceful resolution of the conflict in Ukraine would find a response from the military.

“Take back out the document that you once showed and handed to me, put it back on the table and move forward with it,” Lukashenko suggested.

“Yes, and work with it,” Putin said.

Lukashenko added that the agreement contains “reasonable positions acceptable to Ukraine” and recalled that Ukraine agreed with them.

(…)

"They already agreed, of course," Putin said.

According to Lukashenko, ideas for a peaceful settlement will find a response from the Ukrainian military.

"My instincts have never deceived me. I think that your initiatives for a peaceful settlement of the conflict will find a response in Ukraine. They will find it in the military, oddly enough," he said.

The terms that Moscow signed onto were, well, treacherous to the interests of the Russian state and the Russian people in Ukraine that ostensibly this war was fought for.

If these are indeed the terms that Moscow is still fighting this SMO for, well then there is absolutely nothing to be optimistic about.

What is interesting to note is what Lukashenko said, that the generals in Ukraine would be open to negotiating and accepting these terms. I think he is spot on with this. The military in Ukraine has pumped the breaks several time on notable occasions, like the counter-offensive in the south, and many of them are Soviet citizens first and Ukrainians second. Zelensky knows this and that is why his spokeslady continually denounces the military and why Zelensky constantly purges his own generals.

We actually covered this on the recent podcast. Here:

Ukraine’s top commander Aleksandr Syrsky is ready to lay down arms and capitulate to Russia, a lawmaker from Vladimir Zelensky’s party has claimed.

Syrsky was appointed Ukraine’s highest-ranking general in early February, replacing Valery Zaluzhny, who oversaw last year’s failed attempt to push back Russian forces. According to MP Mariana Bezuglaya from Zelensky’s ‘Servant of the People’ party, the two are secretly colluding to prevent a Ukrainian victory.

Bezuglaya, who is also deputy chair of the National Security, Defense and Intelligence Committee, laid out her case for a top-level military conspiracy in a lengthy post on Facebook on Saturday.

She claimed that Syrsky and Zaluzhny both belong to a “generals’ mafia” protecting their privileges from a younger generation of military leaders, whom Bezuglaya believes to be more competent and innovative, and thus capable of defeating Russia.

”Every further day that Syrsky remains in his position reduces our fighting capability and kills people,” the lawmaker declared, urging Zelensky to intervene and fire Syrsky.

She cited unspecified sources as saying that Syrky and his inner circle favor a ceasefire with Russia and an eventual capitulation.

The important thing to understand here is that neither side is really explaining what they’re negotiating over. What Bezuglaya calls “capitulation” would cause great howls and gnashing of teeth among all pro-Z people in Russia. The current attitude is that Boris Johnson saved the SMO by tearing up the Istanbul deal. I find it hard to argue with this logic because the terms really were horrible for Russia. There is a reason why the Ukrainian delegation popped a champagne bottle when they signed the agreement after all.

Military rule would be preferable in Ukraine as it would also be preferable in Russia.

The military brass in Ukraine essentially just wants to hunker down along the fortified lines that Russia keeps bashing its brains against and to continue quietly accumulating NATO hardware and training a better and larger army. NATO, in contrast, doesn’t want this, and prefers that they keep launching counter-offensives. Strangely though, they don’t provide the tools that Ukraine would need to achieve a resounding success with these offensives, like by providing comprehensive anti-aircraft and anti-drone capabilities. Instead, they’re moving ahead with providing F-16s. This points to the fact that they don’t want Ukraine hunkering down and fighting a defensive war, but want to escalate and go on the offensive.

I’ve written before that bombs are going off all over Russia with factories, warehouses and even nuclear defense silos being targeted.

This will only escalate.

Serbia 2.0.

And Moscow knows this too. They’re always chatting with the Pentagon and hashing out the “gentleman’s rules” under which this conflict will continue to be allowed to unfold.

Here:

These talks were 100% them hashing out what level of bombing by F-16s that Moscow will tolerate. You’ll see. The bombs will keep falling on Russia and this is a prelude to another big push by the UAF in 2025, prodded by Washington despite the pedal-pumping of Ukraine’s Soviet generals who understand the risks of such a strategy.

In conclusion, the only way that we get a ceasefire is if Ukraine’s military launches a coup and sign back on to Istanbul. Or, conversely, if Russia’s military launches a coup and we get an escalation with Russia actually taking this war seriously and not playing by these “gentleman’s rules” by which they tell the Pentagon ahead of time where they’re going to bomb or only attack the most fortified points in Donbass head on over and over and over again.

The current terms being offered to Kiev are extremely generous, but Zelensky doesn’t want to take them and there are several reasons for this.

Most obviously, Zelensky would lose the presidency if the situation stabilizes and free-ish elections are held. Furthermore, his whole pitch to Ukraine’s elite is that he is uniquely capable of going to the West and fundraising for Ukraine. Thus, it is in his interest to play up the Russian threat and to tell tales of phantom mega-offensives being planned by Moscow that only more NATO weapons and money can prevent.

He also seems to think that a Trump election means Washington being more willing to negotiate with Moscow. However, this is still speculative. After all, Trump has a lot of support from Azov and people like Kholomoisky in Ukraine as well. Kholomoisky (who Zelensky put into prison) and most of the oligarchs are open to negotiations with Moscow because they know that they have nothing to fear from Putin.

My point here is that within Ukraine it is the Washington-backed Liberals in Kiev, Zelensky’s circle, and the nationalists (also Western funded) who want the war to continue and to escalate. The military and the oligarchs would probably take the Istanbul off-ramp. Trump and his people could, in theory, tell the more hardcore Biden warmongers to cool it and refocus Washington’s energy on Israel’s wars against Lebanon and then Iran.

In fact, I wrote about how this is the only scenario by which this thing cools down on the blog about a year ago, for which I got angry emails accusing me of promoting Zionism. Lol.

Suffice it to say that a lot depends on what Israel wants to do in the coming months. They’re sending weapons to Kiev now, true, but other commentators have correctly pointed out that they’re still straddling the fence on the Ukraine-Russia conflict. This is in large part because of how popular Putin is in Israel and how closely his power base is coupled with the hardcore Chabadnik faction.

I mean, Putin was literally giving speeches about clamping down on anti-semitism in Europe (de-nazification) and never letting the memory of the Holocaust fade at his good friend Moshe Kantor’s events in Jerusalem before the SMO started.

In fact, I was going to write about this separately as part of an article explaining how Moshe Kantor and his people write Putin’s speeches, but now is a good a time as any to explain what is going on. What follows is from my unfinished draft on the Putin-Kantor relationship.

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