Trump's New "Peace Plan" Is Tougher on Moscow Than Biden's Sanctions Ever Were

This all doesn't sound very peaceful.

I’ve never been all that convinced that the Trump/Vance ticket is the “peace in Ukraine” platform. I mean, I can see the argument, and so can you, I suppose. Some of my readers are quite sharp, actually. The paying ones that is, not the unwashed casuals.

But yeah the following is the argument in a nutshell as I’ve heard it explained.

Trump and Vance are Zio-hawks so they will presumably focus to waging war on Lebanon and Iran instead, which requires money and weapons to be sent to Israel as well as American forces committed to the Middle East again. This will cause them to draw down in Ukraine.

This makes sense, yes, but that doesn’t make it true.

Like, it makes “sense” that Putin would feel threatened by NATO expansion and want to restore Russia’s borders or reassert Russian sovereignty. But this simply isn’t the what motivates Putin. It would also make “sense” that China would be Russia’s ally and weapons manufacturer in the war against NATO because of geopolitcs and balance of power or whatever. Again, totally untrue though.

So it is probably the same thing going on here.

It makes “sense” i.e., “we want to believe that it is the case” that Trump will throw Zelensky to the wolves and give Ukraine to Putin so that he can run off to then bomb Iran. But so far, I see no proof of this being the case at all. If anything, Trump appears to be committed to doubling down against Putin. He just released a proposed peace plan that is far harsher than anything Biden laid out against Russia.

Here is Tsarev’s summary:

Former CIA Director and Secretary of State in the Trump administration Mike Pompeo and influential American lobbyist, adviser to Trump's presidential campaign David Urban published (https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-trump-peace-plan-for-ukraine-russia-foreign-policy-926348cf) an article in the Wall Street Journal outlining the contours of Trump's peace plan for Ukraine.

The peace settlement, as Trump sees it, is based on three key factors.

▪️The first is imposing real sanctions against Russia. The authors of the article believe that the current sanctions are practically nominal, and real pressure should be exerted on the sources of income of the Russian budget. As an example of Biden's half-hearted measures, they cite the non-application of sanctions to Russian banks if their operations are related to the energy sector;

▪️The second factor is the strengthening of NATO. Trump, while still president, constantly accused the Europeans of not wanting to spend money on their defense. Pompeo and Urban propose raising the current 2% defense spending cap to 3% of GDP;

▪️The third is a full-fledged Lend-Lease for Ukraine in the amount of $500 billion. Trump does not want to hang the costs of waging war in Ukraine on American taxpayers, instead he proposes to lend Kiev as much as it needs to buy American weapons;

▪️To implement this plan, it will be necessary to strengthen the American defense industry by pumping it with military orders. Here the authors emphasize the symbolism that is important for Trump: the Russian economy is smaller than the economy of the state of Texas (as well as California and New York taken separately), and it is necessary to show the whole world, and above all, China, that Russia and other countries should not even dream of any full-fledged competition with the United States;

▪️It is also important to gradually push Russia out of the world energy markets. To do this, it is necessary to sort out the situation in Gaza as quickly as possible in order to enlist the support of Saudi Arabia;

▪️The steps to implement this plan, according to the authors, will allow Trump to determine the terms of peace in Ukraine. They include ending the military conflict and restoring Ukraine through reparations from the frozen assets of the Russian Central Bank in the West.

[NOTE: frozen Russian money has already been sent to Kiev directly again recently.]

The United States does not recognize the annexation of Ukrainian territories to Russia, just as it did not recognize the Baltic countries as part of the USSR; Ukraine with a strong army is joining NATO and the EU. A special fund of $100 billion is being created to arm Ukraine, the US share in it does not exceed 20%;

I initially had no illusions about the intentions of Trump and the Republicans regarding Ukraine. The narrative "Trump will surrender Ukraine" was promoted by the American media purely as part of the election campaign in order to discredit Trump.

Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said after a personal meeting that Trump would support Ukraine: (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13652007/BORIS-JOHNSON-convinced-Trump-strength-bravery-save-Ukraine-end-appalling-war.html) "I am confident that Trump will be able to end the conflict in Ukraine on the right terms for the West." Moreover, note that Pompeo's plan is no different from Johnson's plan. It is only more clearly detailed. In essence, they are talking about the same thing.

Time recently wrote about the growing optimism in Kyiv regarding Trump's intentions (https://time.com/7001148/ukraine-zelensky-plan-to-survive-trump/), and the Ukrainian leadership and allies are becoming increasingly confident that under Trump, assistance to Ukraine will be faster and more decisive. Pompeo and Urban indirectly confirmed this in the peace plan announced on the pages of the WSJ, offering to lift any restrictions on the types of weapons supplied to Ukraine.

I will note that Mike Pompeo is one of the key links between Trump and Ukraine. Since the end of last year, he has been a member of the board of directors of Ukraine's largest telecom operator, Kyivstar. This year, Pompeo has met at least twice with the head of Zelensky's office and his "dear friend" (https://x.com/mikepompeo/status/1800619194683105766) Andriy Yermak. If Trump is elected, Pompeo will be a contender for one of the key positions in the administration.

Perhaps Putin was not entirely joking when he said that Biden would be preferable for Russia to lead the United States. Trump may indeed increase arms supplies to Ukraine, and this may have an impact on the front. However, I don’t think that Trump will decide on direct participation of NATO troops in the conflict. And without this, there will be no turning point in Ukraine’s favor at the front.

So yeah, the war will probably continue and even escalate.

I put the odds of Putin capitulating even higher now that he realizes he and his cabal can’t hold out for hope of some kind of policy change in the White House. At the very least, Kiev will mount at least one more large offensive before we have any real negotiations.

Look: as things stand now, the West + Kiev essentially want Putin to surrender all his gains, step down from power and also pay war reparations.

When they’re talking about potential peace talks, they’re approaching Moscow with these starting terms. In other words, even for Putin, these terms are unacceptable. But compared to that, what he is ready to agree to seems tame. That is, he almost certainly would settle for surrendering all gains in Ukraine for the lifting of sanctions on him and his cabal and the end of the conflict. This isn’t even debatable because Putin already signed on to something similar with Istanbul and this was when he had troops parked right outside of Kiev.

So, if the West decides to let Putin keep his head, he will have to surrender all gains in Ukraine, that is just a given.

But it is more profitable and advantageous to keep the conflict going indefinitely and to let Kiev take away more territory, bomb Russia proper, and then, eventually, occupy Russian territory and move the war into 1991 Russian borders.

I believe that the so-called Skywalker Hypothesis that I’ve outlined before will be vindicated.

The reason why I am so confident is because it is the worst case scenario, and the worst case scenario always comes to pass. And actually, that isn’t even entirely the worst of it. Usually, I am unable to even conceive of how bad things can go and when the dust settles somewhat I am left with the realization that a scenario significantly worse than my worst case scenario came to pass.

Still, I end up predicting closer to the truth than anyone else writing in English.

If people actually cared about accuracy of predictions, my career as an analyst would be made. Instead, people simply want to have their superstitions and self-worth validated, no matter what media they consume or products that they buy. That is why they throw money at essayists who never get tired of assuring them that “the Left has gone bananas!” and that their clapping seal readers are handsome, smart, successful and on the right side of history.

This isn’t a “right wing” or “left wing” blog, really.

I run a conspiracy blog, essentially. And you will find that on a long enough timeline, all the conspiracies get proven to be true eventually.

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Except Flat Earth of course.

That shit is just someone having a laugh at gullible Christians.

And they actually convinced half the old MAGA base that the world is flat because it says so in the Old Testament.

I’ll bet Dark Brandon was behind it.

I don’t care what anyone says, he’s still got my write-in vote!

Lol.