Making Clear the Absurdity of the Russian Position on Peace

 

Dylan Combellick is an online commentator on Russia's war on Ukraine.  His background, including living in Ukraine, gives him a grounded perspective on the war in Ukraine.  Here's his profile on Medium.com,

But his special expertise is making clear in simple terms what issues are at stake on the battleground and in geopolitical terms.

Below is a quote from his latest article that illustrates the absurdity of Russia's demands for a negotiated peace agreement.

Especially his last, simple sentence sums up nicely the absurdity of Russian claims.

"I wrote about how to win the war against Russia using Russian tactics. I left out one of the most important, negotiations.

"When entering negotiations with Russia, do what they do — demand the insane, then offer “concessions” and settle for the merely absurd.

"Thus, Ukraine’s opening position should be the annexation by Ukraine of all traditionally Ukrainian lands, including Sochi and Primorye, Rostov, Kursk, and Belgorod. Next to that would be complete nuclear disarmament of Russia and strict limits to conventional arms. Then, Russia should not be allowed to join any alliances that would threaten Ukraine's security, like BRICS or defensive pacts with Iran, North Korea, or other nations that have supplied arms or manpower to Russia. Putin’s legitimacy as leader is in question, as there have never been open and fair elections in Russia, and the press is tightly controlled. Religions are harshly suppressed in Russia, with many churches having been banned entirely.

"Below is a map from a Soviet-era textbook showing the outlines of “nationalities of the USSR.” Note how most of the Rostov and Kursk regions are Ukrainian.

Press enter or click to view image in full size

‘Concessions’ in the Russian style can then be made. “We will allow you to keep twelve nuclear weapons if you agree to pay $500 billion in reparations.” “We will allow Putin to remain in his illegitimate post as leader if you surrender two hundred other war criminals.” “If you will allow the open practice of Mormonism and pay for the construction of Mormon churches, then we will allow your refineries to be rebuilt.” … and so on.

"Demand what you have no right to demand, pretend ownership of things that are not yours, assume rights that are not possessed, and negotiate from a position of absurdism."

The Illusion of a Ukrainian Peace Through a Flawed Negotiation Process

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Mike Pompeo, Trump's former CIA Director and Secretary of State during Trump's first term, has an opinion piece in this weekend's FT about the Ukrainian peace process that, while correct in it's thrust that Ukraine needs credible and robust security guarantees, opens unconsciously with just what is wrong with the American approach under Trump.

Pompeo writes in his opening,"The president [Trump] is marshaling American strength to build the coalition necessary to secure Ukraine's future--exactly the kind of leverage Putin fears."  Pompeo's obsequious praise of Trump may be necessary to ingratiate Pompeo with Trump, but it is an absurd characterization of Trump's effectiveness in negotiating with Putin.

In the same edition of FT, Trump critic and historian, Timothy Snyder, writes in an article titled, The Myths that Made Putin's War, a more  realistic appraisal of Trump's effectiveness.  Timothy Snyder--writing in the context of Russia's mythical past that justifies, in Muscovy's (Moscow's) mind, its war on Ukraine--writes,

"Russia is now engaged in a war in eastern Europe.  And, apropos of this war, it is dominating the court of its stronger rival, the US.  The Trump administration surrenders position after position.  No longer, under Trump, need Putin fear condemnation for his illegal invasion and Russia's extensive war crimes.  Standard means of deterring future wars, such as trials, reparations and troop deployments, are conceded in advance, in exchange for nothing.  US military aid to Ukraine has been stopped twice and, to all appearances, will be allowed simply to run out."

Pompeo writes that the Ukrainian people are "exhausted by years of bloodshed and destruction" and "peace will probably require difficult compromises." But that is for the Ukrainian people and their leaders to decide.  Ukraine did not choose this moment or this circumstance.  Indeed, they have no choice.

The US negotiating separately with Putin, and in bad faith, is not a substitute.

According to a Lawfare Survey, Most Americans Support Ukraine And The Number Is Growing

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 Lawfare Blog:

"Nearly two-thirds of Americans polled, 64 percent, say they sympathize more with Ukraine compared to two percent who say they sympathize more with Russia. This support for Ukraine constitutes an increase of five percent from 59 percent the last time we conducted a similar poll in March 2025. Notably, most of the increase came from Republicans whose sympathy went up from 45 percent in March of 2025 to 55 percent in the latest poll, while Democratic support remains nearly the same at 83 percent compared to 82 percent in March 2025. Sympathy with Russia has remained nearly non-existent at 2 percent—a constant since July 2024—with practically no Democrats sympathizing more with Russia and only 3 percent of Republicans saying the same."

Lawfare Blog is a non-profit multimedia publication dedicated to “Hard National Security Choices.” They provide non-partisan, timely analysis of thorny legal and policy issues.  They strive to achieve academic-level depth with magazine-level readability at the pace of news...with a relentless focus on substantive issues that matter.  Their areas of coverage range from national security law, threats to democracy, cybersecurity, executive powers, content moderation, domestic extremism, and foreign policy, among many others.

The term "Lawfare" is the use of legal systems and institutions to affect foreign or domestic affairs, as a more peaceful and rational alternative, or as a less benign adjunct, to warfare. Wikipedia

Media Bias/Fact Check rates Lawfare Blog as,

• Overall, we rate Lawfare Blog Least Biased based on evidence-based balanced reporting. We also rate them Very High for factual reporting due to proper sourcing and for being used as a resource for verified fact-checkers.

One Small Step Anyone Can Do To Counter Russia's Narrative

A clever initiative by Brian Iselin on Medium.com

Essentially, using Russia's tricks against it.

For those looking for practical, small steps to counter Russia, this is one.

Renaming Kaliningrad to Konigsberg and Moscow to Muscovy: NATO's Smartest Move Yet (1/2)

Our Cartographic Counter-Offensive: It’s Time to Redraw Russia’s Mental Borders (2/2)

From Königsberg (Kaliningrad) to Haishenwai (Vladivostok), coordinated naming campaigns will chip away at Russia’s narrative dominance — city by city.

(To read the article you have to be a member of Medium.com, but it's simple and well worth it)

Trump and Putin's Unreal Expectations for Their Meeting on August 15

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Trump has invited Putin to meet in Alaska on Friday, August 15, to discuss a "peace agreement" between Russia and Ukraine.  Reportedly, the framework for an agreement includes, in Trump's words, "some swapping of territories" between Russia and Ukraine.

News and social media have largely panned the initial, vaguely expressed terms of an agreement.  Any agreement on these terms is seen as putting Ukraine at risk of further Russian aggression and undermining the US's credibility, given the US's previous guarantee to protect Ukraine's territorial integrity under the Budapest Memorandum.

An additional consideration is that, although the US is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court (ICC), the ICC has issued an arrest warrant for Putin due to human rights violations for Russia's forced transfer of Ukrainian children from the Ukrainian territories occupied by the Russian military.  The optics of Putin, an indicted war criminal subject to arrest, visiting American soil (and former Russian territory) are anything but good.

Here is The Economist's take on the sudden development,

"Donald Trump had billed August 8th as deadline day for Vladimir Putin: stop fighting or face crippling sanctions.  But as the day wore on, it seemed the ultimatum had come and gone without event.  Then, around 6pm, the White House announced there would be a summit between Mr. Trump and Mr Putin on August 15th in Alaska.  Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's president, apparently will not attend.  Mr. Putin seems to have achieved this diplomatic triumph simply by skillfully playing his recent negotiations with American envoys.  It was a familiar pattern for Mr. Trump--hard rhetoric, then soft climbdown and more breathing space for the Kremlin."

Other prominent commentators were even more dismissive.  Shankar Narayan on Medium.com writes on the purported framework, "The optics alone would hand the Kremlin a propaganda victory — the image of a U.S. president conceding part of Ukraine to secure a handshake with Putin...Trump is likely walking into his August 15 meeting with Putin believing he can force an agreement and claim the title of dealmaker. Putin, by contrast, enters with every option open. He can agree to stop the war and simply restart it when it suits him. He can secure sanctions relief while demanding Ukrainian territories that improve Russia’s military position for the next round. He can refill his dwindling National Wealth Fund until the U.S. midterms are over — and then send “little green men” back across the border.

Another commentator, Dylan Combellick, also on Medium.com, was even more dismissive: "According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump seems to have agreed to surrender to Putin...Putin, a war criminal, will fly to Alaska to accept the full and unconditional surrender of Donald Trump and the West, and will even be granted territory in return for his ‘reasonableness.’ If this happens, this will be the date that we will look back on in a hundred years and say, “This was the end of the West.”

...

"Trump is promising Russia something that it doesn’t have any right to have stolen, giving it more that it doesn’t have, and getting nothing in return. Ukraine has signed dozens of cease-fires with Russia, and Russia has violated every single one of them. From a historical perspective, this looks more and more like Chamberlain meeting with Hitler in 1938, giving Germany the Czech land, and declaring “peace in our time.”

So much for initial reactions.

With Zelenskyy and Western Europe out of the picture, the August 15 meeting between Trump and Putin seems a doomed initiative.  Any draft agreement would be dead on arrival and could greatly complicate more realistic peace initiatives that respect Ukraine's boundaries and future prospects as an independent country.

We all wait to see what Trump and Putin come up with and whether they can sell.

This from the US Census Bureau

 A newly released report by the US Census Bureau explores changes in the shares of young adults who reached markers of adulthood.

Moving out of the parental home, getting a job, tying the knot, and having kids used to be the most common pathway to adulthood, with almost half of 25- to 34-year-olds having experienced all four milestones in 1975.

Nearly 50 years later, less than a quarter of U.S. adults this age had done the same.

"Findings suggest that young adults today prioritize economic security over starting a family, reflecting the rising burden of housing, food, gas, and other costs."

The Noose Tightens for Vladimir Putin with a Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression

The Washington Post has a clear and concise opinion (firewall) piece by Vladimir Kara-Murza on the complexities of the decision on July 1 of the Council of Europe to set up a Special Tribunal for the crime of aggression against Ukraine, directed at Russia's president, Vladimir Putin.

The Special Tribunal was necessary because there is no existing institution that has the authority to try a head of state for aggression.

It's a long road, but as Kara-Murza writes, with the establishment of the Special Tribunal, "Justice is Coming for Vladimir Putin."

Vladimir Kara-Murza is an opinion writer for The Washington Post.  He is a Russian citizen, a politician, author, and historian. He is a critic of Putin and was imprisoned in Russia from 2022 to 2024.  In 2024, he won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

THE WASHINGTON POST

Vladimir Kara-Murza

Justice is coming for Vladimir Putin

A new tribunal targets the act that made all subsequent Russian war crimes in Ukraine possible.

STRASBOURG, FRANCE — It is not often that one gets a front-seat view on history as I (literally) did last week, sitting in the visitors’ gallery at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and listening to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as he addressed European lawmakers on the establishment of the Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine. The agreement setting up the new court was signed minutes earlier by Zelensky and Alain Berset, secretary general of the Council of Europe, on behalf of its 46 member states.

“Justice must work in a way that makes it clear to anyone planning such crimes, crimes of aggression, that accountability is certain,” Zelensky told parliamentarians in a late-night address. “And it will take strong political and legal cooperation to make sure every Russian war criminal faces justice — including Putin.” This last line was met with long and raucous applause in the chamber.

Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine in February 2022, which triggered the largest military conflict on European soil since the Second World War, revealed a significant gap in international justice. While war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the war in Ukraine fall under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (which has already issued an arrest warrant for Putin over the abduction of Ukrainian children), and countless individual abuses are being reviewed by the European Court of Human Rights, no judicial institution is currently authorized to prosecute the crime of aggression itself — a crime the Nuremberg Tribunal once described as “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

It is this legal gap that the special tribunal is designed to fill. Likely to be located in The Hague, the court’s membership will be open to countries beyond the Council of Europe. The tribunal’s 15 judges as well as the prosecutor and deputy prosecutors will be elected by member states. The sole crime over which the tribunal is authorized to indict, prosecute and convict is the crime of aggression, defined as the decision by one state to use armed force against another in violation of the U.N. Charter. This is, by definition, a “leadership crime”: While war crimes can be committed by any individuals regardless of rank, only those in positions of power can decide to start a war — and in the case of Russia’s personalistic dictatorship, this specifically means Putin.

And this is what the main point of contention among the tribunal’s founding states is likely to be. While Council of Europe officials are pointing to judicial immunity for sitting heads of state as an obstacle to indicting Putin as long as he remains in the Kremlin, this claim is at best dubious. With two resolutions adopted in 2023 and 2024, the Council of Europe’s own Parliamentary Assembly has recognized Putin’s presidency past May 7, 2024 as “illegitimate” because his personal waiver from term limits violated both Russian and international legal norms. The European Parliament has reached the same conclusion. Clearly, a usurper has no right to the protections afforded to legitimate leaders.

But, regardless of how the question of immunity is decided at this stage, the creation of the special tribunal is of monumental importance for the future — not only of Ukraine and of Europe as a whole, but also of Russia itself.

As I have argued many times, the main reason for the failure of Russia’s democratic transition in the 1990s — a failure that led us to where we are today, including the war in Ukraine — was the lack of accountability for crimes committed by the Soviet regime, both against its own people and against other countries. Vladimir Bukovsky, a prominent author and dissident, spent many months in 1991 and 1992 trying to convince the Russian government to organize a public Nuremberg-style trial for former leaders of the Communist Party and the KGB. In his landmark legal opinion issued in November 1992, Russian Constitutional Court Judge Anatoly Kononov argued for holding the former regime responsible under the relevant international statutes, including those relating to “genocide, war crimes, and crimes against peace and humanity.” But these calls went unheeded: Russia’s democratic leaders were unwilling to “rake up the past” and dismissed the idea of trials as a “witch-hunt.” “In that case the witches will return and start hunting us,” Bukovsky warned Kremlin officials at the time — and turned out to be exactly right.

There will be another window of opportunity for political change in Russia — and this time, it must not be squandered. Achieving real accountability for crimes committed by Putin’s regime is essential if a post-Putin Russia is to become a functioning democracy and rejoin the international community. After the fall of Slobodan Milosevic’s regime in 2000, the West made his handover to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague a priority for the normalization of relations. Serbia’s new democratic government delivered the former dictator there in June 2001. It took eight years from the establishment of the International Tribunal in 1993 to Milosevic’s first appearance in the dock.

I hope that Putin makes this journey far quicker.