So Steve Witkoff went to Moscow, got the Putin treatment, and now Donald Trump wants to meet with Putin next Friday in Alaska. Why? Probably because Putin let it be known that he’s interested in a solution.
I’ve read—and that may be wrong—that Steve Witkoff doesn’t really know the details about the territories. And we hear from what Trump says that there may be territory swaps or stuff like that. This is a sign that there’s a confusion about what this conflict is about.
Putin is not interested in having a functioning relationship with Ukraine as an independent state outside of his influence. He is not interested in territory either, primarily. If he’s interested in territory, then it’s because he believes like any good Soviet leader—this is where he grew up. The Soviet Union may be over, but the materialist thinking is still there. He believes, probably, that natural resources are good to have.
And as someone who grew up under Soviet influence, I know very well that the Donbas region has lots of natural resources, and so do the waters around Crimea. So that could be a secondary motivation.
Russia has enough resources. They may be difficult to get to, but it has enough resources. So that argument is true or not—it’s not that true to that extent because Russia definitely has enough resources. So this is about something else than territory.
This is about what Putin believes Russia’s place to be in the world, in history, and in the future. This is about his role as the ultimate mafia criminal in Russia, as one of the richest men on the planet who managed to get into this role due to thievery, state capture, and continuous corruption.
Authoritarian rule always corrupts. There’s no authoritarianism without corruption because all the strategies for transparency, for control by the people, by the courts, have been eliminated. Putinism is—if it’s anything—organized corruption. It is the belief in ultimate control, which is why the term “oligarchs” hasn’t been true for a while, because there are no oligarchs at all. An oligarch—the term “oligarch” means there’s some form of power attached to it. Putin doesn’t allow anybody power other than people that are completely under his control.
So there used to be an oligarchy around Putin, but that power is gone. So this is about Putin, his power, his control, and his stated mission of controlling Eurasia from Lisbon to Vladivostok.
A democratic Western Ukraine is antagonistic to this vision. At least that is how I and many others like me are seeing the situation.
It is, I believe, of relevance that both Witkoff and Trump are real estate people, are developers. There is a business thinking here that believes that everything is about materialism. Everything can be negotiable, and with the right tit-for-tat, you can get a solution. There’s also a business belief that details don’t matter.
You see this a lot with consulting businesses that come into businesses and say “you need to do this different, this and that,” and the people don’t know anything about the business. All they know is models, cookie-cutter solutions. And this has ruined a lot of businesses. It is also ruining some universities. It is also ruining some countries. Yeah, you could see the mindset behind DOGE is that too. The mindset behind austerity is that too.
Now, I know we all need to save money and we all need to have efficient government, but the ruling philosophy that you see domestically and foreign policy-wise with Trump is this business mindset of “no details, make a compromise, tit-for-tat, and we can get this done.”
This ignores any limits such an approach has. This ignores history. This ignores attachments of people. This ignores justice. And it also ignores the situation on the ground.
Ukraine may be losing village after village, field after field, small cities after small city, but it has not been in danger of losing Kyiv and any of these other bigger cities. The Ukrainian playbook here is: “We don’t have enough weapons for a counterattack. So, we’ve contributed to making the battlefield deadly with drones.” There’s a flying carpet of drones around the battlefield. No one really can make moves—only a very stupid military commander would decide to send soldiers into that kind of battle.
And the Soviet Russian mindset is that stupid. So they’re sending wave after wave of human beings into certain death. They may capture a pile of rubble, a field here and there, but this is not victory.
At the same time, Ukraine has worked very effectively to destroy Russian infrastructure behind the front lines—military infrastructure—and to contribute to ruining the Russian economy. It is Putin who has no cards anymore. It is Zelenskyy who holds the cards, but it is the Ukrainian people who deserve justice. It is the people in the occupied territories that deserve to be returned to their homeland.
This is not just territory. This is people. This is their homes. This is about global justice. It is about setting a precedent. If you let Putin take even one piece of land and legitimize it, then he’ll try again. And if it’s not Putin, it’s somebody else. It’ll be Taiwan that’s the next victim, and so on.
Details matter. This is not a real estate deal. And I understand Trump is coming off a peace deal high right now. He negotiated something maybe between India and Pakistan, between Thailand and Cambodia, and just yesterday between Armenia and Azerbaijan. All fantastic news. Kudos.
These, however, were not conflicts on the same scale. India-Pakistan could have been catastrophic, but India and Pakistan also know that, and they’ve been playing this game for a while—horrible game—but Thailand-Cambodia? No comparison either. Cambodia could not withstand Thailand.
Armenia and Azerbaijan mainly was about Nagorno-Karabakh. I grew up listening to this conflict in the ’90s. This has been an old thing going on, but now that Armenia has been defeated, basically signing off on that, given also the tensions between Russia and Azerbaijan—that was also not that difficult. Not to diminish what’s happened, but it is not as complicated.
Russia and Ukraine is complicated because Russia does not believe that Ukraine should exist. Or rather, the Russian state opinion is that—yes, in the past you could make the argument Russia and Ukraine were intertwined like that—but this war has destroyed that idea. This war has made it impossible for the foreseeable future for Russians and Ukrainians to be friends. Many Russians don’t seem to understand that. It’s shocking to me. But that’s the apolitical or even antipolitical attitude within a dictatorship.
So what’s the message here? Zelenskyy already pushed back. The Europeans pushed back. Hopefully, Donald Trump realizes that he can’t treat this like any other easy situation. This has to be done right.
We have the chance here to create a Russian defeat that will eventually benefit Russia. This is about deterrence of further Russian aggression. This is also about deterrence of Chinese aggression. Russia is committing something amounting to a genocide.
Russia’s interests are not territory. If it was that, the war probably would have been fought differently. This is important. Details matter. A business mindset is good for business, but not for foreign policy. And don’t get me started on realpolitik, because realpolitik only gets us into appeasing the strong.
Yeah. So I guess that’s where we are. So now we are all looking at this with trepidation, anticipation. Let me also say it is principally a good thing that people are talking. But don’t underestimate the manipulative malevolence of Vladimir Putin. We’ve seen this in action for a while.
Okay, that’s it. Let’s wait and see. And Ukraine must win.
Ceterum censeo Ucrainam esse defendam. Слава Україні!
[This was originally posted to YouTube as a video. This post is a slightly abbreviated transcript, preserving the oral style of the video.]
Erratic Attempts 