Better in their words…

Well! Having finished a post earlier today I moved on to catching up with other matters. I could have saved myself a lot of time. The first thing I did was listen to Alexander Mercouris’ outstanding

Shoigu Steamrolls French MoD in Tense Call, Macron Upset; Rus Restates Demand; Ukr Crisis Chasov Yar

I’ll save time by doing a summary, rather than attempting a transcript.

It turns out that much of what I discussed in the earlier post today was nothing but subterfuge. What’s going on is the West—the American Empire and its Globalist vassal states that have been part of the American Neocon war on Russia—is panicking, because Russia is approaching a key Ukrainian fortress (Chasov Yar) and a Ukrainian collapse looks inevitable. In fact, I’ve actually seen some estimates that a Ukrainian collapse could occur in a matter of weeks. To give some idea of the state of things with the Ukrainian military, I read this morning that Ukraine is redesignating what were armored formations as infantry formations—for lack of mechanized vehicles.

It appears that, faced with this dire prospect, the West attempted to first gaslight the Russians. The method employed was the deployment of a considerable amount of absurd bellicose rhetoric. The French and others bruiting the concept of sending actual military contingents to bolster the Ukrainian lines, etc. Blinken maintaining that Ukraine would become a NATO member. I’m guessing that the terrorist attack at Crocus was also part of the gaslighting ploy. All this was to convince the Russians that—all facts and appearances to the contrary notwithstanding—they couldn’t win, or could only win at a prohibitive price. In fact, just yesterday we cited Jens Stoltenberg setting out this ridiculous gaslighting ploy:

Victor vicktop55 @vicktop55

Now everything is clear – this is a new NATO strategy — not to defeat Russia, but to convince it that it is losing.

“The sooner we can convince Moscow that it will not win on the battlefield, the sooner we will be able to reach a peace agreement in which Russia understands that it cannot win the war, but must sit down and negotiate an agreement in which Ukraine will become a sovereign, independent state” — Stoltenberg.

Circus performers, that’s all. They want to convince Russia that it is losing. No, you will have to defeat Russia on the battlefield to regain control of Ukraine. But that’s not going to happen, and you know it perfectly well. There was, is not and will not be any sovereign Ukraine. Ukraine is Russia.

https://t.me/vicktop55/23426

5:38 AM · Apr 3, 2024

That was all a prelude to a whirlwind “diplomatic” onslaught that occurred over the last couple of days, spearheaded by the hapless Zhou and the equally hapless French. This was a two pronged offensive.

The US, having long since burned all bridges to Moscow—think of Zhou’s goofy trip to Poland, where he entoned: For God’s sake this man [Putin] cannot remain in power!—Zhou instead staged an unscheduled phone call to Xi Jinping. According to Mercouris, who analyzes the Chinese readout of the conversation, it appears that Zhou attempted to enlist Xi in the project of prevailing upon the Russians to accede to “some kind of easing off of the conflict—a freeze if you like, one whereby the fighting stops and Kiev remains under Ukrainian control and the Ukrainians retain control of what they have at the present time.” Call it Frozen Conflict 2.0. The expectation, apparently, was that Xi, hopefully alarmed by all the bellicose rhetoric, would agree to lean on Putin. Instead:

What Biden got was the usual Chinese lecture about America’s transgressions, about the fact that the relationship between China and the United States is getting worse again, despite the apparent attempts at stabilization, and a very stiff warning from the Chinese not to try in Taiwan what was tried and is now failing in Ukraine. Just as Ukraine was a red line for the Russians, Taiwan is a red line for the Chinese. And just as the Russians weren’t going to sit on their hands over Ukraine, China is not going to sit on its hands over Taiwan. Now I want to stress again that the readout itself—the Chinese readout and the American readouts—don’t really talk much about Ukraine. They do mention that Ukraine was discussed, but apparently Chinese media and the Chinese social media are saying that this discussion actually ultimately was about Taiwan, about Ukraine, and the timing fits and of course it wasn’t just China.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, the French Defense Minister—Sébastien Lecornu—was trying his luck with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. Why the French? We’ll see why very soon. It appears that the Russians were exasperated by the French outreach and so, rather than maintaining confidentiality, they publicly stated that the conversation had been initiated at Lecornu’s “urgent request.” Lecornu tried to turn on some Gallic charm by expressing condolences regarding the Crocus terror attack—condolences that were, apparently, brushed aside by Shoigu rather brusquely:

[Lecornu] persistently tried to convince [the Russian side] that Ukraine and Western countries were not involved in the terrorist attack, shifting the responsibility to ISIS. Sergei Shoigu stressed that the investigation launched in connection with the terrorist attack in the Crocus city hall would certainly be brought to a conclusion and all those responsible would be punished. … The Kiev regime [the Russian designation for Ukraine] does nothing without the approval of Western curators. We trust that in this case the French special services were not involved.

Ouch! And not only that. Shoigu went on to reference Macron’s nonsense about sending French troops to Ukraine. If that plan were implemented, said Shoigu, “it would create problems for France itself.”

It was probably at this point that Lecornu decided that it might be better to get to the point. And this is why the French were involved in the first place. The purpose of Lecornu’s call was, against all the odds, to persuade the Russians to accept this nutty proposal:

The purpose of the call was to see whether the Russians would agree to go back to the Istanbul agreement, the agreement that was reached in Istanbul between Ukraine and Russia two years ago and which the Americans and the British wrecked.

Think back to the Neocons sending Boris Johnson to tell Zelensky to scrap the agreement and go to war with Russia. In the circs, the Anglosphere was clearly in no position to go hat in hand to Russia, asking Russia to go back to the Istanbul that the Anglosphere itself had wrecked. Cue the French involvement. They could have spared themselves the humiliation. Here’s Mercouris’ account of what transpired, probably in very frank language. We know this is the likely account because Macron has been trying to spin the French public:

Shoigu: No. Istanbul is no longer the basis of an agreement. We’re not prepared to go back to Istanbul, as if the last two years never happened. We are prepared to engage in a dialogue with [France]. We’re not prepared to speak to Ukraine. As for Istanbul, well, some of the things that were agreed then could be the starting point for a dialogue between us, Russia, and you, France. But obviously that’s a starting point—we’re not prepared to return to the agreement itself now.

Mercouris, of course, has a lot more to say, but that’s the long and the short of it. It was all a pathetic game, transparently so. The Russians were forced into this war, but now that they’re in it they’re in it to win. Mercouris sums it up:

The Russians are not under any pressure to negotiate. They are winning the war and they know they’re winning the war. The West, if it wants to avoid a spectacular geopolitical disaster—which is what a defeat in Ukraine would be— in its own interests needs to talk to the Russians. But coming up with half baked proposals such as a return to Istanbul or a Frozen Conflict is going to get nowhere. It is only going to annoy the Russians even more. The logical and right thing to do is to ask the Russians what it is, exactly, in Ukraine that they want to achieve, and see whether it might be possible for the West to meet them halfway. I would have thought that is basic obvious diplomacy.

There’s an election in November. This is one more foreign policy disaster (following Afghanistan). The Middle East could turn out to be an even bigger disaster. Again, Zhou is scrambling for an exit ramp, but Netanyahu and the Israel Lobby are not inclined to provide that.