From Nezavisimaya gazeta, Feb. 3, 2025, p. 1. Condensed text:

Talks between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin on Ukraine will take place in a certain geopolitical and geoeconomic context.

Trump’s tariff war with the US’s traditional partners – Mexico, Canada and the European Union – has come as a shock and brought retaliatory measures. All global supply chains are wobbling amid uncertainty and the premonition of irreversible changes.

The militarization of any interstate disagreements [and] the emphasis on the force of arms in resolving them is a distinctive feature of contemporary international life.

Many successful classic economies (such as Germany) have encountered a crisis of the original development model based on low energy costs and export market orientation.

Under these circumstances, the views of political forces in crisis-ridden Western states on the settlement of the Ukraine conflict have become sharply polarized.

Realistically, there is no hope of achieving a lasting and stable peace. Revanchist ideas will continue for years to come to prod politicians toward methods based on the use of military force to restore “justice” and territorial integrity.

Never in the contemporary history of superpowers have war and peace talks taken place in the total absence of diplomatic contacts. Nor are there any contacts on the so-called unofficial second track. The [two] countries’ embassies are not included in the process of coordinating framework and final documents. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said last weekend that the Russian side has not yet received agrément [from the US] for Russia’s new ambassador. According to our sources, he is Aleksandr Darchiyev, head of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s North America department. Incidentally, according to the same sources, Russia has apparently already granted agrément for the US’s new ambassador to work in Moscow. However, it did so back in late November [2024] at the request of the [then-US president Joe] Biden administration. This created a collision of sorts. It could not have come at a worse time for normalizing the mechanisms of Russian-US relations.

With a vacuum of information about the substance of talks, US media outlets are publishing their own theories every day in the form of leaks from high-level offices as to exactly how Trump will approach the Ukraine conflict. The tone of these leaks varies sharply from deep disappointment to unparalleled optimism. At the same time, the goal is to muddle things up to make it more difficult to prepare for the talks, so that everything is decided during the actual conversation, where Trump’s talent for improvisation will purportedly enable him to achieve victory!

The years of political coexistence in the atmosphere of extremely intense confrontation have created a new standard of behavior for [world] leaders: Never admit defeat! Never!

This is the reality in which Trump, Putin, Zelensky and [Chinese President Xi] Jinping currently have to exist, negotiate, and find solutions and new approaches. This creates both difficulties and opportunities, depending on the parties’ interpretation capabilities.

[Moscow’s] political coteries have for two months now been actively pondering what Trump’s decisive election [victory] means in terms of the US’s dominant morality, values and social needs and attitudes. Does Trump reflect these qualities in the best possible way among all contenders for power, or does he impose his will and his perception of the bounds of the possible on the poorly organized and largely amoral (pragmatic) public? Is Trump’s comeback a terrible zigzag of history or a return to the norm, when the president represents his people to the maximum degree possible?

Considering that for the past eight years, Democratic Party leaders have been calling Trump’s supporters rednecks, losers and alkies, should we acknowledge that this is precisely the class of people who have gained power in the country, as represented by the new president?

Democracy as a procedure is also being abused: The uncivilized majority (rednecks) use democracy as a mechanism to suppress the ideas of the refined, advanced, educated and smart minority. The mood of the masses from the industrial era suppresses the motives and energy of the postindustrial creative class.

The US today has ended up not just in the thick of a battle of values, but in a phase of social rift, a split over values.

The function of democracy is to identify the [political] preferences of the majority, and that’s all. Democracy as a voting process says nothing about preferences per se. The preferences of the majority may be erroneous, and even situationally [and] reflexively reactionary; or they may be the conscious desire to achieve essentially antidemocratic, usurpatory goals.

The inevitable negotiations on settlement of the Ukraine conflict will be difficult, but to achieve success – even relative success – it is important to have a sense of realism and a grasp of reality. It is important to understand what’s in the opponent’s head – what system of values, goals and precepts. Without that, it is impossible to use negotiation instruments effectively. [You] may decide that being categorical will hurt, but things will turn out just the opposite. Carrot and stick may look different in reality than in your head!

To describe the Russian leader’s worldview, I will cite a few direct quotes from Vladimir Putin at the end of last year, after Trump’s victory. In other words, what he said was addressed not only to the Russian audience, but also to the outside world.

On Nov. 7, 2024, [Putin said] at a meeting of the Valdai [International Discussion] Club: “I wouldn’t want Russia to return to the pre-2022 path. It was a path of covert, veiled intervention aimed at subordinating our country to the interests of other countries, which thought that they had such a right. Russia cannot exist in such a subordinated or semisubordinated state.”

[At the same meeting,] Putin was also asked the following question: “Exactly 25 years ago, Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin stepped down, handing power over to you, and he said, ‘Look after Russia.’ Twenty-five years later, do you think you have looked after Russia?” Answer: “Yes. I think I have not simply looked after it. I believe that we have moved back from the edge of the abyss, because everything that had happened to Russia before and after that was leading us to the complete, effectively total loss of our sovereignty, and without sovereignty, Russia cannot exist as an independent state.”

At [Putin’s] year-end press conference on Dec. 19, 2024 [see Vol. 76, No. 51‑52, pp. 13‑14], Kommersant correspondent Andrei Kolesnikov asked the president how the [Russian] special military operation [in Ukraine] (SMO) had changed him. Putin’s answer was somewhat unexpected but straightforward: “These three years have been a serious test for all of us, including myself. I started to tell fewer jokes and almost stopped laughing. But there is another circumstance. I have started honing my skills in identifying key issues and focusing my attention and energy on solving them.”

The president was also asked whether he would have changed his decision if it were possible to go back to February 2022. Putin replied, “The decision that I made at the beginning of 2022 should have been made earlier. [We] should simply have started preparing in advance, including for the SMO. Why did we start? Because it was no longer possible to sit around and put up with it. And wait until the situation became worse for us.”

Sanctions, isolation and stonewalling are no punishment for Putin.

The West has missed the main point: Due to his own ideas, the Russian president decided to turn away from the West [and] to steer Russia away from the West conceptually [and] ideologically.

Collective decision-making formats prevailing in the contemporary world proved ill-suited to Russia. Exclusivity and sovereignty as in the US are more to [our] taste, but our economic leverage is not strong enough. As for delegating to other countries the consensual right to decide things for Russia, that goes against our tradition.

Competition and the rules of the game are determined by those who are stronger, not by market outsiders.

Private capital dictates to governments what to do at international negotiations. This is how the economic globalization concept was born and developed. Barriers along state borders prevented multinational corporations from cutting costs. A decision was made to remove [the barriers]. First, by lowering tariff barriers, and then by building an architecture for the free movement of goods, capital and labor.

These principles proved unacceptable to the present generation of the Russian elite brought up during the cold war and wary of the ideas of globalism and liberalism that are coming from the Anglo-Saxon world, the world of “money and the yellow devil.”

Incidentally, China accepted the Anglo-Saxon rules of the game, appreciated the potential of global trade and the inflow of investments, adapted itself to injustice and used globalization to make a great historic leap from backwardness to global leadership. By changing its technological production base with foreign direct investment and by having millions of students and tens of thousands of scientists educated in the West, China has emerged as the world’s second superpower, after the US.

The West woke up too late, admitting that it was wrong to think that competitive economic openness would automatically lead to the country’s competitive democratization, and initiated “divorce proceedings” with Beijing.

Xi Jinping’s remarkable self-possession under these circumstances is noteworthy. He remains committed to cooperation [and] the search for a common denominator; he refuses to invoke civilizational differences; and he is doing all he can to promote Chinese goods, services and investments on Western markets in the process of building a prosperous community of common destiny [for humankind].

Incidentally, herein lies the fundamental difference between the Russian and Chinese development models despite an apparently similar political authoritarian tradition with national specifics. Indeed, the difference is fundamental!

China is indifferent to the specifics of the spiritual and moral state of Western societies. It is pragmatically important for China to be present on that market – the market of spiritually bankrupt people. For the prosperity of China’s own people.

By contrast, Russia has made the pivot to the East and the global South the focus of its ideology – in addition to the emphasis on the obvious rise of Asia and [Russia’s] reluctance to have anything to do with the spiritually bankrupt West.

International relations today are marked by a large number of armed conflicts. According to the Oxford Martin Institute [sic; Oxford Martin School], as of late 2023, over 500,000 people – combatants and civilians – had died due to fighting in armed conflicts of various types (intrastate and interstate). According to [the Oxford Martin School], blood is currently being shed in 89 intrastate and interstate conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe. There are no more safe havens in the world today.

The picture of the spatial distribution of armed conflicts in the world is impressive. It illustrates the point that in the 21st century, violence remains an essential element and factor in international relations.

The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan [and] Syria have conclusively shown that the technical and technological advantages of one party do not in and of themselves lead to victory. . . .

Now, about peace talks as such between Putin and Trump.

To achieve success, it is essential – before they start – to adjust the goals that have been repeatedly stated in public, taking into account the reality on the ground, and to formulate the desired benefits as a reward for the willingness to compromise.

There are no doubts about Putin’s determination to go in to reach the administrative borders of all four provinces included in the [Russian] Constitution [i.e., Ukraine’s Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson Provinces – Trans.]. However, achieving these goals would involve heavy human casualties and financial losses on both sides. These losses would be especially heavy as the conflict nears its end.

Saving soldiers’ lives is a noble cause for adjusting the strictly formulated goals. It is necessary to incorporate the [Russia‑] controlled territories of Kherson and Zaporozhye Provinces into one [constituent] entity [of the Russian Federation] called Novorossia.1 Amendments to the Constitution will cause no problems.

Compromise is a distinctive feature of negotiations per se, not of a capitulation procedure.

The repeated references to the Istanbul agreements [see Vol. 74, No. 27‑28, p. 19] as a basis for [peace] talks will require a substantive clarification of the original position, if only due to the fact that [Russia’s] Kursk Province is in the conflict zone [see Vol. 76, No. 32, pp. 3‑8].

Any delay in starting the talks may be seen as an additional opportunity for the Russian side to force all Ukrainian troops back behind Russian borders. Including [Russian] territory in negotiations as a bargaining chip is still an undesirable scenario for the Kremlin.

Since compromises are unavoidable, they will be made. The key issues are: Ukraine’s decision to abandon its NATO aspirations; security guarantees; the recognition of the Crimea [as part of Russia]; [and] a set of financial and economic matters.

It is essential to bear in mind that Trump’s interests will also become a factor in the negotiation process. Postwar reconstruction and claims to our assets will be important issues for Kiev. For Moscow, the [crucial] issue is 16,000 anti-Russian sanctions. No one is going to lift them, and continuing to live with them in a new world is a farce. As far as Trump is concerned, he is interested in Russia’s separation from China and possibly compensation for the US’s spending on military aid to Ukraine from our frozen assets.

P.S. At the same time, it is important to understand that any agreements with Trump will most likely be tactical and of limited duration, since the majority of Europeans and half of Americans are convinced that Trumpism will go away, along with Trump, in four years. Some experts believe that two years after the Republicans’ defeat in midterm Congressional elections, Trump’s policy will become more cautious and oriented toward the domestic agenda.

P.P.S. Most of Europe’s political elite are in no mood for compromise. In an interview with Ian Bremmer in Davos in late January, Finnish President Alexander Stubb stated that peace in Ukraine was possible only based on three principles: [Ukraine’s] independence, sovereignty (the right to join NATO or the EU) and territorial integrity. In other words, this politician ignores literally all realities on the ground. As if by a conjuring trick, he excludes Russian interests from negotiations and hopes for success. How is that for utopianism and delusional thinking? What’s more, such energetic political experts form the mainstream of European expectations from negotiations.

This will be a significant factor not so much in the success of the peace process as in the very prospect for the normalization of Russian-European relations in the long term.

Budgets for military development in Western and Northern Europe have been allocated and are beginning to be spent, creating their own confrontational logic for years to come. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte maintains that if Ukraine loses, it will take trillions [of dollars], not billions, to restore NATO’s deterrence capability. In other words, the only acceptable outcome for Rutte is Ukraine’s victory [and] Russia’s defeat, in which case military spending would not have to be increased to 5% of gross domestic product. This only goes to show the extent to which the approach of the head of one of the West’s key institutions is divorced from reality. It is difficult to imagine what other unfeasible scenarios seem realistic to Stubb and Rutte.

This is what I mean when I speak about realism as one of the most important prerequisites for successful negotiations.

P.P.P.S. I am convinced that with the current political split in the Western world, [and] the ideological confrontation between “progressives” and “conservatives,” it is difficult to expect a long-term settlement of the conflict in Ukraine. Everyone is talking about peace, but [they] will only get a truce. The next change of government in the White House will put all the ideas of the Biden-[former US vice-president Kamala] Harris-[former US secretary of state Antony] Blinken team back on the agenda. Ideological globalists do not accept the logic or political philosophy of the strategic national interests of individual countries. Perhaps with the exception of the US. And herein lies the main disagreement between Russia and the West. . . .

1[Novorossia (New Russia) is the historical name of an area along the northern Black Sea coast that Russia acquired from Turkey by a series of peace treaties in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Most of it is now part of Ukraine. – Trans.]