The Washington Post ran a simply stunning story two days ago: Ukraine’s offensive derails secret efforts for partial cease-fire with Russia, officials say. As we will explain, if this account is accurate, it would mean Russia was willing to trade away its best weapon in the war against Ukraine, its campaign against Ukraine’s energy supply, for effectively nothing. This bad exchange would be made worse by the fact that it is very clear that Russia has conducted its campaign so far to minimize the deaths of Russian soldiers. The war on the grid is the cheapest, easiest, and lowest risk way for Russia to drop the hammer on Ukraine. Why give that up for very little in return?
Any agreement along these lines would indicate Russia is over-eager for a way to end the conflict, that it sees the war moving in the direction of requiring Russia to subdue nearly all of Ukraine, say save Galacia, which would also be severely damaged by Russian operations. That would mean an open-ended process of occupation and then installation of puppet governments in the areas that did not have ethnic Russians as a large proportion of the population. A less costly but not-very-nice-looking-to-the-international-community alternative we have repeatedly discussed, building on John Helmer’s discussion of creating a very large DMZ, the width of the longest-range mobile-launched weapons NATO possesses, now the 500 km Taurus missile. Our variant of this idea would be to add that areas that look impossible to control politically and could thus be staging grounds for terrorist acts would be kept de-electrified, reducing them to the condition of the Unorganized Territory of Maine.
We’ll look at the Washington Post report and point to an obvious way to make sense of it, that it greatly exaggerated how far along these talks actually were. It is not hard to see that given Russia’s repeated statements about Western duplicity, lack of legitimacy of Ukraine leadership, and the fact that Ukraine is merely a US/NATO pawn, that Russia would set reasonable conditions that Ukraine would be unable to meet. In this scenario, there was no reason not to indulge the feelers, midwifed by Qatar, because they would inevitably founder. But Russia would benefit they ever came to light by demonstrating that it was willing to negotiate but that neither Ukraine nor its NATO masters could consummate the deal.
But if these talks were actually serious and advanced, as the Post indicates, the picture is far darker for Russia unless Russia wanted to use the question of “And who can sign this deal?” to undermine the status of the Zelensky government.
In light of that, another thesis is more probable: that this story is part of a deception operation, to cover for the fact that Ukraine entertained or perhaps even whispered to Qatar about this scheme in order to provide yet more cover for its Kursk invasion.2 How could Ukraine possibly want to scupper what looked like a one-sided deal, even if the odds of it happening were not all that high?
But before we turn to the article, some brief context. Ukraine invaded Russia on August 6. This is a low population area with little strategic importance. Nevertheless, any successful Ukraine entry into Russia, save a short-lived raid, is a very very bad look for the Russian government.
Commentators posited that Ukraine had one or two objectives: to seize the Kursk nuclear power plant, about 60 kilometers from the border, and to force Russia to divert soldiers from the line of contact, giving over-stretched Ukraine forces some relief. Even with Russia being a bit leisurely in opposing the Ukraine advance, it seems to have been blocked about 10 km into Russia, which both sides arguing as to who controls the hamlet of Sudzha. And contrary to Ukraine hopes, Russia has not redeployed troops from the Donbass battlefront but instead has sent in men from reserves inside Russia.
Some have added a third rationale: to shore up flagging support from the US and NATO states and morale at home by showing that Ukraine could still land a punch. The wee problem with that line of thinking (even if some in Ukraine and NATO were of this view) is that a short-lived success accomplishes little, even before getting to the fact that it increases the Ukraine burn rate. For instance, Germany has confirmed it is sending no more weapons to Ukraine out of budget constraints. No amount of flash-in-the-pan wins will change that.
Many commentators have stressed that this attack was a big strategic own goal, a Battle of the Bulge in miniature. Ukraine has had to pull troops from the front lines elsewhere to shore up its Kursk operation. Russia has been systematically destroying scare Ukraine equipment, particularly armored vehicles, missile platforms, and the components of a full Patriot air defense battery.
However, Russia experts, such as Mark Sleboda, point out that this incursion was a huge embarrassment to the Russian government, so the Anglosphere media is correct on this point. The West is hyping reports of Russians in the Kursk area being angry at the Kremlin, but it appears the far more preponderant reaction is fury with the Ukraine government and NATO, and an even harder resolve to keep prosecuting the war.
And this was a NATO drill. The Russians destroyed three HIMARS launchers and the afore-mentioned Patriot system. Those cannot be operated without considerable NATO assistance. Anecdata also supports the Russian view:
📌 Kursk Region.#Ukraine’s adventure has been prepared by American and British generals and NATO military staff and intelligence.#Russian soldiers from the field write that they actively hear English speeches and French and Polish on the radios. pic.twitter.com/wYl72kMXSV
— Иван ☦ (@lll_Tatarinov_H) August 8, 2024
The US and NATO are behind the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ attack on the Kursk region, says Scott Ritter pic.twitter.com/kCzKIricHN
— HizBie (@hizbie_) August 19, 2024
Keep in mind that Putin has also taken the position that the use of Collective-West supplied targeting and surveillance data is tantamount to foreign actor involvement.
An addition bit of context is, as we stated above, that Russia’s General Staff intended to use attacks on the electric grid to finish off Ukraine. From John Helmer’s Buzzer Beater – Russian General Staff Aims at Ending the Ukraine by Electric War in June. As Helmer explained, a big objective was to drive the civilian population westward so that when Russia attacked, it would be less constrained by the need to avoid targeting civilians:
As the Ukraine’s peak summer electricity season approaches, the list of the Russian General Staff’s Electric War targets is shrinking. This is because almost all the Ukrainian electricity generating plants have been stopped. What remains for destruction are the connecting lines and distribution grids for the Ukraine’s imported electricity from Poland and other European Union neighbours. The microwave and cell telephone towers, and the diesel fuel stocks which are powering the back-up generating sets are next.
“There’s no keeping the Ukrainian cell network up any more than there is keeping up the electrical grid,” comments a close military observer. “The General Staff have set the flow of Ukrainian refugees west as inversely proportional to the flow of data and electrons over Ukrainian airwaves and transmission lines. We can expect that relationship to be set to highly inverse before the summer is out. What calculations have been made regarding things further west are just beginning to become evident.”….
In the very long history of siege warfare, there has never been a case of letting the enemy’s civilian population run safely away from his castles and cities until the fortifications and army which remain must choose between surrender and destruction….
The NATO military engineer has compiled his forecast list of Russian targets in the coming days. “We should expect the commercial fuel storage and distribution network to be hit. These are legitimate military targets as the Ukrainian military relies on them to support its war effort. The railways should be hit as well. There’s no good military reason to allow them to keep functioning. Given the NATO country endorsements for striking Russian territory targets, I don’t see the rationale on the Moscow side for leaving unscathed the rail network connecting Lvov and Kiev to Rzeszów [Poland].”
“The target list should include the border switchyards and substations connecting the Ukraine to the European transmission lines. Destroying those and targeting the stations transmitting power from nuclear sources will finish the job. There will be no more load balancing after that. The collapse of Ukrainian logistics, not to mention the society, will follow soon after. If the switchyards connecting the nuclear power plants to the grid are smashed, it’s the end for the Ukrainians.”
As for the Ukraine side of the energy war, despite the Anglosphere media cheerleading occasional Ukraine strikes on Russian oil refineries, which have sometimes set off impressive explosions, there’s no evidence of lasting material damage to any of the facilities, let alone Russian output.2
Now to the Washington Post piece. With this background, it’s hard to see why Russia would have any interest in pursuing this ceasefire scheme, beyond indulging Qatar, with whom Russia would like to maintain good relations. The most logical interpretation is that these talks were actually more on the order of feelers, being brokered by intermediaries who did not have the authority to make commitments. I have no idea about the diplomacy world, but this happens in the very big ticket deal world all the time.
The subhead to the story supports a reading that the exchanges were actually not that far along: “The warring countries were set to hold indirect talks in Qatar on an agreement to halt strikes on energy and power infrastructure, according to officials.” In other words, they’d agreed to discuss a proposal, and not the proposal per se.
Now the text does contain much stronger claims, but the story hinges on the account of a single diplomat “briefed on the talks” who among other things asserted “The official said the two sides agreed to a summit in Doha with just minor details left to be worked out.” That seems wildly implausible given Putin’s personal bitterness over the Western duplicity in the Minsk Accords, with him played for a fool to buy time for Ukraine to build up its forces. The article mentions (and misleads readers) about the last time Russia decided to play nice with Ukraine, the so-called grain deal. The story inaccurately says Russia withdrew from the pact. It in fact was subject to periodic renewal (IIRC every 90 days). Russia did not renew based on non-performance. The agreement was not just about grain. The second set of provisions, integral to the scheme, was for the West to end sanctions on the Russian agricultural bank so that Global South countries, particularly ones in Africa, could buy Russian fertilizer. Russia also complained that the Ukraine grain was going largely to Europe and not poor nations as promised (confirmed by EU countries getting agitated about the deliveries undercutting their farmers), but the big beef was the failure to honor the second big leg of the deal.
The normal journalistic standard is that when relying on anonymous sources, a publication should have three of them to regard a claim as verified. This is not only an anonymous source, but one getting a second-hand account.
Now the fact that some sort of exchange was happening is verified by Ukraine sources (only!). They say a meeting in Doha was on and that Ukraine still wanted to participate (now virtually). But Qatar nixed the idea, not wanting to indulge the sort of one-sided show that has become a Zelensky speciality (recall his peace plan conferences where pretty much everyone but Russia was invited). But given that Russia’s official posture is that it is open to negotiation, it’s can’t refuse to entertain proposals.
Of course, the other obvious problem with the thesis of this story is that Russia knows full well it needs to negotiate with the US, not with its proxy Ukraine. Yet we have the article confirming that the US will have no part of any such talks: “The Biden administration has long said the timing and terms of a potential cease-fire agreement with Russia are for Ukraine alone to decide.”
So the next most likely possibility is that this article is intended to take the teeth out of a successful Ukraine deception operation by depicting the energy war initiative as sincere on the Ukraine side. This idea is not entirely nuts; look how long it took for the repeated Minsk duplicity to become public. And those who outed it were at the very top: first Porshenko, then Hollande, then Merkel. In other words, the considerable number of staffers, including in the US, who were on to this ruse kept quiet about it for years.
Some sources have said this invasion had been in the works for a very long time but had been put off because reasons. Alexander Mercouris has repeatedly said a contact knowledgeable about Russian government operations told him that the Russians knew of Ukraine plans to attack into Kursk two months ago. The timetable lines up with that of the feelers:
The diplomat familiar with the talks said that Qatar has been discussing the arrangement for an energy strike moratorium with Kyiv and Moscow for the past two months.
Mind you, I am not saying this ruse, if indeed that was the card that Ukraine was playing, in any way justifies Russia’s flatfootedness in anticipating the Kursk invasion. Russia should know bloody well by now what it is dealing with in the form of Ukraine’s leadership. Its fondness for terrorism as a substitute for military prowess and its obsession with PR management has only become more extreme as it is becoming obvious, even to occasional readers of the Western press, that the war situation has developed not necessarily to Ukraine’s advantage.
Russia apparently didn’t want to see the forces massing in Ukraine in the Sumy region as preparation for an attack for a host of reasons: it would be strategically stoopid (what Ukraine was marshaling would be insufficient for Ukraine to get far into Russia or hold terrain), it would be therefore be more likely to be Ukraine bolstering defensed before an expected Russian invasion of Sumy. But a just as likely reason, and one I suspect has some currency in Russia, is that the MoD was predisposed to ignore this risk because it would be a nuisance to bolster defenses there.
Now let’s turn to other possible interpretations of this Washington Post piece, accepting its claim that the talks were far along and close to being inked. This is its logic as to why Russia would go along:
The academic added that Russia might be more willing to consider an energy infrastructure deal as a way to lure Kyiv to broader cease-fire talks. Otherwise, he said, Moscow could be less motivated since it believed it could inflict more damage on Ukrainian energy infrastructure than Kyiv was able to on Russian oil refineries.
In other words, the logic is Russia wants out of the war so badly it would trade away its best weapon. This is completely inconsistent with the ever-increasing resolve among the Russian public and Putin signaling over time that more parts of Ukraine are on the menu, such as Odessa and more recently, Kiev.
The only reason I could fathom for a retreat of this magnitude when Russia is winning the war and still increasing the size of its military and its weapons production, it that it has finally started taking a hard look at the end-game problem. As we’ve been pointing out, it is becoming more and more evident that the least bad resolution for Russia is to subdue nearly all of Ukraine, including the potentially very troublesome Western Ukraine (ex nasty Galacia). Russia has seen how determined the US and NATO are to have Russia not win this war. That includes trying to make it into a Pyrrhic victory by trying to bleed Russia with continued terrorism by Ukrainians. That would strongly argue for Russia reducing that exposure by controlling territorial Ukraine and forcing the West into the riskier posture of trying to wage that sort of guerrilla campaign from NATO states.
But one reason that Russia might feel the need to accept even lousy-seeming peace overtures is dependence on its de facto coalition partners. Here I do not mean in the military sense; Russia is more self-sufficient here than the West gives it credit. I mean in the economic sense. Russia succeeded in redirecting its economy to China, India, Turkiye, and Africa with impressive speed. The nations have all stood up to considerable US pressure to respect illegal US and EU sanctions.3
A big reason that Russia has won and gotten even more support from them is that Russia has succeeded in persuading them that it is the wronged party despite being an invader: Russia did everything it could to try to avoid this war (witness the Minsk Accords con and then the West breaking up peace talks in 2022), Russia is working to minimize civilian casualties, Russia is open to talks.
Russia may have felt it had to pursue these talks despite them being at odds with Russia’s interest to keep the support of its de facto coalition partners, particularly China and Middle East states. Recall that China did not participate in Ukraine’s latest one-sided peace conference, regarding them as unproductive with Russia absent. However, China invited Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba for a visit on July 23 to 25 to discuss how to end the war in Ukraine and a potential Chinese part in a settlement. China has taken to playing a soft power card outside the region as a peace-maker, witness its success in end-running the US in brokering a pact between Iran and the Saudis.
However, another scenario (which does not exclude the above scenario, that Russia felt pressured to appease its economic partners) is that Russia saw the talks, if they advanced, as a vehicle for destabilizing the Zelensky government. Putin and other top officials have pointed out that Ukraine has made it impossible to negotiate any deal with Russia via a Constitutional amendment forbidding that as long as Putin is in charge. On top of that, Russia has taken to depicting that Zelensky is illegitimate, that the Ukraine Constitution does not allow for a President to continue in power even under martial law. Putin has opined that his reading of the Ukraine Constitution is that authority is now in the hands of the Speaker of the Rada, but Ukraine legal experts need to settle that question.
Regardless, at some point (and it really should occur early rather than late in a deal process), Russia cqn quite legitimately question the authority of its counterparts to enter into binding commitments. It would look particularly bad for Russia to be theoretically willing to enter into an extremely Ukraine-favorable deal but be unable to deliver because the present government could not make a binding deal.
Needless to say, even though the intent of this planted-looking story may have been to get in front of yet another instance of Ukraine duplicity, the Russians and Qataris and Chinese already have a better grasp of facts. And if they surmise Ukraine used the pretext of peace talks to play yet another dirty, no wonder the Russian are incandescent.
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1 The Post depicts Qatar as proposing this pact. However, given that that the Post also depicts it as arising after the second, peculiar one-sided Zelensky peace conference, that there was not at least some Ukraine input and quite possibly instigation given the impact of the grid attacks.
2 The Post claims otherwise. I do not have time to prove a negative, but as Lambert is wont to say, I do try to pay attention. I have yet to see anything from an independent source confirming that the Russian energy system has suffered meaningful damage from the Ukraine attacks.
3 Economic sanctions are illegal when not approved by the UN, not that the US cares about such niceties.
