Why the US and Ukraine Should Accept Putin’s Latest Peace Offer

Putin is likely planning a massive northern offensive to overrun eastern Ukraine, collapse its military and force Kyiv to capitulate if the West does not accept his new peace proposal.

Putin issues his latest peace offer for the first time demanding more Ukrainian territory as the price for peace indicating he plans to take a lot more Ukrainian land by force if Biden and Zelensky continue to reject his peace offers.

On June 14^th, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a new peace offer including an immediate cease-fire and negotiations for a permanent peace agreement if Ukraine begins withdrawing all its troops from Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson oblasts and commits to returning to being a permanently neutral state outside of NATO. He also stated that the provisions of the Istanbul agreement regarding the reduction in this size of Ukraine’s active-duty army, Ukrainian non-nuclear status and a limitation on the number and range of its postwar weapon systems should be included in any final peace agreement ending the conflict. Since the day after the war began, Russia has been calling for peace negotiations without preconditions but with this announcement that is no longer the case. As I have been warning since April 2022, the longer Ukraine and its Western benefactors waited to negotiate a peace agreement with Russia, the worse the final peace terms would become for Ukraine and that is exactly what we are seeing today.

The South China Morning Post reported on Putin’s offer:

“The conditions are very simple,” Putin said, listing the full withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the entire territory of the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions in eastern and southern Ukraine among his demands. “As soon as Kyiv says it is ready to do this and begins really withdrawing troops and officially renounces plans to join Nato, we will immediately, literally that very minute, cease fire and begin talks,” Putin said. “I repeat, we will do this immediately. Naturally, we will simultaneously guarantee the unhindered and safe withdrawal of Ukrainian units and formations.” The Russian leader also warned the stand-off between Moscow and the West was coming “unacceptably close to the point of no return” and boasted that Moscow “possesses the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons.” Putin has repeatedly invoked nuclear rhetoric throughout the conflict with Ukraine, which he casts as just one front in a wider “hybrid war” between Russia and the NATO military alliance.

Putin warned that if Ukraine and the West refuse Russia’s peace terms, then his peace offer will get worse for Ukraine and Russia will begin taking large swaths of Ukrainian territory by force. This was the first time since September 2022 that Putin has dropped his previous offer of a Korean-style armistice along the current line of control. As I noted in my last article, this strikes me as likely being Russia’s last offer before a massive Russian offensive in the Kharkiv, Sumy and possibly even Chernihiv regions using 200,000-300,000 Russian reservists that could very well succeed in causing Ukraine’s frontline to collapse and enabling Russian forces to overrun eastern Ukraine all the way to the Dnipro River. Putin recently stated that there are 700,000 Russian troops “in the area of the special military operation.” A recent Western estimate, just before the commencement of Russia’s limited Kharkiv offensive utilizing up to 15,000 Russian troops concluded that there were 510,000 troops in Ukraine which would suggest Russia has at least 175,000 troops in reserve along Russia’s border with Ukraine to commit to an expanded Russian military offensive in northern Ukraine though its certainly possible that Russia actually has a lot more.

Under the Istanbul Agreement, Putin offered to give Ukraine control of 93 percent of its internationally recognized territory excepting only Russian Crimea and one-third of the long-disputed Donbass region, but Zelensky ended up refusing it. Now, Putin is offering Ukraine control of a little less than 78 percent of its territory (with Russian control of a little over 22 percent which is only four percent more territory than it currently occupies) but once again Zelensky has rejected his peace offer. If Putin finally authorizes a massive Russian offensive to take control of Ukraine’s three northeastern oblasts that begins to break Ukraine’s frontlines threatening its military collapse, they may want to re-consider as then Ukraine could potentially trade full control of Putin’s requested territories in exchange for a full Russian withdrawal from northeast Ukraine before Putin’s peace terms worsen again for Ukraine.  It is worth noting that Putin’s peace offer did not address the question of Russian occupied territory Kharkiv oblast which is the only formerly Ukrainian territory which Russia has not yet annexed. Presumably, Ukraine could engage in a transfer of the territory that Putin has demanded in exchange for the return of all Russian occupied territory in Kharkiv and Putin would likely accept Ukraine’s proposal.

If a Russian offensive succeeded in overrunning all of Ukraine east of the Dnipro River line that would only leave 55% of Ukraine under Ukrainian control. That is not an unrealistic scenario at all. Accordingly, Biden and Zelensky would be wise to declare victory in terms of succeeding in keeping Ukraine independent and preventing Russia from overrunning all of Ukraine and failing to overthrow Zelensky and replace him with a more pro-Russian Ukrainian leader and accept Putin’s peace terms by accepting Putin’s latest offer, to prevent a full Ukrainian military collapse that could result in the loss of Ukraine’s very independence. If they do not, then the war will continue to escalate with the loss of hundreds of thousands more Ukrainians that could lead to the outbreak of World War Three.

In order to understand how we got to the point where we are on the verge of a nuclear war with Russia being fought over the neutral status of a country on the farthest edge of Eastern Europe in which the US has no discernible national security interest it is necessary to first debunk a number of false assumptions which we have been indoctrinated with by the Biden regime media.

Why the War in Ukraine is a War of Western, not Russian, Imperialism

The Biden administration has been waging a disinformation campaign against US citizens and the world designed to perpetuate the war in Ukraine indefinitely. First, they claimed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was unprovoked when in fact there never has been a war in modern history which has been more provoked than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin spent fifteen years trying to resolve the Ukraine in NATO crisis, which was created by President George W. Bush and continued by his successors, diplomatically. Putin offered two mutual security agreements in 2009 and 2021 and signed the Minsk I agreement in 2014 and in Minsk II agreement in 2015 to try to resolve the crisis created by the Biden authorized, CIA-funded overthrow of Ukrainian President Yanukovych peacefully. Tragically, for Ukraine, both of his mutual security agreements with the US and NATO were rejected and Ukraine refused to implement either of the Minsk agreements which had been guaranteed by France and Germany.

A map showing NATO’s imperialist expansion since the end of the Cold War. With the addition of Finland and Sweden, NATO’s territory has increased by 83 percent in the last quarter century, an area over eighteen times larger than the territory Russia has annexed in Ukraine. A quick look at this map makes it easy to understand why Russia felt forced to react militarily to Ukraine becoming a de facto NATO member in November 2021 after 15 years of Russian diplomatic efforts to resolve the NATO in Ukraine crisis peacefully had failed.

The administration has deliberately misled the American people since the war began in claiming Putin doesn’t want peace when in fact Russia has submitted an endless stream of almost entirely reasonable peace offers since the day after the invasion began. Even Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky declared Russia’s March 2022 to be reasonable and gave Russia a counteroffer which both sides accepted without revision, which has come to be known as the Istanbul Agreement. Zelensky had a summit meeting scheduled with Putin on April 9^th to sign the peace agreement ending the war, under which Russia committed to withdraw its troops from all eight Ukrainian oblasts which it had invaded and occupied after February 24, 2022. Biden hurriedly dispatched UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to Kyiv to derail the peace summit and veto the peace settlement condemning 300,000 more Ukrainians to die in an unwinnable war thus far. While Putin has offered peace negotiations ever since, Biden and Zelensky have refused, banning all peace negotiations, and preventing all of Putin’s attempts to end the war, end the death and destruction and restore peace and stability to Europe. Putin’s June 14^th peace offer, calling for immediate peace negotiations if Ukraine starts withdrawing its military forces from the four Russian annexed former Ukrainian oblasts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia and Kherson was the first time he demanded even one square inch of additional Ukrainian territory since the invasion. It was also the first time he had issued any preconditions for peace negotiations since the war began.

The administration lied in claiming Putin was a new Hitler. President Joe Biden has repeatedly claimed that Putin wants to conquer all of Ukraine and that if we let him win the war in Ukraine, he will not stop but will invade Poland and the Baltic states as well. However, there is no evidence that Putin has any desired to conquer Ukraine let alone Poland or the Baltic states. In January 2022, I expressed my mistaken belief that Putin had been planning the invasion of Ukraine for over two decades and that his aim was to create a new Imperial Russian Confederation with Ukraine as a nominally independent Russian satellite state along the Belarus model. However, I was proven wrong by Putin’s own actions as there is a great deal of evidence to the contrary. In point of fact, Putin was so anxious for peace and to withdraw Russian troops from all of northern Ukraine, including the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, before the peace agreement was scheduled to be finalized, giving Biden and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson the pretext they had been looking for to continue the war without end, thus helping to ensure the destruction of the very country they claimed they were trying to protect in the process. Since he came to power nearly a quarter century ago, Putin has expanded Russian territory by a grand total of over half a percent in Ukraine. By way of comparison, Hitler expanded the territory controlled by Germany by over eight times during a reign of terror lasting half as long as Putin’s tenure as President of the Russian Federation. Putin has repeatedly stated he has no desire to conquer Ukraine let alone attack or invade any NATO member states unless NATO attacks Russia directly first.  

Beginning in April 2022, Biden began falsely claiming Putin was a war criminal who had to be forcibly removed from power. This was in reaction to the Bucha massacre where UN investigators confirmed that 73 Ukrainian civilians had been shot and thrown into a mass grave with Russian troops as the supposed perpetrators. We do not have sufficient evidence to confirm whether in fact Russia was responsible or whether these civilians were Russian collaborators shot by Ukrainian forces but even if Russian troops was to blame, there is no evidence to suggest that Putin ordered them killed. As I noted in my last article, based on the death estimates issued by the UN Human Rights Commission, Russia has killed Ukrainian civilians at an average daily death rate 140 times lower than the rate the US and UK killed German and Japanese civilians from the time the US entered the war until the unconditional surrender of Japan over three and half years later. Not only is there no evidence that Putin has ordered Russian forces to target Ukrainian civilians, based on the very low Ukrainian civilian death count reported by the UN Human Rights Commission of over 12,000 Ukrainian civilians over the past 28 months of war, there is every indication that he ordered them not to.   

On February 17^th, David Sacks wrote a great post on X stating that Biden is falsely claiming the war in Ukraine is making us stronger when in fact it is serving to unilaterally disarm the US and NATO of vast quantities of our most advanced weapon systems and millions of rounds of heavy artillery making us weaker militarily and less able to fight a major war against Russia and/or China. He correctly states that the administration continues to claim that Russia is losing more soldiers when in fact Russia has killed and seriously wounded approximately three times more Ukrainian soldiers than it has lost with an estimated 300,000 Ukrainians killed in action to date as opposed to less than 100,000 Russian troops and that Ukraine’s 700,000 casualties, including soldiers both killed and wounded, are causing it to run out of men to fight NATO’s proxy war against Russia. He notes that Biden claims the world is united against Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine when in fact, 85% of the world’s nations representing 85% of its population have refused to sanction Russia in the belief that NATO expansion into Ukraine is to blame for the unnecessary outbreak and prolongation of the war.

He pointed out that Biden has falsely claimed that if Ukraine keeps fighting it will improve their negotiation position when in fact the longer, they have fought the war the worse their negotiation position has become. Biden, Democrat leaders, and their neocon Republican collaborationist allies continue to attempt to convince the American people that “it is necessary to destroy Ukraine in order to save it.” Sacks concludes that once Biden’s reckless policy has come to its logical and predictable end with the total, and perhaps nuclear, destruction of Ukraine, they will claim opponents of their unbelievably anti-Ukrainian policy were to blame and if we had only been united, then Ukraine would have emerged triumphant and move on to the next victim of their globalist, imperial project.

But perhaps the biggest lie of all is the farce that provoked Russia to invade Ukraine in the first place which is the oft repeated Biden claim that Ukraine will join NATO in the near future when privately Biden administration officials have informed Zelensky that Ukraine will not be joining NATO in the foreseeable future because several NATO member states will never agree to it so long as Russia continues to oppose it. In December, 2021, Putin offered to guarantee Russia would not invade Ukraine if Biden signed a written guarantee to Russia that Ukraine would never join NATO, but Biden foolishly refused saying he “won’t accept anyone’s redline” presumably even if the US crossing that redline provokes a Russian or Chinese nuclear first strike on the US and/or its allies, thereby deliberately choosing war in Ukraine. Biden’s statement here that he won’t accept Russia’s or China’s redlines, turns the prevailing Cold War wisdom of foreign policy realist Presidents from Harry Truman to George HW Bush on its head and suggests he is likely willing to play a game of nuclear chicken not just with Russia over Ukraine but with China over Taiwan with chilling and very likely existential ramifications for the U.S. If the Biden administration had simply admitted this unspoken truth to Russia and issued a written guarantee that Ukraine would never become a NATO member “unless Russia agreed to it,” Russia would never have invaded Ukraine in February 2024 and it would still have control of ninety-three percent of its internationally recognized territory and it would not have lost nearly one-third of its population.  

Here is a list of what I consider to be the four biggest reasons why Biden would be wise to push Ukraine to accept Putin’s latest peace offer:

Putin’s Istanbul Peace Offer to Withdraw Russian troops from Ukraine is Off the Table

On April 8, 2022, the Biden administration joined with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson in making the fateful decision to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to abandon the Istanbul Agreement which both sides had initialed on March 31st. Under the terms of this expansive agreement, Russia had agreed to withdraw all of its troops from Ukraine’s prewar controlled territory, returning control of 93% of Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory to Ukraine in exchange for permanent Ukrainian neutrality outside of NATO and various other concessions. The terms of this agreement would have constituted a stunning victory for Ukraine as I noted in my previous article but they have been off the table since late September 2022 when President Putin announced Russia’s annexation of four Ukrainian oblasts. Up until now, Putin has never demanded a single inch of additional Ukrainian territory as the price for peace but now it seems his nearly two-year long offer for a Korean style armistice along the line of control is finally off the table given neither President Joe Biden nor Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky were willing to entertain it.

Members of the Russian and Ukrainian Delegation Meeting to Finalize the Istanbul Peace Agreement under which Russia Agreed to withdraw its troops from all of Ukraine’s pre-war controlled territory in exchange for permanent Ukrainian neutrality outside of NATO

The question is why did the Biden administration reject victory when Russia offered it to them on a silver platter with an unprecedented Russian military withdrawal from 100 percent of Ukraine’s pre-war controlled territory after only five weeks of fighting, opting to prolong the war indefinitely in an unwinnable war to weaken Russia and sacrifice the lives of over half a million Ukrainians instead? We can only speculate why Biden foolishly rejected Putin’s' offer to roll back Russian troops to its prewar borders however recent history offers us some well- substantiated clues to his rationale. However, the evidence indicates it is likely due to his refusal to give up on his dream to expand America's liberal empire all along Russia’s western frontier including Ukraine giving it dominance over all of Europe as some kind of ‘benevolent hegemon’ despite being a non-European power.

In January 2023, the Biden administration offered Russia a peace offer it found far more acceptable than a full Russian military withdrawal from Ukraine’s pre-war controlled territory under the Istanbul Agreement, which was that Russia could keep all the Ukrainian territory it had annexed if it agreed to drop its insistence on Ukraine not joining NATO. At the time, this Biden peace offer was met with surprise by Western analysts but in fact it served to expose the true purpose of Biden’s decision to veto the victory that Ukraine achieved not on the battlefield but at the negotiation table five weeks after the war began. It showed that the Biden administration cared little or not at all about Ukrainian’s territorial integrity but cared a great deal whether Ukraine remained a US protectorate/imperial dominion or not. This then, is the entire reason why the Biden administration has opted to continue fighting the war in Ukraine “for as long as it takes” which is not to expel Russian troops from Ukrainian territory and restore its full control of its 1991 internationally recognized territory as senior Biden officials continue to claim.

Giving up US control and influence over Ukraine and ending Ukraine’s de facto NATO membership seems to be the one condition for peace the Biden administration refuses to accept. It was Biden’s refusal to guarantee Ukraine would never become a NATO member that caused Putin to invade Ukraine in the first place after he had spent the previous 15 years exhausting all diplomatic options to end the crisis. The reason that the US and UK have rejected all of Putin’s peace offers is because Putin has insisted on not making Ukraine a Russian client state but rather to make Ukraine a neutral buffer state, thus rolling back de facto NATO expansion into Ukraine. President Joe Biden has made clear by his rejection of Russia’s March 31, 2022 peace offer to withdraw all its troops from pre-war controlled Ukrainian territory in exchange for permanent Ukrainian neutrality outside of NAToO and January 2023 peace offer to cede 20% of Ukraine to Russia presumably in exchange for Russia dropping its demand that Ukraine never join NATO that he doesn’t care at all about Ukraine’s territorial integrity. Rather, the only thing Biden and other NATO leaders care about is to keep Ukraine within the western orbit (via NATO membership). Russia’s March 2022 offer to allow Ukraine to join the EU and become part of the economic infrastructure of Europe apparently were insufficient from a US perspective.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky speaking at the so-called “Summit on Peace in Ukraine” where the winning power, the Russian Federation, was unsurprisingly not invaded given that Zelensky formally banned any Ukrianian government official from negotiating peace with Russia nearly two years ago.

There is No Chance of a Ukrainian Military Victory Over Russia

One of the biggest reasons that Ukraine should accept Putin’s peace offer is that the longer the war goes on the weaker Ukraine is getting as they lose up to 1,000 troops a die in intense combat, leaving them desperately short of manpower and virtually exhausting their reserves with hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men attempting to flee the country to escape military service which they rightly consider to be a death sentence in what they rightly see as an unwinnable war. Meanwhile, Russian forces continue to grow stronger as hundreds of thousands more Russian men volunteer for military service, with Putin claiming an average of 1,000 volunteers a day, with their morale continuing to increase confident in ultimate victory given the fact that Russia continues to inflict over three times more casualties on Ukrainian military forces than they suffer themselves. Russia continues to gain more Ukrainian territory with every passing day. The longer the war goes on the more territory Ukraine will end up losing that they will never have any chance of winning back on the battlefield. The situation on the battlefield has grown so dire for Ukraine that they have resorted to copying Stalin’s World War Two-era employment of “blocking detachments” whose mission is to mow down any retreating Ukrainian soldiers to motivate them to hold the line except instead of using NKVD troops and penal battalions to do it, they are using Biden-administration-armed, neo-Nazi Azov regiment detachments.

Far from weakening Russia, Biden’s war of choice in Ukraine has caused Russia to increase the size of their armed forces by 50% from their prewar size to Soviet-era levels, expand the size of their army by nearly three times and more than double the percentage of their GDP that they spend on their military to Cold War levels. Putin has fully mobilized Russia’s economy for war and Russian factories are on track to churning out 1,500 T-90M main battle tanks this year, thousands more armored fighting vehicles and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of missiles and combat drones as well as millions more heavy artillery shells for which Russia can now produce more a year than the US and its NATO allies combined. Meanwhile, the World Bank now assesses that Russia has risen from the 6^th largest economy in the world when Russia invaded Ukraine to the 4^th largest economy in the world by Purchase Power Parity, with Russia vaulting ahead of both Germany and Japan.

As a longtime strategic forecaster, national security strategist and Russia expert, my record in predicting developments of Ukraine has been fairly good. I predicted Russia would invade Ukraine six weeks in advance and predicted the date the invasion would take place within four days of the actual invasion. I was also correct in predicting that Ukraine had no chance whatsoever to defeat Russia no matter how much military assistance the US sent them. However, just like senior US policymakers and military leaders I was mistaken in predicting a quick Russian victory over Ukraine due to Putin’s unexpected unilateral military withdrawal from northern Ukraine in early 2022 that removed the main incentive for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky from signing the Istanbul Peace Agreement. I am now predicting a largescale Russian offensive in northern Ukraine most likely to materialize this summer designed to force Ukraine’s capitulation, since Putin’s attempts to end the war through a negotiated compromise peace agreement over the past two years have failed. To date, Ukraine’s very existence has never been threatened by Russia’s invasion, contrary to Western propaganda claims, given Russia’s very limited military objectives. However, if a Russian offensive were to overrun and occupy all of Eastern Ukraine and capture Kyiv, Ukraine might cease to exist as an independent state.

For over two years now, the Biden administration has claimed Ukraine is winning and has insisted on prolonging the war in Ukraine “for as long as it takes” without identifying what the criteria for victory would be. Before the war began, I stated that there was no chance whatsoever that Ukraine could defeat Russia given that Ukraine is vastly overmatched by Russia in every area in terms of military manpower, conventional and nuclear weaponry as well as economic and industrial might. Russia today has 35 times more territory, over five times more people, five times more tanks, five to ten times more artillery systems and ammunition and twelve times more combat aircraft than Ukraine not to mention 16,000 more nuclear weapons according to a recently leaked Ukrainian intelligence estimate. Hitler was unable to conquer Russia with the finest army in Europe with 315 German Army divisions so what makes the Biden administration believe that Ukraine can defeat Russia let alone cause Putin’s overthrow and Russia’s collapse presumably by storming the gates of Moscow? The very idea that Ukraine could defeat Russia without the direct participation of 32 NATO countries and a nuclear first strike, when it has not succeeded in capturing so much as one-square inch of Russia’s prewar territory, is laughable yet have heard retired three- and four-star generals incessantly repeating this ridiculous and unsupportable assertion on Fox News for over two years now.

Following the successful Ukrainian Kherson and Kharkiv offensives which brought Russia disturbingly close to employing nuclear weapons against Ukraine with unpredictable consequences for the world in September-October 2022, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley declared that Ukraine had reached its high-water mark and that the chances that Ukraine could capture additional territory from Russia militarily was slim. Therefore, he wisely called for immediate peace negotiations in the hopes that Ukraine could obtain the return of some Russian annexed territory by diplomatic agreement, but Biden rejected his wise counsel due to his desire to continue its war for US imperialism.

Biden signs a ten-year security agreement with Ukraine at the G-7 Meeting in Italy committing the US to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to get Ukraine to fight an unwinnable war until the last Ukrainian soldier is killed.

The US and its Western Allies provided vast quantities of modern weapon systems including M-1A1 SA Abrams tanks, Lepoard 2A6 and Challenger 2 tanks to Ukraine to stage a massive counteroffensive against Russia during the summer of 2023 yet Ukraine was only successful in recapturing 0.25% of Russian annexed territory and when the offensive finally ended in October-early November 2023, Western media reported that Russian forces had captured more territory from Ukraine in 2023 than Ukraine had captured from Russia.  Ever since the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, Russian forces have been engaging in continual offensive operations along the full length of the frontline, recently expanding the front to include the Kharkiv region for the first time since October 2022. The aim of these Russian offensive operations has not so much been to recapture territory but rather to use superior Russian air, missile and artillery superiority to destroy the Ukrainian army and all of its reserves so that when Russian forces achieve a major breakthrough this summer, Ukraine will have no reserves to stop Russian forces from successfully driving all the way to the Dnipro River, potentially capturing tens of thousands of Russian troops and occupying most, if not all, of eastern Ukraine.

There is no question in my mind that the US and other NATO leaders understand clearly that there is no chance that Ukraine will ever be able to defeat Russia militarily or recapture any of the Russian annexed territories. NATO leaders have exhibited great concern that Ukraine is mere months away from military collapse with the UK, France and Poland discussing plans to send tens of thousands of combat troops to defend Kyiv and the Dnipro River Line from being overrun by advancing Russian forces.

So, if Western leaders know that Ukrainian defeat is inevitable, why do they continue to prolong the war for no apparent reason, when it is painfully obvious to every non-ideological, rational thinking observer that doing so is merely serving to maximize the death and destruction in Ukraine and the loss of Ukrainian territory? UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently provided the answer when he stated in a video he posted on social media several weeks ago that if the West were to accept the return of Ukraine to permanently neutral status outside of NATO, “it would mean the end of Western global hegemony.”

With this fact in mind, it is clear that not only is Russia’s Biden provoked invasion of Ukraine not a war of Russian imperialism but it is rather, quite literally, a war of Western imperialism. Only when we understand this salient truth can we understand the real reason why Biden and his neocon Republican imperialist allies, has been so adamant about fighting their proxy war against Russia to the last Ukrainian because they sincerely believe that Western global dominance is on the line and they have no interest in surrendering America’s liberal empire to save Ukraine from being transformed into a failed Third World rump state. They believe that the more devastating the territorial and population losses are to Ukraine, the more it will become dependent on the Western powers for its security. Indeed, were it not for Biden sending UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to promise Zelensky a blank check of US financial and military support in exchange for fighting the war against Russia indefinitely, the war would have ended over two years ago with a full Russian military withdrawal from Ukraine.

The US Has No National Interest in Fighting, Let Alone Prolonging, the War in Ukraine

I have long stated it makes little sense for the US to risk nuclear war with Russia over a dispute over the neutrality of Ukraine, a nation in which the US has no discernible national security interest. There have been several more prominent national security experts who have stated that Ukraine is, at best, a peripheral interest for the US unlike the Western Hemisphere which is a vital interest for the US or Western Europe or Japan in which the US also has clearly definable security interests. As leading foreign policy realist scholar, Dr. John Mearsheimer, has stated, “Ukraine is not a vital strategic interest for the West. It is a vital strategic interest for the Russians, they have made that perfectly clear, and not just Putin.” Because Ukraine is the country in which the US has the greatest vital interest in a war which Putin has repeatedly stated is an existential fight for Russia, the Russian Federation enjoys escalation dominance over the US in the Ukraine conflict meaning it is willing to escalate all the way up the escalation spiral to the nuclear level but the US most likely is not given that if all of Ukraine were annexed by Russia tomorrow, America’s national security interests would not be threatened and, I would argue, neither would NATO’s given there is zero evidence that Putin has an desire to attack NATO unless NATO first directly attacks Russia.

From a purely national interest perspective, the US interest in Ukraine is purely humanitarian, not security based. Viewed from a purely humanitarian perspective, the predominant US interest should be as former and perhaps future President Donald Trump recently stated at a CNN townhall earlier this year to bring an immediate end to the death and destruction in Ukraine. The US has an interest in helping to bring about an immediate cease-fire and helping to mediate the best possible negotiated compromise peace deal for Ukraine.  If we had an actual national security interest in Eastern Europe, why did FDR and Churchill surrender it to Stalin at Yalta at the end of World War Two? It may be controversial to state openly but the truth is that the US never suffered any detrimental national security effects from either Nazi or Soviet control and military occupation of Eastern Europe from the time German tanks rolled into Poland in 1939 to the time the last Russian troops were withdrawn from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary in 1994. Accordingly, what makes people think US national security will be imperiled by continued Russian control of the Donbass region located at the farthest eastern fringes of Europe, half a world away, or Kherson or Zaporizhia for that matter, none of which most Americans could even locate on a map?

Former Republican presidential candidate and would-be future Trump administration Cabinet official, Vivek Ramaswamy, giving a seminal address on “A New Monroe Doctrine for America” that I helped him formulate

Sumantra Maitra, Director of Research and Outreach, at the American Ideas Institute wrote an excellent piece calling for a new US grand strategy in Europe of offshore balancing which he termed “a Dormant NATO” recommending the US withdraw all of its ground troops from Europe, particularly Eastern Europe, leaving only a limited naval and air presence, and transfer US leadership of NATO to the UK, France, and Germany while immediately ending all NATO involvement in the war in Ukraine. Former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, wrote an outstanding foreign policy piece in the American Conservative which drew heavily from Maitra’s excellent ideas and also included a number of my own as I was serving as his Defense and Foreign Policy Advisor at the time. Reportedly, President Trump is wanting to implement it if he is re-elected President. Maitra writes “the US should never take a full withdrawal from NATO off the table,” something I have been calling for since 2019, and his proposal would go a long way towards accomplishing that with a massive benefit in terms of US national security and a significant savings in terms of defense spending as it would also serve to end our Cold War with Russia and largely end the threat of Russian nuclear escalation. Maitra wrote a critique of former Trump National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien’s article in Foreign Affairs in which he noted,

“While a lot was said about Western European freeriding, not much is said about the Baltics or Ukraine and their attempt to chain-gang us to war. A student of history would remember that most modern great power wars were due to smaller protectorates dragging their benefactors to unnecessary civilization-destroying wars. The Danes are not the ones pushing for escalation in Ukraine. The Balts and the Polish are. For what it’s worth, Western Europe is still more important economically and strategically to the American security architecture. Eastern Europe, not so much.”

Maitra’s point about the Baltics and Ukraine’s attempts to chain-gang us into an unnecessary nuclear war with Russia is one I have been warning about for the past five years. Serbia in 1914 and Poland in 1939 dragged the Western Allies into two unnecessary world wars that cost the lives of over 100 million innocents. Now Ukraine is trying to do the same but at the cost of up to a billion lives.

Earlier this week, White House Strategic Communications Director Admiral John Kirby (USN Re.t) was asked under what conditions Ukraine would be allowed to join NATO. He replied that they first have to defeat Russia, which is the mightiest nuclear superpower on the planet, knowing there is no possibility of them ever accomplishing that. The whole idea Ukraine will ever join NATO had been a farce from the day Bush first raised it in 2007-2008. It's been common knowledge in the West that Ukraine will never formally join NATO. That would not pose a problem we're it not for the fact that Biden made Ukraine a de facto member of NATO in November 2021 provoking Russia to invade. The present war has exposed NATO’s total inability to provide any security to Ukraine. The only way Ukraine can obtain lasting security is by signing a peace agreement minimally acceptable to Russia like the one Putin proposed last week because then Russia will never have any reason to invade them again just as was the case from 1991-Feb 2014 when Ukraine had good relations with Russia and was neutral, independent, whole, and free.

Russian leaders have stated that the US has treated Ukraine exactly the way it would have had Ukraine been a formal NATO member state and they are probably right. If Ukraine had been a formal NATO member when Russia invaded Ukraine, it's unlikely that Biden would have responded any differently. Today, Ukraine is little more than a US imperial dependency. If the US had cut off all aid last year, Ukraine would have faced not just military collapse but likely also regime collapse if Zelenksy had continued to reject Russia’s peace offers. So, Ukrainians need to ask themselves the question as to whether Ukraine was better off as a neutral state with good relations with Moscow or as a US vassal state and de facto NATO member beholden to the Western powers? Every American should be asking this question of their elected leaders as well. The answer could not be any more obvious.

Russian non-strategic nuclear missile launcher deployed in Belarus for joint nuclear warfighting exercises earlier this month

The Dangers of Russian Nuclear Escalation Will Continue to Increase the Longer the War Continues

Meanwhile, following Biden’s incredibly dangerous decision to authorize the use of long-range US missile strikes on targets deep inside Russia by Ukraine, NATO and Russia continue to march further up the escalation spiral leading to nuclear war. No US President has ever been foolhardy enough or more willing to provoke potential nuclear retaliation by authorizing US missile strikes by another country on Russian territory until now. Putin has been escalating his nuclear threats against the US and NATO in response to repeated escalations by Western leaders in authorizing the use of their long-range missiles by Ukraine against targets deep inside Russian territory. In response, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg stated last week that NATO is in talks to operationally deploy more non-strategic nuclear weapons currently in storage in response to increased threats of nuclear war with Russia. Before the war began, all 150 obsolete US B-61 nuclear gravity bombs were in storage in five Western European nations. Stoltenberg’s announcement that some have since been operationally deployed leads one to ask whether NATO is extending its nuclear umbrella over Ukraine meaning that NATO would respond with nuclear retaliation against Russia in the event Russia employed non-strategic nuclear weapons against Ukraine, potentially killing hundreds of NATO troops stationed there leading to a full nuclear exchange costing up to one billion lives.

Former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Stephen Bryen addresses this issue in his most recent article.

One reason to assess this may be the change in strategy underway is the NATO-US decision to unleash long range weapons in Ukraine on Russian territory. In the proxy wars prior to Ukraine, the US and Russia have been careful to avoid directly attacking each other.  That is why Truman was against US forces crossing the Yalu River in Korea; why neither China nor Russia was attacked in the Vietnam war; why in the Cuban missile crisis President John F. Kennedy refused any nuclear attack on Cuba and the Soviet Union.  But there were moments when tensions grew to approach the nuclear threshold.  That was especially the case in 1973 when Russia began threatening intervention with nuclear weapons in the Yom Kippur war, and when the US declared a DEFCON-3 alert.  In the context of superpower rivalries and proxy and other conflicts (the Cuban Missile Crisis was not a proxy conflict but a direct confrontation between the US and USSR) NATO-approved attacks on Russian territory appear to cross a dangerous red line.  When combined with the no negotiations and no talks, no peace posture of the US and most of Europe on Ukraine, the danger of an expanding conflict, or even one involving nuclear weapons, is increasing.  Upgrading nuclear arsenals in that context adds fuel to the fire.

According to renowned foreign policy realist Dr. John Mearsheimer, both former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former US Secretary of Defense MacNamara stated after the Cold War that the US nuclear umbrella over its NATO allies was essentially a bluff and that the US would not actually have responded with a nuclear retaliatory strike in response to Soviet nuclear strikes on NATO forces in West Germany. Given Ukraine is a non-NATO member state, it seems hard to believe that the Biden administration would risk a full nuclear exchange over a dispute with Russia over Ukrainian neutrality. This is particularly the case when one considers Russia’s overwhelming theater nuclear supremacy over the US with up to seventy times more non-strategic nuclear weapons than the US has according to a recently leaked Ukrainian intelligence report ensuring Russia would triumph over the US in the event of any non-strategic nuclear exchange. Accordingly, I think it is more likely that the NATO Secretary-General’s announcement is nothing more than strategic signaling meant to deter Russian nuclear escalation, much as French President Macron’s threat to send tens of thousands of French troops to fight Russia in Ukraine was likely meant to deter Putin from launching a massive northern offensive in a bid to achieve a Ukrainian military collapse rather than an indicator of his actual plans.

On October 16, 2022, I published an article in The National Interest warning that the successful Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kharkiv caused Russia to seriously consider using non-strategic nuclear weapons in Ukraine as it had clearly violated Russia’s nuclear redline which Putin had articulated a few weeks earlier. I did not realize how right I was given subsequent revelations earlier this year that US intelligence assessed the chances of Russian nuclear escalation at that time as over 50%, sparking a concerted US diplomatic effort to dissuade Russia from resorting to nuclear first use in Ukraine both directly with Russian military officials and through outreach to Russia’s Chinese allies.

As I have written previously, if Putin used even one well-placed low-yield nuclear weapon in a demonstration attack against a major Ukrainian city, particularly one detonated over Kyiv, that caused thousands of injuries but no deaths, it would likely force Zelensky to capitulate under pressure from Biden to de-escalate the conflict to avert a full-scale nuclear exchange. The problem is if Russia was able to force Ukraine’s surrender and get the Biden administration to capitulate through nuclear coercion, rather than peaceful negotiation, it would embolden Chinese President Xi Jinping to utilize non-strategic nuclear weapons against US military bases, assets and/or allies in the Pacific to force reunification with Taiwan. This is one of the many reasons why a peaceful resolution to the Ukraine war would be far preferable from a US standpoint.

Former British diplomat, Allistair Crooke has stated that Russia is right that NATO countries are direct participants in the war since NATO provides targeting data for Ukrainian missiles, to send the missiles up and help guide the missiles around Russian missile defenses to Russian targets. This assertion has been corroborated by other Western sources. Judge Nepalitano has also confirmed that US soldiers are directly engaged in combat fighting an undeclared war against Russia in Ukraine launching missiles and guiding them to their Russian targets, provoking a potential Russian nuclear response. Do the American people understand the existential risks to Biden’s morally and strategically bankrupt policy of prolonging an unwinnable war for Ukraine indefinitely?

Stephen Bryen also reports that for the first time Ukraine will be using F-16 aircraft to strike Russia from a Romanian air base while the US already provides all the targeting coordinate, guidance, and perhaps even target selections, for long-range Ukrainian missile strikes on the Russian Federation with Ukraine giving them plausible deniability. It seems highly unlikely that Russia will allow Ukrainian airstrikes to be carried out against its territory from a NATO air base without striking back hard at NATO which according to Bryen may be Biden’s plan to try to provoke World War Three with Russia in the hopes leading a world war against Russia will increase his sagging poll ratings and help him get re-elected. More likely, he hopes Russian cyber retaliation on the US homeland will give him a pretext to assume emergency powers and suspend the presidential election just as Zelensky did earlier this year. As Bryen states, Biden’s decision to deliberately provoke a Russian attack on NATO could lead to the outbreak of a war that could very well result in the destruction of not just NATO but the US homeland itself.

NATO is now introducing F-16s to Ukraine, which reportedly will operate from Romanian airfields. They will be equipped with long-range JASSM cruise missiles and AIM-120 air-to-air missiles. Will Russia need to destroy their Romanian air base operations or will NATO back off the idea of using them to launch F-16 sorties that, some anticipate because of location, will be aimed at hitting Crimea?

Most of these missiles have been supplied by NATO (mostly American) and all of them are given targets based on NATO-supplied coordinates. 

NATO operates spy planes, long-range radars and satellites to pinpoint the exact coordinates for their Ukrainian clients. The Russians, depending on air defenses to try and ward off most of the damage, have kept fairly quiet about these attacks.

Sending troops and offering fighter jets and other weapons could be interpreted as intentionally aiming for a wider, European war. The fact that the US apparently is behind using F-16 bases in Romania may be Biden’s way to cause a war in Europe and save his sinking political fortunes.

Such ideas are inherently risky because NATO’s defenses are embarrassingly thin. Risking the alliance and Europe’s future for the sake of staying in office is, in and of itself, shameful and probably criminal if true. NATO is already perilously close to turning itself into an aggressor alliance, which could spell its disintegration and rejection.

One must ask how the US would respond if Russia was arming Mexico to the teeth with long-range Russian missiles and had Russian troops operating the missiles guiding them to strike civilian and military targets in the US? I think the answer is that the US would have most likely bombed and invaded and perhaps even annexed part of Mexico and called it a defensive war while popping off a couple of nuclear weapons at Russia to teach them a lesson to never do it again.

Late last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin held a war council with Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko in Minsk where they likely discussed plans to open a second Belarussian front against Kyiv after holding a war council with Xi in Beijing last week where they likely discussed Xi’s plans to blockade Taiwan later this year. Meanwhile, Russia continues to engage in non-strategic nuclear weapons exercises with Belarus not far from Kyiv ready to nuke any NATO expeditionary forces that enter Ukraine. The decision to start a nuclear war with Russia now rests with Biden, Sunak, and Macron. Given the risks of the outbreak of a nuclear war that could cost the lives of a billion innocents, one wonders if it might have been better for the safety and security of the US and the world at large if Nixon had ceded Taiwan back to the PRC in 1975 as he planned before Watergate and if Russia and if Ukraine had remained in a federation with Russia after the collapse of the USSR so the US wouldn’t be facing a simultaneous nuclear war with two allied superpowers over the fate of a couple nations halfway across the world right now.

Putin has made clear Russia’s willingness to escalate to the nuclear level to remove the existential threat posed by NATO in Ukraine. Biden’s endless, manufactured war in Ukraine is being fought “for as long as it takes” to force Russia to give up the primary objective of its so-called “Special Military Operation” which is not to take control of Ukraine or even to replace Zelensky with a more pro-Russian President subservient to Russia. Rather, the primary rationale for the limited Russian invasion of Ukraine was to rollback NATO and expel NATO troops, bases and intelligence agents out of Ukraine. The purpose of the invasion was to restore Ukraine to being a buffer state between Russia and NATO that would protect both sides from aggression by the other as it was before the Biden ordered and CIA backed Maidan coup which overthrew Ukrainian President Yanukovych. Meanwhile, a senior Biden administration official said last week that it may be necessary to expand the size of the US nuclear arsenal for the first time since the end of the Cold War.  Biden and other Western leaders have made clear their willingness to risk nuclear war and the entire destruction of Western civilization in a blaze of nuclear glory over the loss of “Western global hegemony” in Ukraine in order to prevent its return to being a well-armed neutral state like Switzerland with a small standing army but a large number of army reservists that could be mobilized in the event of future aggression.

Accordingly, the question is how is it possible to reconcile absolutist US military objectives in Ukraine with Russia’s desire to rollback America’s liberal empire out of Ukraine to establish what Putin has termed “a sanitary zone” or largely demilitarized buffer zone protecting Russia from continued NATO proxy missile strikes? When you understand that the real purpose of Biden’s manufactured war in Ukraine is to get Russia to concede that Ukraine can continue as a US protectorate and de-facto NATO member state, then it’s possible to consider that Russia could conceivably agree to some kind of limited NATO membership arrangement for western Ukraine, albeit with no NATO troops, in return for Eastern Ukraine becoming a Russian client state like Belarus. I will be exploring this proposition in my next article.

© David T. Pyne 2024

David T. Pyne, Esq. is a former U.S. Army combat arms and Headquarters staff officer, who was in charge of armaments cooperation with the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas from 2000-2003, with an M.A. in National Security Studies from Georgetown University. He currently serves as Executive Vice President of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and as a member of the Committee on the Present Danger-China. He recently served as Defense and Foreign Policy Advisor to former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. He has also co-authored the best-selling new book, “Catastrophe Now--America’s Last Chance to Avoid an EMP Disaster” and his new book “Restoring Strategic Deterrence” will be published in early fall 2024. He serves as the Editor of “The Real War” newsletter at dpyne.substack.com and as a contributor to “The National Interest”. Here is a link to his interview archive. He may be reached at emptaskforce.ut@gmail.com.

Recent Media Interviews

May 20th--Interview with COL Rob Maness (USA Ret.) on Patriot TV to discuss the weakness and vulnerabilities of the US Navy in a war with Communist China. Here is a link to the interview.

May 21st—Interview with Jon Twitchell on the “Talk with John” radio show on KTALK AM 1640 to discuss Russia’s new Kharkiv offensive in northern Ukraine, potential motivations for the assassination of Iran’s President and the inauguration of Taiwan’s pro-independence President which China has stated would guarantee war. Here is the link.

May 23rd—Interview with Brannon Howse on Patriot TV to discuss China’s Joint Air and Naval Blockade exercises designed to punish Taiwan for its new President’s inaugural speech criticizing China which they condemned as “confessing independence” and leading to war as well as Speaker Johnson’s decision to call on Biden to allow Ukraine to use long range US missiles to target Russia, perhaps provoking Russia to attack the US directly in response. Here is the link to the interview.

May 31st—Interview with Brannon Howse on Patriot TV to discuss Trump’s conviction on bogus charges, Biden’s plans to steal the presidential election and Zelensky’s decision to stay in office past his term as Ukraine’s dictator and Biden’s plans to follow his example. Here is the link to the interview.

June 4th—Interview with Jon Twitchell on his “Talk with John” radio show on KTALK AM 1640 to discuss Trump’s conviction on bogus charges, Zelensky’s decision to stay in office past his term as Ukraine’s dictator and Biden’s plans to follow his example as well as Biden’s and Zelensky’s efforts to provoke Russian nuclear escalation. Here is the link to the interview.

June 4th—Interview with Jon Twitchell on Main Street Radio to discuss Trump’s conviction on bogus charges, Zelensky’s decision to stay in office past his term as Ukraine’s dictator and Biden’s plans to follow his example as well as Biden’s and Zelensky’s efforts to provoke Russian nuclear escalation. Here is the link to the discussion.

June 6th—Interview with Mormon Renegade to discuss the increasing possibility Biden will stumble the US into a simultaneous world war with Russia over Ukraine and with China over Taiwan while discussing Biden’s end game in Ukraine and whether he plans to imprison Trump, triggering a constitutional crisis.

June 13th—Interview with Stew Peters on the Stew Peters show to discuss Russian nuclear warfighting exercises being conducted by a flotilla consisting of a nuclear missile submarine and a guided missile frigate 66 miles off the coast of Florida in response to Biden’s decision to authorize Ukrainian strikes deep inside Russian territory using long-range US missiles. Here is the link to the interview.

June 18th—Interview with Jon Twitchell to discuss Biden’s and Zelensky’s efforts to provoke Russian nuclear escalation, Russian Navy nuclear missile exercises off the Florida coast, Putin’s new peace proposal which is likely his last before Russia begins a largescale invasion of northern Ukraine as well as my upcoming new peace proposal in which Russia would agree to allow western Ukraine to join NATO in exchange for eastern Ukraine joining the Russian-led CSTO alliance. Here is the link to the interview.

Upcoming Media Interviews

June 24th—Interview on the New Paradigms show which is sponsored by Epoch Times to discuss the current state of the war in Ukraine, the increasing chances of escalation to a direct war between Russia and NATO and the chances for negotiating a compromise peace agreement ending the war.

June 25th-Interview on National Security Hour, sponsored by The Epoch Times, on I-Heart Media to discuss the victory of nationalist parties in the EU elections, Macron’s decision to hold snap parliamentary elections in France as well as the connection between the war in Ukraine to the nationalist party resurgence.

July 12th—I will be giving a presentation to Utah’s Constitutional Conservatives in Logan to show US mistakes over the past century that have made the world far less safe and free as well as how the US can avert an unnecessary nuclear war with the Sino-Russian alliance.