Manipulating the US president to make his domestic and foreign policy decisions as Stephen Miller of the White House (lead image-3) is doing with President Donald Trump (lead image-2) is not new.
Jimmy Carter tried to dismantle the bureaucracy and the mindset (ideology) of the “imperial presidency”, as he called the White House during the election campaign of 1976. But then Carter fell under the spell of National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski; he controlled what the president was told was the evidence for his policy choices, the risks, and the consequences. In this way, Brzezinski more than influenced the policy outcomes Carter believed he was deciding for himself.
(One of them was the secret US war with the Kremlin in Afghanistan.)
Carter required that his decision-making process start and end on paper; he read reams of it in the personal study off the Oval Office. He demanded his intelligence briefing every morning. However, connected by an internal passage of connecting doors, Brzezinski supervised what was in the papers and vetted who walked in the outer Oval Office door to have words with the President.
Trump prefers pictures, screens of them, and he gets one intelligence briefing per week, followed by interpretation over lunch in the private White House dining room from Vice President JD Vance. Miller controls the paper, especially the virtual posts, the press gaggles on aircraft in flight and airfields at takeoff and landing, and in the Oval Office. Vance coaches Trump through his misspeaking, memory failures, political gaffes.
Listen now to the way in which the method and purpose of these new men differs from anything in the history of the American presidency; and how the leaders of the European allies, the UK, and Canada exploit what they believe they know in order to get the policy decisions they want from Trump — that is, after Miller, Vance and others have decided and Trump has been persuaded.
Then once you understand, ask whether the calculations of the allies, and also of the main enemy at present, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, are misjudgements of what serves their national strategies best.
In the new podcast from Dialogue Works, Nima Alkhorshid asks if President Donald Trump has decided to sell Tomahawk missiles to the NATO allies for attacking the Russian hinterland, and why the allies are so keen to continue fighting the war when it is obvious the Tomahawk cannot turn defeat on the Ukraine battlefield into victory. Listen to the hour-long discussion here.
The third question in the discussion is — what to make of Russian policy towards Palestine after the Arabs cancelled their long-prepared summit meeting in Moscow with President Vladimir Putin, scheduled for October 15, and opted instead for a summit with Trump at Sharm el-Sheikh on October 13 – from which Putin was excluded? Answer: Russian policy contradicts the US-Israeli plan for Gaza but they won’t say so in public nor will the Arabs countenance a confrontation with Trump right now. The podcast looks again at Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s attempt to explain the Russian reason to Arab journalists.
Last week, according to the New York Times, the Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was reported to have tried to head off President Donald Trump’s escalation to frontal military attack on Venezuela and regime change in Caracas by offering “a dominant stake in Venezuela’s oil and other mineral wealth in discussions that lasted for months, according to multiple people close to the talks.” Reportedly, Maduro’s terms included: “all existing and future oil and gold projects to American companies, give preferential contracts to American businesses, reverse the flow of Venezuelan oil exports from China to the United States, and slash his country’s energy and mining contracts with Chinese, Iranian and Russian firms.”
The first provision of the treaty calls for “joint initiatives within the framework of OPEC+, the Forum of Gas Exporting Countries and other multilateral organizations, [to] promote balanced and stable long–term development of global energy markets without using artificial restrictions and unfair competition tools”. The second proposed to “cooperate in the energy sector in such areas as the exploration and development of new oil and natural gas fields, increasing the returns of fields operated by joint ventures and reducing their environmental impact.”
Maduro signed the instrument of treaty ratification in front of the Russian Ambassador to Venezuela on October 7. But that was several days after Maduro had been told the Trump Administration had purported his scheme to replace the Russian oil companies with American ones, and had cancelled negotiations on Maduro’s term sheet led by Richard Grenell.
For the time being, there has been no ratification of the Venezuelan strategic partnership treaty by the State Duma in Moscow. When Venezuela’s Ambassador to Moscow, Jesús Salazar Velázquez, visited the Duma on October 6, ratification was discussed but not agreed. Instead, the official Duma communiqué reported that Velazquez had agreed with Duma deputy chairman Ivan Melnikov — a Communist Party faction leader who ranks third in the parliamentary leadership — to “express solidarity in countering Western military-political and financial-economic pressure. Both sides noted the importance of inter-parliamentary cooperation as part of bilateral interaction and discussed the possibility of holding a meeting of the Russia-Venezuela and Venezuela-Russia parliamentary friendship groups via videoconference in the near future.”
President Putin has twice stopped short of the opportunity to express his solidarity with Maduro. On October 2, during his appearance at the Valdai Club conference, Putin acknowledged that the French commando boarding of a tanker carrying Russian oil was “piracy”. Illegal yes, but Russia is not going to be provoked, Putin said. The French “want very much to transfer the tension from inside the country to the external contour, to excite some other forces, other countries, in particular Russia, to provoke us into some vigorous actions.”
Trump’s attacks on Venezuelan boats off the coast, which began in September and have been justified in Washington as an operation against drug smugglers, have not been explicitly condemned by the Kremlin. They have been called piracy by the Kremlin-funded security analysis platform Vzglyad.
At Putin’s last opportunity, in a press conference in Dushanbe on October 10, he was asked: “It has just been announced that Donald Trump did not receive the Nobel Peace Prize. In your opinion: should he have received it, did he deserve it, was he worthy of it?” By then Putin knew the prize had been awarded to the US backed regime-change candidate to overthrow Maduro, Maria Corina Machado. In his reply, Putin ignored Venezuela and praised Trump.
“It is not for me,” he said “to decide who should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize… There have been cases where the committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to individuals who had done nothing for peace. In my view, these decisions inflicted enormous damage on the prize’s prestige. A person comes along – good or bad – and within a month or two, boom. For what? They had done absolutely nothing. Is that how it should work? It ought to be awarded for actual merits. Consequently, I believe, its prestige has been significantly undermined. But that is neither here nor there – it is not for me to judge. Whether or not the incumbent President of the United States deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, I do not know. But he has genuinely done much to resolve complex crises that have persisted for years, if not decades. I have said this before – I know for certain: regarding the crisis in Ukraine, he sincerely strives for a resolution. Some things have worked out, others have not. Perhaps much more can still be achieved based on the agreements and discussions in Anchorage. But he is certainly making an effort, certainly working on these issues – issues of achieving peace and resolving complex international situations.”
Listen to Dimitri Lascaris, Slobodan Despot and me discuss the reasons why the weak and desperate governments of Europe and the UK want war with Russia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChTDuZnYwSk
by Editor - Saturday, October 11th, 2025 No Comments »
When President Vladimir Putin acknowledged on the weekend (lead image, left) that for war operations, he refers to his “colleagues”, he meant, among several things, that he has removed his restrictions on the General Staff’s conduct of the electric war on the Ukrainian battlefield as far west as the Polish border.
The record of Russia’s electric war strikes in the Ukraine began on October 10-12 and 16-20, 2022; then followed on October 22-27, 2023; March 29-30, 2024; June 1, 2024; and November 7, 2024. Click to follow each stage of the electric war. Roughly speaking, Putin agreed with the General Staff that they could target power generating plants and the power grids transmitting electricity to the main population centres.
Triggering population evacuation from east to west, then into Poland, was one of the political goals Putin agreed. Cutting the train lines between Poland, Lvov and Kiev was not. This allowed almost unrestricted inflow of US and NATO weapons and men to supply the eastern front, including the Ukrainian attack and occupation of Kursk region which began on August 6, 2024; also, the movement of western political and media figures to and from Kiev for escalation of the propaganda war against Russia. The open rail lines have been used to demonstrate the US- NATO line that Ukraine is winning, Russia losing the war.
Putin then accepted President Donald Trump’s proposal for a 30-day halt to attacks on the Ukraine’s civilian energy infrastructure; that began after their telephone call on February 12.
Trump’s war staffs in Washington, Poland, and the Ukraine did not honour the Putin-Trump telephone agreement; it was a unilateral, unreciprocated Putin concession Instead, they have steadily escalated their drone and missile attacks on Russian energy infrastructure, including oil pumping sites, oil storages, gas pipelines and processing plants, port terminals, and oil refineries.
The tone of the war decision-making process in Moscow has sharpened as the enemy attacks have escalated, their targets deeper in the Russian hinterland.
A Moscow source in a position to know says that Putin has rejected the criticism that concessions to Trump for the sake of negotiating a peace settlement were producing no reciprocation from the Americans; instead encouraging them to escalate to test Russian vulnerability,pressure the domestic economy, and probe for Putin’s weakness.
Trump (also Vice President JD Vance) have attempted all three.
He intended to combine them when he announced on September 23 that Russia is a “paper tiger”. Then in front of his assembly of military commanders on September 30 Trump made the attack personal. “He [Putin] should have had that war done in a week. And I said to him, you know, you don’t look good. You’re four years fighting a war that should have taken a week. Are you a paper tiger?”
Trump has also dismissed negotiating to achieve end of war. “Problem with Vietnam,” Trump told the crew of the USS Harry Truman on October 5, “we, you know, we stopped fighting to win. We would’ve won easy. We would’ve won Afghanistan easy, would’ve won every war easy. But we got politically correct, ‘Ah, let’s take it easy.’ It’s, we’re not politically correct anymore, just so you understand. We win — Now, we win. We don’t want to be politically correct anymore.”
Trump also keeps repeating his personal attack on Putin — “I’m very disappointed in him.”
In answer, Putin’s approach, the President has said privately, should be: “we won’t rock the boat. We won’t be provoked.” The General Staff, the intelligence services and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have responded: “the other side will rock the boat even harder.” The source requests that the discussion of their options which has followed should remain out of public debate.
Moscow sources acknowledge the sting in the paper tiger jibe. “The Europeans and Brits have studied Putin’s weaknesses and think they know how to defeat him. They think – and the Russian oligarchs have been telling them – there is no Kremlin secret they don’t know.”
The source dismisses pro-Russian podcasters in the US. “They think they are following the Kremlin line from RT and Sputnik which reward them by putting them on Russian TV and quoting them.” “It’s a circle jerk”, says a military source familiar with US slang.
Putin’s performance at the Valdai Club conference last Thursday has triggered sharp internal reaction; some of it has spilled out publicly. Putin tried to explain himself in a brief interview with Pavel Zarubin on the weekend. “I was simply honestly and frankly laying out certain situations, the essence of the issues, and how I feel about them,” the President said. This has been interpreted in Moscow as apologetic.
“Well,” Putin went on, “it’s up to my colleagues to respond. I spoke sincerely and honestly as it is; how things actually were; and how I would like to see the situation develop. Some will like this; some won’t. And I didn’t have a goal. I didn’t set out to do anything pleasing. I just tell it like it is.”
Moscow sources point out that Putin has now followed up in two unexpected sessions with his colleagues. The Security Council was called into session on Tuesday, earlier in the week than usual. That meeting was followed on Wednesday with a meeting between Putin and the Defense Ministry, General Staff and military commanders from the front army groups (lead image, right). “In an attempt to show its Western sponsors at least some semblance of success,” Putin began, “the Kiev regime is trying to target civilian facilities deep inside our territory. This will not help it. Our goal is to ensure the safety of the Russian citizens, as well as the safety of the strategic sites and civilian infrastructure, including energy facilities.”
Putin’s intention was to stiffen Russian deterrence by threat of retaliation if Trump escalates by supplying the Tomahawk missile to Germany, the UK, Canada or other NATO states for redeployment in the Ukraine; or by authorizing the Germans to fire the Taurus missile at Russian hinterland targets. The operational strategy agreed, a source claims, is Russian readiness to fight one battlefield at a time to match Trump’s sequencing of wars on Russia’s western, eastern, and southern fronts. It is also to accelerate the fight to the finish on the Ukrainian battlefield.
“Within six months, by the end of the winter, to consolidate control of the four regions,” one source claims.
“In a year, maybe less, maybe longer,” another source believes. “The operational strategy is to keep the line hot; keep the Ukrainians, and of course the Americans, in doubt about which direction we will concentrate our ground movements. This is operational dominance, manoeuvre control, control of the surprise factor.”
“Comrades,” Putin assured the military meeting, “our shared objective remains unchanged – we must ensure the unconditional fulfilment of all goals set for the troops in the course of the special military operation.”
For the first time, the White House has issued a piece of paper (lead image, top), signed by the President, attempting to install a form of fuhrer fascism to deter, arrest, and if need be shoot to kill any form of expression which amounts to disloyalty to the President and to his MAGA doctrine.
The paper defined that as “targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society.” This includes public expression of the terms “fascist” and “anti-fascist”.
According to the White House paper, those who speak in such language are hiding under “the umbrella of self-described ‘anti-fascism.’ These movements portray foundational American principles (e.g., support for law enforcement and border control) as ‘fascist’ to justify and encourage acts of violent revolution. This ‘anti-fascist’ lie has become the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties…anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity…and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
The paper, drafted by Stephen Miller, deputy chief of the White House staff, was signed by Trump on September 25. It is titled “NATIONAL SECURITY PRESIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM/NSPM-7”. Its subject is “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” Read the Miller Memorandum in full here.
It was followed by the Pentagon order for all US forces commanders and their staffs to assemble at the Quantico base in Virginia on September 30 to be addressed by Trump and Peter Hegseth, the Defense Secretary.
Since May 6, they have been under the direct threat of purge. Hegseth announced he was commencing to cut by 20% the 3 and 4-star general ranks of the main forces, by 10% in other flag officers of the main forces, and a 20% cut in the general ranks of the National Guard. No time line was announced for the cuts to be decided in two phases.
He was starting, Hegseth also claimed, “the most comprehensive review” of headquarters and operational command structures and areas of responsibility since 1986. When that takes place, there will be “a minimum of an additional ten percent reduction of general and flag officers throughout the DOD, in conjunction with the realignment of the unified command plan.”
The sword of Damocles wasn’t a stab in the back. “This is not a slash and burn exercise meant to punish high ranking officers, nothing could be further from the truth,” Hegseth claimed in anticipation of resistance from the generals.
None of these proposed cuts or reorganizations of commands were confirmed in the four months before Trump ordered the generals to assemble. None of the mainstream media journalists at the Pentagon nor of the alt-media military podcasters has reported a general source as admitting the link between the purge plan, the Miller Memorandum, and Trump’s summons to Quantico. The President then made this obvious.
In his speech to the assembled flag officers (lead image, bottom), Trump declared: “we are under invasion from within. We’re stopping it very quickly. After spending trillions of dollars defending the borders of foreign countries, with your help, we’re defending the borders of our country from now on. We’re not going to let this happen…San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places and we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within. Controlling the physical territory of our border is essential to national security. We can’t let these people live…If it’s OK with you generals and admirals…I say, they spit, we hit. Is that OK? I think so. They spit — it’s a new thing. They spit, we hit…This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room because it’s the enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control. It won’t get out of control, once you’re involved…With leaders like we have right here in this beautiful room today, we will vanquish every danger and crush every threat to our freedom in every generation to come, because we will fight, fight, fight and we will win, win, win.”
Trump also issued the loyalty warning: “I’ve never walked into a room so silent before. This is very — don’t laugh! Don’t laugh, you’re not allowed to do that! You know what, just have a good time. And if you want to applaud, you applaud. And if want to do anything you want, you can do anything that you want. And if don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank, there goes you future.”
That was at the beginning of Trump’s hour-long speech. Then at the end, the warning was repeated: “I’ll tell you, Pete and General Caine and all of the people that I’ve met that have been lifted up in rank. And we got many of them out of here. To be honest with you, I didn’t like doing it, but we got many of you out of here because we weren’t satisfied.”
Viewed in Moscow, the Kremlin-supported security analysis platform Vzglyad has reported the political significance of the loyalty oath assembly in Quantico when most US experts have missed it. This is because the Russians remember Adolf Hitler’s loyalty oath (Führereid) and what followed for Russia. Between 1934 and 1935, first for military personnel and then for civilians, Hitler ordered the state loyalty oath to be changed from the secular language, “I swear loyalty to the Reich’s constitution” to: “I swear by God this holy oath that I shall render unconditional obedience to the Leader of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler, supreme commander of the armed forces”.
According to Vzglyad’s writer, Gevork Mirzayan, “hundreds of American generals were offered a choice. In the understanding of liberals, the choice is between personal loyalty to Trump and loyalty to the American state. [In] July 1935, the German generals were summoned to an extraordinary meeting in Berlin and informed that their previous oath of allegiance to the Weimar Constitution was invalid and that they must take a personal oath to the Fuhrer. ‘Most of the generals have taken a new oath to retain their positions,’ retired General Ben Hodges commented on the Quantico meeting.”
The Russian interpretation is not placed between the lines. This is a message directed by a leading policy medium at the Kremlin, not a message from the Kremlin to the audience outside the Kremlin wall.
Last week (October 2) at the Valdai Club conference in Sochi, President Vladimir Putin (lead image, left) responded to a question from an Iranian about the war in Gaza and President Donald Trump’s plan for Gaza which had been released two days earlier in Washington.
“About Trump’s Gaza plan,” Putin replied, “you know, it will probably come as a surprise to you, but on the whole, Russia is ready to support him. If, of course, as we have to look carefully at the proposals made, it will lead to the final goal, which we have always talked about. Russia has always advocated the creation of two states: Israel and a Palestinian state, starting in 1948 and then in 1974, when the relevant UN Security Council resolution was adopted. And this, in my opinion, is the key to a final solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.”
Claiming he had not “looked at this proposal so carefully yet”, Putin enumerated his questions: “First: How long will this international administration work? How and to whom will power be transferred later? As far as I understand, this plan outlines the possibility of transferring power to the Palestinian Authority. In my opinion, it would be better, of course, to put everything under the control of President [Mahmoud] Abbas and the current Palestinian administration. It may be difficult for them to resolve the security issues. But so far as I can imagine, my colleagues, with whom I spoke on this topic today, envisage the possibility of transferring control over the Gaza Strip, including to the local militia, to ensure security. Is this bad? In my opinion, this is a good thing.”
“We need to understand, I repeat, how long the international administration will manage there, in what time frame it is supposed to transfer both civil power and security issues, which is very important. And, in my opinion, this should definitely be supported. We are talking about freeing all the hostages held by Hamas, on the one hand, and releasing a significant number of Palestinians from Israeli prisons. Here, too, we need to understand how many Palestinians, whom, and at what time can we release them? And of course, you know, the most important question is: how does Palestine feel about this? That’s exactly what you need to understand. And the countries of the region, the entire Islamic world, and Palestine itself, the Palestinians themselves, including, of course, Hamas… Of course, Israel’s attitude towards this is also important. We don’t know yet either: how did Israel take it? I do not even know of any public statements on this subject, I just did not have time to look at it. But it’s not even public statements that are important, but in fact how the Israeli leadership will treat this, whether it will fulfill everything that the President of the United States has proposed. There are a lot of questions.”
Putin was skeptical of the role in a Gaza supervisory authority known as the “Board of Peace” (BOP) proposed by Trump for former UK prime minister Tony Blair. Hinting at Blair’s roles in initiating the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Putin said “he’s not known as a great peacemaker, but I know him personally. Moreover, I visited him, spent the night at his house, we had coffee in our pyjamas in the morning, and so on…He is a man with his own views, but he is an experienced politician. And in general, of course, if his activities, his experience, and his knowledge are directed towards a peaceful course, then he can play some positive role.”
The next day, October 3, the Hamas leadership issued a 5-paragraph reply to Trump.
This was amplified in a detailed response to the Trump plan in a 21-minute interview broadcast by Al-Arabiya, the Saudi state television channel based in Riyadh. Osama Hamdan (lead image, right), a veteran Palestinian diplomat, advisor to and spokesman for Hamas, answered each of Putin’s questions, and more.Watch and if need be, turn on the English auto-translate function at the Youtube setting.
Hamdan rejects any role for the foreign “board of peace”, proposed by Trump in his plan, and any role as a foreign overseer or viceroy for Blair, whether in his pyjamas or out of them.
On June 30, 2021, during his Direct Line programme, President Vladimir Putin was asked what games he liked to play during his schooldays. “I am tempted to say chess,” he replied, “but, unfortunately, it was not chess.”
Four years have gone by until his appearance yesterday at the Valdai Club, when the president was asked the same question. He replied: “Well, I loved chess.”
Putin was castling.
In the ancient game of chess the move which is known by this name is a relatively new one. The rules to allow it also took centuries to develop. The purpose of castling is defence when the king is under attack and there is safe space between the king and the castle (rook), so that they can exchange places and the king retreat to the safer margin of the board. The opportunity created thereby is for the rook to move more actively into the counter-attack against the adversary. The castling king is delegating the offensive to his rook.
To understand what Putin’s castling means on the board today, read what he said first about the Board of Peace (BOP) Gaza plan of President Donald Trump, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and ex-prime minister Tony Blair. “Russia always supports and welcomes any steps by Trump,” he told his spokesman to say, “that seek to avert the tragedy that is now unfolding. We want this plan to be realized, so that it may help steer events in the Middle East toward a peaceful path”.
The clock at the Tass office in Moscow was reading 14:24 on Tuesday afternoon when Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for President Vladimir Putin, was reported as saying the following about the Gaza plan of President Donald Trump, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and ex-prime minister Tony Blair: “Russia always supports and welcomes any steps by Trump that seek to avert the tragedy that is now unfolding. We want this plan to be realized, so that it may help steer events in the Middle East toward a peaceful path”.
Two hours later, the Tass clock was reading 16:13 when Peskov told the Tass reporter to add: “If you asked me if Russia is involved in this plan [of Trump on the settlement in the Gaza Strip], no, it is not. There were no signals from the American side on this.”
Across the city at the Foreign Ministry, the hands on the clock on Maria Zakharova’s wall had moved to 17:24, when having completed all the required sign-offs, the spokesman published the official Ministry response to the Gaza plan: “Donald Trump’s plan provides for a ceasefire in the Palestinian enclave, the release of hostages and all detained persons, as well as the gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces. It also includes lifting the blockade and ensuring free access of humanitarian aid to all those who need it under the auspices of the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross.”
“The leading Arab Muslim countries have expressed support for the plan. The Palestinian National Authority has confirmed its readiness for cooperating with all partners to shape a comprehensive peace agreement. Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu has publicly welcomed the new US plan. Russia has always called for an immediate ceasefire and an end to bloodshed in Gaza. We believe that any measures and initiatives aimed at this deserve to be supported. We hope that a ceasefire will become sustainable and will ultimately lead to lasting stabilisation in the Palestinian enclave. This will create the necessary conditions for launching comprehensive efforts to rebuild the sector’s infrastructure, which has been almost completely destroyed during the hostilities.”
“It is important that a successful and smooth implementation of this plan should pave the way to the resumption of a constructive dialogue between the Israeli and Palestinian sides on a comprehensive political settlement of all disputed issues on the recognised international legal basis, which provides for the creation of an independent Palestinian state that will live in peace and security with Israel.”
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was out of Moscow in Sochi. He was attending the Kremlin-financed platform known as the Valdai Club.
He had been told what Peskov announced earlier as the Kremlin line. He had also agreed to the text of Zakharova’s press release. But then, at 17:59 publication time, he was asked: “What is Moscow’s position on Trump’s plan to resolve the situation in Gaza, which was announced on Monday? How do you assess the proposal to establish interim external management with the international participation and the formation of an international contingent for operational deployment in Gaza? Did Moscow receive any signals about the possibility of participating in this contingent? How do you assess the chances of success of this plan as a whole?”
Lavrov replied that, unlike Peskov and the Ministry in Moscow, he wasn’t ready to answer because he wasn’t sure what the plan details were, who had authored them, what the Arab governments were thinking, and how the Palestinians, including Hamas, would respond. He spoke ironically, which the Ministry signalled by putting some of Lavrov’s phrases in inverted commas and leaving his verbs to be understood to mean their opposite.
“We have not seen this plan. We have only heard comments about its contents. You have now outlined its main provisions. I have heard that this international body, which is intended to ‘temporarily govern Gaza’, is planned to be headed by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. He himself seems to have already announced this. I reiterate, I am not privy to the details. I do not know what powers he will be granted, nor how the Arab countries view this. I am aware that some of them have already welcomed ‘Donald Trump’s plan’. However, a final assessment can only be made once we know the views of all of Palestine’s neighbours, Israel, the countries of the region, the League of Arab States, the Gulf Cooperation Council, and, above all, the Palestinians themselves. I have heard that representatives of the Palestinian National Authority are not being considered for inclusion in this temporary body, even as observers.”
“Regarding the international security forces. No, we have not been invited to participate. I reiterate, we only became aware of this new plan yesterday. However, I have read that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, commenting on ‘Donald Trump’s plan’ – which was announced following Netanyahu’s visit to Washington – said that the plan is good and should not be altered. He claimed that Hamas and everyone else should agree to it. Among the positive aspects of this plan, he stated that Israel would retain control over security in Gaza. This somewhat contradicts the establishment of international forces, so all the details need to be clarified first.”
A long time ago, living in his Italian exile from Moscow, Maxim Gorky wrote a brief essay called “The Clock”. The point of it is at the beginning: “It is eerie to listen, in the stillness and loneliness of the night, to the beautiful and uniform voice of the clock…How shall we live so as to have the consciousness of not having lived in vain? How shall we live so as not to lose faith and willpower? How live that no second shall pass which is not moved by intellect and feeling? Will the clock never give an answer to that? Oh! this motion without an end! What does the clock say to it?”
by Editor - Wednesday, October 1st, 2025 No Comments »
A week ago on September 23, President Donald Trump called President Vladimir Putin’s military power a “paper tiger”, and declared ”this is the time for Ukraine to act”.
By that he said he meant “to take back their Country in its original form and, who knows, maybe even go further than that!”
Five days later, the successor president, Vice President J D Vance, explained that deployment on the Ukrainian battlefield by NATO-supplied Tomahawk cruise missiles, with a 2,500-km range, is the next step he and Trump are considering.
“Russia is really stalled,” Vance claimed, “The Russian economy is in shambles. The Russians are not gaining much on the battlefield… The Russians have refused to sit down in any bilateral meetings with the Ukrainians. They have refused to sit down in any trilateral meetings with the President…The Russians have got to wake up and accept reality here… About Tomahawks, it’s something the President is going to make the final determination on. What the President is going to do is what’s in the best interest of the United States of America.”
The scheme, Vance intimated, is to allow NATO member states with Tomahawk batteries – at the moment this means the UK and Germany – to deliver them to Kiev, or for other European states to buy the missiles from the US and send them on. This means that the crews operating the Tomahawk systems in the Ukraine would be British, German, or other Europeans. “What we’re doing,” Vance said, “is asking the Europeans to buy that weaponry that shows some European skin in the game. I think that gets them really invested in both what’s happening in their own backyard, but also in the peace process that the president has been pushing for, for the last eight months,” Vance said.
The skins at risk of Russian counterattack, Vance meant but omitted to acknowledge, would be European, not American.
The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, responded with the obvious followed by a placebo.
“We have heard these statements. We are thoroughly analyzing them. Our military specialists are closely monitoring it.” “Even if it happens that the United States sends its Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, currently there is no cure-all that could be a game changer on the front lines for the Kiev regime. No magical weapons exist, and Tomahawk or other missiles simply won’t be a game changer.”
Then Peskov muffled a warning: “The question… is this: who can launch these missiles…? Can only Ukrainians launch them, or do American soldiers have to do that?” The answer is already obvious – Vance made it plain. The operators of the Tomahawks would be Europeans.
Peskov’s questions also avoided Vance’s and Trump’s strategic point. They are now aiming to intensify the domestic damage they can inflict deep inside Russian territory – Moscow and St. Petersburg if they can — in the belief this will trigger loss of Russian morale and voter opposition to Putin. “This war is terrible for their economy,” Vance repeated several times, as has Trump. The Russians, Vance declared, “have to ask themselves how many more people are they willing to lose…for very little military advantage.”
What is happening from the Russian point of view which isn’t public?
The US “understanding” from the Anchorage summit meeting on August 16 is no longer the Russian interpretation as Putin himself first explained it. “Hopefully, the understanding [singular] we have reached will bring us closer to this goal and open up the road to peace in Ukraine,” Putin said at his brief press conference after meeting with Trump. “We see that the US President has a clear idea of what he wants to achieve, that he sincerely cares about his country’s prosperity while showing awareness of Russia’s national interests. I hope that today’s agreements [plural] will become a reference point, not only for resolving the Ukrainian problem but also for resuming the pragmatic business relations between Russia and the United States.”
Escalation to Tomahawk attacks on the Russia hinterland is also not the “understanding” with the US which the Russian Foreign Ministry announced after Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met at the United Nations with Secretary of State Marco Rubio: “The heads of the foreign offices exchanged opinions on the Ukraine crisis settlement as a follow up to the understandings [plural] reached at the Russia-US summit in Anchorage. The parties have reaffirmed mutual interest in the search for peaceful solutions. Sergey Lavrov emphasised our country’s readiness to adhere to the line developed by the Russian and US leaders in Alaska, including to coordinate efforts with the US side to remove the root causes of the Ukraine conflict. The minister stressed the unacceptability of the schemes intended to protract the conflict promoted by Kiev and some European countries. The parties compared their positions on the entire bilateral agenda including the prospects of restoring their socio-political contacts. They have reaffirmed the importance of using the impetus given by Russian and US presidents to the process of normalising bilateral relations.”
Speaking to Russian reporters, Lavrov then added: “We operate on the premise that everything we have heard from our US colleagues at the top and other levels tells us that they want to help us end this conflict by addressing and eliminating its root causes. There are no other countries in the Western camp that abide by such a position. I have no doubt that the US President is genuinely interested in this outcome. Some people are trying to have influence on him, but that’s another matter… The 2022 borders are off the table today. What we are now discussing are the borders as enshrined in the Constitution of the Russian Federation.”
The “reality on the ground”, as Vance and Trump say they understand it on the battlefield, is plainly now not the reality on the ground as the Russian side sees it. The US is announcing that Russia the paper tiger has lost escalation dominance on the battlefield, and is vulnerable to even greater domestic insecurity than it faced three years ago, when the Special Military Operation began. If that was the “root cause” of the war, as Putin and Lavrov say they have explained to their US counterparts, Trump and Vance are now dismissing “root cause” as the basis for terms to end the war.
When Vance announced that the Tomahawk deployment will be decided “in the interests of the United States of America”, he meant to say that the Russian military and Putin have lost their power of deterrence.
A Moscow source in a position to know says the General Staff will convince the President on the measures required to prove the Americans wrong. “I believe the Russians will secure victory using the Oreshniki rather than a massive ground offensive. But there is also a build-up many of us can tell. That is why Americans and Europeans are getting very nervous, threatening Russians with a direct confrontation unless they back off.”
