On August 24, 1991, Marshal Sergei Fyodorovich Akhromeyev committed suicide. He had returned from his holiday at Sochi responding to the attempted removal of Mikhail Gorbachev from power. According to the reports of the time, he hanged himself in his Kremlin office, leaving behind a note. One version of what it said was: “I cannot live when my fatherland is dying and everything that has been the meaning of my life is crumbling. Age and the life that I have lived give me the right to step out of this life. I struggled until the end.”
Listen to today’s discussion with Nima Alkhorshid as we inspect the defences being built now against President Donald Trump’s ultimatums from the Ukraine to Iran, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, India, and China.
Before we start, though, ask whether there is any evidence in what Trump himself says to show he understands any negotiating terms short of capitulation.
President Donald Trump had just turned nineteen in June 1965 when he heard on the radio the Rolling Stones sing the song which made them world famous. “I can’t get no satisfaction,” the song began, and repeated the line, and then repeated more words. “I can’t get no satisfaction/’Cause I try, and I try, and I try and I try/I can’t get no, I can’t get no.”
Trump’s syntax is the same, the tune he is singing is still no hit.
The Russian oligarchs created by the Yeltsin Administration and continued by the Putin Administration (with a handful of deductions) have never trusted Russia.
That’s why they have been willing to pay exorbitant prices for offshore assets – mines, steelmills, jet planes, motor yachts, Old Master paintings, and mansions with sea views – because the cash had been transferred out of Russia tax free, often stolen from other Russians or the state, sometimes in suitcases, concealed in chains of transfers between impenetrable holding companies, trusts and cutouts, laundered in violation of the Russian statutes on money laundering, which on Kremlin and Central Bank orders are not enforced. In other words, money that was hot and cheap.
Naturally, this lucrative cashflow has been vulnerable to raiding by individuals, especially Russians, acting on the principle that it isn’t illegal to steal from a thief and on the method that it is easy to raid when asset ownership depended on whispers and handshakes.
When these Russian robbers have fallen out, however, they have taken their disputes to the High Court of London to adjudicate. But why would such Russians trust the British courts and lawyers? Of course, they haven’t; they don’t. But they trust the Russian courts and lawyers much less.
The most famous of the High Court cases between two Russian robbers was Boris Berezovsky versus Roman Abramovich. That was decided in 2011 by the judge on her conclusion that while on the evidence testified to, the two were grand larcenists, especially from the Russian state, Abramovich was the more convincing liar of the two. Berezovsky lost, and as he faced bankruptcy, he killed himself in his London mansion full of paintings which he couldn’t sell because they were all forgeries. Altogether, the case lasted for five years, 2007-2012; Berezovsky’s losing claim totalled $5.6 billion, and more than twenty barristers were engaged for all sides, and more than that number of solicitors. The legal costs of the case came to more than $100 million.
This is how it ended. Then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin added his finale months before the judge: “What can I say? It would be better if they held this trial in Russia. [Question: Would Russia gain from this economically?] This would be more honest – both for them and our country. The money was made and stolen here – let them divide it here, too.”
Less famous, but much longer and more costly, was the group of London court cases revolving around the Russian state shipping group Sovcomflot and its associated companies which, altogether, run the largest energy tanker fleet in the world. The cases ran for sixteen years (2005-2021); were heard by thirteen judges in the High Court, the Court of Appeal, and the Supreme Court; in legal fees and penalties they cost more than $200 million. Two Russian shipping executives and a Russian charterer were acquitted and compensated. They were then tried in a Moscow court; convicted on evidence the London courts had dismissed; and sentenced to long prison terms in absentia, because they had won refuge from the injustice and granted asylum in the UK.
President Putin has had nothing at all to say about the two outcomes of the case. For his reasons and the conflicting directions he has given over the years on Russian shipping policy, read the book.
The Russian aluminium (Rusal) oligarch Oleg Deripaska (lead image, right) has probably run more cases in the High Court and over more years than any other Russian litigant. They can be followed in this archive. In one of these lawsuits decided last year, the judge opened his ruling by saying: “It is fair to say that the Claimants (“the Deripaska Parties”) and Vladimir Chernukhin and his company Navigator Equities Ltd (“Navigator”) (“the Chernukhin Parties”) are not the best of friends. It is also fair to say that the honesty and integrity of both of Mr. Deripaska and Mr. Chernukhin has from time to time been found to be wanting in cases before the English Courts, not least in previous proceedings before this court under sections 67 and 68 of the Arbitration Act 1996.” — Para 1. Deripaska won his case as the judgement concluded that “the Deripaska Parties wish to discover the identity of the persons who, it is strongly arguable, forged a document designed to deceive this court and an arbitral tribunal, and to defraud them of some US$300m. I consider that the granting of the relief sought in this case is a necessary and proportionate response to this serious wrongdoing in all the circumstances.” — Para 123.
The notoriety of these cases and of the litigants has advertised the availability of the British courts and lawyers to serve increasingly large numbers of corporations and individuals with big-money claims and personal axes to grind. Better and more predictable value, they calculate, to spend their money on British lawyers in London courts than on bribes and other “administrative measures” in the Russian courts.
In practice, the escalation of the British Government’s war against Russia on the Ukraine battlefield and in economic sanctions, especially against the oligarchs, ought to have stopped the lawyers from taking on new cases and the courts from hearing them. But this hasn’t happened.
The big reason is the war itself — the Russians are retaliating against the sanctions by refusing to repay British and other banks for the credits they received before they were sanctioned. The principle is the same – it isn’t illegal to steal from a thief. The foreign banks are also using the sanctions to shield themselves from the judgements of the Russian courts in paying their obligations to Russian companies.
No one in their right mind fights four wars on four separate fronts at the same time, three of them against nuclear-armed adversaries. But President Donald Trump doesn’t have a right mind.
He has delegated that to an under secretary of Defense named Elbridge Colby and his business partner, Wess Mitchell. They have repeatedly written decision memoranda for the President on sequencing his wars, one war, one front at a time, and transferring the risks, casualties, and costs of the warfighting to his allies – the Anglo-Europeans on the Ukraine battlefield, and the Israelis on the battlefield against Iran. But Trump doesn’t read before he makes up his mind.
Instead, Trump has decided he can compel his allies to pay the price of his warfighting in their money and their blood, so he can afford to skip the sequencing, fight all his wars at once, and multiply the profits for himself. In Trump’s new declarations of war this week against Russia, India, and China, and the introduction of his new warfighting alliance with Pakistan against India, China and Iran simultaneously, this is what Trump thinks he is doing.
Calling it peacemaking, he has told the Norwegian government to make sure he wins this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
Colby and Mitchell don’t have enough of a business to make themselves targets in this new war. But the billionaire asset raiders and speculators who have been bailing out Trump’s insolvencies, financing his election campaigns, and serving as his negotiators for the capitulation terms he aims at forcing, are now military targets – their companies, funds, trusts, homes, and cash balances, that is. They are Steven Witkoff, the special negotiator for Gaza, Iran and Russia; Howard Lutnick, Secretary of Commerce; Steven Feinberg, Pentagon Deputy Secretary; Scott Bessent, Treasury Secretary; and Warren Stephens, US Ambassador to the UK. This is a turn-up for the books, their books, which they haven’t been anticipating. But then no one who isn’t in their right mind anticipates they will be defeated in warfighting by the likes of Russians, Indians, Chinese, or Iranians.
In this new podcast with Nima Alkhorshid, we discuss the warfighting thresholds which have been crossed this week, starting with the reported operational deployment of the Russian S-400 air defence missile system in Iran, targeting Israeli and US aircraft.
During his long weekend in Scotland, President Donald Trump announced that nothing but the capitulation of both his allies and his adversaries will satisfy his MAGA and MEGA aims. Make America Great Again, Make the Empire Great Again come to the same thing: capitulation to Trump’s terms or die. Trump’s term for that is “total obliteration”.
Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission President, capitulated, and so did UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
Both of them are playing for time — and paying heavily in new tribute to the US: 5% of their GDP ($1.2 trillion) to expand their armies and refill the Ukrainian battlefield with US weapons; $750 billion in purchases of US oil and gas; $600 billion in European investments in US assets; $90 billion in tariff penalties to the US Treasury; and several hundred billion dollars, euros, and pounds in money losses of domestic producers against duty-free US import dumping.
Trump has also dismissed all terms for ending the Ukraine war which President Vladimir Putin has presented, together with the ceasefire concessions he has made since their first telephone call on February 12.
“I’m — I’m not — you know, I’m not so interested in talking anymore,” Trump declared at the Turnberry golf club he owns on Monday. About Putin, “he’s a — he talks. We have such nice conversations, such respectful and nice conversations, and then people die the following night in a — with a missile going into a town and hitting — I mean, recently I guess the nursing home, but they hit other things. Whatever they hit people die. So, I don’t — we’ll see what happens.”
There have been no terms from Russia, Trump has claimed. “No, I haven’t gotten — I haven’t had any response.” And so he has issued a new surrender ultimatum for Putin: “Ten days from today” – that’s August 8. “We’re going to put on tariffs and stuff, and I don’t know if it’s going to affect Russia because he wants to obviously probably keep the war going. But we’re going to put on tariffs and the various things that you put on. It may or may not affect them, but it could.”
Trump has followed with a declaration of sanctions war against India. “They have always bought a vast majority of their military equipment from Russia, and are Russia’s largest buyer of ENERGY, along with China, at a time when everyone wants Russia to STOP THE KILLING IN UKRAINE — ALL THINGS NOT GOOD! INDIA WILL THEREFORE BE PAYING A TARIFF OF 25%, PLUS A PENALTY FOR THE ABOVE, STARTING ON AUGUST FIRST. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER. MAGA!”
Trump followed this attack with a new pact for Pakistan, the enemy India defeated in the four-day Operation Sindoor in May. According to Trump yesterday, “we have just concluded a Deal with the Country of Pakistan, whereby Pakistan and the United States will work together on developing their massive Oil Reserves. We are in the process of choosing the Oil Company that will lead this Partnership. Who knows, maybe they’ll be selling Oil to India some day!” The concealed terms of the “deal” include the replacement of Chinese arms supplies to Pakistan with US substitutes, and the sabotage of Chinese infrastructure projects.
As for the impact on US energy prices and economy-wide inflation from his campaign to stop Russia oil flowing to the international market, Trump has said: “I don’t worry about it. We have so much oil in our country. We’ll just step it up even further. I mean, oil is down pretty low right now. We’ll step it up even further.”
This is braggadocio and vainglory. What it means is that Trump and his advisors and officials understand there is a new vulnerability for their MEGA war – that is the same combination of inflation and blood which during the Vietnam War resulted in the retreat of the US army and the defeat of the Democratic Party presidency of Lyndon Johnson. Trump is claiming he can escape oil price inflation and put the European and British militaries in the firing line with Russia. No US body bags.
Listen to Chris Cook’s latest Gorilla Radio broadcast in which the Gorilla spells out the fight-back strategy aimed at Trump’s soft underbelly.
President Vladimir Putin has held three telephone calls with the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this year so far. What matters most now, after the third of these calls on July 28, is that Putin has omitted to put on the Kremlin record what he told Netanyahu – and what Netanyahu has just relayed to President Donald Trump that is Putin’s warning to them both.
If the latest press leaks, calculated in Iran and possibly in India too, are correct, then Putin has crossed a warfighting threshold he has refused to cross before.
The President of the European Commission and the British Prime Minister have just demonstrated to President Vladimir Putin that there are only two options in dealing with the US President, and negotiations aren’t one of them.
Read the verbatim record of what Trump told Putin during his press conference with Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Monday as he and President Ursula von der Leyen have chosen to capitulate themselves. The video record can be viewed here.
The record also reveals that Trump planted a reporter’s question so that he could publicly demand from Starmer his multi-million dollar golf course bribe – a 15-year imprisonment crime in US law:
“Question: Mr. President, can we come to Turnberry, if I may? Have you or will you enlist the prime minister in your effort to bring the open back to Turnberry? And Prime Minister, you described this beautiful course. Do you agree with the president that it’s time to bring the Open back to Turnberry?
Keir Starmer: Well, as you know, that’s not a matter directly for me. That’s for the sporting authorities. But, look, I mean, it is absolute — the first time I’ve been here. It’s absolutely magnificent, both inside and out. And looking at the courses itself and the building, it’s — it’s incredible. But the decision on the Open is not a decision for me, as you’ll understand.”
Trump was pressing because UK officials have been telling the London newspapers the Trump bribe is too expensive for them to pay. The British Open Golf championship had not been held at Turnberry since 2009, five years before Trump bought it, a UK official told a newspaper in February, because the course “needed tens, or hundreds, of millions of pounds of investment to improve its accessibility by public transport and by road as well as improved hotel facilities.” In April, Starmer’s subordinates were still trying. “The government is doing everything it can to get close to Trump. One concrete thing is that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) have been involved in pushing for the Open to return to Trump-owned Turnberry.”
President Donald Trump’s long weekend trip to Scotland wasn’t to meet King Charles III; that meeting has been set for mid-September.
He met the President of European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, not to negotiate trade terms but to announce the conclusion of what Trump called “probably the biggest deal ever reached in any capacity trade or beyond trade;” also, “the biggest deal. People don’t realize. This is bigger than any other deal. We have, uh, great countries, great countries. Uh, I’m familiar with many of ’em, so are you. And, uh, this is really the biggest deal. This is the, I guess we’re the biggest, uh, out there.”
He also met British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. The two hours he spent with each of them was less than the games of golf he played with his son Eric Trump, and with Warren Stephens, the US Ambassador to the UK since May and another of the asset speculators who have financed Trump’s re-election campaign.
Trump’s purpose in Scotland was to advertise the game of golf on the two resort courses he owns in Scotland — Turnberry in Ayrshire in the southwest, and in Aberdeen in the northeast. “The golf was, uh, the golf was beautiful,” Trump told the press beside von der Leyen. “It’s, uh, golf can never be bad, even if you play badly, it’s, uh, it’s still good. If you had a bad day on the golf course, it’s okay. Uh, it’s better than other days”.
That’s Trump’s game. But Trump’s golf business is in financial trouble within the Trump group of companies in the US; and in the financial accounts it is required to report to the UK Companies House.
Advertising the value of the assets, as Trump’s game-playing visit has been planned to display, also exposes the financial vulnerability and invites rescue at a takeover premium. If the Trump plan is to pressure the British and Scots authorities into designating Turnberry for the British Open Championship; or if it is an advertisement to sell to an investor who has needs of his own from the US Government, then the scheme may amount to an offence under 18 U.S. Code § 201: “Whoever…being a public official or person selected to be a public official, directly or indirectly, corruptly demands, seeks, receives, accepts, or agrees to receive or accept anything of value personally or for any other person or entity, in return for: (A) being influenced in the performance of any official act.”
