Apparently, We’re Now Talking About Peace Talks

Just to be clear on the timeline here: July is like, 4 days away. But with the spring offensive being launched in June, it’s possible that the July peace talks might not happen until September.

The Ukraine is known to give things deceptive names in order to boggle the minds of their dim-witted opponents. It’s similar to how the Vikings named the ice land “Greenland” and the green land “Iceland.”

RT:

Peace negotiations on the Ukraine conflict could begin as early as next month, German state-TV channel ARD has claimed. According to the broadcaster, senior officials from a number of global powers held a meeting last week in the Danish capital Copenhagen to discuss the issue.

ARD reported on Sunday that US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan was among the dignitaries present at the event. According to the broadcaster, the main objective of the gathering was to secure the support of ‘neutral’ countries such as China, India, Brazil and South Africa.

The high-ranking meeting represented a major step forward toward actual peace negotiations, ARD claimed. Citing its Brussels bureau, it added that talks could get underway as early as July.

Last Thursday, the Financial Times reported that Sullivan, along with high-ranking State Department official Victoria Nuland, would head a “diplomatic offensive” at Ukraine’s request. Their purported objective was to convince powers from the ‘Global South’ to scale back their relations with Russia.

However, the officials were not confident of succeeding, the FT claimed. The newspaper quoted an anonymous European official as acknowledging that the “rest of the world is not convinced” by the West’s stance.

…

Meanwhile, taking to Facebook on Sunday, the head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, Aleksey Danilov, wrote that he would not rule out Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s participation in future peace talks involving Russia.

As I always say:

• I do not have any insider information, and
• I am not a wizard, or in possession of any sort of mystical or magical powers.

Therefore, it would be ridiculous for me to make predictions about things that will happen in the future.

“Predicting the future” has become a popular game among political commentators, as it is viewed as an easy way to gain credibility. What they all do is throw out tons of predictions, enough so that a handful will necessarily be correct, and then when the majority do not come true they ignore those and focus on the few they got right just by the nature of statistical odds.

I focus on the right-wing, because they’re the ones doing this in a way that is so offensive to me personally, but the left does it too. The left is actually probably worse about it. I’m old enough to remember when MSNBC was predicting every single day that the very next day Donald Trump would finally be caught red-handed colluding with Russia.

(NOTE: I’m not sure the left does this for political points in the way the right does. I think they are more about promoting a fantasy world by creating complex conspiracy theory narratives and then pushing off the need to prove them by claiming the proof will come at a later date. The right also does this, notably with QAnon and with Sean Hannity type theories about how Democrats are going to be arrested soon.)

So, I just want to be clear on that: I don’t make predictions.

The right is so inundated with prediction-makers that it sometimes seems like people are suggesting I’m bitching out for not making predictions. As if everyone has to make predictions, and if you say you don’t make predictions, you’re refusing to play by the rules. But seriously: I don’t have insider info and I am not a wizard. Why would anyone think I could predict events?

What I can do is look at the information that is available to all of us and try to figure out where things are going. Based on what people are saying and doing, I can look at potential outcomes.

There were only ever three potential outcomes to the Russia-Ukraine conflict:

• #1: Russia wins the war, most likely through some kind of negotiated surrender by the extant Kiev Junta (less likely, it could be through a coup in the Ukraine, either assisted or unassisted by Russia)
• #2: The US/NATO enter the war and it becomes a global war, and
• #3: The pressure from the war and sanctions causes the Russian government to collapse, the country Balkanizes, and America installs various puppets.

There was one outcome that was never a possibility at all:

• #4: The Ukraine wins a war outright by dominating Russia on the battlefield.

No matter how many weapons they got, and no matter how terribly Russia fought, the sheer differential in the sizes of the countries made #4 always impossible. At various points, the US’ top players, including the war’s main planner, Victoria Nuland, have said that #4 is impossible and the goal in saying you are trying to do #4 is pushing for #3. Meanwhile, many believed that Nuland was actually pushing for #2 behind the scenes.

One would have thought that #3 was off the table after the Russian economy was saved, but the attempted coup by Wagner’s Top Jew Prigozhin showed that this is still a possibility.

It is impossible to say that #1 is “more likely” than #2, as it is impossible to predict the behavior of the US government. Saying “surely, Jews wouldn’t do something like that” has not ever worked out well for anyone.

That said, #1 is what any rational person, without any insider information, would have naturally assumed was the most likely.

I was seeing signs, and noting them on this website, that #1 was in the works in the West, long before this debacle of a failed counteroffensive (which the Ukraine authorities are now officially claiming was a series of probes, by the way). People in positions of power were getting cold feet, top level think tanks were publishing claims that the war was pointless and should end, the “Keev” government was looking less and less stable, the Ukrainian population itself was running out of warm bodies to throw into the Russian war machine, and the US government was pivoting to attacking China.

Now, after the commitment to the killing fields of Bakhmut, and the slapstick comedy style counteroffensive, this has become the biggest debacle in military history. There is nothing that even comes close to the Ukraine debacle, as no national army in all of history would have kept fighting for this long while knowing they would lose. This situation was only possible because of the unique situation of the Ukraine being controlled by a foreign power that was apparently trying to get the entire population killed on purpose, and the ability to use electronic media censorship to convince the population both that they were winning the war and that the enemy was planning to kill them all out of pure mean-spiritedness.

In a situation of #1 negotiations, the US puppeteers would tell their puppet Zelensky that the jig was up, and order him to attend peace talks with Russia and do whatever Putin wanted him to do. The US would then claim that it was all Zelensky’s fault – that they wanted to keep fighting but he wouldn’t do it. Conversely, they would also claim both that they actually won, because Russia didn’t conquer the entire Ukrainian territory, and that at some point in the future, they would come back stronger to destroy Russia.

We are now at the point where Ukrainian officials have begun to break the ice on the topic, and hearing rumors of plans for talks. Of course, the Ukraine and the media are continuing to claim that the Ukraine is winning in their “counteroffensive,” pushing #4 as the inevitable end, just around the corner.

Maybe negotiations will happen in July. That’s certainly very possible at this point.

However, the war could also keep going indefinitely, and the US could also announce a “limited” NATO deployment at any moment. There are people in Washington right now arguing that the failure of the counteroffensive is just more proof that the Ukrainians need more help, and there are three or four dozen US Senators who would enthusiastically support #2 with no questions asked. Antony Blinken was out there on Sunday arguing that Prigozhin’s drunken fail coup is proof Putin is weak and now is the time to start putting more pressure on Russia.

If I were forced to bet on it, I would bet that negotiations of some kind are organized before the end of the year, but that the war drags on for another year or so. It seems like there is enough energy behind the financials of the war, and enough apathy among Americans and Europeans, that they really don’t have any reason to wrap it up quickly, even if they’re ready to start scaling it back. If they give up on actually trying to move the line, and pivot to holding the territory they currently have, the Western equipment would be more effective, and they wouldn’t be burning through so many boys.

However, within another year or so, Russia will most likely strengthen their army and try to move on Kharkov and/or Odessa, and it’s possible that there is enough sense in Washington to try to keep those in negotiations.

Who Wants What?

Ultimately, I don’t think there is a single person who knows how this is going to play out, and whatever happens is going to be the result of jockeying between various forces in the West.

These groups want a pullback/wind down/wrap-up:

• Top-ranking military officials
• The think tank intelligentsia
• Israel’s current authorities
• Anti-Chinese extremists of all shades
• German industrialists
• Silicon Valley tech bros
• Whatever MAGA elements remain in the Republican Party/donors

These groups, conversely, want to keep pounding and potentially start a world war:

• The media
• NATO
• Arms contractors
• BlackRock
• Extremist Russian Jews with a megalomaniacal obsession with Russian Jewish history
• Soros type NGOs
• Democrat politicians

There is obviously overlap between some of those groups, and the lines wouldn’t be totally clean-cut (even the arms contractors could split if they figure that stockpiling arms to threaten China would be more profitable – in April, Biden announced plans for four new bases in the Philippines). But on the whole, this is what I’ve observed, and you can see them doing the back and forth in real time.

Things to Watch

Recently, there has been a big push to get Israel to commit to the Ukraine. If Bibi Netanyahu agrees to do that, it’s probably a signal things will keep rolling for a while, as Bibi Netanyahu very rarely agrees to do anything he doesn’t want to do.

Beyond that, we’ll obviously keep an eye on the arms transfers, though that could give the wrong feedback. (It’s possible that if the US was getting ready to negotiate, they would send a bunch more equipment for the stated purpose of negotiating from strength while for the real purpose of getting as much of it destroyed as possible so they can replace it.)

Even discussing negotiations at all is a big signal, though that is still being observed. Remember that Boris Johnson flew in in April of 2022 and ordered Zelensky not to negotiate for peace. Zelensky had publicly stated that he was willing to surrender the Donbass and agree to neutrality. Following that, Zelensky signed a decree that made it illegal to ever negotiate with Russia. (He can obviously sign a decree rescinding that decree, because the Ukraine is a vibrant democracy.)

What does not seem to be a factor at all in the calculus of anyone powerful is just how badly this war on Russia has damaged the US’ standing on the global chessboard. The way that this has empowered China is my favorite topic, but aside from the think tanks (and that wild Fiona Hill speech), no one really even brings this up in the West. The media simply ignores completely the fact that there has been an epic sea change in the Third World towards aligning with China.

It appears also that failures in the Ukraine are almost as irrelevant as the failures on the global stage. Presumably, this talk of talks comes in light of the failure of the counteroffensive/”cascading series of probes,” but there are no statements from anyone in power linking the two together. As I’ve said repeatedly over the last few weeks, while the Ukraine military was getting slaughtered in their counteroffensive, and there were all of these viral clips of Western tanks being blown up, the media was running headlines saying that they were on the verge of conquering Crimea. The media narrative obviously doesn’t necessarily reflect the internal discussions of the decision-makers, but it appears to me that we would all be shocked by how much they overlap (that is to say, it appears to me that many people in decision-maker roles would prefer watching CNN and reading the New York Times to reading the technical data on the war).

Be Mindful of Predictors

In conclusion, I would just restate my above point: don’t take predictions too seriously.

Making predictions can be fun, but it can easily spin out into a fake reality. People talking to large audiences have a responsibility to those audiences, and they should not pretend to be orb-pondering wizards.

Overall, the Western world feels extremely unstable. Maybe these people will start World War III, maybe they will keep up a simmering state of high tension across the globe until they can’t anymore. Maybe the economic collapse will continue apace, maybe it will speed up. Regardless of how the details play out, the trajectory is the West is unambiguously downward.

No one has the ability to change these things that are happening. The reason that I communicate them to you is not because I think anyone is going to change anything on the global scale, but because I want to help people make decisions in their own lives, which will ultimately be what leads us to a better world.

In general, I would say that focusing on the downward trend is much more important than getting riled up by big events. I say this obviously as someone who got quite riled by the events in Russia last week, but that was a state of riling that existed in the context of the thing happening live. At that point, it’s justified. However, if you spend your life expecting some major world-changing collapse event to be coming along any day, you might end up not paying enough attention to the general downward trend, and therefore your decisions may not end up being as informed as they might have been.

I encourage you all to make informed decisions about your future and, insofar as it is within your power, about the futures of your family members. Personally, I feel very strongly that you can’t go wrong in scaling back your life, moving to a rural or relatively rural location, and getting a handle on some degree of self-sufficiency.

Some of you reading this, I know, are sitting in cities and scared to death of what your kids are being taught in school. You wouldn’t be worrying about that if you’d taken my advice and moved out of the city in 2020. Moreover, when you live in a safer environment that you have more control over, you’re going to spend a lot less time thinking about the next big happening, and more time enjoying your life, spending it with people you care about, doing things that bring you joy, and creating bright spots in the darkness that is the 21st century experience pattern of occidental man.

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