Tag: russia

Volodymyr Zelensky’s Non-Compromise NATO Compromise

A key reason that Russia went to war in Ukraine was to prevent Ukraine from ever joining NATO; a key reason that Ukraine went to war with Russia was to defend their right to join NATO. On December 14, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky gave up Ukraine’s right to join NATO. He presented the concession as a compromise. But it is not really a compromise. Zelensky may intend the non-compromise to leverage concessions from Russia, but it may not really change anything.

That blocking Ukraine accession to NATO was Moscow’s primary motivation has been confirmed by NATO, by Ukraine and by the United States. Jens Stoltenberg, NATO Secretary General at the start of the war, says that “no more NATO enlargement… was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine… [Putin] went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.”

Davyd Arakhamiia, who led the Ukrainian negotiating team in Istanbul, says that an assurance that Ukraine would not join NATO was the “key point” for Russia. “It was the most important thing for them… They were prepared to end the war if we agreed to… neutrality, and committed that we would not join NATO.”  Zelensky said, in his first interview after the invasion, “As far as I remember, they started the war because of this.”

Amanda Sloat, the former Special assistant to President Biden and Senior Director for Europe at the National Security Council, was recently caught suggesting that a guarantee that Ukraine not join NATO could have prevented the war. “We had some conversations even before the war started about, what if Ukraine comes out and just says to Russia, ‘Fine, you know, we won’t go into NATO, you know, if that stops the war, if that stops the invasion’ – which at that point it may well have done,” she said. “There is certainly a question, three years on now, you know, would that have been better to do before the war started, would that have been better to do in Istanbul talks? It certainly would have prevented the destruction and loss of life… If you wanna do an alternative version of history, you know, one option would have just been for Ukraine to say in January 2022, ‘Fine, you know, we won’t go into NATO, we’ll stay neutral. Ukraine could’ve made a deal, I guess, in, what, March, April 2022 around the time of the Istanbul talks.”

But Ukraine did not make that deal because the United States, the U.K., Poland and their partners pushed them not to. They promised Ukraine whatever they need for as long as they need it to fight Russia in defense of the “core principle” that Ukraine has the right to choose its alliances and that NATO has the right to expand.

Nearly four years and hundreds of thousands of deaths later, Ukraine has surrendered the right to join NATO. On December 14, Zelensky said that he is ready to give up the demand for NATO membership in exchange for “bilateral security guarantees between Ukraine and the United States – namely, Article 5–like guarantees… as well as security guarantees for us from our European partners and from other countries such as Canada, Japan and others.”

Zelensky presented this concession as “a compromise on our part.” But it is not really a compromise for three reasons.

The first is that the retraction of the promise that Ukraine would join NATO was already a done deal. Ukraine’s accession to NATO was never going to happen.

That reality was implicitly stated by Biden and explicitly stated by Trump. It is point number 7 in Trump’s 28-point peace plan. The reality has been recognized by Zelensky who has “understood that NATO is not prepared to accept Ukraine” since the start of the war. He has, since that time, “acknowledged” that Ukraine “cannot enter” the “supposedly open” NATO door and that, though “publicly, the doors remain open,” in reality, Ukraine is “not going to be a NATO member.” Any hope of resuscitating that dream died in the recently released 2025 National Security Strategy of the United States of America that states the policy priority of “Ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.”

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The EU is getting ready for its most dangerous move

Modern diplomacy is increasingly taking on strange and contradictory forms. Participants in the latest round of Ukraine-related talks in Berlin report significant progress and even a degree of rapprochement. How accurate these claims are is hard to judge. When Donald Trump says the positions have converged by 90%, he may be correct in a purely numerical sense. But the remaining 10% includes issues of fundamental importance to all sides. This, however, does not stop Trump from insisting that progress is being made. He needs to create a sense of inevitability, believing momentum itself can force an outcome. Perhaps he is right.

What is more paradoxical is the configuration of the negotiations themselves. On one side sits Ukraine, a direct participant in the conflict. On the other are the Western European countries surrounding it. Indirect participants who, in practice, are doing everything possible to prevent an agreement from being reached too quickly. Their goal is clear: To persuade Kiev not to give in to pressure. Meanwhile, the US presents itself as a neutral mediator, seeking a compromise acceptable to everyone.

There are obvious reasons to doubt American neutrality, but let us assume for the sake of argument that Washington is acting in good faith. Even then, one crucial actor is conspicuously absent from the visible negotiating process: Russia. In principle, this is not unusual. Mediators often work separately with opposing sides. But in the public narrative, events are presented as if the most important decisions are being made without Moscow. Trump’s allies and intermediaries pressure Zelensky and the Western Europeans to accept certain terms, after which Russia is expected to simply agree. If it does not, it is immediately accused of sabotaging peace.

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Ukraine Energy Sector in Permanent Crisis Due to Relentless Russian Strikes – Daily Power Cuts Affecting All Regions

‘Hello, darkness, my old friend’.

Ukraine’s energy sector is living under extreme circumstances, as the constant Russian drone and missile attacks wreak havoc in the country’s power generation and transmission.

The biggest private energy provider is living in permanent crisis, according to its chief executive.

BBC reported:

“Most of Ukraine is suffering from lengthy power cuts as temperatures drop and Maxim Timchenko, whose company DTEK provides power for 5.6 million Ukrainians, says the intensity of strikes has been so frequent ‘we just don’t have time to recover’.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Tuesday that Russia knew the winter cold could become one of its most dangerous weapons.”

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FBI Agents Thought Clinton’s Uranium One Deal Might Be Criminal – But McCabe, Yates Stonewalled Investigation: Report

Remember Uranium One? The massive 2010 sale of US uranium deposits to Russia approved by Hillary Clinton and rubber-stamped by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) – after figures linked to the deal donated to the Clinton Foundation?

Turns out rank-and-file FBI investigators thought there was enough smoke to launch a criminal investigation, but internal delays and disagreements within the DOJ and FBI ultimately caused the inquiry to lapse, newly released records reveal. 

The materials, made public by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and first reported by Just the News, reveal that investigators argued internally over the delays – which allowed the statute-of-limitations to expire and ultimately halt the case.

The Uranium One transaction – involving the sale of a Canadian mining company with substantial U.S. uranium assets to Russia’s state-owned nuclear firm Rosatom – became a flashpoint during Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Critics argued that then-Secretary of State Clinton, a member of CFIUS, helped approve the deal while donors connected to Uranium One made large contributions to the Clinton Foundation.

The New York Times reported in 2015 that “as the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013 … a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors. Other people with ties to the company made donations as well.”

“And shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr. [Bill] Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock,” the Times reported. “At the time, both Rosatom and the United States government made promises intended to ease concerns about ceding control of the company’s assets to the Russians. Those promises have been repeatedly broken, records show.” -Just the News

Resistance from senior officials – including then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe – slowed the inquiry to the point where statute-of-limitations concerns were later cited to justify shutting it down.

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The Oligarch Part 1: How one powerful man made Zelensky president, Ukraine his pocket state, and sent it to war

Igor Kolomoysky built up Ukraine’s largest bank, then plundered it for billions in a scheme so elaborate it looks like a state intelligence operation. During the 2014 Maidan revolution, he ended up caught in a whirlwind of far-right militants, rising Western scrutiny, and a dramatic denouement with his bank – and fled abroad. Not one to give up, though, Kolomoysky had a plan for revenge and its name was Vladimir Zelensky.

Zelensky, however, soon ran amok. He “tricked Putin” in Paris, ruining hopes for peace in the Donbass, and setting the stage for the fateful events of 2022. Caught between Western pressure and his benefactor’s menacing presence, Zelensky tried to play both sides until events forced his hand. Yet Kolomoysky’s downfall merely left an open niche for a new shadowy figure to stride in.

Below is the first part of RT’s investigation, based on hundreds of pages of court documents, dealing with Kolomoysky’s rise, his turning PrivatBank into an empire of fraud, the events of Maidan, and his involvement in the post-Maidan world.

“He did play as Napoleon, right, Zelensky?… This Napoleon will soon be no more,” said a man with curly grey hair and a scraggly grey beard from the defendant’s cage in a Kiev courtroom. It was the middle of November, and Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoysky was speaking at a hearing in the longstanding fraud charges he faces related to his plundering of PrivatBank. Looking relaxed in a track suit and speaking in Russian, Kolomoysky predicted that Vladimir Zelensky would come crashing down with him due to his own intimate involvement in the corruption scandal currently roiling Ukraine.

Events in Ukraine have taken on the feel of a Shakespearean tragedy as one after another in Zelensky’s inner circle has fallen or fled under the taint of corruption. Perhaps it would be fitting if Kolomoysky ends up with the last word in this sordid affair, for it was his efforts that gained Zelensky the presidency in the first place. When the oligarch himself finally met his comeuppance, into the breech stepped another Kolomoysky-made man, Timur Mindich, who would reconstruct much of his former benefactor’s patronage network for equally corrupt aims.

It is perhaps an exaggeration to say that all crooked roads in Ukraine lead to Kolomoysky – if only because corruption there is too pervasive to trace to one man. Yet, Kolomoysky seems to stand upstream from the entire intertwined morass of militant nationalism, cronyism, and corrupt patronage networks that have defined modern Ukraine.

So who is Igor Kolomoysky and why does his name still echo in the halls of power in Kiev? This is the man who orchestrated one of the largest and most elaborate embezzlement schemes in modern history that cost the Ukrainian state 6% of GDP to remedy. This is the man who built up massive private security forces and financed far-right militias at an estimated cost of $10 million per month in the fraught post-Maidan period. And it is a man whose machinations Zelensky was loath to confront until Western pressure forced his hand.

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Top British General Warns That UK Families Must Be Ready To Lose Sons and Daughters in a War Against Russia

The UK is obsessed with a conflict against Russia.

The absolute insistence with which British authorities keep trying to brainwash citizens into supporting a needless military conflict with Russia is mind-boggling.

Now, the UK top military chief has gone farther than anyone, by warning that British families ‘must be prepared to send their sons and daughters to war against Russia’.

Daily Mail reported:

“In a stark message, Chief of the Defense Staff Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton said ‘more people’ needed to be ready to take up arms to protect the country.

He explained that although the chances of a direct Russian attack on UK soil remain remote, that ‘does not mean the chances are zero’.”

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Britain plans ‘Iron Dome’ missile shield to protect UK from Russian attack, Armed Forces chief reveals

Britain is developing an ‘Iron Dome’ defence system to intercept Russian missiles and drones, the head of the Armed Forces has revealed.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton said a system similar to that employed by Israel to block attacks from Palestine is needed due to the threat posed by the Kremlin.

It would protect critical infrastructure and major cities in the UK. Sir Richard told LBC radio: ‘We call it the integrated air and missile defence. 

‘And we have, over 30 years, not really faced a threat from the air in that way.

‘The threat has evolved. Russia’s capability and willingness to use ballistic and cruise missiles has become more apparent.’ 

He added that the UK would need to invest more in ‘radar capability, airborne air defence and our ability to shoot down drones and cruise missiles’.

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BRITAIN ESCALATES: First Female MI6 Intel Chief Blaise Metreweli Warns of Russia’s ‘Aggressive’ Threat in First Speech, Vows a More ‘Active’, ‘Operational’ Role

Granddaughter of a Ukrainian Nazi, Metreweli is going after Russia – coincidence?

The United Kingdom is hell-bent on the confrontation against Russia.

For many, it’s a clever way to distract from the real problems of mass migration, two-tier policing, censorship, stagnant economy, skyrocketing taxes… the list goes on.

But for some, like the new MI6 Intel chief, it’s reportedly a multi-generational conflict – it’s personal.

Let’s call back a BBC News quote back from June:

“Blaise Metreweli was announced as the incoming head of the Secret Intelligence Service earlier this month. She will be its first female ‘C’ in its 116-year history.

With little known about her wider backstory, several newspapers reported on Friday that her grandfather was Constantine Dobrowolski, who defected from Soviet Russia’s Red Army to become the Nazis’ chief informant in Chernihiv, Ukraine.”

Yes, you read it right: she is the granddaughter of the man they called ‘The Butcher’.

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Why Diplomacy Is Going Nowhere & Ukraine Is Doomed

With Zelensky having much-belatedly dropped aspirations for Ukraine’s NATO membership, European officials are now openly admitting what pretty much everyone knew but was afraid to say.

EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas has newly acknowledged in fresh remarks that Ukraine’s membership in the military alliance is now obviously “out of the question” – but that the European Union now needs to provide concrete security guarantees.

“Now if this [Ukraine’s NATO membership] is not in question, or this is out of the question, then we need to see what are the security guarantees that are tangible. They can’t be papers, or promises, they have to be real troops, real capabilities,” she told reporters ahead of an EU Foreign Ministers meeting.

Kallas asserted that “in the last 100 years, Russia has attacked at least 19 countries,” and so this means “the security guarantees are needed for all other members” in the EU.

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The Death of Ukraine’s Dream of NATO Membership

Ukraine’s dream of NATO membership is dead. It died, surprisingly, not on the battlefields of Ukraine nor at the negotiating table with Russia. It died in a document written in the White House to be sent to Congress to explain America’s national security vision.

The 2025 National Security Strategy of the United States of America, dated November 2025, was released on December 4. Embedded unimposingly, without fanfare, in a section on The Regions called Promoting European Greatness, and not even in the section that discusses the war in Ukraine, the Security Strategy quietly states the priority policy of “Ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.” Those fourteen words seem to have pulled the plug on a dream that was already on life support.

That policy priority found expression in point 7 of Trump’s 28 point peace plan that states that “Ukraine agrees to enshrine in its constitution that it will not join NATO, and NATO agrees to include in its statutes a provision that Ukraine will not be admitted in the future.”

Since it was first promised at the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO,” the dream has been an unrealistic one. It did not take into account the real wishes of Ukraine, NATO or Russia, and it did not take into account previous promises already made by NATO and Ukraine. At the time of the Bucharest summit, the U.S. may have wanted NATO membership for Ukraine, but only 20% of Ukrainians did.

In 1990 and 1991, at the end of the Cold War, NATO promised Gorbachev and the Soviet Union that NATO would not expand any further east. But it was not just NATO that promised to stay out of Ukraine, it was also Ukraine that promised to stay out of NATO. Article IX  of the 1990 Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine, “External and Internal Security,” says that Ukraine “solemnly declares its intention of becoming a permanently neutral state that does not participate in military blocs…” That promise was later enshrined in Ukraine’s constitution, which committed Ukraine to neutrality and prohibited it from joining any military alliance: that included NATO. Moscow has recently reminded that Russia “recognized the sovereignty of Ukraine back in 1991, on the basis of the Declaration of Independence” and added that one of the main points for [Russia] in the declaration was that Ukraine would be a non-bloc, non-alliance country; it would not join any military alliances.”

Ukraine’s constitution was only amended to include a mandate for all future governments to seek NATO membership in 2019, five years after the U.S. supported coup. The amendment was made with neither vote nor referendum. At the time, public support in Ukraine for NATO membership hovered around a tepid 40%.

That that amendment could be reversed, and that Ukraine could be willing to do so, was signaled by Ukrainian officials, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, in the early days of the war. At the start of the war, Zelensky said he has “understood that NATO is not prepared to accept Ukraine.” In March 2022, he said “For years we have been hearing about how the door is supposedly open [to NATO membership] but now we hear that we cannot enter. And it is true, and it must be acknowledged.”

In April 2022, after the war had begun, polling indicates that only 24%-39% of Ukrainians wanted NATO membership. At that time, the tentative agreement arrived at in Istanbul included that “Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership…” The draft reportedly stipulated that “permanent neutrality” be enshrined in Ukraine’s constitution.

Ukraine was pushed off that path by the U.S. for their own policy reasons, including the “core principle” that Ukraine has the right to choose their alliances and that NATO has the right to expand.

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