© Johnhelmer.org
David Ignatius (
lead image, left) has been a career-long mouthpiece for the US State Department. He has just been called in by the current Secretary of State Antony Blinken (
right) to convey an urgent new message to President Vladimir Putin, the Security Council, and the General Staff in Moscow.
For the first time since the special military operation began last year, the war party in Washington is offering terms of concession to Russia's security objectives explicitly and directly, without the Ukrainians in the way.The terms Blinken has told Ignatius to print appeared in the January 25 edition of the
Washington Post. The paywall can be avoided by reading on.
The territorial concessions Blinken is tabling include Crimea, the Donbass, and the Zaporozhe, Kherson "land bridge that connects Crimea and Russia". West of the Dnieper River, north around Kharkov, and south around Odessa and Nikolaev, Blinken has tabled for the first time US acceptance of "a demilitarized status" for the Ukraine. Also, US agreement to restrict the deployment of HIMARS, US and NATO infantry fighting vehicles, and the Abrams and Leopard tanks to a point in western Ukraine from which they can "manoeuvre...as a deterrent against future Russian attacks."
This is an offer for a tradeoff -
partition through a demilitarized zone (DMZ) in the east of the Ukraine in exchange for a halt to the planned Russian offensive destroying the fortifications, rail hubs, troop cantonments, and airfields in the west, between the Polish and Romanian borders, Kiev and Lvov, and an outcome Blinken proposes for both sides to call "a just and durable peace that upholds Ukraine's territorial integrity".
Also in the proposed Blinken deal there is the offer of a direct US-Russian agreement on "an eventual postwar military balance"; "no World War III"; and no Ukrainian membership of NATO with "security guarantees similar to NATO's Article 5."
Blinken has also told the
Washington Post to announce the US will respect "Putin's tripwire for nuclear escalation", and accept the Russian "reserve force includ[ing] strategic bombers, certain precision-guided weapons and, of course, tactical and strategic nuclear weapons."
President Putin has offered a hint of the Russian reply he discussed with the
Stavka and the
Security Council last week.
Putin told a meeting with university students on Wednesday, hours after Blinken's publication. "I think that people like you," the president
said, "most clearly and most accurately understand the need for what Russia is now doing to support our citizens in these territories, including Lugansk, Donetsk, the Donbass area as a whole, and Kherson and Zaporozhye. The goal, as I have explained many times, is primarily to protect the people and Russia from the threats that they are trying to create for us in our own historical territories that are adjacent to us. We cannot allow this. So, it is extremely important when young people like you defend the interests of their small and large Motherland with arms in their hands and do so consciously."
Read on, very carefully, understanding that nothing a US official says, least of all through the mouths of Blinken, Ignatius, and the Washington Post is trusted by the Russians; and understanding that what Putin and the Stavka say they mean by Russia's "adjacent historical territories" and the "small and large Motherland" has been quite clear.
Follow what Blinken told Ignatius to print, before Putin issued his reply. The
propaganda terms have been highlighted in bold to mean the opposite — the public positions from which Blinken is trying to retreat and keep face.
Comment: NATO will struggle to further its plans to surround Russia, and Turkey is revealing how fragile the organisation is, amidst its pathological attempts to wage war on Russia: Erdogan tells Sweden it won't back NATO bid after Quran burning outside its embassy in Stockholm