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New Delhi, August 20, 2025—Two police branches in northeastern Indian state of Assam opened separate criminal investigations into Siddharth Varadarajan, editor for independent news website The Wire, its entire editorial team, including Hindi language editor Ashutosh Bhardwaj and contributor Karan Thapar, and the outlet’s parent company, the Foundation for Independent Journalism (FIJ). The investigations are related to several articles and interviews published after the deadly attacks on tourists in Jammu and Kashmir in April and the ensuing India-Pakistan military escalation.
Pakistani journalist Najam Sethi, who was interviewed multiple times by Thapar during the escalating tension between the two countries, was also named in the investigation.
“By twice initiating investigations under a law currently being legally challenged for its resemblance to a colonial-era sedition law, and defying a Supreme Court ruling, Assam police are misusing the legal system to intimidate journalists,” said Kunāl Majumder, CPJ’s India representative. “Authorities must immediately withdraw these summonses against The Wire editors and journalists and end the misuse of security laws to target journalists for their work so they can report freely without fear of arrest.”
On July 11, police in Morigaon district in Assam opened an investigation into Varadarajan and the FIJ owners in relation to a June 29 report alleging the Indian Armed Forces lost fighter jets to Pakistani forces, quoting an Indian military official.
On August 12, the Supreme Court granted protection to Varadarajan and FIJ owners from arrest stemming from this investigation.
The same day, the Assam Police Crime Branch in Guwahati, the state capital, issued summonses to Varadarajan and Thapar in connection with a separate investigation. That investigation, registered on May 9, cites 12 news articles and interviews with journalists, defense experts, and columnists, according to CPJ’s review of the First Information Report, which opens an investigation.
Both investigations accuse The Wire journalists of violating Section 152 of the country’s penal code for “endangering the sovereignty, unity, and integrity of India.”
Section 152, which came into effect in July 2024, is currently being challenged in court as a rebranded version of the colonial-era sedition law, which the Supreme Court suspended in May 2022. Section 152 carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.
Police inspector Soumarjyoti Ray, who issued the summons, told CPJ by phone he would not comment on the case.
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“How much is Trump pocketing off the presidency?” That’s the question driving a major new investigation by journalist David D. Kirkpatrick in The New Yorker, which finds that the first family has been leveraging its place atop U.S. politics to rake in billions. According to Kirkpatrick, Donald Trump and his immediate family have made $3.4 billion from his time in the White House, including more than $2.3 billion from various cryptocurrency ventures alone.
“What really surprised me about all this is just how fast they’re making this money. They seem to turn down no opportunity,” says Kirkpatrick. “It really sharpens the question of what a buyer, so to speak, might be getting for that.”
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Hello Gaslit Nation listeners! This conversation was recorded before war criminal Putin and convicted felon Trump staged their grotesque spectacle on the blood-red carpet in Alaska. For our analysis of that hellscape—and what it means for Ukraine and democracy defenders everywhere—be sure to check out the recording of the August 18th salon, coming soon to Patreon.com/Gaslit. Thank you for listening and supporting the show!
*
In Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity, we find a roadmap for fighting oligarchy, injustice, and despair. Historian Marci Shore, author of The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution, reminds us that revolutions rarely begin with grand plans.
The 2014 EuroMaidan uprising started with students protesting a classic bait-and-switch. President Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian Trump, ditched a long-promised agreement to move Ukraine closer to the European Union. Instead he took a massive bribe from Russia.
When peaceful protesters gathered, Yanukovych sent in his riot police to beat them, like in Russia. This backfired. Their parents showed up. Then their neighbors. Then thousands more across the country. Within days, Kyiv was packed with hundreds of thousands of furious, freezing citizens demanding dignity, decency, and an end to oligarch rule. Yanukovych has been in exile in Russia ever since, awaiting his American counterpart, Trump.
August 24 marks 34 years since Ukraine overwhelmingly voted to break free from Kremlin rule and declare its political independence. Ukraine’s Independence Day is a reminder to never bet against people who’ve had enough.
As historian Marci Shore shares urgent lessons for us today, saying, “The fact that it can happen at all means that somehow we human beings have that in us. We somehow have that capacity, and we have to cling to that hope.”
Marci also discusses the debate many are having in America today: Do we stay or do we go? She and her husband the historian Tim Snyder made headlines when news broke they had relocated to Toronto, for impotant opportunities, ringing an alarm that authoritarian experts had left America.
Want to enjoy Gaslit Nation ad-free? Join our community of listeners for bonus shows, exclusive Q&A sessions, our group chat, invites to live events like our Monday political salons at 4pm ET over Zoom, and more! Sign up at Patreon.com/Gaslit!
EVENTS AT GASLIT NATION:
August 25 4pm ET – Join the Gaslit Nation Book Club for a powerful discussion on The Lives of Others and I’m Still Here, two films that explore how art and love endure and resist in the face of dictatorship.
Minnesota Signal group for Gaslit Nation listeners in the state to find each other, available on Patreon.
Vermont Signal group for Gaslit Nation listeners in the state to find each other, available on Patreon.
Arizona-based listeners launched a Signal group for others in the state to connect, available on Patreon.
Indiana-based listeners launched a Signal group for others in the state to join, available on Patreon.
Florida-based listeners are going strong meeting in person. Be sure to join their Signal group, available on Patreon.
Have you taken Gaslit Nation’s HyperNormalization Survey Yet?
Gaslit Nation Salons take place Mondays 4pm ET over Zoom and the first ~40 minutes are recorded and shared on Patreon.com/Gaslit for our community
Show Notes:
Small Acts of Democratic Resistance https://democracyseminar.newschool.org/forum/
Counting Sheep: A Guerrilla Folk Opera https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EccprVySrPQ
Gaslit Nation’s interview with Nataliya Gumenyuk https://gaslitnation.libsyn.com/lessons-from-ukraine-five-years-after-the-revolution
New Yorker: Donald Trump’s Politics of Plunder https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/02/donald-trumps-politics-of-plunder
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Photograph Source: The U.S. Army – Public Domain
As I write, US Marines and National Guard have been dispatched to Los Angeles, Florida, the District of Columbia and elsewhere, allegedly to help the local police enforce civil law. When asked, What’s wrong with that? Many people’s first answer is, Because it’s against the law. Of course, that’s important, but not as decisive as it sounds. The law usually cited, the Posse Comitatus Act, says that the use of the military to enforce civil law is not permitted unless Congress permits it. OK, this hopefully prevents the military from granting itself these powers: only Congress can decide that. What Congress ought to decide, the question, “What’s wrong with that?” is left unanswered.
Some people say that in American history, the military has never – or almost never – been used to enforce domestic civil law. This is not accurate. The year the Posse Comitatus Act was enacted, 1878, was just one year after President Rutherford B. Hayes brought the post-Civil War Reconstruction project to an official end (March 4, 1877) by ordering the withdrawal of the last of the US Army units from the South, where they had served as the Military Government for 12 years. 1877 was also the year of the Great Railroad Strike, during which the Army and the National Guard were regularly called in as strikebreakers, and more than once fired into crowds. We can be sure that the authors of the Posse Comitatus Act were acutely aware of these momentous events.
And we can read those lawmakers’ ambivalence in the ambiguity built into the law. On the one hand, there is the temptation of military power. The Congress didn’t want to rule out domestic use of military force altogether: maybe, just maybe, the army can get something useful done more quickly and efficiently than if it’s left up to the politicians and bureaucrats. Well, the Civil War did get the country put back together again, though at a horrendous price. But most historians agree that Reconstruction, carried out under military rule by the Union Army, mostly failed, producing the Jim Crow subculture that is reasserting itself under the Trump Administration today.
Similarly, the use in 1877 of Army and National Guard troops (plus scabs, Pinkertons, militia, etc.) may have prevented an American version of the Paris Commune, but failed to produce a docile working class or silence the labor movement.
So there is the purely practical question: using military force, whether for the commendable purpose of guaranteeing political and human rights to the newly freed black people of the South, or for the less commendable purpose of crushing the workers’ movement in the North, simply might not work – in fact, might backfire.
But aside from that, using the military to do police work produces a deeper effect – you could call it a side effect except that it might turn out to be the main effect: that of decisively altering the country’s form of government.
As Political Science 101 classes teach, the state is defined as the social organization that monopolizes the right of legitimate violence. Where does it get that right? One simple answer is to win the war. What war?
For want of a better term, we can call it the Primal War of the State: the war that a state fights with its people, or part of its people, in order to establish itself as a state.
Another answer, less simple, is that the state gains this right of legitimate violence, and is therefore a state, by the consent of the people.
The above two are simplified theoretical models; actually existing states are mostly complex mixtures of the two principles, with liberal democratic states striving to emphasize the element of consent, and military dictatorships sometimes in actual war with (some of) their people and sometimes holding them in a state of “peaceful” submission, which is one form that the state of war can take. (There are many countries whose militaries are not strong enough defeat any of their neighbors, and whose only purpose is the “pacification” of their own subjects).
In a liberal democracy, both the law enforcement forces (police and judiciary) and the military are empowered by the state’s right of legitimate violence. Members of both are permitted to use physical, including lethal, force against people. But the circumstances under which they may do this, and the rules they must follow, are entirely different.
In the United States and other countries that follow the tradition of the Magna Carta, police may use force against a person who is in the act of committing, or is suspected of having committed, a crime, no one may be imprisoned or otherwise punished except by due process of law, and if the prosecutors can’t show plausible evidence that the arrested person did something illegal, that person must be released (Habeus Corpus).
“Due process” means that the civil authorities can legitimately use violence (arrest, imprisonment, punishment) against people in response to something they have done.
Soldiers are required to obey no such rule. Their job is to kill people not in response to what they have done, but according to who they are, namely, enemy soldiers. As long as they are wearing the enemy uniform (or as a practical matter, if they are non-combatants who happen to have got between you and the enemy) you can kill them without violating the law. The policeman’s job is to arrest suspects and turn them over to the judiciary for trial; they are not empowered to administer punishment on the street (though many police in the US seem uncomfortable with that rule). Soldiers are not trained in criminal investigation, crowd control, or arrest techniques. Rather, their orders are to “destroy the enemy”, the more the better. Especially in a crowd control situation, it’s not surprising if an angry crowd can begin to look, to a soldier, like the “enemy”, a disorderly situation can begin to take the form of war, and the government to take the form of military rule. There is no reason to believe that the Trump Administration is unaware of this. On the contrary, that seems to be the point.
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Lamar River, Yellowstone. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Anyone who drives around the state of Montana right now can see one unassailable truth: our state’ renowned rivers and the prized fish which inhabit them are in big trouble. From east to west, north to south our great rivers have withered to tiny ribbons of water, un-floatable for most recreation and uninhabitable for our native and prized trout species.
When rivers shrink, algae explodes and temperatures soar, as sunlight penetrates the water from top to bottom. As the algae decays, it consumes oxygen, turning what was a perfectly oxygenated, cold-water fish habitat into a hypoxic dead zone, where nothing can survive.
Anyone who has lived in Montana for more than a few seasons can tell: these symptoms are no longer rare events, happening every so often. Now, it seems, this is the new normal. Like many things in nature, the reason for our declining surface water supplies is multifaceted. Climate change is inducing drought, year over year, while demand for water soars as every inch of Montana is bought up and groundwater is given away for new development. Simultaneously, the state is allowing unlimited nutrient pollution through categorical exclusions from water quality protections. Where these political realities meet is at a dead river. Where they began is with Governor Gianforte’s Red Tape Initiative.
So what can the state of Montana do about it? We could start by enforcing the states’ public water rights, which have the exact legal purpose of protecting in-stream flows. That’s right – the state owns water rights and they are a part of the public trust, like our right of stream access. That means the state must protect those interests, above all else, or they violate our constitutional rights. Yet, in pursuit of its political pro-business agenda, the Gianforte administration is refusing to exercise these rights on our behalf. Instead, the very water that is supposed to be left in our rivers, is exploding out of private center pivots everywhere you look.
Since fish can’t sue, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Upper Missouri Waterkeeper and Save the Bull Trout are suing for the fish and also for people who recreate on our world class rivers. In Montana, like much of the West, water is property and that property is extremely valuable in our arid climate. Without question, ranchers have a right to use water but so to do the fish and the people of Montana.
The most valuable right the public owns is located where the Blackfoot River joins the Clark Fork River at the site of the former Milltown Dam.
The Montana Power Company was granted 2000 cfs for its water right when the dam was built in 1904 as an instream hydropower right to generate electricity. In 2008, the State of Montana acquired this very senior water right through the Upper Clark Fork River Basin Superfund settlement with the intent that the water right would be used to restore the fishery and recreational uses. Yet, during the hottest and driest period on record, when the famed Blackfoot river has been in the 0% percentile of flows all summer, Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks and Governor Gianforte have not enforced our rights.
This is but one example of the tragedy that is unfolding.
Simply put, our lawsuit alleges that Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks has a duty to enforce and protect its water rights by making a call to support minimum flows designed to protect aquatic life because state held instream flow rights are part of the public trust and thus the agency is constitutionally mandated to utilize them to protect our right to a clean and healthy environment.
Afterall, there is nothing more antithetical to a clean and healthy environment than a dead, dry river.
Please consider joining us to protect our rivers that are world famous, not just for fishing but also for floating and swimming.
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Ralph devotes the entire program to challenging the “official” count of 60 thousand fatalities reported so far in the genocide Israel, aided and abetted by the United States, has perpetrated on the Palestinians in Gaza. First, Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, who volunteered twice in Gaza hospitals, presents the various studies that revise estimates into the hundreds of thousands. Then weapons expert, Professor Theodore Postol, backs that up with his knowledge of the destructive power of the weapons being used and the photographic evidence of the rubble.
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa is a trauma, general, and critical care surgeon. He has volunteered twice in Gaza since 2024 and three times in Ukraine since 2022. He has published on humanitarian surgical work in the New York Times, Politico, and the Journal of the American College of Surgeons.
I’ve made my point clear month after month that I believe the death toll is now well over 500,000. And it’s important to have an accurate death toll to respect the Palestinian dead and to intensify diplomatic, political, and civic pressures from around the world (and particularly from the White House and Congress) to cease fire, to let the humanitarian trucks that are already at the border in (with food, medicine, water, hospital supplies), and to make sure that this conflict is resolved safely.
Ralph Nader
It certainly seems that every single international expert on the topic does think that this is a genocidal attack, so I don’t see any reason to disbelieve what they’re saying. But that doesn’t have to do with how many people are killed. So what I’m just trying to point out is that even if the numbers of people that we talk about here today are (like Ralph said) half a million, or whatever number of people have been killed, nobody disputes that huge numbers of mass killings have taken place. And it doesn’t seem that anybody who knows what they’re talking about disputes that it’s genocidal at this point.
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa
It’s been very widely understood by lots and lots of people, of a huge variety of political leanings, a huge variety of life experiences, of professions, et cetera, that this is the image that springs to mind when they go to the Gaza Strip—it’s something like a gigantic concentration camp.
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa
If the U.S. or Israel cared at all about how many people (including, remember, this is a territory that is half children) —if we cared how many people, including children, we have starved to death, have shot dead, have blown up, et cetera, we could figure it out in two weeks and with 10 grand. The Israelis wouldn’t even have to stop their assault. They could keep doing it. They could just agree to de-conflict this group of a few people. But they won’t do it for obvious reasons. And I shouldn’t say “they” —we won’t do it for obvious reasons.
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa
Theodore Postol is Professor of Science, Technology and National Security Policy Emeritus in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. His expertise is in nuclear weapon systems, including submarine warfare, applications of nuclear weapons, ballistic missile defense, and ballistic missiles more generally.
When you have a large building collapse, everyone is going to be dead unless they’re out of the building. It’s just that simple. And even when you have large buildings collapse and you have people coming in to search for people, you typically only find a few people who happen to have been lucky enough to be trapped in a cavity that’s near a surface area of the rubble heap. If you’re deep in the rubble heap, your chances of surviving are near zero.
Professor Theodore Postol
News 8/15/25
* New Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index data shows Trump’s new tariff regime has resulted in significant increases in tariff-sensitive staple consumer goods. Some startling price spikes include a 38.9% rise in the price of vegetables, 14.5% increase in the price of coffee and an 11.3% increase in the price of beef and veal. Beyond food, electricity is up 5.5%, rent and shelter is up 3.6%, and health insurance is up 4.4%. These increases are sure to be politically unpopular, as Trump campaigned on bringing down inflation and the price of groceries. The reporting of this data also raises questions about Trump’s response, given his response to the recent negative BLS data reporting on new job creation.
* Speaking of job creation data, while the U.S. only reported the creation of 73,000 new jobs in July, Mexico, under left-wing economic nationalist president and AMLO successor Claudia Scheinbaum, created over 1.26 million new jobs in the same month, according to Mexico News Daily. Furious about the jobs report, Trump forced out the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and is now seeking to install right-wing economist EJ Antoni. According to the BBC, economists have said his “economic commentary [is] rife with basic mistakes.” Antoni, kowtowing to Trump, has proposed ending the monthly jobs report. Antoni would need to be confirmed by Senate Republicans, who have expressed some trepidation about his appointment, but whether that will be enough for them to stand up to Trump on this appointment seems unlikely.
* In more domestic economic news, Jacobin reports corporations are experimenting with a new method of worker exploitation – so-called “stay-or-pay” contracts. According to this article, millions of employees – from nurses to pilots to fast food workers – are, often unwittingly, being “inserted into…restrictive labor covenants [which] turn employer-sponsored job training and education programs into conditional loans that must be paid back — sometimes at a premium — if employees leave before a set date.” These contracts, known as Training Repayment Agreement Provisions, or their acronym TRAPs, have become a major new battleground between corporate interests and groups fighting for labor rights, including unions and regulators. However, with Trump administration efforts to rollback even the modest labor protections promulgated under the Biden administration, the possibility of any federal intervention on behalf of workers seems remote.
* In more Trump-related news, the occupation of Washington, D.C. has commenced. Trump has deployed federal agents, including officers with the Department of Homeland Security and Drug Enforcement Administration, as well as National Guard troops, to patrol the streets of the capital. Some of these deployments seem to be mostly for media spectacle; feds have been seen patrolling tourist areas like the National Mall, Union Station and Georgetown, but others have been going into District neighborhoods and harassing District residents for smoking on their own property. Moreover, while Trump has said “Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people,” the Justice Department has in fact announced that this year violent crime in Washington has hit a 30-year low, per NPR. Trump is restricted to a 30 day takeover of the District by law, but is seeking to extend this window through Congress.
* As usual, even as Trump claims to be cracking down on crime, his administration treats corporate crime with kid gloves. Despite major news of corporate misconduct this week – including the reopening of a Boar’s Head facility shut down earlier this year due to a listeria outbreak despite ongoing sanitation issues and an explosion at the Clairton Coke Works in Pittsburgh that left at least two dead and ten injured – a new Public Citizen report shows the extent of the administration’s soft-on-corporate-crime approach. According to this report, “the Trump administration has already withdrawn or halted enforcement actions against 165 corporations of all types – and one in four of the corporations benefiting from halted or dropped enforcement is from the technology sector, which has spent $1.2 billion on political influence during and since the 2024 elections.”
* Turning to Gaza, the Financial Times reports, “Israel has killed…prominent Al Jazeera correspondent [Anas Al-Sharif] in Gaza and four of his colleagues…in an air strike targeting them in a media tent.” This report notes the Israeli military “took credit” for the strike after “months of threats and unproven allegations that [the journalist] was the head of a Hamas cell.” The Committee to Protect Journalists called these claims an attempt to “manufacture consent for his killing.” The network called this move a “desperate attempt to silence voices in anticipation of the occupation of Gaza.” Anas Al-Sharif was a prominent journalist in the Arab world and was part of a Reuters photo team who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2024. Israel has already killed six Al Jazeera reporters in Gaza prior to this strike.
* Meanwhile, in Egypt, President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi last Tuesday issued his harshest criticism of Israel thus far, accusing the nation of prosecuting “a war for starvation, genocide, and the liquidation of the Palestinian cause.” Yet, according to Drop Site News, Sisi’s comments came just days before an announcement that an Israeli company will begin supplying Egypt with vast amounts of gas. This $35 billion deal between Egypt, neighbor to Israel and Palestine and the largest Arab nation, and Israeli energy company NewMed is the largest export agreement in Israel’s history. This deal adds a new dimension to other comments Sisi made in those same remarks, wherein he defended Egypt against criticism for “not opening the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing to allow in aid.” It remains to be seen whether the genocide comments represent a new chapter of Egypt-Israel relations, or whether they are just a smokescreen to cover Egypt and Israel’s increasing economic interdependence.
* In Palestine news from the homefront, Semafor reports the Democratic National Committee will consider two dueling resolutions on Gaza at their meeting this month. According to Dave Weigel, one, introduced by DNC Chair Ken Martin would “[urge] a ceasefire and a return of hostages held by Hamas,” along with a reaffirmation of the increasingly far-fetched two-state solution. The other, introduced by a DNC member on the progressive flank of the party, calls for “suspension of military aid to Israel” and recognition of a Palestinian state. The latter resolution has drawn the ire of Democratic Majority for Israel, a political organization that aims to keep the Democratic Party firmly in the pro-Israel camp. DMFI’s president, Brian Romick, is quoted saying that resolution would be a “gift to Republicans” and would “embolden Israel’s adversaries.”
* In more positive foreign affairs news, Jeremy Corbyn’s new party in the United Kingdom appears to be gaining steam. A string of polls indicate the party could win the seats currently held by several high-profile Labour Party MPs, including Health Secretary Wes Streeting and now-resigned Homelessness Secretary Rushanara Ali. Most shockingly, it seems they could even win Holborn and St. Pancras, the seat currently held by Labour Party Prime Minister Keir Starmer. If this Corbynite wave does ultimately crest, it would be a stunning reversal of fortune after the Starmerite Labour Party expelled the former Labour leader in 2023.
* Finally, AOL announced this week that they will end their Dial-up internet service in September, Ars Technica reports. AOL launched their Dial-up service in 1991, helping to usher in the era of widespread internet adoption. While this may seem like a natural step in terms of technological advancement, US Census data from 2022 shows that approximately 175,000 American households still connect to the Internet through dial-up services. As this article notes, “These users typically live in rural areas where broadband infrastructure doesn’t exist or remains prohibitively expensive to install.” In effect, this move could leave these rural communities completely without internet, a problem compounded by the Trump administration’s decision earlier this year to “abandon key elements of a $42.45bn Biden-era plan to connect rural communities to high-speed internet,” per the Guardian. It should be considered a national disgrace if both the private sector and the government leave these rural communities behind.
This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven’t Heard.
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Donald Trump came into office promising to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. Now, six months later, his high stakes meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska may have put the United States and Russia on a new path toward peace, or, if this initiative fails, could trigger an even more dangerous escalation, with warhawks in Congress already pushing for another $54.6 billion in weapons for Ukraine.
After emerging from the meeting, Putin correctly framed the historical moment: “This was a very hard time for bilateral relations and, let’s be frank, they’ve fallen to the lowest point since the Cold War. I think that’s not benefiting our countries and the world as a whole. Sooner or later, we have to amend the situation to move on from confrontation to dialogue.”
Trump said he will follow up by talking to NATO leaders and Zelenskyy, as if the U.S. is simply an innocent bystander trying to help. But in Ukraine, as in Palestine, Washington plays the “mediator” while pouring weapons, intelligence, and political cover into one side of the war. In Gaza, that has enabled genocide. In Ukraine, it could lead to nuclear war.
Despite protests from Zelenskyy and European leaders, Trump was right to meet with Putin, not because they are friends, but because the United States and Russia are enemies, and because the war they are fighting to the last Ukrainian is the front line of a global conflict between the United States, Russia and China.
In our book, War In Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, which we have now updated and revised to cover three years of war in Ukraine, we have detailed the U.S. role in expanding NATO up to Russia’s borders, its support for the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014, its undermining of the Minsk II peace accord, and its rejection of a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine after only two months of war in 2022.
We doubt that Donald Trump fully grasps this history. Are his simplistic statements alternately blaming Russia and Ukraine, but never the United States, just a public façade for domestic consumption, or does he really believe America’s hands are clean?
At their first meeting in Saudi Arabia on February 18, senior U.S. and Russian negotiators agreed on a three-step plan: first to restore U.S.-Russian diplomatic relations; then to negotiate peace in Ukraine; and finally to work on resolving the broader, underlying breakdown in relations between the United States and Russia. Trump and Putin’s decision to meet now was a recognition that they must address the deeper rift before they can achieve a stable and lasting peace in Ukraine.
The stakes are high. Russia has been waging a war of attrition, concentrating on destroying Ukrainian forces and military equipment rather than on advancing quickly and seizing a lot more territory. It has still not occupied all of Donetsk province, which unilaterally declared independence from Ukraine in May 2014, and which Russia officially annexed before its invasion in February 2022.
The failure of peace negotiations could lead to a more aggressive Russian war plan to seize territory much faster. Ukrainian forces are thinly spread out along much of its 700 mile front line, with as few as 100 soldiers often manning several miles of defenses. A major Russian offensive could lead to the collapse of the Ukrainian military or the fall of the Zelenskyy government.
How would the U.S. and its Western allies respond to such major changes in the strategic picture? Zelenskyy’s European allies talk tough, but have always rejected sending their own troops to Ukraine, apart from small numbers of special operations forces and mercenaries.
Putin addressed the Europeans in his remarks after the Summit:
We expect that Kyiv and the European capitals will perceive [the negotiations] constructively, and that they won’t throw a wrench in the works, will not make any attempts to use some backroom dealings to conduct provocations to torpedo the nascent progress.
Meanwhile, more U.S. and NATO troops are fighting from the relative safety of the joint Ukraine-NATO war headquarters at the U.S. military base in Wiesbaden in Germany, where they work with Ukrainian forces to plan operations, coordinate intelligence and target missile and drone strikes. If the war escalates further, Wiesbaden could become a target for Russian missile strikes, just as NATO missiles already target bases in Russia. How would the United States and Germany respond to Russian missile strikes on Wiesbaden?
The U.S. and NATO’s official policy has always been to keep Ukraine fighting until it is in a stronger position to negotiate with Russia, as Joe Biden wrote in the New York Times in June 2022. But every time the U.S. and NATO prolong or escalate the war, they leave Ukraine in a weaker position, not a stronger one. The neutrality agreement that the U.S. and U.K. rejected in April 2022 included a Russian withdrawal from all the territory it had just occupied. But that was not good enough for Boris Johnson and Joe Biden, who instead promised a long war to weaken Russia.
NATO military leaders believed that Ukraine’s counter-offensive in the fall of 2022 achieved the stronger position they were looking for, and General Milley went out on a limb to say publicly that Ukraine should “seize the moment” to negotiate. But Biden and Zelenskyy rejected his advice, and Ukraine’s failed offensive in 2023 squandered the moment they had failed to seize. No amount of deceptive propaganda can hide the reality that it has been downhill since then, and 69% of Ukrainians now want a negotiated peace, before their position gets even worse.
So Trump went to Alaska with a weak hand, but one that will get weaker still if the war goes on. The European politicians urging Zelenskyy to cling to his maximalist demands want to look tough to their own people, but the keys to a stable and lasting peace are still Ukrainian neutrality, self determination for the people of all regions of Ukraine, and a genuine peace process that finally lays to rest the zombification of the Cold War.
The whole world celebrated the end of the Cold War in 1991, but the people of the world are still waiting for the long-promised peace dividend that a generation of corrupt, war-mongering leaders have stolen from us.
As negotiations progress, U.S. officials must be honest about the U.S. role in provoking this crisis. They must demonstrate that they are ready to listen to Russia’s concerns, take them seriously, and negotiate in good faith to achieve a stable and lasting agreement that delivers peace and security to all parties in the Ukraine war, and in the wider Cold War it is part of.
The post US-Russia Talks: the Choice Between Peace and Escalation first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.