RUNNING UPDATES ON THE CONFLICT IN UKRAINE - 29.01.2025
Including geopolitical issues affecting the balance of power in the ongoing end game war to establish our common future, a closely monitored prison planet or tolerance for diverse modes of governance.
TRUMP’S PLANS TO ACCUMULATE LEVERAGE OVER PUTIN ARE RAPIDLY FALLING APART. HOW MANY POSSIBILITIES REMAIN BEFORE HE’S FINALLY READY TO TALK?
COLLECTIVE WEST | RUSSIA
JOHN HELMER: Ukraine War: Is the Conflict Growing More Complex for All?
DANIEL DAVIS - COLONEL JACQUES BAUD: EXCLUSIVE: Russian Partisans Prepare to Rise up in Ukraine Cities.
PROFESSOR JOHN J. MEARSHEIMER: PUTIN: Peace Can Only Happen On My Terms.
ALEXANDER MERCOURIS of THE DURAN: PUTIN No Talks With Zelensky, Has No Legal Status, Cannot Be Trusted; US MSM: Military Aid Kiev Stop.
ALEX CHRISTOFOROU of THE DURAN: US drone mystery revealed. OPEC, no price CRASH. MELONI under investigation. Xbox will defeat Russia.
Putin: Russia Ready to Pick Negotiators for Direct Talks With Zelensky, But He Can't Sign Peace Deal.
Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree outlawing peace negotiations with Moscow in 2022, months after the West sabotaged a ready peace treaty to pursue an all-out proxy war against Russia.
President Putin has expressed readiness to find negotiators to speak directly with Volodymyr Zelensky.
"If he wants to take part in negotiations, I will select such people, it's not an issue. The question is about the final signing of the documents," Putin said in a TV interview Tuesday, noting that Zelensky's legitimacy has expired, and he therefore "does not have the right to sign anything."
Under Ukrainian law, the end of the president's term means his powers are transferred to the chairman of the Verkhovna Rada parliament, and in accordance with the Constitution, even martial law does not give him the right to extend his authority, Putin said.
Zelensky's powers officially ran out last spring, but he remained in office after cancelling elections, citing martial law.
"On the question of the final signing of the documents...there cannot be a single mistake or wrinkle. Everything must be polished," Putin emphasized.
Furthermore, direct talks cannot start if Zelensky does not lift his self-imposed ban, Putin said.
"If there is a desire, any legal question can be resolved. So far, we simply don't see such a desire" from the Ukrainian side, the president said.
Zelensky Explains Why He Banned Talks With Russia
New Revelations on 2022 Talks
"Negotiations factually began immediately after the start of the Special Military Operation. Initially, we told the Ukrainian leadership at the time that the people of the Lugansk and Donetsk People's Republics don't want to be part of Ukraine. Leave these territories, and that's it, that's where it ends. No fighting, no war," Putin said.
The Ukrainian side rejected these terms, but Russia nevertheless agreed to talks. "This was at the end of February 2022," Putin recalled.
Russia was prepared to implement the peace deal reached in Istanbul in the spring of 2022, "even though there were things [in the draft deal, ed.] which we had issues with," Putin revealed.
"Nevertheless, I agreed that we were ready to implement this document. And on March 15 or 16 we informed Kiev that we were ready to refine and sign this document. There was practically nothing to change there," he said.
Trump Says Zelensky Shouldn't Have Allowed Conflict to Happen But Wanted to Fight
"Somewhere near the end of March [2022, ed.] we received a proposal from Kiev - the one with the signature of the head of the Ukrainian negotiations group, Mr. Arakhamia. And it was these Ukrainian proposals - I want to emphasize this, it's very important, that formed the basis of the draft peace treaty developed at Istanbul," Putin said.
The draft agreements also "had a small point proposed for consideration by the Ukrainian side on a personal meeting between the two presidents. I agreed to this," Putin added.
Russia also sent signals to Kiev's Western sponsors, including now former US president Joe Biden, Putin said, saying he had made clear that "if they had a desire...to achieve peace, the path was very simple."
Putin: Ukraine Crisis Could Have Been Avoided if 2020 US Election Wasn't Stolen
Conflict Would End Quickly Without NATO Involvement
Today, Putin said, Ukraine's sovereignty is "almost nil," and without foreign sponsorship and weapons, the present conflict would "end in a month and a half or two months."
Putin also commented on Zelensky's claims that he banned negotiations after the Russian military was stopped at the gates of Kiev in early 2022, pointing out that Russian forces withdrew voluntarily as an act of good faith for the sake of the peace treaty being negotiated in Istanbul, many months before Zelensky implemented his ban in October 2022.
"For us it was clear in principle that deception was a serious risk. Russia has been deceived in a similar manner for decades: they say one thing, they do something completely different," Putin said. "Nevertheless, based on considerations of the need to prevent the bloodshed associated with a serious war, we agreed, and began to withdraw troops from Kiev at the end of March."
Subsequently, then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson flew to Kiev on NATO's behest to tell Zelensky to scrap the peace plan, and Ukrainian and Western media blew up the Bucha Massacre controversy, accusing Russian forces of slaughtering unarmed Ukrainian civilians in a suburb of Kiev to justify continued fighting and Western support. Follow-up investigations revealed that the civilians killed at Bucha were murdered by Ukrainian neo-Nazi forces sent in to punish locals accused of 'collaborating' with Russian forces.
LT. COL. KAREN KWIATKOWSKI: Trump and Ukraine.
LEVAN GUDADZE: Ukraine attacked a nuclear facility in Russia. Attempted assassination of Putin. Sanctions War.
JAMARL THOMAS - MICHAEL MALOOF: Shocking Admission: Ukraine's Spy Chief Says Country Could Cease To Exist By Summer.
DANIEL DAVIS - PROFESSOR JOHN J. MEARSHEIMER: John Mearsheimer LIVE Wed 1:00p est.
BORZZIKMAN: We'll not accept PEACE without Odessa, Nikolayev, and Pridnestrovie: Russians Made a Tough Statement.
Pepe Escobar: Dancing to Trump’s Disco Inferno.
The spectacle of Trump’s sound and fury - a torrent of executive orders, photo ops, carefully scripted illusionist tricks, breathless headlines - signifying…something, veils the same old imperial mindset, now blasting out in the open as a weaponized three-ring circus. Stagecraft invariably trumps substance as every smirk and scowl is media-weaponized to the enthralled, bloodthirsty arena spectators.
Mr. Disco Inferno won a mini-trade war with Colombia in only 10 hours, after posting an image depicting himself as an Al Capone-style Mafia boss in pinstripe suit and fedora hat, standing next to a sign that reads “FAFO”, which means “Fuck Around and Find Out”.
He will win the proxy war in Ukraine. In 24 hours. Sorry, in 100 days. Sorry, maybe more. And “if they don't settle this war soon, like almost immediately, I'm going to put massive tariffs on Russia and massive taxes and also big sanctions.” Why? Because, "you know, I love the Russian people.”
He brags that the United States “has the largest amount of oil and gas” (it does not) and is going to use it; he will “ask Saudi Arabia and OPEC to bring down oil prices” (they will say no); because if “the oil price came down, the war in Ukraine would end immediately” (this is definitely not a “cause and effect” case).
He will make “the largest tax cuts in US history.” The US can ensure LNG supplies to Europe (of course, at a huge mark-up); the US “does not need Canada to make cars, as well as Canadian oil and gas”;the United States’ “massive oil and gas reserves” will allow it to “become a manufacturing superpower and the world capital of AI and cryptocurrencies”.
Buried in the sound and fury is the fact that the US can count on a steady stream of gas for domestic needs but that turns problematic when it comes to exports. Hence the expropriation obsession – as in outright Empire of Plunder: the US badly needs Iraqi, Syrian, Venezuelan, Mexican, Iranian and Russian reserves. Because even if carefully exported, there is insufficient liquification facilities in the US to supply the EU. And that’s why Europe remains largely dependent on Russian LNG and other sources since the sabotage of the Nordstreams.
Satisfaction…came in a chain reaction
Yes: there is incoming blood on the dancefloor. To get into the real groove of Disco Inferno, we might as well focus on the top three challenges for Trump 2.0: the tech war against China; the geoeconomics war against the Global Majority; and the proxy war in Ukraine.
The irruption of Hangzhou-based Chinese tech start-up DeepSeek on the global stage was something for the ages, instantly decimating the spun-to-death “small yard, high fence” American strategy to smash China’s tech advances.
DeepSeek should indeed be seen as the “biggest dark horse” in the open-source Large Language Model (LLM) domain, now identified from Jakarta to Wall Street and Silicon Valley as potentially Beijing’s secret weapon in the AI war with the US. Even Mr. Disco Inferno was forced to admit DeepSeek’s breakthrough as a “wake-up call”.
At the heart of the matter we find two clashing models: neoliberal hypercapitalism versus meritocratic socialism.
The head of DeepSeek, Liang Wenfeng, is a fascinating geek. His given name (Wenfeng) means “Vanguard of Culture”; one of the meanings of his family name (Liang) is “bridge”. So he may be seen – as he is in China – as Mr. Bridge to the Vanguard of Culture (here’s Mr. Bridge in an excellent interview , in Chinese; please use auto-translate).
Mr. Bridge pulled a spectacular Sun Tzu on US sanctions over exporting advanced graphic processing units (GPUs), especially Nvidia’s advanced chips. Moreover, Chinese Big Tech firms cannot compete with the financial firepower of US Big Tech.
So the answer was to develop cost-efficient powerful LLM models, without access to literally hundreds of thousands of Nvidia H100s chips. DeepSeek stated they had used just 2,048 Nvidia H800s and only $5.6million to train a model with 671 billion (italics mine) parameters: that’s a very small fraction of what OpenAI and Google spent to train models of the same size.
And everything was developed locally, via scores of PHDs from the top Chinese universities - Peking, Tsinghua, Beihang – and not American Ivy League experts.
So in a nutshell DeepSeek is a 100% Chinese LLM companywhich was capable to come up with open-source models and a free downloadable app for every consumer to use. That in itself destroys the current American-imposed neoliberal hypercapitalist AI business model.
The rules of the game indeed are being rewritten. So what is the – predictable - American response? Call for more sanctions. In parallel, DeepSeek was forced to suspend new registrations because its site suffered a massive cyberattack. Talk about the price to pay for eviscerating a humongous $1 trillion off the techno-feudalists gathered at the New York Stock Exchange.
Mr. Disco Inferno of course supports the commodifying of all data compared to free data for everyone. Right before the DeepSeek shock, he had - theoretically - secured as much as $1 trillion from the Saudis, including to a large extent investments to develop AI and data centers in the US.
The new game of course is just beginning. Stargate, OpenAI’s joint venture with Japan’s SoftBank, also heavily plugged by Trump, plans to spend at least $100 billion on AI infrastructure in the US. In parallel, Elon Musk’s xAI is massively expanding the Colossus supercomputer to contain more than 1million GPUs to help train its Grok AI models.
I couldn't get enough, so I had to self-destruct
Now to the war against the Global Majority. Inestimable Prof. Michael Hudson is adamant: in an absolutely must read essay, he concisely explains that “when Trump promised his voters that the United States must be the ‘winner’ in any international trade or financial agreement, he is declaring economic war on the rest of the world.”
The key Hudson take away: If nations in the Global South are to save their economy “from being plunged into austerity, price inflation, unemployment and social chaos”, they will have to “suspend payments on foreign debts denominated in dollars.”
It’s a work in progress: “Circumstances…are forcing the world to break away from the US-centered financial order. The US dollar’s exchange rate is going to soar in the short term as a result of Trump blocking imports with tariffs and trade sanctions. This exchange-rate shift will squeeze foreign countries owing dollar debts in the same way that Mexico and Canada are to be squeezed. To protect themselves, they must suspend dollar debt service.”
There may be serious problems ahead for Mr. Disco Inferno: “Trump’s America First political theater that got him elected may get his gang unseated as the contradictions and consequences of their operating philosophy are recognized and replaced. His tariff policy will accelerate US price inflation and, even more fatally, cause chaos in US and foreign financial markets. Supply chains will be disrupted, interrupting US exports of everything from aircraft to information technology. And other countries will find themselves obliged to make their economies no longer dependent on US exports or dollar credit.”
Prof. Hudson notes how Trump “thinks that the US economy is like a cosmic black hole, that is, a center of gravity able to pull all the world’s money and economic surplus to itself. That is the explicit aim of America First. That is what makes Trump’s program a declaration of economic war on the rest of the world. There is no longer a promise that the economic order sponsored by US diplomacy will make other countries prosperous. The gains from trade and foreign investment are to be sent to and concentrated in America.”
The EU, in the Global North, is even more vulnerable to “America First”. Davos came and went with a mere blip on the screen, apart from the odd US banker bragging about “peak pessimism” in Europe – linked to the incoming Trump tariff tsunami – and head of the European Central Bank Christine “Look at my new Hermes scarf” Lagarde wondering it was “not pessimistic” to say that Europe is facing an “existential crisis”.
The US-EU trade balance stands at a hefty 1.5 trillion euros a year, including massive Atlanticist investment flows. But what really matters is the financial mess in individual EU nations, especially top two Germany and France, with their Via Dolorosa to be extended ad infinitum when it comes to their cost of borrowing driven by tax cuts in the US.
I heard somebody say (Burning Burning) burn that mother down
And now to the Forever Wars front.
Mr. Disco Inferno, posing as a humanitarian for the non-stop camera clicking, has asked vassals Jordan and Egypt to de facto become accomplices in ethnic cleansing, absorbing as many as 1.5 million people from Gaza. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention explicitly “prohibits the forced transfer of protected people out of or into occupied territory”.
Turning a genocide into a real estate opportunity in a “phenomenal location” will proceed in parallel with energetically courting the Saudis, after MbS in Riyadh promised last week to invest at least $600 billion – and up to a possible $1 trillion – in the US.
The official Saudi position is on the necessity of “strategic investments” to “stabilize long-term revenue streams” – not to mention consolidate lavish spending on all those US-made weapons systems. Call it a classic geopolitical case of Power of Capital merging with The Strategy of Chaos.
Telling Riyadh how to dance is one thing. To entice the Russian bear to the dancefloor is a completely different proposition.
As star French historian Emmanuel Todd has brilliantly demonstrated , “Trump’s job will be to manage the defeat of the US against Russia.” That’s the toughest call ever. Trump’s supreme anathema is to be seen as a loser.
So there are only two feasible options. 1. To “end the war” by not really ending it, just postponing it to the end of the decade, stealing a de facto Russian victory via massive spin and a gargantuan P.R. campaign. 2. Keep weaponizing Kiev – especially via NATO vassals, while posing as a peacemaker who cannot deliver because of Russia. That will be a toxic variant of the current “war until the last Ukrainian”.
That kind of gimmickry won’t fly in Moscow. Putin and the Security Council have made it extensively clear the conditions for a real end to the war – not a pause for NATO rearmament.
The authentic-or-not 100-day plan for a possible deal that has been circulating in the Washington-London-Kiev echo chambers touches on a few probabilities: a Putin-Trump phone call in the next two weeks or so; a possible meeting, bilateral (Trump-Putin) or trilateral (with the Ukrainian actor; quite unlikely) until mid-March; start of negotiations on the main parameters; a possible ceasefire by Easter; an International Peace Conference by the end of April, mediated by US, China, some EU members and some from the Global South; presidential elections in Ukraine at the end of August.
Key parameters: Ukraine as a neutral state, and not a member of NATO; member of the EU by 2030; Ukraine does not reduce the size of the army; does not officially recognize Russian sovereignty over conquered territories; “some” sanctions against Russia lifted immediately after the conclusion of the peace agreement, some - over the course of three years - depending on Russia's compliance; all restrictions on the import of Russian energy to the EU to be lifted; and last but not least, the thorny matter of a “European peacekeeping contingent”.
The CIA is feeding all sorts of misinformation to Trump on everything from the real state of things in the battlefield to the state of the Russian economy. As it stands, Russians watch all the bombast with barely a smirk. Peskov: “Moscow still hasn’t received word from Washington about possible Trump, Putin contact… Readiness for meeting remains.”
So far, nothing. Totally empty game playing. Perhaps Trump, in secrecy, may be practicing his master shot: “The heat was on, rising to the top / Everybody going strong, and that is when my spark got hot”.
Time to hit the dancefloor.
(Just can't stop) when my spark gets hot
(Just can't stop) when my spark gets hot
(Just can't stop) when my spark gets hot
(Just can't stop) when my spark gets hot
Well, it may turn out that the really hot spark will be detonated not by Mr. Disco Inferno, but by dance partner Vladimir Putin.
Ukraine Lost More Soldiers in Conflict With Russia Than US in Korea, Vietnam - Trump Envoy
COLLECTIVE WEST | GLOBAL MAJORITY
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CAPTAIN MATTHEW HOH: The Palestinian Sufferings.
COLLECTIVE WEST | BRICS
JAMARL THOMAS - Dr. WILMER LEON: In Shocking Move, Trump Threatens Economic War Against Taiwan.
BREAKTHROUGH NEWS: DeepSeek Sends Panic Across Silicon Valley: Is China the Future of AI?
USA
LARRY JOHNSON: Trump’s Opportunity to have an Historic Presidency.
NON-ENGLISH NEWS
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GROK PICS
VICTORY BELONGS TO RUSSIA: IT IS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME
Each day that passes makes a conclusive Russian victory in the Donbass and beyond more certain. As Russia bolsters her forces, and weaponry, those of Ukraine decrease. Russian forces gain ready access to rest and recuperation as troop numbers increase. The increasingly exhausted and demoralised Ukrainian troops have an ever decreasing prospect of such respite. This situation is likely to bring them to complete breakdown as Russia unleashes the firepower of the more modern and advanced weaponry that is arriving with the newly mobilised Russian troops.
The various Ukrainian offensives are now weak when confronted by the reinforced Russian lines. A few futile efforts achieve quite miserable results before fire reigns down on the Ukrainian troops and they are forced back to their starting positions.
And now, all this being said, we have arrived at the wet, and later, freezing conditions where these pathetic Ukrainian forces will be subject to myriad forms of abject misery with death and injury all around them while they lie sodden or frozen, abandoned to their fate by Kiev.
The pitiable young and old of Ukraine have been frogmarched to their deaths as cannon-fodder while the bestial elites of the collective West urge their "president" to add more to their number there at the gates of Hell and their doom. We must feel for the majority of them as they are not the Nazis we revile, in most part they are decent men, fathers, sons, brothers, husband and uncles, who no doubt saw through the coup of 2014 for what it was. But sadly, their fate seems sealed.
Nothing will stop Russia now. Every factor favours them. Victory will be Russia's. In Donbass and beyond and in due course across the world.
Victory belongs to Russia: It is now only a matter of time.
TRUMP’S PLANS TO ACCUMULATE LEVERAGE OVER PUTIN ARE RAPIDLY FALLING APART. HOW MANY POSSIBILITIES REMAIN BEFORE HE’S FINALLY READY TO TALK?
