There still seems a lot of talking around each other...and Zelensky can't be too happy about Vlad the Conqueror and Joe the Dementia-riddled Fraud deciding he and his nations fate...
IME it's the excluded that can hump your plans apart as much as the actions of a principle foe...
Oh well, who cares? Not like anybody listens to us, learns from history or otherwise GAFF...
I put Alexander Mercouris on via Roku. He said the sequence of meetings means that the US and Russia will meet and maybe agree on something then tell Ukraine the results later. Like you just said. He goes on too long. He is the son of a diplomat so he gets off on the details.
He said that Russia is making demands. Then the US seems to agree to meet on the demands for 2 days. He also said the US is asking the Russians to de-escalate.
I instinctually despise neo-hereditary elites...America was founded on principles that ended such despotic feudalism.
See this?
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/imperialist-russia-four-western-provocations-led-current-us-russia-crisisI deny outright any and all knee-jerk blame-America-first bullsplatter. Indeed this Cato/Statecraft guy even undercuts such at the outset...
In her memoir "Madame Secretary," former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and secretary of state Madeleine Albright concedes that Clinton administration officials decided already in 1993 to endorse the wishes of Central and East European countries to join NATO. The Alliance proceeded to add Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary in 1998. Albright admitted that Russian President Boris Yeltsin and his associates were extremely unhappy with that development. The Russian reaction was understandable, since the expansion violated informal promises that President George H. W. Bush’s administration had given Moscow when Mikhail Gorbachev had agreed not only to accept a unified Germany but a united Germany in NATO. The implicit quid pro quo was that NATO would not move beyond the eastern border of a united Germany. Informal promises...
Bush was an old guard pragmatist, it was wise not to promise anything in writing...
That being said, it was Clinton and Not-at-Albright who got us into an arena only the fracking gutless EU should have been involved with!
NATO’s 1995 air war against Bosnian Serbs seeking to secede from the newly minted country of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the imposition of the Dayton Peace Accords greatly annoyed Yeltsin’s government and the Russian people. The Balkans had been a region of considerable religious and strategic interest to Moscow for generations, and it was humiliating for Russians to watch impotently as a U.S.-led alliance dictated outcomes there. The Western powers conducted an even greater provocation four years later when they intervened on behalf of a secessionist insurgency in Serbia’s restless Kosovo province. Detaching that province from Serbia and placing it under U.N. control not only set an unhealthy international precedent, but the move also displayed utter contempt for Russia’s interests and preferences in the Balkans. Clinton abused GHWB's pragmatic approach for a decidedly interventionist power play and the defeated post-Soviet Russians were powerless to resist. The former is the sin, the latter a reparations. And all that followed for the US stuck with the Clinton template. The former Yugoslavia was never a unified country except as a result of Tito dominance, fear and terror...it was never going to end well no matter what. But Russians have thin skins, thinner egos and long memories. They should have licked their wounds and shored up their fractured demoralized and weak nation...they didn't until Putin but ended up with restoring a pre-revolutionary Imperialist version akin to their Czarist days. Everything that followed, NATO, Ukraine, Crimea...all of it could have been negotiated has Russia not sought to enrich itself at the West's expense by arming and supporting the most batshyt crazy islaminal regimes on the planet (Iran, Syria, etc) and socialist regimes (Venezuela, Cuba) as it made them look no different in character than when they were Soviets.
As I've said hundreds of times,
there are no innocents on either side, each ran with their templates and each talks over the other...and here we are at the likely inevitable.
At least Stockman has the intellectual honesty to acknowledge the bogus claim of using ethnic Russians in Ukraine as a rallying cry for Russia's claim that huge swaths of Ukraine belongs to them!
Ukraine’s history can be summarized as follows:
700 or so years as a meandering set of borders in search of a country (1200 AD to 1922);
69 years as an administrative appendage of totalitarian Soviet rulers in Moscow, who purged Tartars and replanted Russians in the eastern regions along the way;
23 years as a happenstance nation-state that fell into existence when the biggest and most evil empire in history collapsed overnight (1991–2014); and
7 years as a pretext for Washington interventionists, neocons and anti-Trump Dems to rekindle cold war fears, the better to keep hideously swollen national security budgets firmly in place.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/david-stockman-prospect-world-war-iiiFurther buttressing my assertion that there is indeed NO innocents on either side. The way out of this was murdered by Clinton...and there is no way out now that leaves one or the other shamed and angry. Peace
cannot happen with Czarist Russia or the corrupt uni-party Deep-state tyranny in America.
ETA - Truman Strike Group ordered to stay in Med.
https://saraacarter.com/us-warships-ordered-to-stay-in-mediterranean-as-ukraine-russia-tensions-grow/Leaving nobody for the 5th Fleet (Persian Gulf) but the Essex (LHD-2) ARG in the Gulf of Aden...typically a carrier group and its airwing are on-station with the ARG, but the Vinson is homeward bound in the Guam area and nothing else seems to be ready for deployment yet, and there is 5 carriers in RCOH, DPIA or PIA...and Reagan just got off tour and should remain for Pacific patrol (China) leaving Nimitz (coming off PIA and needing workups)...Lincoln (has been working up after being in PIA, may be ready)...Bush (has been doing quals coming out of DPIA, may be ready soon) and Ford (in PIA and likely not to go out on maiden deployment till Summer/Fall)...so it's up to Lincoln (San Diego) and Bush (Norfolk) to fill any demands.
