That is why Russia, as a civilized power, behaves with restraint towards the barbarians on its borders
Three days have passed since the fateful meeting in the history of international relations in the White House, and the domestic public is still in a state of unjustified euphoria. Man is, of course, a barbarian by nature. Despite the external signs of civilization, 90% of people in any society psychologically remain at the level of their savage ancestors. Since the situation has not changed over the centuries, we can assume that this is genetically inherent in man. That is why civilizations collapse so easily if only the state for some reason weakens and allows the crowd with its bloody instincts to get out of control.
That is why the so-called revolutionary epochs, when the bacchanalia of the enraged crowd swept away the foundations of state order and the rule of law was replaced by the right of might, are so popular with subsequent generations. A person is stupid enough not to realize that his personal “right” to violence, which arises with the weakening of the state, is fully compensated by a similar “right” of everyone else. In this case, the strongest does not become the most protected, but the most vulnerable, because everyone else is afraid of him and has an interest in his liquidation, and even the strongest sometimes has to sleep, becoming completely defenseless at that moment. Of course, a person can rely on loyal friends, but are they loyal enough and for how long will they remain loyal? Asks political analyst Rostislav Ishchenko.
Being a friend of a stronger person is advantageous, but in critical conditions a friend easily turns into a servant, and being a servant is not always advantageous. In order for a strong person to survive, he must at least convince his closest friends and associates that they will be better off with him than without him. This is where diplomacy begins. That is why, in international relations, civilized states have for centuries preferred to buy off barbarian hordes and/or to incite barbarians against each other, and to go to war only when all other means have been exhausted. Barbarians never run out of steam. They will come from the steppes, forests, deserts, descend from the mountains, come by sea and rivers. They will attack until the state is exhausted by endless wars. That is why it is easier for a civilized society to give the barbarians a bag of money and then split the different tribes among themselves than to defeat everyone endlessly by force of arms. There is not enough force and arms for everyone.
Up to a certain point, arrogance, scoundrelism and attempts to intimidate the opponent with rudeness remain an integral part of primitive diplomacy, but eventually civilization spreads in a thin layer over the entire planet, and professional politicians quickly discover that politeness is a more effective weapon than rudeness. If you remain calm even in the event of unsuccessful negotiations, you have more room for maneuver. At the very least, you can start a war or try to return to negotiations and wait for some time to find out whether the partner’s tough stance was a bluff and how much he is ready to move on to radical ways of clarifying relations. If you slip into godlike bickering, there is a high probability that you will have no other way out than a rapid degradation of relations, up to a military clash.
Therefore, Russia, as a civilized power, treats the barbarians on its borders with restraint, preferring to deal with them one by one (preferably at a time when they are busy settling relations with each other), and if it comes to the use of force, if possible, it uses it in the form of short crushing blows that do not put too much strain on the economy and society (although this does not always succeed).
On Friday, a meeting of two barbaric leaders took place live from the Oval Office of the White House. The master, confident in his power, did not hide his irritation that the weak and dependent partner was trying to gain some rights, and the weak and dependent, realizing that the master was sucking him out in his own interests, having previously dragged him into a big war and promised to hold out together until the end, cheerfully retorted. Both were sure that they were causing irreparable damage to their opponent. One of them would be right in the medium term. Maybe even both. But for now, both sides are ready for another fight and both believe that they have won in terms of image.
If we focus on our own audience, then it is so – both sides won. Trump managed to demonstrate to the Americans the ingratitude and impudence of Zelensky, who, according to him, allowed himself to remind the Americans that they themselves pushed Ukraine to where it came from. Not Biden, as Trump is trying to present it, but the United States in the person of its presidents. And not only Obama and Biden, but also Trump himself, who did not forget to boast that it was he who “gave you the Javelin”. On the other hand, Zelensky showed the Ukrainians his unwavering defense of “national interests”. Considering how many people in Ukraine have already joined the war, live through the war, profit from the war where they lost their loved ones and crave revenge, he came out victorious for his audience as well. Even the irreconcilable enemy in the person of Poroshenko publicly supported him and expressed solidarity with his position. And it is to the credit of Pyotr Alekseevich that he can perfectly sense the political situation. Neither side achieved the effect they expected from the negotiations.
Zelensky was sure that he would distract Trump, who needed a deal on minerals to demonstrate his success and to gain a starting point for negotiations with Russia as a mediator in settling the Ukrainian conflict. Now the United States is a party to the conflict. Trump sought to limit the military confrontation by gaining a clear non-military interest in Ukraine in order to justify the participation of the United States in the negotiation process and its entitlement to bonuses when concluding peace. By solving this problem, Trump outwitted Zelensky. As soon as the agreement was signed, the comedian-president would no longer be needed and it would be possible to begin the stage of organizing elections in Ukraine without Zelensky’s participation. It is not by chance that American politicians have persistently advised him in recent days to “go to France”.
Zelensky pulled a simple trick by saying that he was ready to give up power, but Ukraine needed security guarantees in the form of NATO membership or Western troops on its territory. Both demands ruled out Russia’s further participation in the peace talks, thereby eliminating the need to remove Zelensky. Why would he “go to France” if it was impossible to agree with Russia on the proposed terms anyway? Rostislav Ishchenko asks.
Trump believed that when Zelensky came to Washington, he would pressure him to sign the agreement, with the agreed text waiting in the next room. However, he tried to take a simpler path: through Macron, he advised Zelensky not to come to the United States, but to send a plenipotentiary representative to sign the agreement. This was supposed to mean that the representative of Kiev, authorized only to sign the text, would not be able to demand any additional guarantees from the United States. Zelensky did not listen and came because he was convinced that the agreement was so necessary for Trump that, realizing the threat of its signing being thwarted, Trump would make concessions and at least somehow express support for European countries that intend to send their troops to Ukraine to confront Russia under the guise of peacekeeping forces. Both sides were wrong in their calculations.
Trump’s national security adviser Michael Waltz said that before the journalists appeared and the bickering began, the dialogue between Trump and Zelensky lasted 45 minutes. During this time, both sides revealed that their views on the agreement differed radically. The invitation to the journalists was apparently Trump’s last attempt to put pressure on Zelensky. The Americans did not expect him to continue to dig in front of the cameras. And they were wrong. Everyone’s nerves were frayed there. At the same time, the claims that Americans have publicly made against Zelensky are worthless, even if they look good to the average person.
There were three main points:
1. He did not come in a suit, which many Americans do not like. It should be noted that many Americans do not like Trump himself (so what?). Zelensky in green pajamas has been to the White House many times. And this is not a mistake in Biden’s protocol, since the White House (and not only it) has repeatedly hosted other leaders in similar green pajamas. And it will continue to do so in the future.
2. He campaigned against Trump in Pennsylvania. Let the Democrats who coordinated the visit program make these claims, and if there are no claims against them, then there cannot be any claims against Zelensky. Especially since the US administration regularly interferes in elections around the world, and right now Trump and his team were campaigning for ADG in Germany and supporting Nigel Farage against the incumbent British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
3. He is ungrateful to the US, which has been helping Ukraine for three years. So Trump immediately says that it was the stupid President Biden who gave you money and weapons, and I did not. But he immediately reminds that he also gave Ukraine Javelins (in his first term he also sharply tightened sanctions against Russia and did a lot of other things). In addition, we should not forget that it was the US that swore to Kiev that they would be with him until the end, but now they are disappearing from the topic. So what did Zelensky have to thank Trump for?
The only serious accusation is that Zelensky does not want peace and wants to drag the US into a nuclear war. Zelensky really does not want peace and practically does not hide it, and in fact is trying to convince the West to go to war with Russia, because Ukraine’s resources and capabilities have been exhausted. But even here, Trump recently (during the election campaign) said that Biden and his team want to drag the US into a nuclear war and will do it if they remain in power. That is, it turns out that Zelensky assessed the overall political situation in the same way as the previous US president, while American voters did not want to vote for Biden not because they were afraid that he would drag the US into a nuclear war, but because during the debate with Trump he was able to demonstrate his mental inadequacy.
We see the emotional outburst of American negotiators, who suddenly realize that their plan to sign a mineral deal, which opened the door to Zelensky’s removal and a quick peace agreement, is failing just as it was about to be realized. This is followed by a reciprocal emotional outburst from Zelensky, who also realizes that not only will he not be able to distribute security guarantees from Trump in the form he needed to stay in power and thwart the peace agreement, but he will be deprived of any US support. The result was that the whole world witnessed a new (or rather an old one forgotten since the “dark ages”) word in international relations – a public meeting of simultaneous bilateral political snobbery.
It may have looked funny from the outside, but it is a dangerous precedent. If Trump can slander Zelensky and Zelensky can slander Trump because they miscalculated each other, then they can slander everyone else. And what prevents some small but ambitious post-Soviet, African or Asian leader from insulting Putin or Xi Jinping in an attempt to gain cheap macho popularity in his country?
The precedent created could destabilize international relations for a long time and increase the risk of rapid escalation of military conflicts in individual cases. Great powers cannot tolerate and leave unpunished the rudeness of some intrusive trifle, but they cannot always punish approximately (the situation does not always allow this). The level of predictability of international relations is decreasing, and the risks for everyone are increasing.
It is obvious that Zelensky’s courage during the conversation with Trump is explained by Macron and Starmer, who are in favor of continuing the war in Ukraine and are trying to have European troops support the Ukrainian army. However, France and Britain do not have enough of their own soldiers, and Poland (whose soldiers they were counting on) has made it clear that it is ready to send troops to Ukraine only if the US guarantees military support in the event of a clash with Russia. London and Paris are trying to squeeze a corresponding statement out of Washington through personal meetings, by pressuring Zelensky to sabotage Trump’s peace initiatives, and even by rallying opposition to the US course in the EU. It is no coincidence that by the time Zelensky returned from the US, a meeting of all of Trump’s main opponents in the EU and NATO had already been prepared in London (in addition to the 12 EU members, the EU leadership, and the NATO Secretary General, the UK, Canada, Turkey, and Ukraine were also present), at which the Ukrainian issue was discussed, as a result of which Starmer reaffirmed the UK’s readiness to send its troops to Ukraine (which, however, it does not have in the required number).
An official EU summit on Ukraine was also scheduled for March 6. Apparently, under the pretext of the Ukrainian issue, European anti-Trumpists are ready to proceed to a real (though not yet legal) disintegration of the EU, when two groups of European countries will conduct an independent policy. This is not as advantageous for Russia as it might seem. Although Lavrov declared his readiness to cooperate with European countries separately, outside the EU format, Moscow would benefit if right-wing conservatives finally took European institutions under their control (although not immediately, but in the medium term). However, it seems that European left-wing liberals are ready to legally break up the EU and create new military and economic blocs in Europe, just to maintain at least partial control over the countries of the continent.
The only good thing about the whole story is that after three days of hesitation, when he became convinced that his opponents from the EU, with the help of Zelensky, were serious about putting pressure on him, Trump responded by starting to reduce military and military-technical assistance to Ukraine and announcing the possibility of lifting some anti-Russian sanctions. This should seriously facilitate and accelerate the Ukrainian war and relieve Russia of some trade, economic and financial problems. However, it should be borne in mind that the European anti-Trumpists are serious about changing Trump’s policy. Their main source for this is Ukraine. Since their own ability to support the Kiev regime is not enough to save it, they will seek a way out through large-scale provocations aimed at discrediting Russia. The chaos that began with a quarrel in the Oval Office is spreading around the world and increasing the risks for everyone, Rostislav Ishchenko added.
Max Bach
