How Deep State Scuttled Ukraine Peace Process

A day after trilateral meeting between United States, Ukraine and Russia concluded in Abu Dhabi on February 5, resulting in confidence-building measure of prisoner exchange involving over 300 prisoners of war, Lieutenant General Vladimir Alexeyev was shot and critically injured by a hired assassin in Moscow. Alexeyev is a deputy of the head of Russian GRU military agency, Admiral Igor Kostyukov, who was leading the Russian delegation.

In January, Moscow accused Kyiv of trying to strike a residence of President Vladimir Putin in Russia's northern Novgorod region with over ninety long-range attack drones. Kremlin said Russia would review its negotiating position in ongoing talks with the United States on ending the Ukraine war.

A video posted on the Russian Defense Ministry's Telegram channel showed Admiral Igor Kostyukov handing to the US attaché what he described as the controlling mechanism of a drone found among downed fragments. "The decryption of the content of the memory of the navigation controller of the drones carried out by specialists of Russia's special services confirms without question that the target of the attack was the complex of buildings of the Russian president's residence in Novgorod region," Kostyukov said.

Similarly, last June, Ukraine mounted Operation Spiderweb, in which Ukrainian drones struck deep inside Russia targeting strategic bombers, in order to scuttle peace talks between Russia and Ukraine happening in Turkey, after the inauguration of Mr. Trump as president, who had made an electoral pledge of resolving the Ukraine conflict as soon as possible after being elected president.

Despite Trump admin’s indisputable sincerity in resolving the deadly conflict, the charade of peace negotiations has been going on for four years but the elusive peace deal has repeatedly been scuttled by certain opportunistic quarters in US military that are hell bent on engaging Russia in a protracted war of attrition in order to degrade military capabilities of Cold War-era rival.

Fact of the matter is Ukraine War was over before it even began, in the first month of the war, after Russia achieved its central military objectives in Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. In the early days of Russia’s military campaign in Ukraine, the Washington Post reported in March 2022: “The main threat to Kyiv appears to be a massive Russian convoy, about 40 miles long, approaching Kyiv from the northwest and believed to be about 20 miles from the capital and stuck near a cargo airport.”

Dubious Ukrainian claims of having repelled Russia’s assault on the capital by mounting guerrilla warfare tactics to the contrary, it’s an incontestable fact that the “40-mile-long” military convoy of battle tanks, armored vehicles and heavy artillery that descended from Belarus in the north and reached the outskirts of Kyiv in the early days of the war without encountering much resistance en route the capital was simply a decoy astutely designed as a diversionary tactic by Russia’s military strategists in order to force Ukrainian forces to scramble to defend the embattled country’s capital and deter military command from sending reinforcements to Donbas in east Ukraine where real battles for territory were fiercely fought.

All the towns from the Belarus border to the northern approaches of the capital fell in quick succession. Russian forces continued advancing from the northwest of Kyiv, capturing Bucha, Hostomel and Vorzel on the outskirts of the capital by March 5, and Irpin by March 9, 2022.

Quite astonishingly, however, instead of mounting a long-awaited assault on the capital, it was reported on March 11, 2022, that the convoy had largely dispersed, taking up positions in forests around the capital, before withdrawing back to Belarus after Russia’s announcement of scaling back military campaign in north Ukraine at Istanbul peace initiative on March 29, 2022.

Clearly, commanders of the military convoy had explicit instructions to spare the city of four million people. The indiscriminate bombardment of the densely populated Ukrainian capital and ensuing urban warfare would inevitably have caused thousands of needless civilian casualties. Therefore, Russia’s military brass decided to spare the rest of the embattled country and restricted Russian military offensive on liberating Russian-majority Donbas region in east Ukraine.

Shortly thereafter, at Istanbul peace initiative in March 2022, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin, leading the Russian peace delegation in Istanbul talks, told reporters: “In order to increase mutual trust and create the necessary conditions for further negotiations and achieving the ultimate goal of agreeing and signing an agreement, a decision was made to radically, by a large margin, reduce military activity in the Kyiv and Chernihiv directions.”

Ukrainian negotiators said that under their proposals, Kyiv would agree not to join alliances or host bases of foreign troops, but would have security guarantees in terms similar to Article 5, the collective defense clause of the transatlantic NATO military alliance.

“Ukrainian negotiators have essentially agreed to Russia's principal security demands of rejecting NATO membership and regarding the presence of foreign military bases on its territory,” the Kremlin's chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky, who is ironically still leading Russian delegation in Geneva four years later, told Sputnik News in March 2022.

“The combat potential of the Ukrainian Armed Forces has been significantly reduced, which allows us to focus our main attention and efforts on achieving the main goal—the liberation of Donbas,” then-Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu proudly boasted in March 2022.

Following Istanbul peace initiative in March 2022, in the spirit of apparent “reconciliation and multilateralism” defining the Biden administration’s approach to conducting international diplomacy, then-US Secretary of State Antony Blinken handed over the “power of attorney” to the Ukrainian president to offer Russia relief from international sanctions in exchange for ending its military offensive in Ukraine.

On April 3, confirming in an NBC News interview that Zelensky—then one of the most ambitious emerging new leaders in Central Europe, not to be mistaken for an imperialist stooge—had the ability to negotiate sanctions relief for peace, Blinken, while assuming the air of magnanimity and rapprochement, revealed that President Joe Biden’s administration would support whatever the Ukrainian people wanted to do to bring the war to an end.

“We’ll be looking to see what Ukraine is doing and what it wants to do,” Blinken said. “And if it concludes that it can bring this war to an end, stop the death and destruction and continue to assert its independence and its sovereignty – and ultimately that requires the lifting of sanctions – of course, we will allow that.”

Contradicting misleading reports hailing Ukraine’s imperial stooges as purported “masters of their own destinies,” however, President Joe Biden told the EU leaders at a summit in Brussels in March 2022 that “any notion that we are going to be out of this in a month is wrong, and that the EU needed to prepare for a long-term pressure campaign against Russia.”

“US and European officials voiced skepticism over Russia’s sincerity and commitment towards the peace talks, underlining that only a full ceasefire, troop withdrawal and return of captured territory to Ukraine would be enough to trigger discussions over lifting sanctions on Russia’s economy.

“Western countries were discussing both enforcement of existing sanctions and drawing up potential additional measures to increase pressure on Russian president Vladimir Putin,” senior EU and US officials confided to the Financial Times.

Advising Ukrainians to hold out instead of rushing for securing peace deal with Russia, the Sunday Times reported, senior British officials were urging Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to instruct his negotiators “to refuse to make concessions during peace negotiations with Russian counterparts.”

“A senior government source said there were concerns that allies were over-eager to secure an early peace deal, adding that a settlement should be reached only when Ukraine is in the strongest possible position.”

In a phone call, then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned President Zelensky that President Putin was a “liar and a bully” who would use talks to “wear you down and force you to make concessions.” The British prime minister also told MPs it was “certainly inconceivable that any sanctions could be taken off simply because there is a ceasefire.” London was making sure there was “no backsliding on sanctions by any of our friends and partners around the world,” he added.

Leaving Orwellian doublespeak of American and European statesmen aside, in a significantly escalatory move virtually sinking Istanbul peace initiative to the bottom of Black Sea, Ukraine's Operational Command South announced in April 2022 that it had hit a Russian warship with a “Ukrainian-made Neptune anti-ship missile” that was operating roughly 60 miles south off the coast of Odesa in southeast Ukraine and that it had started to sink. “In the Black Sea operational zone, Neptune anti-ship cruise missiles hit the cruiser Moskva, the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet—it received significant damage,” the Ukrainian statement said.

A Russian government statement acknowledged: “A fire broke out. Other units of the ship’s group tried to help, but a storm and a powerful explosion of ammunition overturned the cruiser and it began to sink.” Although the Russian statement initially claimed the cruiser “remained afloat” and measures were being taken to tow it to port, it later admitted the warship had sunk as four Russian ships that had gone to the Moskva’s rescue were hampered by bad weather and by ammunition exploding on board.

Russian news agencies said the 611-foot-long (186 meters) Moskva, with a crew of almost 500, was commissioned in 1983 and refurbished in 1998. It was one of the three cruisers in Russia’s formidable Black Sea Fleet. The Moskva was armed with a range of anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles as well as torpedoes and naval guns and close-in missile defense systems, including 16 anti-ship Vulkan cruise missiles with a range of at least 700 km (440 miles).

Reportedly, the warship was also carrying S-300 anti-air missiles, which were crucial to Russia’s air-defense capabilities over Crimea. It was the first time Moscow had lost a cruiser since German planes sank the Chervona Ukraina (Red Ukraine) in 1941 at Sevastopol – the Crimean naval base.

Although Ukraine claimed the Russian warship was struck by a “Ukrainian-made Neptune anti-ship missile,” developed domestically based on the Soviet KH-35 cruise missile that became operational in the Ukrainian naval forces in 2021, Politico reported in March 2022 that Kyiv had specifically demanded “long-range anti-ship missiles” from Washington.

Lending credence to the reports the United States had delivered Harpoon anti-ship missiles to Ukraine, the Washington Post reported in March: “During an official visit, a Ukrainian special operations commander told Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) and other lawmakers that they were shifting training and planning to focus on maintaining an armed opposition, relying on insurgent-like tactics.

“Ukrainian officials told the lawmakers that they were frustrated that the United States had not sent Harpoon missiles to target Russian ships and Stinger missiles to attack Russian aircraft, Moulton and Waltz said in separate interviews.”

In addition to the CIA’s clandestine program for training Ukraine’s largely conscript military and allied neo-Nazi militias in Donbas in east Ukraine aimed at cultivating an anti-Russian insurgency in Ukraine, and the US Special Forces program for training Ukraine’s security forces at Yavoriv Combat Training Center in the western part of the country bordering Poland, the Pentagon revealed in April 2022 that it had also been training Ukrainian troops that were inside the US before Russia launched its invasion.

The Ukrainian naval cadets were participating in a pre-scheduled professional military education program at the Naval Small Craft Instruction and Technical Training School in Biloxi, Mississippi, when Russia's invasion of Ukraine began on Feb. 24, according to Pentagon’s then-Press Secretary John F. Kirby. 

“That school is a security cooperation school, operating under the US Special Operations Command in support of foreign security assistance and geographic combatant commanders’ theater security cooperation priorities. The Ukrainian forces received training on patrol craft operations, communications and maintenance.

“Since the conclusion of the course in early March, the Department of Defense provided the group additional advanced tactical training on the systems the United States has provided to Ukraine, including on the Switchblade unmanned aerial vehicle. Several batches of Ukrainian naval cadets trained at the Naval Training School in Biloxi, Mississippi, have already returned home to Ukraine and were deployed in Odesa and the rest are now headed back to Ukraine,” Kirby said.

Besides receiving advanced tactical training on operating the Switchblade kamikaze drones and unmanned coastal defense boats, included in the additional $800 million in military assistance to Ukraine announced by the Biden administration in April, the Ukrainian naval cadets also received training on operating long-range anti-ship missiles in the United States.

Clearly, the US-trained Ukrainian naval forces deployed in Odesa in the southeast scored two hits of Harpoon anti-ship missiles on the Russian guided-missile cruiser Moskva operating 60 miles south off the coast of Odesa that punched a hole in the warship’s hull and ignited a blaze that, in turn, caused the massive amount of ammunition loaded on the cruiser to explode, and the battleship subsequently sank to the bottom of the Black Sea.

Dispelling dubious Ukrainian claim of having sank Russian cruiser with domestically built Neptune anti-ship missiles and conclusively determining the military operation to sink Moskva was planned and orchestrated by Pentagon, the Daily Mail revealed in April: “US maritime surveillance plane was over Black Sea minutes before Russian flagship Moskva was hit by missiles.”

“The US Navy used its new marine surveillance aircraft to provide accurate targeting data to Ukrainian forces to sink the Russian Black Sea flag ship Moskva on April 13. P-8 Poseidon aircraft is packed with state-of-the-art surveillance equipment which can track surface vessels and submarines at ranges of more than 100 miles.

“P-8 left US Naval Air Station Sigonella in Sicily on April 13, hours before the attack. Before reaching the Black Sea coastline, the Poseidon turned off its trackers, so it could no longer be followed online. The aircraft was 'hidden' for almost three hours before it returned to Flight Radar 24.

“The US Navy refused to confirm if it assisted Ukraine with the attack by providing intelligence data. A Defense source added: 'In keeping with our support to NATO’s eastern flank, we have been conducting some limited air patrols off the coast of Romania. But we will not speak on the details of operational matters.’”