Letter From the Editors

As the world grows increasingly troubled, we reflect on the tranquility that came before and find: What makes a time peaceful is not the absence of conflict, but foreknowledge of how escalating the conflict would end. Countries back down when the costs of escalation outweigh the benefits; now that the outcome is less predictable, they are taking their chances.

In the face of Trump’s new tariff policy, for example, Narendra Modi is doubling down on an expanded partnership with Russia to challenge US supremacy, as shown during Putin’s recent state visit to India. In his public statements – after the now-traditional one-on-one car talk – the Russian president expressed this challenge explicitly: “Together with like-minded countries in BRICS and the SCO, as well as a few states of the global majority, we are working to shape a more just and democratic multipolar world order.” According to Valdai expert Anton Bespalov, Modi is showing his newfound commitment to multipolarity by rapprochement not only with traditional friend Russia but long-term rival China, “one of the things that the West actually fears most.”

In the Ukraine peace talks, too, Moscow and Kiev are bucking at Washington’s attempts to create reality by fiat, albeit less directly. Analyst Ian Bremmer explains: “Amid public displays of applause – more often than not feigned – for Donald Trump’s efforts to stop the bloodshed, everyone is scrambling to shape the terms of peace, as well as the realities on the ground.”

In the Russian capital, despite their cordial reception, Trump’s chief negotiator and son-in-law arrived to discover that the 28 points proposed by their opposite numbers were only the beginning of Kremlin demands. Regarding the points on territorial claims, scholar Dmitry Novikov writes, “The Russian leadership did not directly confirm its readiness for such ‘exchanges,’ but indicated that the American proposals could serve as a basis for discussion.” Valdai’s Dmitry Suslov states more frankly that “Russia, obviously, will never agree to let Ukraine keep its forces in place.”

While Ukraine’s position is more desperate, it is also refusing to budge on its key sticking point – security guarantees – which its negotiators underlined in bilateral talks with both the US and the EU. And as Bremmer points out, leverage on this issue has shifted from Washington to Brussels and Kiev, since “Trump no longer controls Ukraine’s lifeline. The US is selling weapons and providing intelligence, but European countries are now fully bankrolling Ukraine’s war effort.”

Kiev, after all, still has reason to believe it can flip the script against Russia. While its land forces are on the defensive, Ukraine has kept on the attack in the green water. Novaya gazeta Europe reminds us that Ukrainian forces drove the Russian Fleet out of Sevastopol with unmanned seacraft, and the new-model Sea Babies are now impeding tankers’ navigation throughout the Black Sea.

Putin, naturally, is spitting mad about this. Immediately before meeting the US peace delegation, he launched into a furious tirade about the conflict that is, he still insists, “not even a war in the proper sense.” He announced immediate retaliation by intensifying “strikes against Ukrainian seaports and the vessels that enter those ports.” However, he added: “The most radical solution would be to cut Ukraine off from the sea, effectively making it impossible for it to engage in piracy at all.” What’s more, he threatened that “if Europe wants to go to war with us, and if they start first, we are ready even right now, no question about it.”

Practically in summary of this attitude, Suslov calls Russian advances in Donetsk “a message to US negotiators, among others. Russia will never agree to major concessions. It will never abandon the fundamental objectives of its special military operation, because it is absolutely confident that it can achieve its objectives through military means.” This limits the US’s options to pursue Donald Trump’s key goal of a Ukraine peace. We must wonder, then: What is that arch-script-flipper going to do about it?