By the close of Thursday there was a difference of opinion between the Kremlin and the White House on what had taken place on the telephone earlier that evening between President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump.
More exactly, there had been argument over Trump’s threat to send long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles through NATO to the Ukraine for firing at the Russian hinterland.
In Trump’s summary, tweeted at 20:11 Moscow time, he said “great progress was made with today’s telephone conversation.” He said the main points of conversation were the Middle East peace plan; the Melania Trump initiative on the war-displaced children; “a great deal of time talking about Trade between Russia and the United States when the War with Ukraine is over”; a new meeting between foreign ministers, Marco Rubio and Sergei Lavrov; and Budapest for the meeting to follow between the presidents.
In Ushakov’s summary, posted by the Kremlin an hour later at 21:10, the call had lasted “almost two and a half hours. Clearly, it was a rather substantive and at the same time very open and frank exchange.”
The last phrase means there was serious disagreement. This was over Trump’s challenge to Putin’s military capacities as a “paper tiger” by the Tomahawk threat. According to Ushakov, “The issue of potential supplies of long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine was also raised. Vladimir Putin reiterated his position that Tomahawks would not change the situation on the battlefield but would inflict substantial damage to relations between our countries, to say nothing of the prospects for a peaceful settlement.”
Ushakov’s summary omitted to record what Trump had replied to Putin on this. Trump’s tweet didn’t mention Tomahawk at all. They did agree, Ushakov said, to transfer the argument to their subordinates for a meeting next week, and then to meet directly in a new summit in Hungary.
Ushakov’s readout of the call ended on the line: “Overall, I would say that the telephone contact between the Russian and US presidents was very useful, and the two leaders agreed to stay in touch.”
For the time being, Trump thinks his Tomahawk threat is working; Putin thinks he has delayed the move and made its cancellation the precondition for the Budapest summit.
Manipulating the US president to make his domestic and foreign policy decisions as Stephen Miller of the White House (lead image-3) is doing with President Donald Trump (lead image-2) is not new.
Jimmy Carter tried to dismantle the bureaucracy and the mindset (ideology) of the “imperial presidency”, as he called the White House during the election campaign of 1976. But then Carter fell under the spell of National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski; he controlled what the president was told was the evidence for his policy choices, the risks, and the consequences. In this way, Brzezinski more than influenced the policy outcomes Carter believed he was deciding for himself.
(One of them was the secret US war with the Kremlin in Afghanistan.)
Carter required that his decision-making process start and end on paper; he read reams of it in the personal study off the Oval Office. He demanded his intelligence briefing every morning. However, connected by an internal passage of connecting doors, Brzezinski supervised what was in the papers and vetted who walked in the outer Oval Office door to have words with the President.
Trump prefers pictures, screens of them, and he gets one intelligence briefing per week, followed by interpretation over lunch in the private White House dining room from Vice President JD Vance. Miller controls the paper, especially the virtual posts, the press gaggles on aircraft in flight and airfields at takeoff and landing, and in the Oval Office. Vance coaches Trump through his misspeaking, memory failures, political gaffes.
Listen now to the way in which the method and purpose of these new men differs from anything in the history of the American presidency; and how the leaders of the European allies, the UK, and Canada exploit what they believe they know in order to get the policy decisions they want from Trump — that is, after Miller, Vance and others have decided and Trump has been persuaded.
Then once you understand, ask whether the calculations of the allies, and also of the main enemy at present, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, are misjudgements of what serves their national strategies best.
In the new podcast from Dialogue Works, Nima Alkhorshid asks if President Donald Trump has decided to sell Tomahawk missiles to the NATO allies for attacking the Russian hinterland, and why the allies are so keen to continue fighting the war when it is obvious the Tomahawk cannot turn defeat on the Ukraine battlefield into victory. Listen to the hour-long discussion here.
The third question in the discussion is — what to make of Russian policy towards Palestine after the Arabs cancelled their long-prepared summit meeting in Moscow with President Vladimir Putin, scheduled for October 15, and opted instead for a summit with Trump at Sharm el-Sheikh on October 13 – from which Putin was excluded? Answer: Russian policy contradicts the US-Israeli plan for Gaza but they won’t say so in public nor will the Arabs countenance a confrontation with Trump right now. The podcast looks again at Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s attempt to explain the Russian reason to Arab journalists.
Last week, according to the New York Times, the Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was reported to have tried to head off President Donald Trump’s escalation to frontal military attack on Venezuela and regime change in Caracas by offering “a dominant stake in Venezuela’s oil and other mineral wealth in discussions that lasted for months, according to multiple people close to the talks.” Reportedly, Maduro’s terms included: “all existing and future oil and gold projects to American companies, give preferential contracts to American businesses, reverse the flow of Venezuelan oil exports from China to the United States, and slash his country’s energy and mining contracts with Chinese, Iranian and Russian firms.”
The first provision of the treaty calls for “joint initiatives within the framework of OPEC+, the Forum of Gas Exporting Countries and other multilateral organizations, [to] promote balanced and stable long–term development of global energy markets without using artificial restrictions and unfair competition tools”. The second proposed to “cooperate in the energy sector in such areas as the exploration and development of new oil and natural gas fields, increasing the returns of fields operated by joint ventures and reducing their environmental impact.”
Maduro signed the instrument of treaty ratification in front of the Russian Ambassador to Venezuela on October 7. But that was several days after Maduro had been told the Trump Administration had purported his scheme to replace the Russian oil companies with American ones, and had cancelled negotiations on Maduro’s term sheet led by Richard Grenell.
For the time being, there has been no ratification of the Venezuelan strategic partnership treaty by the State Duma in Moscow. When Venezuela’s Ambassador to Moscow, Jesús Salazar Velázquez, visited the Duma on October 6, ratification was discussed but not agreed. Instead, the official Duma communiqué reported that Velazquez had agreed with Duma deputy chairman Ivan Melnikov — a Communist Party faction leader who ranks third in the parliamentary leadership — to “express solidarity in countering Western military-political and financial-economic pressure. Both sides noted the importance of inter-parliamentary cooperation as part of bilateral interaction and discussed the possibility of holding a meeting of the Russia-Venezuela and Venezuela-Russia parliamentary friendship groups via videoconference in the near future.”
President Putin has twice stopped short of the opportunity to express his solidarity with Maduro. On October 2, during his appearance at the Valdai Club conference, Putin acknowledged that the French commando boarding of a tanker carrying Russian oil was “piracy”. Illegal yes, but Russia is not going to be provoked, Putin said. The French “want very much to transfer the tension from inside the country to the external contour, to excite some other forces, other countries, in particular Russia, to provoke us into some vigorous actions.”
Trump’s attacks on Venezuelan boats off the coast, which began in September and have been justified in Washington as an operation against drug smugglers, have not been explicitly condemned by the Kremlin. They have been called piracy by the Kremlin-funded security analysis platform Vzglyad.
At Putin’s last opportunity, in a press conference in Dushanbe on October 10, he was asked: “It has just been announced that Donald Trump did not receive the Nobel Peace Prize. In your opinion: should he have received it, did he deserve it, was he worthy of it?” By then Putin knew the prize had been awarded to the US backed regime-change candidate to overthrow Maduro, Maria Corina Machado. In his reply, Putin ignored Venezuela and praised Trump.
“It is not for me,” he said “to decide who should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize… There have been cases where the committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to individuals who had done nothing for peace. In my view, these decisions inflicted enormous damage on the prize’s prestige. A person comes along – good or bad – and within a month or two, boom. For what? They had done absolutely nothing. Is that how it should work? It ought to be awarded for actual merits. Consequently, I believe, its prestige has been significantly undermined. But that is neither here nor there – it is not for me to judge. Whether or not the incumbent President of the United States deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, I do not know. But he has genuinely done much to resolve complex crises that have persisted for years, if not decades. I have said this before – I know for certain: regarding the crisis in Ukraine, he sincerely strives for a resolution. Some things have worked out, others have not. Perhaps much more can still be achieved based on the agreements and discussions in Anchorage. But he is certainly making an effort, certainly working on these issues – issues of achieving peace and resolving complex international situations.”
Listen to Dimitri Lascaris, Slobodan Despot and me discuss the reasons why the weak and desperate governments of Europe and the UK want war with Russia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChTDuZnYwSk
by Editor - Saturday, October 11th, 2025 No Comments »
There are two reasons why President Vladimir Putin is serious about making the Oreshnik threat of retaliation in public, and also serious in holding it back. A red light, which is also flashing yellow and green.
One reason is political. Russian public opinion is strongly in favour of a peace settlement negotiated with President Donald Trump if that’s possible, and for as long as the public believes Putin should continue to try. Russians do not support military escalation by the Kremlin to compel a peace agreement in Washington and Kiev. This is because they don’t believe escalation will work that way, and because the price they believe they will pay is too high to suffer. Reflecting this calculation of cost, benefit, risk, and probability of outcome for escalation, public support for Putin’s performance, including his conduct of the war and negotiations with Trump, is stable and high – 87% at the moment, two points short of the 2015 record.
This indicator should not be misinterpreted as unconditional in the personality cult or state propaganda fashion. Rather, it is the calculated consensus that Putin’s combination of goals, political and military, is the right one. Also, because Putin’s method of ambiguity, compromise, and flexibility is the only practical one for the time being.
The second reason is military. A strike by hypersonic multiple-warhead Oreshnik missiles against Ukrainian targets, including decapitation targets in Kiev and Lvov, will not produce the capitulation of the Ukrainian regime and surrender of the Ukrainian armed forces. It also cannot stop or deter the US, Germany, France, the UK, Poland, Finland, and other NATO states from continuing their war against Russia on the Ukrainian battlefield, and simultaneously on the fresh war fronts they are preparing along the full extent of Russia’s borders in the north, the Arctic, the far east, and the south in the Caucasus and Caspian Sea to Azerbaijan and Iran.
If the Russian public can make this calculation in an approximate fashion, it’s plain the General Staff, intelligence services and Foreign Ministry have calculated it with precision. Moscow sources in a position to know confirm this, and also the details leading to it. Opening the file on the latter in wartime will give aid and comfort to the enemy — not here.
Read instead the latest summary reports – here and then here.
Putin has tied the credibility of the Oreshnik for the Ukrainian battlefield to the strategic battlefield – this means the nuclear war calculation – in the START nuclear arms control treaty talks which he and Trump have opened and agreed to extend for a year until February 2027. About these negotiations, at the Valdai conference last Thursday (October 2) Putin cracked what looked like a joke, a pun on names.
Asked what will happen next if the extended START talks fail, Putin replied: “it is very difficult to say what would happen next because the answer does not depend on us alone. I know what will happen within a year if the US administration accepts our proposal, but it is difficult to say what would happen beyond this limit. It is not a simple dialogue; we are aware of the pitfalls. First, we have created many modern high-tech weapons, like Oreshnik. Not Oreshkin, but Oreshnik.”
Maxim Oreshkin is the deputy chief of the President’s staff, a former minister of economic development, and a principal domestic policy advisor to Putin at present. Misspelling the missile name Oreshnik, literally hazel tree, as Oreshkin is a common mistake in Russian. Putin was joking — and he wasn’t.
“We have recently shown that such systems are not strategic weapons,” Putin went on in his answer. “Yet some experts in the United States claim that they are strategic weapons. This issue must be clarified. I will not go into detail now, but it needs clarification, which will take time, of course.”
The point has been missed by most commentaries from the Russian and American military bloggers on the test firing of the Oreshnik against a Dniepropetrovsk target on November 21, 2024. Read the archive on what happened then and on interpretation of the Oreshnik Moment since then.
Putin tried elaborating. “The second issue concerns tactical nuclear weapons. The treaty covers strategic weapons, but modern tactical weapons are many times more powerful than the bombs which the Americans dropped on Japan, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I believe those were 20-kiloton bombs, but modern weapons – tactical systems – are several times more powerful. There are pitfalls in this sphere too. The only place where we have deployed them outside Russia is Belarus, whereas the Americans have such weapons all over the world – in Europe, Turkiye [Kremlin spelling], and in various other places. But it is true that we have more such weapons. It is an issue that needs attention.”
“Several other aspects still need to be worked out. We know there are voices in the US who say they ‘do not need an extension.’ Well, if they do not need it, then neither do we. Overall, we are doing fine as is; we are confident in our nuclear shield, and we know what we will be doing tomorrow and the day after. So, if they do not need it, neither do we.”
For the time being, that’s the Russian response to Trump’s escalation to the long-range Tomahawk missile and the space weapon system he is calling Golden Dome. Politically, the Moscow sources judge this is enough said. The military discussion of the Ukraine battlefield options, they say, must remain under wraps. Putin has made explicit also that this discussion, and the conclusions reached, are collective ones with his “colleagues”, civilian and military. Enough to speak operationally, not strategically for the time being, the sources say. “The operational strategy is to keep the line hot; keep the Ukrainians, and of course the Americans, in doubt about which direction we will concentrate our ground movements. This is operational dominance, manoeuvre control, control of the surprise factor.”
The Foreign Ministry has followed by indicating the conclusion that the Russian oligarchs have failed to get Trump and his intermediary, Steven Witkoff, to accept the billion-dollar business deals and bribes which have been offered by the Kremlin’s emissary, Kirill Dmitriev, in exchange for sanctions relief. This is the meaning of Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov’s announcement on October 8: “Unfortunately, we have to admit that Anchorage’s powerful momentum in favour of agreements has been largely exhausted by the efforts of opponents and supporters of the war. This is the result of destructive activities, primarily by the Europeans,” Ryabkov explained with the qualifier in the adverb.
By “Europeans”, Ryabkov meant the money lobbies in Europe and the UK, and also in Washington. Since January Putin has agreed to authorize the Dmitriev strategy of neutralizing them by outbidding them with more money. Here is how that started in January with the oligarchs’ picnic. Here is how it was failing in April. The Anchorage summit meeting on August 16 was Dmitriev’s last chance.
Those Moscow officials who believed Dmitriev would fail with Witkoff have been saying, “we told you so”, but Ryabkov practises diplomatic discretion.
Russian public opinion remains powerful. US military bloggers miss its significance. Putin does not.
When President Vladimir Putin acknowledged on the weekend (lead image, left) that for war operations, he refers to his “colleagues”, he meant, among several things, that he has removed his restrictions on the General Staff’s conduct of the electric war on the Ukrainian battlefield as far west as the Polish border.
The record of Russia’s electric war strikes in the Ukraine began on October 10-12 and 16-20, 2022; then followed on October 22-27, 2023; March 29-30, 2024; June 1, 2024; and November 7, 2024. Click to follow each stage of the electric war. Roughly speaking, Putin agreed with the General Staff that they could target power generating plants and the power grids transmitting electricity to the main population centres.
Triggering population evacuation from east to west, then into Poland, was one of the political goals Putin agreed. Cutting the train lines between Poland, Lvov and Kiev was not. This allowed almost unrestricted inflow of US and NATO weapons and men to supply the eastern front, including the Ukrainian attack and occupation of Kursk region which began on August 6, 2024; also, the movement of western political and media figures to and from Kiev for escalation of the propaganda war against Russia. The open rail lines have been used to demonstrate the US- NATO line that Ukraine is winning, Russia losing the war.
Putin then accepted President Donald Trump’s proposal for a 30-day halt to attacks on the Ukraine’s civilian energy infrastructure; that began after their telephone call on February 12.
Trump’s war staffs in Washington, Poland, and the Ukraine did not honour the Putin-Trump telephone agreement; it was a unilateral, unreciprocated Putin concession Instead, they have steadily escalated their drone and missile attacks on Russian energy infrastructure, including oil pumping sites, oil storages, gas pipelines and processing plants, port terminals, and oil refineries.
The tone of the war decision-making process in Moscow has sharpened as the enemy attacks have escalated, their targets deeper in the Russian hinterland.
A Moscow source in a position to know says that Putin has rejected the criticism that concessions to Trump for the sake of negotiating a peace settlement were producing no reciprocation from the Americans; instead encouraging them to escalate to test Russian vulnerability,pressure the domestic economy, and probe for Putin’s weakness.
Trump (also Vice President JD Vance) have attempted all three.
He intended to combine them when he announced on September 23 that Russia is a “paper tiger”. Then in front of his assembly of military commanders on September 30 Trump made the attack personal. “He [Putin] should have had that war done in a week. And I said to him, you know, you don’t look good. You’re four years fighting a war that should have taken a week. Are you a paper tiger?”
Trump has also dismissed negotiating to achieve end of war. “Problem with Vietnam,” Trump told the crew of the USS Harry Truman on October 5, “we, you know, we stopped fighting to win. We would’ve won easy. We would’ve won Afghanistan easy, would’ve won every war easy. But we got politically correct, ‘Ah, let’s take it easy.’ It’s, we’re not politically correct anymore, just so you understand. We win — Now, we win. We don’t want to be politically correct anymore.”
Trump also keeps repeating his personal attack on Putin — “I’m very disappointed in him.”
In answer, Putin’s approach, the President has said privately, should be: “we won’t rock the boat. We won’t be provoked.” The General Staff, the intelligence services and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have responded: “the other side will rock the boat even harder.” The source requests that the discussion of their options which has followed should remain out of public debate.
Moscow sources acknowledge the sting in the paper tiger jibe. “The Europeans and Brits have studied Putin’s weaknesses and think they know how to defeat him. They think – and the Russian oligarchs have been telling them – there is no Kremlin secret they don’t know.”
The source dismisses pro-Russian podcasters in the US. “They think they are following the Kremlin line from RT and Sputnik which reward them by putting them on Russian TV and quoting them.” “It’s a circle jerk”, says a military source familiar with US slang.
Putin’s performance at the Valdai Club conference last Thursday has triggered sharp internal reaction; some of it has spilled out publicly. Putin tried to explain himself in a brief interview with Pavel Zarubin on the weekend. “I was simply honestly and frankly laying out certain situations, the essence of the issues, and how I feel about them,” the President said. This has been interpreted in Moscow as apologetic.
“Well,” Putin went on, “it’s up to my colleagues to respond. I spoke sincerely and honestly as it is; how things actually were; and how I would like to see the situation develop. Some will like this; some won’t. And I didn’t have a goal. I didn’t set out to do anything pleasing. I just tell it like it is.”
Moscow sources point out that Putin has now followed up in two unexpected sessions with his colleagues. The Security Council was called into session on Tuesday, earlier in the week than usual. That meeting was followed on Wednesday with a meeting between Putin and the Defense Ministry, General Staff and military commanders from the front army groups (lead image, right). “In an attempt to show its Western sponsors at least some semblance of success,” Putin began, “the Kiev regime is trying to target civilian facilities deep inside our territory. This will not help it. Our goal is to ensure the safety of the Russian citizens, as well as the safety of the strategic sites and civilian infrastructure, including energy facilities.”
Putin’s intention was to stiffen Russian deterrence by threat of retaliation if Trump escalates by supplying the Tomahawk missile to Germany, the UK, Canada or other NATO states for redeployment in the Ukraine; or by authorizing the Germans to fire the Taurus missile at Russian hinterland targets. The operational strategy agreed, a source claims, is Russian readiness to fight one battlefield at a time to match Trump’s sequencing of wars on Russia’s western, eastern, and southern fronts. It is also to accelerate the fight to the finish on the Ukrainian battlefield.
“Within six months, by the end of the winter, to consolidate control of the four regions,” one source claims.
“In a year, maybe less, maybe longer,” another source believes. “The operational strategy is to keep the line hot; keep the Ukrainians, and of course the Americans, in doubt about which direction we will concentrate our ground movements. This is operational dominance, manoeuvre control, control of the surprise factor.”
“Comrades,” Putin assured the military meeting, “our shared objective remains unchanged – we must ensure the unconditional fulfilment of all goals set for the troops in the course of the special military operation.”
For the first time, the White House has issued a piece of paper (lead image, top), signed by the President, attempting to install a form of fuhrer fascism to deter, arrest, and if need be shoot to kill any form of expression which amounts to disloyalty to the President and to his MAGA doctrine.
The paper defined that as “targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society.” This includes public expression of the terms “fascist” and “anti-fascist”.
According to the White House paper, those who speak in such language are hiding under “the umbrella of self-described ‘anti-fascism.’ These movements portray foundational American principles (e.g., support for law enforcement and border control) as ‘fascist’ to justify and encourage acts of violent revolution. This ‘anti-fascist’ lie has become the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties…anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity…and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
The paper, drafted by Stephen Miller, deputy chief of the White House staff, was signed by Trump on September 25. It is titled “NATIONAL SECURITY PRESIDENTIAL MEMORANDUM/NSPM-7”. Its subject is “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence.” Read the Miller Memorandum in full here.
It was followed by the Pentagon order for all US forces commanders and their staffs to assemble at the Quantico base in Virginia on September 30 to be addressed by Trump and Peter Hegseth, the Defense Secretary.
Since May 6, they have been under the direct threat of purge. Hegseth announced he was commencing to cut by 20% the 3 and 4-star general ranks of the main forces, by 10% in other flag officers of the main forces, and a 20% cut in the general ranks of the National Guard. No time line was announced for the cuts to be decided in two phases.
He was starting, Hegseth also claimed, “the most comprehensive review” of headquarters and operational command structures and areas of responsibility since 1986. When that takes place, there will be “a minimum of an additional ten percent reduction of general and flag officers throughout the DOD, in conjunction with the realignment of the unified command plan.”
The sword of Damocles wasn’t a stab in the back. “This is not a slash and burn exercise meant to punish high ranking officers, nothing could be further from the truth,” Hegseth claimed in anticipation of resistance from the generals.
None of these proposed cuts or reorganizations of commands were confirmed in the four months before Trump ordered the generals to assemble. None of the mainstream media journalists at the Pentagon nor of the alt-media military podcasters has reported a general source as admitting the link between the purge plan, the Miller Memorandum, and Trump’s summons to Quantico. The President then made this obvious.
In his speech to the assembled flag officers (lead image, bottom), Trump declared: “we are under invasion from within. We’re stopping it very quickly. After spending trillions of dollars defending the borders of foreign countries, with your help, we’re defending the borders of our country from now on. We’re not going to let this happen…San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places and we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within. Controlling the physical territory of our border is essential to national security. We can’t let these people live…If it’s OK with you generals and admirals…I say, they spit, we hit. Is that OK? I think so. They spit — it’s a new thing. They spit, we hit…This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room because it’s the enemy from within and we have to handle it before it gets out of control. It won’t get out of control, once you’re involved…With leaders like we have right here in this beautiful room today, we will vanquish every danger and crush every threat to our freedom in every generation to come, because we will fight, fight, fight and we will win, win, win.”
Trump also issued the loyalty warning: “I’ve never walked into a room so silent before. This is very — don’t laugh! Don’t laugh, you’re not allowed to do that! You know what, just have a good time. And if you want to applaud, you applaud. And if want to do anything you want, you can do anything that you want. And if don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank, there goes you future.”
That was at the beginning of Trump’s hour-long speech. Then at the end, the warning was repeated: “I’ll tell you, Pete and General Caine and all of the people that I’ve met that have been lifted up in rank. And we got many of them out of here. To be honest with you, I didn’t like doing it, but we got many of you out of here because we weren’t satisfied.”
Viewed in Moscow, the Kremlin-supported security analysis platform Vzglyad has reported the political significance of the loyalty oath assembly in Quantico when most US experts have missed it. This is because the Russians remember Adolf Hitler’s loyalty oath (Führereid) and what followed for Russia. Between 1934 and 1935, first for military personnel and then for civilians, Hitler ordered the state loyalty oath to be changed from the secular language, “I swear loyalty to the Reich’s constitution” to: “I swear by God this holy oath that I shall render unconditional obedience to the Leader of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler, supreme commander of the armed forces”.
According to Vzglyad’s writer, Gevork Mirzayan, “hundreds of American generals were offered a choice. In the understanding of liberals, the choice is between personal loyalty to Trump and loyalty to the American state. [In] July 1935, the German generals were summoned to an extraordinary meeting in Berlin and informed that their previous oath of allegiance to the Weimar Constitution was invalid and that they must take a personal oath to the Fuhrer. ‘Most of the generals have taken a new oath to retain their positions,’ retired General Ben Hodges commented on the Quantico meeting.”
The Russian interpretation is not placed between the lines. This is a message directed by a leading policy medium at the Kremlin, not a message from the Kremlin to the audience outside the Kremlin wall.
Last week (October 2) at the Valdai Club conference in Sochi, President Vladimir Putin (lead image, left) responded to a question from an Iranian about the war in Gaza and President Donald Trump’s plan for Gaza which had been released two days earlier in Washington.
“About Trump’s Gaza plan,” Putin replied, “you know, it will probably come as a surprise to you, but on the whole, Russia is ready to support him. If, of course, as we have to look carefully at the proposals made, it will lead to the final goal, which we have always talked about. Russia has always advocated the creation of two states: Israel and a Palestinian state, starting in 1948 and then in 1974, when the relevant UN Security Council resolution was adopted. And this, in my opinion, is the key to a final solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.”
Claiming he had not “looked at this proposal so carefully yet”, Putin enumerated his questions: “First: How long will this international administration work? How and to whom will power be transferred later? As far as I understand, this plan outlines the possibility of transferring power to the Palestinian Authority. In my opinion, it would be better, of course, to put everything under the control of President [Mahmoud] Abbas and the current Palestinian administration. It may be difficult for them to resolve the security issues. But so far as I can imagine, my colleagues, with whom I spoke on this topic today, envisage the possibility of transferring control over the Gaza Strip, including to the local militia, to ensure security. Is this bad? In my opinion, this is a good thing.”
“We need to understand, I repeat, how long the international administration will manage there, in what time frame it is supposed to transfer both civil power and security issues, which is very important. And, in my opinion, this should definitely be supported. We are talking about freeing all the hostages held by Hamas, on the one hand, and releasing a significant number of Palestinians from Israeli prisons. Here, too, we need to understand how many Palestinians, whom, and at what time can we release them? And of course, you know, the most important question is: how does Palestine feel about this? That’s exactly what you need to understand. And the countries of the region, the entire Islamic world, and Palestine itself, the Palestinians themselves, including, of course, Hamas… Of course, Israel’s attitude towards this is also important. We don’t know yet either: how did Israel take it? I do not even know of any public statements on this subject, I just did not have time to look at it. But it’s not even public statements that are important, but in fact how the Israeli leadership will treat this, whether it will fulfill everything that the President of the United States has proposed. There are a lot of questions.”
Putin was skeptical of the role in a Gaza supervisory authority known as the “Board of Peace” (BOP) proposed by Trump for former UK prime minister Tony Blair. Hinting at Blair’s roles in initiating the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Putin said “he’s not known as a great peacemaker, but I know him personally. Moreover, I visited him, spent the night at his house, we had coffee in our pyjamas in the morning, and so on…He is a man with his own views, but he is an experienced politician. And in general, of course, if his activities, his experience, and his knowledge are directed towards a peaceful course, then he can play some positive role.”
The next day, October 3, the Hamas leadership issued a 5-paragraph reply to Trump.
This was amplified in a detailed response to the Trump plan in a 21-minute interview broadcast by Al-Arabiya, the Saudi state television channel based in Riyadh. Osama Hamdan (lead image, right), a veteran Palestinian diplomat, advisor to and spokesman for Hamas, answered each of Putin’s questions, and more.Watch and if need be, turn on the English auto-translate function at the Youtube setting.
Hamdan rejects any role for the foreign “board of peace”, proposed by Trump in his plan, and any role as a foreign overseer or viceroy for Blair, whether in his pyjamas or out of them.
On June 30, 2021, during his Direct Line programme, President Vladimir Putin was asked what games he liked to play during his schooldays. “I am tempted to say chess,” he replied, “but, unfortunately, it was not chess.”
Four years have gone by until his appearance yesterday at the Valdai Club, when the president was asked the same question. He replied: “Well, I loved chess.”
Putin was castling.
In the ancient game of chess the move which is known by this name is a relatively new one. The rules to allow it also took centuries to develop. The purpose of castling is defence when the king is under attack and there is safe space between the king and the castle (rook), so that they can exchange places and the king retreat to the safer margin of the board. The opportunity created thereby is for the rook to move more actively into the counter-attack against the adversary. The castling king is delegating the offensive to his rook.
To understand what Putin’s castling means on the board today, read what he said first about the Board of Peace (BOP) Gaza plan of President Donald Trump, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and ex-prime minister Tony Blair. “Russia always supports and welcomes any steps by Trump,” he told his spokesman to say, “that seek to avert the tragedy that is now unfolding. We want this plan to be realized, so that it may help steer events in the Middle East toward a peaceful path”.
