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By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with [2]
For the first time since the negotiations to end the Ukraine war began, President Vladimir Putin has sent as the chief Russian negotiator a General Staff officer and military intelligence chief, Admiral Igor Kostyukov.
The two Russians who have been closest to Putin, Vladimir Medinsky and Kirill Dmitriev, are not at the table. Neither is the Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov.
In Abu Dhabi on Friday (January 23), Kostyukov faced the Americans Steven Witkoff, Jared Kushner, Daniel Driscoll, and General Alexus Grynkewich (lead image, left). Driscoll is the Secretary of the Army, in the running to replace Peter Hegseth at the Pentagon, and a protégé of Vice President JD Vance. Grynkewich has been in charge of the losses on the Ukrainian battlefield since May 2024 when he was head of operations at the Pentagon and then as chief of the European Command (EUCOM) from July 2025.
At Abu Dhabi each of the Americans displayed open-neck, casual clothing. This dress-down Friday costume was a calculated insult to both the Ukrainian delegation – Rustem Umerov in uniform and Kirill Budanov in suit and tie—and to the Russians, Kostyukov and his second at the table, General Alexander Fomin. Kostyukov wore a dark civilian suit and a white collared shirt buttoned at the neck. But Kostyukov’s tie wasn’t tightly drawn. Was he sending the Russian Army’s message that it hasn’t reached the point of strangulation for the other side, yet?
The American signal was that they are dictating terms; that they retain escalation control over the Russians and they must capitulate, along with the NATO allies and the Zelensky regime. This is not the “coordinating” role which, after the two-day meetings concluded, Witkoff announced [3]. “On Friday and Saturday, the United States coordinated a trilateral meeting alongside Ukraine and Russia, graciously hosted by the United Arab Emirates. Talks were very constructive, and plans were made to continue conversations next week in Abu Dhabi. President Trump and his entire team are dedicated to bringing peace to this war.”
Russian sources believe Witkoff’s stop to “this war” is no stop to the continuation of the war against Russia which the US, with the NATO allies, continues to escalate on land northward to Finland and Greenland; in the nuclear arms race in space; and at sea on all of Russia’s trade routes – the Baltic Sea through the Danish Straits, the Northern (Arctic) Route through the Bering Strait, the Black Sea through the Dardanelles, the Mediterranean, Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean.
This larger peace is what Putin claims Trump agreed in the “understandings of Anchorage, Alaska” – the terms the two presidents discussed last August before Trump cut their meeting short and flew home.
“Naturally, we do not want to publicly go into the details of the provisions that are being discussed. And therefore, I cannot and will not tell you exactly what formula is meant by the Anchorage formula [4] (формулой Анкориджа),” Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, announced on Friday.
“There is a high dynamic. The Americans, as intermediaries, are rushing against time. They are in a hurry. They can be understood. This is not a quick process,” Peskov told [5] a reporter on Sunday. “And now, in fact, the essence of the situation is that a certain formula for resolving the territorial issue was developed in Anchorage and on the eve of Anchorage. And now it is very important to implement it.”
Peskov was not asked, and the Kremlin is not yet acknowledging, that the US side has changed Putin’s “Anchorage formula” by introducing two new conditions for “resolving the territorial issue”. They were tabled at Putin’s meeting with Witkoff, Kushner and Joshua Gruenbaum, the Chabad devotee who has joined the negotiations for Putin’s agreement to the US takeover of Gaza through Trump’s Board of Peace (BOP). The second new Trump demand to add to the “Anchorage formula” is Putin’s acceptance of the US takeover of Greenland, which Yury Ushakov acknowledged in his read-out from the Kremlin meeting [6].
“During the meeting in the Kremlin, we also discussed Donald Trump’s idea of a Board of Peace, a host of regional matters and the Greenland issue,” Ushakov admitted [7].
Putin’s new concessions in this three-way swap have stimulated dissent in Moscow. The Kremlin has replied with an editorial on Friday in Vzglyad, the semi-official security analysis platform, headlined: “Moscow [Putin] has made an elegant diplomatic move in a subtle game with the United States”.
“By supporting Washington’s initiatives, the Kremlin is showing how productive an equal Russian-American dialogue can be for the whole world, and especially for its hottest regions. And how useless and counterproductive Europe is in this sense…But why should Russia indiscriminately reject this proposal? Trump is quite sincerely striving for a Ukrainian settlement, so why not assume that he is pursuing the same goals in the case of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict?… Rejecting such initiatives means cutting off opportunities for ourselves in advance, blocking one of the zones for playing on the world chessboard, and even publicly refusing to interact with the leading Western power. Moreover, the Peace Council does not currently touch upon or discuss any of Russia’s interests related, for example, to its own…It is logical that Trump, within the framework of his own dealmaking logic, considers this hint – and will be at least additionally motivated to take a respectful step in return, which is important for Russia’s interests [8].”
There is no consensus among the senior policymakers on the Security Council that there is anything “respectful” in Trump’s tactics or anything to be relied upon as he continues to change his “Anchorage formula” by upping the ante.
For the Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev has announced that time is running out for Trump to accept the year-long extension of time for negotiation of new strategic arms limitation terms when the START Treaty expires in a week’s time – on February 5 [9]. There has been “a shift in the right direction but the movement is still very weak,” Medvedev said in a lengthy interview [10] published today. “Donald Trump is initially unstable in political guidelines… We must make sure that Washington is really ready not in words, but in practice to respect our indigenous security interests. And able to work on an equal footing on a common reduction in conflict potential.”
“Unequal footing” — that was the signal from the dress-down US delegation in Abu Dhabi.
Strategic arms limitations “must be mutual and parallel. And this position remains in force if no clarifications follow in the US approach by February 5,” Sergei Ryabkov, the first deputy foreign minister said [11] over the weekend. He also conceded [12] that there has been no follow-up on the Anchorage formula from Trump’s agencies. “It is counterproductive to hold high-level events that are later deemed fruitless,”
The Russian Foreign Ministry has also had belatedly to acknowledge that Trump has not released the Russian crew members of the Marinera, as had been announced with thanks by the Ministry spokesman, Maria Zakharova, on January 9 [13]. Worse, the British Government is refusing [14] Russian consular access to the jailed crew.
In the new podcast from India with Lieutenant General P R Shankar and Brigadier Arun Saghal, we discuss each of Trump’s war tactics and Putin’s negotiating responses as their combination is interpreted by Russia’s strategic allies – India, China, and Iran. Click to view or listen to the Sunday morning broadcast [15].
[16]Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5L1y2WHqSaA [15]
For the military background of General Grynkewich, read this [17].
In the background, lending urgency for the US and Ukrainian sides in Abu Dhabi, is the escalation of the Russian General Staff’s electric war campaign against targets in western Ukraine: this is where Grynkewich’s EURCOM and NATO staff officers have been based. If the current talks fail, as Brig Saghal spells out, what is the point in battlefield time at which they will evacuate to stay alive? And from the perspective of the Russian General Staff, what do they believe they must continue to do in order to bring about capitulation in Kiev on the Russian terms?
For the time being, open-source attempts to assess the breaking-point for the Ukrainians are inconclusive. According to Peter Korotaev’s review [18] of the political conditions in Kiev, the Zelensky regime, backed by both Trump and the NATO allies, will continue to sacrifice their men in the land war in the east and the survival of civilians in the power blackout in the west. “The Ukrainian public seems capable of accepting seemingly endless deprivation, without any actual organized resistance to the state. In any case, the government probably has good reason to believe that [19].”
[20]Left: source: https://eventsinukraine.substack.com/p/the-impotence-of-the-people [18]. Right: source: https://t.me/boris_rozhin/195341 [21]
The Russian milblogger assessment [21] is similar: “The war will not end at the table, no matter what illusions Trump may have about the opposite. It will end when either the Bandera front or the rear collapses. The foot soldiers of the Ukraine are not ready for anything else and will not be ready… And let the contact groups continue to contact, Abu Dhabi is no worse than Istanbul in this regard.”
For the US precedents for using electric war to compel military capitulation and political regime change, read the RAND report of 2001 [22] on how this was done to Slobodan Molosevic’s Serbian presidency in 1999.
[23]Left: https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1351.html [22]
Right: https://casebook.icrc.org/case-study/united-statesunited-kingdom-conduct-2003-war-iraq [24]
THE US WAR AGAINST RUSSIAN, INDIAN AND CHINESE TRADE CORRIDORS AND SEA LANES
[25]Black line represents the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%E2%80%93Middle_East%E2%80%93Europe_Economic_Corridor [26]
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[28]For a discussion of the “Trump Route” – the Zangezur Corridor – to threaten the International North-South Trade Corridor (INSTC) of Russia, Iran, and India, read this https://www.google.com/search?q=INSTC%2C+india+coridor&oq=INSTC%2C+india+coridor&gs_lcrp=EgRlZGdlKgYIABBFGDkyBggAEEUYOdIBCDU1MTFqMGo0qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 [29] and then this: https://johnhelmer.net/zugzwang-in-zangezur-in-this-caucasian-game-armenia-has-defeated-itself-trump-claims-another-peace-prize/ [30]