Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a meeting with members of the Security Council in Moscow, Russia, February 22, 2025.
On the menu today: After weeks of the Trump administration pressuring Ukraine to sign on to a cease-fire deal, Russia’s Vladimir Putin has responded with a raspberry. The Russian dictator declared at a press conference, “We agree with the proposal to cease hostilities, but we have to bear in mind that this cease-fire must be aimed at a long-lasting peace and it must look at the root causes of the crisis.” That’s a lot more ominous than it sounds, because Putin’s ideas of “the root causes of the crisis” are the existence of an independent Ukraine and the NATO alliance making its own decisions. Meanwhile, a Fox News personality whose name you haven’t heard in a while takes a weekend trip to Moscow and reports back that everything’s hunky-dory.
Putin’s Middle Finger to the U.S.-Ukraine Cease-Fire Proposal
On Thursday, Vladimir Putin refused the 30-day cease-fire offer on the table from the United States and Ukraine. Putin said he is willing to talk about a lasting peace, but first Ukraine must meet his list of demands. According to media reports, Putin’s demands are as follows:
“Crimea, Sevastopol, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Luhansk — these are regions of Russia. They are written into the constitution. This is a given fact,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. That amounts to one-fifth of Ukraine’s legitimate, internationally recognized pre-war territory. Putin demands that Ukraine permanently renounce any claim to these territories.
Ukraine must disarm itself of any NATO weapons. Of course, the top suppliers of the Ukrainian military are the United States with $69.7 billion worth of weapons systems and ammunition since the start of the war, Germany with $13.7 billion worth, the United Kingdom at $10.8 billion worth, Denmark at $8.1 billion worth, Sweden at $5.1 billion worth, Poland at $3.9 billion worth, France at $3.8 billion worth, and Canada at $2.8 billion worth. (All figures from the Kiel Institute’s Ukraine support tracker, converted from Euros to dollars, and as of December 31, 2024.) All those countries are NATO members, and thus, under the Russian demands, Ukraine would have to give up all weapons systems received from those countries. This amounts to a unilateral disarming of the Ukrainian military, in exchange for a promise from a former KGB lieutenant colonel that he will not start the war again.
Putin also demanded that Ukraine cap its military size. Previously, Putin had demanded Ukraine limit the size of its army to 50,000 troops. As of January, the Ukrainian army is 880,000 troops, meaning that Russia wants the Ukrainian army to be reduced to less than 6 percent of its current size.
According to CNN, “Putin also suggested that Ukraine halt mobilization and any training of its troops, and that other nations stop supplying weapons to Kyiv during the ceasefire.” Halt any training of troops.
Putin insisted no foreign peacekeepers can enter Ukrainian territory.
Ukraine must abandon the idea of NATO membership. While the Trump administration had already made this concession before negotiations began, note that Putin is establishing a system where he gets a veto over which countries NATO can accept.
The U.S. must return six diplomatic compounds that Russia contends were seized illegally by the United States between 2016 and 2018.
All Western economic sanctions upon Russia are illegal and must be lifted.
This is pretty much the same deal that Russia offered back in April 2022. Our Dan McLaughlin did a deep dive into these reports recently, and he concluded that Ukraine never turned down a deal that would have ensured its continued existence as an independent nation.
President Trump’s reaction to Putin’s counterproposal: “Based on the statements he made today, they were pretty positive, I think.”
For weeks, I have been told that I’m being far too harsh on the Trump administration, and that Trump had deftly maneuvered Putin into a box that the Russian dictator would have no choice but to either agree to a cease-fire, or look intransigent and suffer the consequences of a spurned, offended Trump. I was assured that if Putin turned down the offer, Trump would take a much harder stance on the regime in Russia.
Well, I look forward to that much tougher stance from the Trump administration. It’s gonna start any day now, right?
Who Travels to Russia?
I talked a bit about this on the Three Martini Lunch podcast last Friday; for most of my travels around Ukraine and Syria, I had no interaction with the governments over there.
For the portion of the trip to the Ukraine border region near Kursk Oblast in Russia — I emphasize near the border, not over the border, because I have no interest in having Russia issue some nonsense Interpol warrant for illegally entering its territories — my traveling companions and I reached out to a contact who’s well connected in the Ukrainian military to see what would be simultaneously sufficiently interesting and sufficiently safe to cover. (I really didn’t want to test the warranty on the body armor.) The Ukrainian military offered to take us to a hospital that was treating civilians, as long as I didn’t disclose the location. I said, “sure.” That turned into my February 27 Washington Post column.
Everything about what I would and wouldn’t disclose was pre-negotiated. If somebody in a position to know says, “if you report that, it’s gonna get somebody killed,” I’m willing to leave it out. I want to give my readers the most complete story possible without anybody departing this earth because of it. So, the Russian little old ladies are identified by only their first names, and I didn’t disclose the village in Kursk Oblast where they were injured. And, as is standard in most reporting on the war, Ukrainian soldiers are identified by their first names or call signs, unless they give explicit permission otherwise.
Over the (deep sigh) decades, I’ve reported from Turkey (two years!), Germany, the United Kingdom, Israel, Jordan, Taiwan, and Transnistria, among other places, and made presentations at the Austrian National Defense Academy and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe*.* I’ve spoken to and interviewed ambassadors, foreign ministers, diplomats, military officials, and spokesmen from those countries and a bunch of other countries. This is not my first rodeo, and you’re just gonna have to trust me that I’m giving you the most complete picture of the situation that I can in the circumstances of a country at war.
I mention all this because Andrew Napolitano — that guy who was on Fox News until 2021 after, uh, bad things happened — recently took a weekend trip to Russia. He writes in his syndicated column that he was invited by Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov and — his words — “the renowned Professor Alexander Dugin.”
Dugin is the rather notorious ultranationalist who argued that the destruction of Ukrainian independence is a requirement of Russia’s destiny, as is the destruction of “the American empire.” Apparently, back in the 1990s, Dugin “dearly loved English apocalyptic folk music for its commitment to Nazi Satanism.” Now, a lot of people looking to be edgy are into just one or the other, but you have to admire the effort of those who are willing to take two awful tastes and combine them together, risking the ire of the Abrahamic faiths, Indiana Jones, and the Blues Brothers.
Napolitano buys the argument that the war didn’t begin with the Russian invasion in 2022 or the occupation of Crimea in 2014, but that it “started in 2014 with a coup against a popularly elected president who sought neutrality for Ukraine. . . orchestrated by the U.S. State Department in conjunction with the CIA and British MI6.” Darn that James Bond! This is the sort of morally inverted rewriting of history that one would expect from a guided tour run by the Russian government. (Read our Andrew Stuttaford or George Weigel for a corrective; Viktor Yanukovych was a pro-Russian politician, a crook, and a guy perfectly happy to keep his country in servile status to Moscow if it meant he kept the trappings of power. A majority of the Ukrainian people grew fed up with it and rose up against him; Yanukovych fled to Russia and in 2019 he was sentenced, in absentia, of treason by a Ukrainian court.)
To hear Napolitano tell it, Russia is like nirvana, only better. “Moscow today is the city of lights. Its atmosphere is one of midtown-Manhattan hustle and bustle — but cleaner, happier and friendlier. Its older buildings around Red Square and its Doha-style gleaming skyscrapers in the financial district are nearly all lushly illuminated at night and packed with workers during the day. . . Today’s Russia is thoroughly modern, generally happy, devoutly Christian Orthodox and yearning to interact commercially, culturally and even politically with the West.”
“Generally happy,” other than the “new, all-out drive to eradicate public dissent in Russia. Through new laws and other measures, Russian authorities doubled down in their relentless attack against free speech, civic activism, independent journalism, and political dissent, in an apparent attempt to silence public opposition to the war, any criticism of the government, or any expression of social non-conformism. New wartime censorship laws criminalize any criticism of Russia’s war on Ukraine or the questioning of the official narrative and state propaganda. The war and subsequent general mobilization led to considerable exodus of population out of Russia. Key political opposition leaders are behind bars, as are a growing number of critics of the authorities and of the war.”
Alexei Navalny could not be reached for comment.
It’s funny, you’d think a place that is so clean, happy, friendly, and thoroughly modern would have a male life expectancy higher than 65 years. Maybe it’s because Russia ranks second in the world in alcoholism (gotta tip my hat to you, Hungary) with a mere 36.9 percent of Russian men estimated to meet the definition of “alcoholic.”
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Napolitano uses the term “Special Military Operation in Ukraine” when discussing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. (Considering the performance of some of the Russian troops in the past year, they must mean “Special” as in “Special Olympics.”) Napolitano writes that the SMO “has united the Russian people, stimulated their economic development and independence, and reminded the U.S. foreign policy mavens of the virtues and values of realism.”
Napolitano explains that, if anything he’s saying sounds strange or inaccurate to your ears, it’s just because you’ve been brainwashed. “You’d never know any of this if your knowledge of Russia has been generated in American government schools and animated by neocon elites whose mentality of hatred for all things Russian has choked Realism and rejected Reset based on ancient and unrealistic fears.” Many civilian residents of Bucha, Ukraine, also could not be reached for comment, because they’re in a mass grave.
(My aversion to the Russian government is also based on the fact that it keeps firing ballistic missiles and cruise missiles at the city I’m in while I’m trying to sleep.)
“The Russia I saw had barely a police officer on any street corner, banished woke and all its absurd fashions, embraced cleanliness and happiness, and enjoys an infrastructure that is smooth and highly functional,” Napolitano swoons.
I can’t believe he didn’t tell us how great the prices were at the grocery store, too. (Right now, one dollar buys more than 85 Russian rubles; a loaf of bread is about 43 rubles, so yes, you can get a loaf of bread for about fifty cents. That sounds like a great deal until you realize the average yearly salary in Russia sits around 1.24 million rubles, or roughly $14,771 per year. The U.S. poverty level for an individual living alone is $14,891.)
Lenin allegedly referred to Western intellectual defenders of communism as “useful idiots,” and some might see similar echoes in those who go to Russia and wholeheartedly swallow and repeat Putin’s arguments.
But everybody needs to feel useful, even Andrew Napolitano.
ADDENDUM: You’re going to want to read Shannen Coffin summarizing the long, outrageous, and infuriating saga of the Michael Mann lawsuit. Mark Steyn isn’t with National Review anymore, and he has been publicly critical of this institution — criticisms I obviously don’t agree with — but that doesn’t change the fact that a great injustice has been done to Steyn by a ludicrous court system and bewildering judicial decisions.