Professor Geoffrey Roberts is one of a growing number of ‘free thinkers’ who are rejecting the standard Western propaganda model that frames Putin and Russia as merchants of evil, instead ascribing to them motives that are both pragmatic and commonplace.  This leaves plenty of room to criticize Putin’s regime and its hardball geopolitics.  These academics, however, have shouldered the intellectual’s role to challenge the dominant narrative and expose underlying untruths – “Russia’s totally unprovoked war”, etc.

As any rookie strategist knows, outcome-focussed policy is based around the alignment of ends, ways and means: what you set as your goals must be matched with a clear strategy and the necessary resources to achieve them. Ukraine as a Western proxy war has proven a massive failure on all three counts.

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has called for the EU to turn Ukraine into a “steel porcupine” and for Europe to undertake a massive rearmament. If successful, the project would convert the EU from a largely political-economic union into a military-industrial superpower. It could also create a debt bomb as well as cluster bombs of social discontent that explode at various points in the future.

Witnessing the extraordinary cage fight this week between Zelensky and Trump in the Oval Office was an eye-popping glimpse into what is normally kept behind closed doors when world leaders meet to nut out matters of great consequence. 

What we seem to be back to is the kind of unequal treaties

Time will prove that an ugly peace delivers more than a beautiful war. Russia and the US are setting to work on something even bigger than the Ukraine conflict: normalising relations between the two superpowers which will have huge consequences economically, geopolitically and, hopefully, all to the benefit of the long-suffering Ukrainians and other peoples caught between the two behemoths. 

Back at the very start of the war retired US Ambassador Chas Freeman, an eloquent critic of many aspects of his government’s international conduct, warned that the US was prepared “to fight to the last Ukrainian”.  Some want to prove him right.  Others want to save the remaining young men of Ukraine. 

States don't tend to kill each other's generals, not least because it invites reciprocal action. The bombing in Moscow this week, killing General Igor Kirillov, was a successful attack by Ukraine and its allies. The ongoing use of long-range missiles used by the West to hit targets inside Russia is, I suggest, surprisingly similar. Both are designed to provoke a reaction rather than achieve anything militarily. They can't alter battlefield realities. It says a lot about where we have got to in the Ukraine War.

Former director of the CIA’s Russia desk and current director of Grand Strategy at the Quincy Institute George Beebe gives a masterclass in responsible statecraft - and why the West must negotiate with Russia to end the war.

It may be time to think the unthinkable: all the signs are pointing to the West preparing to launch a proper war in Europe. Once started it could bring, for the first time in living memory, millions of Western civilians into uniform and see the cities of the West attacked. Preposterous? Jumping the Shark? Listen to what the leaders in the West are saying. The time to stop the madness is now, not once the elites drive us into the abyss and civilians are stripped of all rights to oppose.

Not even at the height of the Cold War was either side mad enough to fire missiles into the other’s territory. Germany, egged on by the US, France and the UK, is planning to do just that.