March 22 — Day 1122a — Wazzup With Witkoff?, War Crimes and Children, Buzzing Around Belgorod
Hi All!
I would call this week one with no critical developments save one which got profiled the last review: As we expected, Germany in a major shift of historical scale decided to re-arm and become the engine of European military independence.
Ukraine will get a piece of that directly but the real significance is that European security structure dating back to the end of World War Two is in its death throes. Even if the United States reverses its stance towards Europe and Russia, I can see no future in which America is not eventually a marginal player in European defense.
Likewise, this might be the beginning of European transition to full global power statu, on par with China or the US. It would, as has long been the case in European geopolitics, come down to how comfortable the rest of Europe might be living next to an extremely well-armed Germany. Again.
This review kicks off with some comments by the Trump administration’s main negotiator with Russia on the ceasefire deal, a real estate rich guy named Steve Witkoff.
We Are Supposed to Believe This Guy is Smart? Doesn’t He Know People Will See This Stuff?
As many of you have noted, the Trump administration has shoved Florida politician and Secretary of State Marc Rubio to the background on the Russia-Ukraine negotiations. Last week the White House openly demoted another member of that negotiating process, a former US Lieutenant General named Keith Kellogg.
As their replacement, the Trump team has pushed a New York real estate mogul named Steve Witkoff (image, charity function, attractive US pop star included) into the lead negotiator role. Last week Witkoff was closeted with Vladimir Putin, for hours, as Trump’s personal representative on the ceasefire talks. The White House tells us Witkoff is a skilled negotiator and a man with unique deal-making abilities. I’ve found estimates putting his net worth is about $150 million.
So who is this guy? The internet tells me he was born in NYC in 1957 and that his father was a successful ladies’ clothes manufacturer. In other words, his family is old but not ancient New York money. He went to expensive Hosfra University on Long Island, got a doctorate in law, and went into commercial real estate law practice.
Witkoff began buying office buildings in the New York area in the 1990s. His foot in the door apparently was a big savings and loan collapse in NYC at the time that forced bankruptcies and put a lot undervalued properties on the market, which he swooped up. Witkoff’s portfolio expanded relentlessly and by 2021 his family business owned about 70 properties. They seem to be hotels, apartment buildings and office buildings in the usual suspect locations like NYC, Miami and Las Vegas.
He met Trump in the 1980s as a lawyer on a Trump real estate deal and he is a longtime golfing buddy. In business he is known as a risk-taker, a guy who will put a whole lot of his own money into a development project rather than staying conservative and only investing where banks will front the capital. His websites say he has a few overseas properties but aside from London I can’t find out where. It seems positive he knows no foreign languages and has little experience abroad, because for high end Americans, London isn’t really abroad, the market caters to them.
He is, nonetheless, Trump’s main man on the Russia-Ukraine negotiations and so the single individual right now most responsible for ending the biggest war in history since World War Two.
Witkoff interviewed with Tucker Carlson yesterday. Here is a direct quote of some of how Witkoff answered a question on how he sees the Russo-Ukraine War being brought to an end:
”First of all, I think the largest issue in that conflict are these so-called four regions, Donbas, Crimea. You know, the names, Luhansk, and there’s two others. They’re Russian-speaking. There have been referendums where the overwhelming majority of the people have indicated that they want to be under Russian rule. I think, that’s the key issue in the conflict. So that’s the first thing. When that gets settled — and we’re having very, very positive conversations…the question is, will the world acknowledge, that those are Russian territories. Will it end up, can Zelensky survive politically if he acknowledges this?”
https://x.com/i/status/1903339956434612661
The Carlson interview also had a section in which Witkoff says he believes Putin prayed for Trump after Trump got shot, and that Putin is a pretty good guy, not an adversary. But I’ll spare you.
The point is, this is what the top US negotiator on the Russia-Ukraine War, the man talking on behalf of the United States directly to Vladimir Putin, is saying in public. This is the official US position.
That position is constructed on lies and falsehoods that should disqualify the man from any association with the US government in any capacity, never mind as the guy responsible for talks between the world’s biggest and second-biggest nuclear powers.
Witkoff is openly declaring the United States advocates the Russian position. It is not concealed. It is directly hostile to Ukraine and Ukrainian national security.
The thing is, just as obviously, the United States is incapable of forcing major concessions from Ukraine. After all Russia went to war and got 900,000 of its citizens killed or wounded in an attempt to get Ukrainian concessions. Look how that turned out.
Unless Witkoff and Trump back off their position, anyone thinking the ceasefire talks could get results is a moron. I have no doubt he is an intelligent man, but in public, sorry, he’s talking like a fool.
The Russians will love everything Witkoff told Carlson, it is simply a statement of fact that he repeated word-for-word Kremlin talking points on Ukraine.
But the Ukrainians and the Europeans won’t have any part of it. Without the Ukrainians and the Europeans there is no peace deal.
Point by talking point:
1. Wiktoff said the big issue is Ukrainian territory. Not so. It is that Russia invaded sovereign Ukrainian territory in an unprovoked act of aggression. Russian claims to Ukrainian territory are illegitimate and even if the Trump team chooses to pretend otherwise, democratic Europe will back Ukraine, as will most of the international community. Witkoff assumption here is Ukraine is isolated against Russia, this is absurd.
2. Witkoff says the Ukrainian territories Russia wants are all Russian-speaking. Not so. They are predominantly Russian-speaking and certainly where Russia has invaded a state campaign is in progress to eliminate other language use. However, first place, there are and pretty much always have been islands of ethnic minorities, particularly Tartars, Ukrainians, Greeks and Armenians. But second place, far more importantly, support for Russia in those regions is almost directly linked to level of education and dependence on state subsidies. The poorer the individual or the more the individual lives off the government (be it pension or insider oligarch deal) the more the individual likes Russia.
3. Witkoff says the four territories Russia wants held referendums to join Russia which voters overwhelmingly supported. Not so. The votes Witkoff is referring to were held at the point of automatic rifles held by Russian soldiers or local militia armed, paid and deployed by the Russian state.
It is shocking — and long-term readers will know I use an emotion-linked term like that almost never — that a US official would assert otherwise in public. This is an epic lie on the level of “slaves really liked slavery” or “the Japanese had really good reasons to bomb Pearl Harbor” or “It was the Poles that attacked the Germans to start World War Two”. Millions of people saw the reality, which was regime change ordered and executed by the Kremlin, using military force, in Ukraine’s Crimea and Donbas regions. I am one of the eyewitnesses.
4. Witkoff’s says he had “very, very positive conversations” on solving the territory issue. This is absurd. Neither side has moved a millimeter in ten, count them ten years, to end that territorial dispute. This is already a territorial dispute like Israel, Syria, Jordan and the Palestinians. Kyiv and Moscow have been crystal clear that their priority isn’t a ceasefire, it’s blowing up stuff in each other’s countries with long range strikes.
At the most generously optimistic definition of the term, it might be factual to say Witkoff broached the subject of territory and now he is formally aware the Ukrainian and Russian positions are diametrically opposed and have been so for a decade.
By that definition, picking up a football and telling Lawrence Taylor (image) you will now run past him carrying that football would also be a “very, very positive conversation.”
You Pick The Side of History You Are On, But You Don’t Get to Revise It Later
This week saw a pair of pretty awful developments in the area of war crimes. On Tuesday Putin issued an order that all Ukrainians without Russian citizenship living in occupied territories — according to Witkoff and Russia, now part of the Russian Federation — have until September 10 to “regulate their legal status.” This means get a Russian passport or else. “Citizens of Ukraine who are in the Russian Federation and do not have legal grounds for staying (residing) in the Russian Federation are obliged to leave the Russian Federation.” This is forced resettlement, a war crime.
Once the Ukrainians living in occupied territories forced to become Russian citizens — this is where they grew up, went to school, own property, work, run businesses, have buried relatives — then, the taxes they pay will go toward supporting the Russian military, and the military-aged men will be obliged to go fight against the country they were born in Ukraine. Forcing people to fight against their own country is, likewise, a war crime.
As we can see, because he says so, Witkoff and so the US government are fully on board with this. The official American position is that Ukrainian territories invaded by Russia are now legitimately Russian territory, and the people living there are legitimate chattel of the Russian state.
If senior Russian officials were ever prosecuted for committing these war crimes, then at minimum I would say Witkoff and Trump could be prosecuted for aiding and abetting them. Logically it follows, and as the holder of a Juris Doctor degree Witkoff should recognize that. There is no statute of limitations on war crimes.
Second, this week, the US State Department and so Marco Rubio’s personal sandbox announced that due to a need to reduce the cost of government the US was stopping funding, and delivery of intelligence data, to NGOs tracking somewhere between 10–60,000 Ukrainian children that have been effectively abducted by Russia and now are being brought up as Russians. The parent organization for the tracking is an alma mater, Yale. A big fear is that without US funding the data base is inaccessible or far less accessible, and that data will become outdated or disappear. This would lead to fewer kidnapped children returned to Ukraine.
By and large this was orphans and children separated from care-givers in territories Russia invaded. These are children highly susceptible to education and the views of adults; inside the Russian educational system they will be educated to love Russia and hate Ukraine. That’s another war crime.
State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said the allegation of missing data is false and that the US government “knows fully that the data exists and it’s not been deleted and it’s not missing.”
That leaves US taxpayers with the choice of believing Ms. Bruce, or not. I would point out she is a US government official picked by the White House to support Trump administration policies. Just like Witkoff.
I have swiped a CNN photo of Ukrainian children in the Crimean city Simferopol in a patriotic Russian parade for graphic illustration of which side of the moral fence the US government has picked.
Blam Blam Blam — This Doesn’t Look Like a Ceasefire To Me…
Both sides have been energetically hurling long-range strikes at each other, I think in part to emphasize to the Americans that it’s the people that are actually shooting, not dudes wearing suits in DC, that get to decide whether there’s a ceasefire or not.
The Russians this week seem to have shifted tactics somewhat and turned Shahed drones loose on cities that don’t have the best air defenses, with the objectives of maximizing civilian casualties and civilian homes and businesses. The area around Odesa port — This is Isaac Babel/Ilf and Petrov territory — got hammered yesterday. The burning buildings are depressing so this is sufficient pretext for an image of Ostap Bender (Archil Gomiashvili) and a chair. Extra points if you guess how many chairs there are total.
As for the Ukrainians, I have been struck by how little interest the western media has had in the Ukrainian side of that equation. Below is a link to a run-down of the last ten days or so, but short version, two days ago Ukrainian drones torched a major oil refinery in Krasnodar Krai, as I write this it’s still burning.
Earlier in the week Ukrainian long-range missiles — home made, no need to ask permission from the Americans — whacked Engels-2 base by Saratov, epic explosion of stored missiles. It was one of the most effective strategic strikes of the entire war. Later in the week Russian civilian media reported that members of a Russian bomber crew that had been launching missiles at Ukraine were killed in the strike.
I point this out because in many western media because retaliation like that is exactly what puts backbone into national will to resist. Westerners unaware that the Ukrainians are retaliating against Russia, will misjudge Ukrainian will to fight.
I have done stock images of a Tu-95 too often and death portraits of the Russian aircrew is too macabre, so attached is a Maxar image of the Engels-2 missile storage site, pre-strike.
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/49290
We Like Invading Russia Let’s Do It Again! — Kursk Incursion Over, Belgorod Incursion Begins
In the early part of the week reports started coming in that some force of some kind had crossed the Russia-Ukraine frontier into Russia’s Belgorod region and that it was bigger than a patrol, and that there was shooting. Over the next three days the Russians announced several times the Ukrainian sneaky-deaky infantry guys had been wiped out, and there definitely weren’t any Kyiv troops holding anything, only to have the fighting flare up again and for local authorities to announce for forced evacuations of civilians.
What appears to have happened is that elements of Ukraine’s 225th Assault infantry regiment, supported by elements of 17th Mech (this was former high-performance tank unit) Brigade had pushed about 1–2 km. into the Russian Federation and captured a tiny village called Popovka and pushed into the outskirts of a somewhat larger village called Demidovka.
The 225th is one of those units with a strong leadership that has grown over time and become a pretty-respected fighting outfit. They were in the Kursk salient retreat so, obviously, evacuating from there didn’t completely render them combat-incapable about two weeks later.
Confirmed — because they say so themselves — is the presence of elements of 414 Unmanned Aircraft Brigade a/k/a Ptakhi Madyara. This is one of the most effective tactical drone strike units in ZSU meaning in the the world, and I state that with confidence. They MAKE their own fiber-optic drones. Image of a sector hit by a lot of those type drones, attached, it’s not Belgorod.
Unconfirmed, but based on some sources I am seeing highly likely, is the presence of elements of 33rd Mechanized Brigade. These guys are pretty seasoned, they fought a lot in the Kurakhove sector and also did time in the Kursk sector.
As to why they did it, clearly, one of the Ukrainian objectives was simply efficient destruction of Russian men and material.
About five kilometers to the south, in mixed farmland-wooded territory, some Ukrainian unit or units walked across the international border and kicked off firefights near a village called Grafovka, a place called the Kachanov Yar, a village called Lipsy, and another village called Priles’e. Overall it looks like a border incursion across a 12–15 kilometer front about 1–3 kilometers deep into Russian territory.
I read on the internet the Russian units in the vicinity are elements of 237th Tank Regiment, 3rd Motor Rifle Division. I’ve also seen reports of Russian border troops/FSB in the area. What I haven’t seen is credible reports the Russians have kicked the Ukrainians out, meaning, maybe the Ukrainian plan is a variation on the old Longstreet approach (dig up the review yourself), operationally you want to be on the offensive so you can set up tactical battles you fight defensively.
This incursion raid is not a war-changer, but it it is significant as it shows Ukrainian willingness and capacity to take the initiative in the immediate wake of the Kursk withdrawal/defeat, and also, I suspect, a fair template of how we might expect to see the Ukrainians attack in the future.
Anyone thinking about “peacekeepers” deployed in Ukraine, would need to consider how those peacekeepers might prevent the Ukrainians from doing what they just did in Belgorod region, across a front running about 1,600 kilometers. That’s just scale. Now think about the picture of the drone guide wires, and then ask yourself, what armies are there out there that are ready for a war like that?
Yeah, Sure, If the US Stops Helping Ukraine It’s Fat Lady
Many of you will have noted an important feature of US rhetoric on Ukraine is that Ukraine cannot stand against Russia without US support. I mean, Trump yelled exactly that at Zelensky during their infamous White House meeting.
This week some more detailed information came out, courtesy the Ukrainian government, on the flip side of that, to wit, data on on how independent the Ukrainian defense industry actually is. I think the stats speak for themselves.
- In 2024 Ukrainian defence manufacturing increased by a factor of six
- The value of that manufacturing was $10 billion (calculated in ridiculously undervalued UAH, my guess is the purchasing power equivalent compared to NATO state defense outlays was three to ten times that.
- The plan for 2025 is that domestic defense production will triple and on paper reach 30–35 billion dollars (!). That’s not taking purchasing power parity into account.
- Ukrainian production of mortar rounds (albeit there have been serious quality issues) meets all demand by the military, import is helpful but not critical
- Ukraine produced 96.2 percent of all drones used by the AFU
- Ukraine is effectively autonomous in the production of ground robotic systems and long-range strike unmanned aerial vehicles, although as with mortar rounds import is helpful.
- The government plan is to produce 30 thousand long-range drones and 3 thousand cruise missiles. Yes, I know, that’s just what they say. However, last year the Ukrainian state set the objective of manufacturing 1.2 million drones. This is confirmed by multiple sources: They exceeded it.
Besides the simple “OK, I didn’t know that” aspect of these factoids, there is the bit about closed information ecosystems. This news was all over the Ukrainian media. The Ukrainian government has a pretty good record about telling the truth, broad-sweep, on war planning. To Ukrainians, it doesn’t look like they are losing. People who have never set foot in Ukraine, who tell them they are losing, just seem stupid to Ukrainians. I think it’s appropriate here to supply an image of the US Vice President JD Vance telling Zelensky Ukraine will lose the war.
Mine Awareness and Government Accountability
In one of those half-empty/half-full developments, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry this week announced plans to order a whole bunch of mortar rounds, in part, from mortar round manufacturers that last year put tens of thousands of bad bombs into the hands of troops. The biggest problems were bad fuses and and propellant that burned improperly.
We know that the orders were placed, because the defense contracting orders are open to the public and a public activist group called the Public Anti-Corruption Council, followed by Ukrainian media, could read the names of the manufacturers (actually there is one very big one), the amount of money involved, and the track record of their product in the past. So now that is in the Ukrainian public information space, fingers are being pointed, and if you want to just ask any Ukrainian mortarman will tell you, sure we have enough mortar bombs these days. But if it’s a serious mission and really important the target get hammered, better to use imported ammo if you have it.
There is of course the angle that this is not what a country at war needs to have happening, the ammo needs to be reliable.
There is also of course the angle this is exactly what a country at war needs to have happening, there is an independent media doing its job, and a government obliged to make enough information about state contracting and spending public so that problems that would get troops killed get out in the open and discussed, rather than swept under the rug and ignored.
Honestly, I don’t know when the problem will be fixed. But what is absolutely clear, there no way it can be ignored. Ukrainian mortar bomb image.
continued…
Meanwhile, back in the real world: ‘Europe is only half-awake from its long sleep,’ Janan Ganesh, in The FT, https://on.ft.com/4hjxIey
We’re great at summits, sure, but tell me, what guarantees have we in Europe provided the Ukrainians thus far? Where are the actionable commitments for a European peace initiative (if one can even call it that)? It has been more than a month now of ‘emergency summits’—lots of rhetoric and no consensus. How unusual. We are going to let Ukraine down if we continue like this, typically feckless and fractious.
Fascinating -- loved the part about the free open press in Ukraine reporting on the poorly manufactured mortar rounds (fuzes, et cetera). That is something (free, open press) that Trump is trying suppress in the USA. Having that free press gives me hope for Ukraine.
(Plus the other parts were largely positive for Ukraine but this really stood out for me.)