Putin, Trump, and the Elusive “Peace”

Trump’s Alaska summit with Putin yielded no ceasefire, but it revealed the contours of a possible peace—where diplomacy, exhaustion, and hard limits define the battlefield’s end.

At the August 15 Alaska summit, Vladimir Putin performed as expected. He desperately wants an end to Western sanctions, détente with the U.S., and assurances that the U.S. will not impose a disastrous anti-Russian secondary boycott—and, apparently, some additional Ukrainian territory.

Consequently, Putin, in his media synopsis, talked more about restored friendship with a “neighborly” United States under Trump. He scarcely mentioned Ukraine directly—other than to imply to Westerners that he seeks not merely to annex a foreign country, but to reclaim what he views as a former Soviet province with ancient ties to the Russian people.

Trump did not get his ceasefire with Putin. But he quickly pivoted to remind us that the table is set for a supposedly comprehensive peace without first requiring a temporary cessation of arms.

Trump addressed the media more succinctly and with greater discretion than Putin, appearing more optimistic that the Russian-American hostility was thawing. And he views normalization as a necessary step toward comprehensive peace in the weeks to come.

The left lambasted Trump for speaking politely of Putin and vice versa. There was additional criticism of a Fox interview in which Trump mentioned “land swaps” and for his supposed prior naïveté in believing he could obtain a ceasefire with Putin.

Yet for all the posturing, we have known for some time the general outlines of a peace, how it could come about, and why it has not yet happened.

Ukraine will not join NATO, but will likely be fully armed by the West. Ukraine lacks the power to retake Crimea or the Donbass, but with Western aid, it can preserve most of its territory.

Ping! Out to the Victor Davis Hanson list

It was not Trump who, after the reset’s failure, moved on to concoct “Russian collusion” and “Russian disinformation” to use Russia to destroy a political rival. It was not Trump who went to Ukraine, threatened to hold up aid, and fired a prosecutor looking into his son’s selling to Ukrainians the influence of his father’s vice presidency.

From the AG website, and worth your morning reading time.

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“the tricky part is taking care of Ukraine’s Neo- Nazi problem.”

Putin propaganda!

The roots of neo-Nazism in Putin’s Russia
The origins of this relationship date to the late 1990s, when Russia was shaken by a wave of racist violence committed by neo-Nazi skinhead gangs. After Putin’s accession to the presidency in 2000, his regime exploited this development in two ways.

First, it used the neo-Nazi threat to justify the adoption of anti-extremism legislation, a longstanding demand of some Russian liberals. Ultimately, this legislation would be used to prosecute Russian democrats.

Second, the Kremlin launched “managed nationalism”, an attempt to co-opt and mobilise radical nationalist militants, including neo-Nazis, as a counterweight to an emerging anti-Putin coalition of democrats and leftist radicals.

Moving Together, a pro-Putin youth organisation notorious for its campaign against postmodernist literature, made the first move by reaching out to OB88, the most powerful skinhead gang in Russia.

This cooperation expanded in the aftermath of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004. To insulate Russia against the contagion of pro-democracy protest, the Kremlin transformed Moving Together into a more ambitious project called “Nashi”, or “Ours”.

As part of its preparations to confront a potential democratic uprising in Russia, Nashi enlisted football gang members, whose subculture overlapped with the neo-Nazi underground.

During 2005, Nashi’s thugs staged a series of raids on anti-Putin youth groups. The most violent attack, which left four left-wing activists in hospital, led to the arrest of the assailants. They were released after a visit to the police station from Nikita Ivanov, the Kremlin functionary who supervised the regime’s loyalist youth organisations.

The resulting scandal provoked a reconfiguration of “managed nationalism”. While Nashi distanced itself from football gangs, its radical militants migrated to two rival Kremlin proxies, the nationalist “Young Russia” group and the anti-immigration “Locals” group. These organisations became bridges between the neo-Nazi subculture and the Kremlin.

Neo-Nazi leaders implicated in killings
As I demonstrated in a recent study of the Kremlin’s relationship with Russian fascists, these linkages made possible a bold experiment to create a pro-Putin neo-Nazi movement.

In 2008-09, the Kremlin was threatened by Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny’s efforts to build an anti-Putin coalition of democrats and radical nationalists in Russia. In response, the Kremlin began to work with Russkii Obraz (“Russian Image”, or “RO” for short), a hardcore neo-Nazi group best known for its slick journal and its band, Hook from the Right.

With the assistance of Kremlin supervisors, RO attacked nationalists who were abandoning the skinhead subculture for Navalny’s anti-Putin coalition. In return, RO was granted privileged access to public space and the media.

Its leaders held televised public discussions with state functionaries and collaborated openly with Maksim Mishchenko, a member of parliament from the ruling party. Perhaps most shockingly, RO also hosted a concert by the infamous neo-Nazi band Kolovrat in Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square, within earshot of the Kremlin.

The problem for the Kremlin was that RO’s leader, Ilya Goryachev, was a fervent supporter of the neo-Nazi underground, the skinheads who committed hundreds of racist murders in the second half of the 2000s. The authorities turned a blind eye to RO’s production of a two-hour internet “documentary” titled Russian Resistance, which celebrated these killers as patriotic heroes and called for armed struggle against the regime.

But they could not ignore the arrest on murder charges of Nikita Tikhonov, an ex-skinhead and cofounder of RO. Tikhonov was the leader of BORN (“Fighting Organisation of Russian Nationalists”), a terrorist group that committed a string of murders of public figures and antifa militants.

The victims included the renowned human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova. Tikhonov was convicted of their murders in 2011.

https://www.latrobe.edu.au/news/articles/2022/opinion/russias-long-history-of-neo-nazis

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