John Helmer: Blinken Concedes War Is Lost – Offers Kremlin Ukrainian Demilitarization; Crimea, Donbass, Zaporozhe; and Restriction of New Tanks to Western Ukrai

The reading that John Helmer highlights is so out of left field that it’s hard to know what to make of it. Aside from being a spook, David Ignatius of the Washington Post is too high profile a reporter to err in recounting a one-on-one interview with Blinken.

For the first time since the special military operation began last year, the war party in Washington is offering terms of concession to Russia’s security objectives explicitly and directly, without the Ukrainians in the way.

Helmer takes this interview to be the US offering “terms of concession”. The problem is that if that is what it is meant to be, it is so procedurally irregular as to be an obvious red herring. If the US really wanted to talk, it would go through channels. And there is no evidence that has happened. Senior Russian officials have repeatedly said they have not only not gotten any proposals from the US, the Russians have made a point of stating that there has been virtually no senior level communication between the US and Russia for months. One of the sort of recent exceptions was the mid-November meeting in Istanbul between CIA chief William Burn and the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergey Naryshkin. Russia later stated that Burns said nothing new with respect to Ukraine.
 
The second, as Helmer points out, isthat the collective West has shown itself to be not agreement capable and even proud of its cheatin’ ways.
 
But on top of that, if Blinken is actually willing to trade the Donbass, Crimea and Zaporzhizhia on a short-term basis for a cessation of hostilities, which the Washington Post piece does not say anywhere. If it’s coded, I can’t see where; perhaps some of Helmer’s Russian interlocutors discern that but again, I would like to know how exactly. It may be that the admission that Ukraine can’t take Crimea is so radical that Russian tea-leaf readers see that as signifying more.
 
But if that’s the point, Blinken underscores that any concession is not expected to be lasting. From the Washington Post: