Clown World Diplomacy

Sometimes laughter is the only sane response to what we read in the news. If you know a thing or two about the world (as I hope you do), then our thoughts are inevitably forced down two paths. Path number one: we are being lied to by the politicians and the media alike to hide from us what is really going on. Path number two: the politicians and the media are both a bunch of clowns acting out their shtik out in the open and the reason none of it makes sense is because there is no sense to make — just some silly clowning around.

This, I feel, pretty well summarizes what's happening in the combined West, but then there is Russia and China. These two don't clown around at all; rather, they say what they are going to do and then they do it. They aren't funny or entertaining or easy to understand. In particular, they don't bother to make themselves easy to understand in English. They don't think in English and they don't much care what they sound like in translation, which is often machine translation and wrong. The Chinese speak in code that's impossible to penetrate without deep knowledge of Chinese language, history and culture. Therefore, on all matters Chinese I defer to China experts (Russian ones). The Russians are far more straightforward (for me, because I happen to be one) but seemingly impossible to explain to Westerners because of significant differences in mentality.

Here is a concrete example. I hope that I won't instantly bore you, but the Russians don't aim to entertain people in the West and most of them don't care whether or not they are entertained or bored or even alive. Western governments have first provoked the conflict in the Ukraine, then armed and financed Russia's enemies, and the wages of these sins are yet to be paid. If this sounds strange to you, that's the difference in mentality I mentioned. I try to keep the exposition light and lively, but the dire subject matter imposes its own limits.

The immutable Russian position is that the formerly Ukrainian regions of Crimea, Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson are now part of the Russian Federation in accordance with the Russian Constitution. This redrawing of the political map was based on public referenda held within these regions, the results of which were overwhelmingly in support of them joining the Russian Federation. Meanwhile, in the bedeviled lands to the west of Russia's holy borders, discussions unfold on whether the Ukraine should agree to let Russia keep some of these formerly Ukrainian lands. The fact that the referenda were not internationally recognized is regarded as significant (it is of no importance to Russia).

The Russian view is that it is the Ukrainian troops which are currently occupying Russian territory. Lugansk is Ukrainian-free, but there are still sizable chunks of Donetsk, Zaporozhye and Kherson to be "liberated" from Ukrainian "occupation" (these are the exact words the Russians use). Add to this a tiny chunk of Kursk region, which was never Ukrainian, and which Ukrainian troops invaded last August and have been trying to hold on to ever since. This futile effort has cost them the lives of some 60 thousand Ukrainian soldiers, whose rotting corpses are now littering the woods in the area, pixelated yet still ghastly images of which are regularly shown on Russian nightly news.

The Russian constitution indicates an unquestionable minimum of territory which the Russian forces must liberate because, from the point of view of Russian military honor, doing so is a sacred duty while failing to do so would be treasonous: the remainder of Donetsk, Zaporozhye, Kherson and, of course, a tiny bit of Kursk. But there is no hard limit to the number of other regions that the Russians might liberate. Russian troops are already in control of portions of Kharkov and Sumy regions and are a few kilometers away from Dniepropetrovsk region. These regions are also peopled by Russians: Russian-speaking, culturally Russian, religiously Russian Orthodox. They should also be given a chance to vote in a referendum on joining the Russian Federation, where they would be safe from government persecution for their language, culture and faith.

But these are not the only regions of the (former?) Ukraine which are Russian-speaking, culturally Russian and religiously Russian Orthodox. At a minimum, these include Nikolaev, Odessa, Sumy and Kiev regions. One of the three stated goals of Russia's Special Military Operation (SMO) in the Ukraine is to protect the lives of Russians. Why should the residents of Odessa have their rights of self-determination denied while the residents of Donetsk have been granted theirs? Such arbitrariness would be impossible to justify, and so the SMO will have to keep rolling along until all Russians have been granted their rights and feel safe, wherever they may be.

The other two stated objectives of the SMO are denazification and demilitarization. The Ukraine, whether or not any of it remains as an item on the political map of Europe, must not have any Nazis in positions of authority (as they are now) and all Nazis who have criminal cases against them pending in Russia (of which there are tens of thousands) must be arrested, tried, sentenced and imprisoned. And demilitarization means that whatever part of the Ukraine remains at the end of the SMO must be certified free of weapons, armed groups or foreign troops that could pose any sort of threat to the security of Russia. These two objectives are, likewise, non-negotiable.

I have probably bored you half to death, so here is an old joke comparing a lady to a diplomat. If a lady says "no", that means "maybe". If a lady says "maybe", that's a "yes". And if a lady says "yes", that's not a lady. If a diplomat says "yes", that's a "maybe". If a diplomat says "maybe", that's a "no". And if a diplomat says "no", that's not a diplomat. And yet quite recently Sergei Lavrov, Russia's Foreign Minister and a consummate diplomat, when asked whether Russia's new territories could be a subject for negotiation, said "no". Lavrov is a diplomat and yet he said "no"; what does that mean? It means that the question of Russia's new regions is not a topic for diplomatic discussion.

What is it then a topic for? Here's a hint: one syllable, three letters, first letter is "W". Are you willing to die for a chance to dispute the ownership of faraway places you haven't heard of until quite recently and which you might find it difficult to find on the map? I didn't think so! And yet I have heard reports of numerous discussion by Western politicians of whether the Kiev regime would or would not agree to part with these new Russian regions, whether something could be traded for them, and who would or would not recognize them as Russian territory. Given that such discussions cannot be regarded as diplomacy, what are they? Idiotic, infantile babbling?

Another topic discussed at length in Western press and by Western politicians, is the topic of a ceasefire. Various conditions for a ceasefire have been proposed, completely overlooking the fact that a ceasefire requires the two sides that are involved in active hostilities to agree to it. Have the Russians expressed any willingness to consider a ceasefire? No, the perfectly straightforward, unchanging Russian position is that hostilities will cease once the causes of the hostilities are dealt with systematically and the objectives of the SMO have been achieved. As to what these objectives are, see above: securing the rights of Russians including self-determination and denazification and demilitarization of the (former) Ukraine. These conditions had been negotiated, written down in the Istanbul Protocol Draft Document of April 15, 2022 and given preliminary approval by the Ukrainian side, but then their Western "partners" intervened and ordered them to "fight to the last Ukrainian."

Since the preconditions for a ceasefire do not exist, why is a ceasefire even a topic of discussion? This would be a good question for Western politicians to answer first, but instead they have chosen to leapfrog over it and to launch into a heated discussion of who would introduce peacekeeping troops into the Ukraine once ceasefire has been achieved. In Russian, such discussion is sometimes referred to as "Fighting over the hide of a bear that hasn't been hunted yet." No matter what you decide, the bear will rip your head off if you come close enough.

The fate of the Ukraine was sealed in the summer of 2023 when the Ukrainian offensive failed to penetrate even the first of three Russian defensive lines. All that's been happening since then is mindless slaughter on the Ukrainian side and eager, enthusiastic tinkering with new weapons on the Russian side. The Kiev regime has been getting ready to start drafting 18-year-olds but many of them have left the country in preparation. The number of new volunteers willing to join the Ukrainian army is almost exactly zero. Recruits are given almost no training and sent to their death at gunpoint. There is at the moment a temporary halt to US weapons deliveries to the Kiev regime that may in a month or two put the slaughter on pause. At some point the fine people of Kiev might find it within themselves to start a civil war and overthrow the regime, but that's more wishful thinking than a prediction because the Kiev regime is a ruthless totalitarian state that exercises strict control, including mind control, over its victims.

The Western political/media clown show has recently developed a sideshow called "raw earths" — that's what Donald Trump has been calling "rare earths", which, by the way, are rather scarce on the territory of the former Ukraine and not worth bothering with. Trump is strictly about show business and real estate and "don't know" much physics or chemistry. He previously used the term "hydrosonic rockets" (instead of "hypersonic") and claimed that "America has the best hydrosonic weapons in the world."

All of this insipid clowning around has just one objective: the clowns want to keep their jobs for just a tiny bit longer, hoping that something changes in the meantime. They will do whatever they have to, no matter how humiliating and idiotic, to keep the limelight on themselves, and their court journalists and the mob of bloggers will keep on prattling about their antics in order to sell advertising and grow their audience.

Enjoy the clown show, if you so wish, but remember: this show is not about diplomacy. It's about a three-letter word that starts with a "W". And if your political leader-clowns get their lines sufficiently wrong, there is also a five-letter word that starts with a "D".