Sven von Storch: Putin Has Called Joe Biden’s Bluff – It’s Time to Negotiate | The Gateway Pundit | by Richard Abelson | 123

 

The much-ballyhooed Ukrainian counter-offensive has failed. In Vilnius, Volodymyr Zelensky had to realize the Ukraine will not be joining NATO anytime soon. Vladimir Putin has called the Biden administration’s bluff, who set the deadly escalation in motion with their November 2021 “U.S.-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership”.

It is now time for Jill Biden to get Old Joe a blanket, sit him down by his vintage Victrola radio, and tune it to a country music station playing Kenny Rogers: “You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em…”

It is now time to fold ‘em, Joe. – for the sake of every Ukrainian mother who has sons.

Commentary by Sven von Storch

While Western media have been hiding the truth about the disastrous Ukrainian counter-offensive from us for a month, Russian defense minister Sergey Shoigu spelled out the horrific numbers Monday: “The armed forces of Ukraine lost over 26,000 servicemen and more than 3,000 items of military hardware during their so-called counter-offensive,” Shoigu told reporters, including 17 German Leopard tanks and 12 US Bradleys. Videos of burned-out Western tanks abound on the internet – and now Putin wants to tow their charred remains outside the Western embassies in Moscow.

The only hope to break through the massive Russian defences is apparently to supply banned cluster munitions to Ukraine, whose use Biden spokeswoman Jen Psaki called a “war crime” on Feb. 28, 2022.

On Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov once again stressed his desire to hold peace talks, and “search for ways to settle the Ukrainian crisis peacefully,” TASS reports. Kiev and Moscow were already close to a cease-fire in April 2022, according to former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, before it was torpedoed by Boris Johnson, presumably at the behest of the Biden White House. Since then, about 80.000 Russians and up to 350.000 Ukrainians have lost their lives.

At the NATO Summit in Vilnius, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán called for immediate peace talks, to “bring peace to Ukraine instead of weapons.” In the United States, more and more Americans are skeptical of what exactly the USA is doing spending $113 billion on a corrupt regime in Kiev, that embezzles hundreds of millions of dollars, bans the opposition and cancels elections, all in the name of “defending democracy”.

In May, Senator Lindsey Graham visited Zelensky and allegedly called “Russians dying” the “best money we’ve ever spent.” Graham seemed to give the green light for Zelensky to hurl his remaining 80.000 or so combat troops at the iron maw of the Russian defenses – in vain.

None of these war hawks can tell us what the strategic goal is, however. Is it conquering Crimea, ethnically cleansing the Donbass, degrading the Russian Army, or regime change in Moscow (since that worked so well in Libya and Iraq)? One may assume there are reasons that Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland, Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan don’t want to get into too many details about their goals.

Failing mentally, Joe Biden has to worry about election year challenges from two prominent pro-peace candidates, who both claim they could end Biden’s proxy war within 24 hours: Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The charismatic challenger within Biden’s own party is not only heir to the most famous political name in US history, a recent poll by The Economist shows Kennedy is the only candidate who more people rate favorably than unfavorably (by +19%!), across party lines. While the media pull out all the stops to smear him, Kennedy’s poll numbers show he may have a real shot at overcoming the bitter divide pitting Left against Right in the USA. And Donald Trump is cheered by thousands everywhere he goes, despite all the mud slung at him by media and a very obviously weaponized justice system.

Trump’s and Kennedy’s pro-peace messages obviously resonate with Americans more than CNN and The New York Times will admit. Maybe Biden’s handlers will realize they need to be proactive and end the increasingly unpopular, expensive and pointless war now.

It is now time for peace talks between Kiev, Washington and Moscow. The right-wing

Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is often chided for allegedly being “pro-Putin“ because it has a sizeable number of East German members, and emigres from the former Soviet Union (many of them Jews who fled Islamic Ex-Soviet Republics to Germany) who have a better understanding of the Russian interests and mindset.

No matter what you think of the AfD – they drafted a peace plan for Ukraine in February, which makes impeccable sense:

• –  Minimum 90 day ceasefire
• –  Troops retreat behind 30 km sanitary cordon
• –  OSCE monitors
• –  Humanitarian aid access
• –  UN peace keepers in Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson
• –  Withdrawal of Russian forces behind the lines of Feb. 24, 2022
• –  Gradual drawdown of EU, UK and US military support for Ukraine
• –  Gradual lifting of sanctions against Russia
• –  OSCE referendum in disputed territories on whether to join Ukraine or Russia
• –  Privileged EU partnership for Ukraine
• –  No NATO or EU membership for Ukraine
• –  No nukes, rockets or foreign troops in Ukraine

Ask anyone and it will be hard to find a better, more realistic peace plan for Ukraine than this one, to stop sending the “flower of Ukrainian youth into an abattoir of death to exhaust Russia” (Robert Kennedy Jr.).

The Ukrainian counter-offensive has failed. All that comes now is more senseless sacrifice of young men’s lives.

Biden, Nuland, Blinken and Sullivan overplayed their hand in November 2022 by inviting Ukraine to join NATO.

For better or worse, Vladimir Putin has called their bluff. They had no aces left.

It’s time to count our money and go home.

So the young men of Ukraine can go home, too.

Alive.

Sven von Storch is chair of the Civil Alliance in Berlin and a close ally of Steve Bannon.