Trying to separate the signal from the noise on the Russia-Ukraine War negotiations

A situation like the current stage of the Russia-Ukraine War presents the frustrating challenge of trying to understand what really happening, as opposed to what various interested parties are asserting. And also to understand negotiating strategies of the various parties, which obviously overlaps with the first problem.

Times Radio (as in Times of London) has been featuring an interesting set of perspectives on the situation that often confront the viewers and listeners with both those problems. One of their guests has been Bill Browder (1), who is a founder and former CEO of of the Hermitage Capital hedge fund and whose grandfather was Earl Browder, Chairman of the US Communist Party from 1935 to 1945. A fact that journalists understandably consider an interesting factoid. A 2017 CNN report describes Bill as being “a Red Diaper baby turned capitalist,” the red diaper label being a longtime phrase to describe people whose parents were Communists. It goes on to describes Bill B’s business dealings in Russia led to his become “becoming, like his grandfather, a victim of the very dictatorship he once defended.” (2)

It’s as though “Russia” is some timeless entity that has been fundamentally the same since Ivan the Terrible took over as the first tsar in 1547. But for a lot of pundits, that kind of assumption passes as deep historical knowledge. In the case of the Browders, during Earl’s time as Communist Party Chairman for the US, Russia was part of the Soviet Union, which was a Communist country whose chief leader during Earl’s chairmanship in the US was Joseph Stalin. The Russia headed by Vladimir Putin who became the nemesis of Bill Browder was a country that had gone through a major and bitter transition after 1992 from a centralized Communist economy and government to being a capitalist oligarchy with an authoritarian government whose democratic roots were never more than paper-thin, and which was no longer part of a Soviet Union.

Otherwise, Russia in Ivan’s time was pretty much the same as in was in Earl and Bill’s and Vlad Putin’s time.

(Would Earl have been happy that his grandson became a prominent critic of a very capitalist post-Soviet Russia? Who knows?)

I mention this because evaluating negotiations is not the same as understanding how particular problems arose in the first place. Bill Browder has his own issues with Putin’s regime and is definitely hostile to it. But he also has had a lot of experience with it and has examined Putin’s governance and negotiating style closely.

This Times Radio segment is a good example of how we can parse negotiating approaches differently than how we evaluate the underlying macro issues. It looks at the dubious qualifications and questionable performance of Trump’s current favorite ham-and-cheese- sandwich real estate crony and current star international negotiator Steve Witkoff in dealing with Russia over the Ukraine war.

It’s titled “Steve Witkoff is a *Kremlin lover’, which probably gives him too much individual credit for his positions. It’s painfully obvious that Witkoff is there to make a deal on terms very favorable to Russia because that’s what the Orange Anomaly wants. But Russia is also known for its hardheaded negotiating style – that approach does have a longer continuity than Putin’s position heading it up. So having someone on the American side as chief negotiator who is interested in giving in to Russia’s position is suboptimal to put it mildly if we’ re interested in seeing any kind of reasonably stable end to the current war that doesn’t create even worse problems. (3)

In this podcase, Andrew Neil observes, of a segment in which the sad silver-spoon baby Tucker Carlson (an heir to the Swanson fortune) interviews Witkoff:

You know, it's what happens when you have two idiots beside a microphone and neither of them knows what they're talking about.
I mean, one is just a busted flush mad American broadcaster. But the other is the president's Special Envoy and he knows nothing about what he's talking about: I mean, this guy's a property billionaire. He's never been involved in this level of geopolitics. He doesn’t know anything about it.

By chance, Tucker and Witkoff manage to turn an accurate observation of the moment - when they scoff at the notion that Russia might have territorial designs beyond Ukraine – into stereotypical sophomoric nonsense. It has been a weakness of the Ukraine-hawks’ common talking points to blandly state as fact that Putin’s immediately goal in the war was to take control of Ukraine. But the actual approach that Russia took in the first year of the current war (2022) looked as though it was based on a goal of potentially occupying and controlling the four eastern provinces of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson – along with Crimea, which they annexed in 2014 – and installing a compliant government in Kiev.

Those were illegitimate and illegal aims. But they were also not the same as aiming at a near-term annexation of all Ukraine.

And in the real world, if Russia were to be successful in that more limited goal of a puppet regime in Ukraine, that doesn’t mean they would move immediately to start absorbing Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states. As a practical matter, the European NATO members do have to prepared to deter and defend against any such attempts by Russia. But those risks don’t emerge overnight, any more than the Russia-NATO disputes over Ukraine emerged from the blue in January of 2022.

But the segment of Carlson and Witkoff in the video has Tucker cackling like a stoned kid after Witkoff sneers at the idea that “the Russians are gonna march across Europe,” which I don’t hear even the most enthusiastic hawks saying. Cackling Carlson comments, “Why would they want that? I wouldn’t want those countries. Like, why would they?”

As they say in the American South, “Somethin’ about that boy just ain’t right.”

As much as I’ve been complaining about the ill effects of the use of the Munich Analogy in trying to explain any and all foreign policy challenges, hearing Trump’s chief negotiator on Russia-Ukraine and the Middle East making a stoned-airhead version of the argument with Tucker Carlson is pretty grim.

Notes:

(1) Trump team casting Putin as a ‘good guy’ has made my ‘blood boil’ | Sir Bill Browder. Times Radio YouTube channel 03/24/2025. <https://youtu.be/bkkRUTzQVbo?si=lvf7Jc2K5EAZ3U9x> (Accessed: 2025-24-03).

(2) Weiss, Michael (2017): Bill Browder, from red diaper baby to Putin’s nemesis. CNN 07/28/2017. <https://edition.cnn.com/2017/07/28/opinions/bill-browder-opinion-weiss/index.html> (Accessed: 2025-24-03).

(3) Steve Witkoff is a ‘Kremlin lover’ | Andrew Neil. Times Radio YouTube channel 03/24/2025. <https://youtu.be/65bwJmKcBzE?si=j_uHyROJr2AjRzw3> (Accessed: 2025-24-03).