The president of the powerful US government-linked Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, has argued that the proxy war in Ukraine is frozen.
He said he expects no territorial changes in the next year of fighting between Russia and NATO-backed Ukrainian forces.
At the same time, he dismissed the possibility of peace negotiations to end the frozen conflict, insisting, “There is no desire in Ukraine to compromise. If anything, they’re escalating their demands”.
Haass is a former US diplomat who served as director of policy planning for the State Department in the George W. Bush administration, during the lead-up to its illegal invasion of Iraq.
The president of the powerful US Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, admitted the proxy war in Ukraine is frozen. He expects no territorial changes in the next year of fighting.
So why doesn't the West support peace talks?
They want to bleed Russia (as Ukrainians die) pic.twitter.com/JnNPE8PXPM
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) February 19, 2023
“If you ask me a year from now, if we were to meet again, I think we’re going to see something pretty similar to where we are. I don’t expect the next year to bring fundamental changes in who controls what amount of territory [in Ukraine]”, Haass confessed.
The Council on Foreign Relations chief made these remarks on February 19 in Germany, in an interview at the Munich Security Conference.
The mediator of the interview, Jack Kelly, asked Haass about the potential for peace talks, and if it would be possible to return to the kind of negotiations that Türkiye held in March 2022.
These previous peace talks had been sabotaged by Western governments.
Haass totally dismissed the idea, stating, “Look, I’m not confident… Neither side right now has any desire to negotiate”.
“There is no desire in Ukraine to compromise. If anything, they’re escalating their demands. It’s not just all the territory, every square inch of it, going back to what they had when they became independent; [it’s also] economic reparations and war crimes accountability”, Haass said.
“So the gap between the sides is enormous, and I simply don’t see that changing for some time to come”.
While arguing the proxy war is frozen, Council on Foreign Relations chief Richard Haass (former top State Department official under George W Bush) dismissed the possibility of peace talks:
"There's no desire in Ukraine to compromise. If anything they're escalating their demands" pic.twitter.com/r75jILWrcZ
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) February 19, 2023
Haass emphasized that the proxy war in Ukraine “has been going on since 2014”, and did not start with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which he called “just this latest chapter, this more intense chapter”.
Haass implied that the war began with Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, after a democratic referendum in which more than 90% of Crimeans voted to join the Russian Federation. (Western governments denounced this referendum as illegitimate, but a Pew poll found that a staggering 88% of people in Crimea supported it.)
What Haass did not mention is the US-sponsored coup d’etat that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected, geopolitically neutral government in February 2014, which set off a civil war and led to Russia’s intervention – precisely what US Ambassador to Russia William Burns (who now serves as CIA director) had warned of in a 2008 embassy cable.
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is closely linked to the US government, and has a revolving door with the State Department.
The influential New York-based think tank acts as a kind of privatized arm for US policy-making, with funding from the billionaire Rockefeller oligarchs and their family foundation.
During World War Two, the CFR’s War and Peace Studies project helped formulate the strategy for the creation of the US empire and the subsequent Cold War.
Bill Appledorf
2023-02-20 at 00:27
Whatever the outcome is in Ukraine, the U.S. will find someone in the region, maybe the Poles, to arm and keep their war against Russia going.
The U.S. wants Russia’s mineral and other resources, and neocons, who live in a fantasy world in which it is impossible for them to be defeated and removed from society, will not relent.
The nonstop demonization of “Putin!” and “Russia!” will continue ad infinitum in U.S. corporate media, and millions of liberals will swallow that crap no matter what easily verifiable information independent journalists put in front of them.
Destroying German Nazism necessitated the complete obliteration of Germany in WWII: its cities, its military, its industry. And even at that, Allen Dulles rescued the highest officials in the Nazi SS and gave fascism a new lease on life in the U.S. “security” state.
The only way to end U.S. aggression is to completely obliterate it economically. Physical destruction is out of the question, but ending dollar hegemony, sanctioning the U.S., banishing it from the community of nations, and treating it as the pariah that it is is humanity’s only hope of ridding itself of this vicious, murderous, psychopathic empire.
Deschutes
2023-02-26 at 06:35
I forgot about Richard Haas, what a total f&cking @sshole. He was doing foreign war criminal policy for GW Bush, you know, reducing Iraq to a depleted uranium rubble heap…laying waste to Afghanistan…and provoking war in Georgia and S. Ossetia. His delusional thinking about Ukraine, i.e. “the war is in a stalemate” is laughable: the Russian army continues to grind down the UAF, with upwards of 175,000 dead Ukrainian soldiers; they have NO air force; the Ukraine government is now kidnapping men off the street to draft into the war; the Ukraine military is running out of tanks, ammo, howitzers etc. They’re totally f&cked–but here is this @sshole Haas describing this massacre as a “stalemate”!? He reminds me of other USA/EU/NATO bullshitters like Allena Baerbock, Victoria Nuland, Antony Blinken, Liz Truss, Ben Wallace, or that idiot Borass Johnson. They live in their own little fantasy bubble of lies, projections and wishful thinking–safely removed from the actual, real world realities of the battlefields of Ukraine. Russia is just about to cauldron Bakhmut, yet another massive loss of UAF soldiers. And the so-called ‘council on foreign relations’? It seems to be the main gathering place for the biggest @ssholes from USA/EU. After all its funded by Rockefeller oil money, the same sh!t and scum that have driven America’s oil war foreign policy for the last 70 years.
slorter
2023-03-22 at 23:05
The Russians have already in their possession 70 to 80% of Ukraine GDP!
Haass is an ass!