Diplomatic theater
Impotent Budanov, omnipotent Yermak, deceptive Trump.
At the start of April it seemed like peace talks would be renewed. Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukraine’s presidential administration and top negotiator, told Bloomberg that American diplomats Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner would come to Ukraine after April 12 to hammer out a deal with Russia.
They still haven’t visited. Why not?
Don’t get me wrong, it would be excellent to see an end to all this pointless slaughter. But I think there is good reason to be skeptical.
There is a certain idea I would like to critique today. This is the idea that Kyrylo Budanov, currently head of Ukraine’s presidential administration, is gearing the country up for peace with Russia. Not through retaking Donetsk and marching into Red Square, but by giving up the remaining parts of the Donbass, as is currently demanded by Moscow and Washington.
Now, there are plenty of reasons to believe this theory. Budanov, who (supposedly) leads Ukraine’s negotiation team, has spent the past year calling for ceasefire with Russia instead of endless war in pursuit of the 1991 borders. He is quite positive towards the Trump administration. Western media often single out Budanov as the main Ukrainian backchannel to Moscow. Recently, Budanov made positive statements about the ‘pro-Russian’ Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Some hence believe this to be a sign of progress in negotiations, given that Russia wants the rights of this church to be protected in Ukraine.
Then there’s the fact that Budanov has long been described by the western media as the CIA’s chief protege in Ukraine. And Washington, particularly Trump, supposedly wants to end the war in Ukraine in order to better focus on fighting China.
Opposed to Budanov, the theory goes, was Andrey Yermak, head of the presidential administration from 2020 until his resignation in November 2025 and replacement by Budanov at the start of 2026. Yermak, unlike Budanov, opposed giving up any Ukrainian territory, and supported continued war until the 1991 borders. Yermak, in turn, was thought by many to be closer to MI6 and London, whose obsession with war against Russia is well-known.
Now, I too have dabbled in this theory. It was also eloquently expressed by Leonid Ragozin. But let me explain why I think there’s no need to place too much hope in Budanov’s peacemaking abilities — or even intentions.
Yes, Washington and London/Brussels have different strategies towards Russia. But in practice, there is little difference.
We know from the pronouncements of his own administration and the western press that Trump has the following aim: to get Moscow on Washington’s side in the struggle against China, or at least for Moscow to distance itself from China and stay neutral in this conflict. I call this the ‘reverse Kissinger’ strategy, given that Trump is inspired by Henry Kissinger’s success in attracting Beijing away from Moscow in the 70s, a move that in large part won the cold war for NATO.
But the problem is that Russia isn’t going to do this. Beijing buys Russian energy and has the largest land border with Russia. Washington, meanwhile, is separated by an ocean and competes with Russia in energy markets. More importantly, whatever seemingly positive signals sent by the Trump administration can be easily reversed by a Democrat return to the White House, which is hardly unlikely. The Chinese government, in contrast, is far more predictable and stable. Political, economic and military cooperation between Russia and China deepens by the year. The same is obviously not true for Russia’s would-be ‘western partners’.
However, Trump knows what he wants. And lacking many other particularly impressive foreign policy successes (unless you count abducting leaders of impoverished latin American countries), there is every indication that Trump would like to continue striving in this impossible game of achieving a ‘reverse Kissinger’ vis a vis Beijing and Russia.
The question then arises — how can Trump get Russia to do what it doesn’t want to? The answer has been quite clear over the past year — by inflicting costs on Russia through Ukraine.
If Trump simply wanted to end the war in Ukraine at any cost in order to win a Nobel, as many like to say, he could have done so easily. Washington has immense leverage over Ukraine. It could cut off intelligence sharing with Ukraine — Ukrainian military officials regularly state that every one of their long/mid-range strikes behind enemy lines is coordinated minutely by the Americans. All this can only be done through the satellite imagery and other intelligence provided by the Americans.
Washington could cut off Starlink access to the Ukrainian army, or even threaten to do so. Only about 10% of the Russian army used Starlink, but when Washington cut that off to them at the start of 2026, it led to somewhat serious problems for the Russian army, and temporarily successful local Ukrainian counterattacks.
Ukraine’s army, meanwhile, is almost entirely dependent on Starlink. Without it, Ukrainian battlefield logistics would collapse. It would be a true catastrophe.
Or Washington could cut off arms shipments to Ukraine. JD Vance recently triumphantly stated how proud he is that his administration cut off arms shipments to Ukraine. But like everything this Thielite opportunist says, it’s a lie. The US continues shipping arms to Ukraine through Trump’s PURL program. All that’s different from Biden is that the Europeans pay for it, with an extra 10% markup. Without Patriot missiles and other crucial American weapons systems, Ukraine would be crippled.
Not only has Trump not stopped military aid to Ukraine, but he’s actually increased it. And this makes absolute sense, if he is committed to forcing Russia into abandoning its alliance with China. The longer Russia resists, the more Trump will escalate against Russia.
This increased military aid hasn’t taken the form of increased artillery shells or the other conventional weapons systems the Biden administration shipped to Ukraine. And that isn’t necessarily all that bad for Ukraine — in current military conditions, drones whose components both Ukraine and Russia purchase from China are responsible for up to 90% of losses. But drones aren’t something that the US can supply.
The form this escalation has taken is increased ‘Ukrainian’ drone strikes against Russian civilian energy infrastructure. We know from the NYT, hardly a pro-Trump publication, that Trump’s CIA director John Radcliffe radically stepped up his agency’s aid to Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian energy assets over the entirety of 2025.
‘Aid’ is an understatement. The CIA, with Trump’s blessing, allowed Ukraine to do what Biden largely prevented them from doing. Furthermore, it provides immense intelligence assistance without which these strikes would be far less effective, if not impossible.
And over the past four months of 2026, this strategy of increased pressure on Russia has intensified. Washington’s Ukraine policy has been conducted by the most Trumpian people you can imagine — the likes of Palantir, the silicon valley militarists that are the true basis of the Trump regime.
At the start of 2026, Mikhailo Fedorov became defense minister of Ukraine. He has long been the most visible partner of Palantir in Ukraine, and these past few months have seen a number of dramatic pronouncements from him and his ministry about deepened cooperation with Palantir.
As a result of Fedorov’s activities and his Palantir friends, Ukrainian strikes on Russian energy have increased to a level never seen before. According to official Russian statistics, March 2026 saw more Ukrainian long-range strikes on Russia than vice versa — the first ever such case.
Ukrainan strikes on Russian ports and energy infrastructure led to a temporary halting of Russian energy exports in the first half of April. According to Reuters, it was the largest such decline in six years. Russia has already recovered, but the fact remains that it is bearing real costs, costs that the Biden regime never tried to impose on Russia at such a scale.
That’s why in practice, all the verbal back and forth between Trump and the British, the Europeans, or even Zelensky is largely meaningless. Sure, the London-Brussels-Kyiv axis don’t have the desire or hope to gain Moscow as an ally against China. They just want to continue the war against Russia, hopefully achieving a regime change in Moscow. Or, at minimum, continue slashing social spending and ratcheting up military hysteria and expenditure domestically.
But even if Trump has the strategy of pulling Moscow to his side against China, his only means for accomplishing this is through increasing military aid to Ukraine. Which, obviously, more than satisfies the Europeans.
One might even hypothesize that privately, some of the British or Europeans have been encouraging Trump’s illusions about the possibility of attracting Russia to its side against China. ‘Just keep prodding the Russians, Daddy Donny, and I’m sure they’ll agree to your demands!’
That’s my view of the broader strategic reasons why there’s no need to get excited about Trump’s diplomacy, and about the figure of Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s most pro-Trump political heavyweight.
And it’s why instead of an upcoming ceasefire, I am more inclined to believe reports from the Ukrainian press that Zelensky is intent on continuing the war until 2028. With the Democrats back in the White House, it’ll be time for another grand counter-offensive. No wonder other Zelenskite politicians speak of war until 2030.
And now, I’ll go into some more detail about this diplomatic theatre. First, we’ll see how Zelensky has been adamant the past few days in rebuffing Trump’s negotiation offers. This leads us onto some exciting details about the current state of Ukraine’s elite clan wars, shedding light on why Budanov is far less powerful than it might seem.
Though Budanov seemingly replaced Yermak, the latter is more influential than ever. Yermak’s proxies are omnipresent in the top echelons of government, including the presidential administration Budanov is nominally in charge in. Budanov is surrounded by enemies. To top it off, Yermak makes daily calls to his proxies in order to better curate policy — all with Zelensky’s go ahead.
And finally, we’ll see that Budanov’s ‘pro-peace’ rhetoric is merely a superficial variation of the same tune sung by Zelensky’s other avatars — more war, more mobilization, shame on the draft dodgers.
