WHY? PEACE PLANS, LEAKS & PUTIN’S GAME

Vladimir Putin is not a strategic genius or some military savant. What he is, is a bully, a master manipulator and professional distorter of facts and perceptions. He plays to his strengths, using them to get the outcomes he wants and expects. He has been that way since he was teenager, throughout his career in the KGB/FSB. He carried on doing the same thing as he effectively ran St Petersburg quietly but efficiently behind the scenes. Later he took the same path of quiet manipulation all the way to the Prime Ministership under Yeltsin, and eventually the presidency. And he still does it today.

For Putin the world is about the art of smoke and mirrors, misdirection and sleight of hand. Like a magician, he dangles the keys over there while his hand is your pocket stealing your phone and wallet.

You’re never subject to one trick either, there are several happening at the same time so that when you inevitably see through one because he’s played you so often, you haven’t seen the secondary or tertiary efforts he’s already at work with. Your brain cannot see the wood for the trees but his brain is looking down from above and he sees the entire plan, whichever way out you try and go he’ll be covering it.

Having looked at what’s been achieved, with this let us not forget, Russian originated plan, a plan given to a gullible American realtor who has no concept of right and wrong, freedom and justice, no real concern for the 44 million Ukrainians – a country he is happy to negotiate away as long as it ends the war and gives Trump what he wants, and where he has not even set foot; ultimately we see nothing. No deal, no result and nothing has changed.

Ukraine said no to the original deal. Putin knew that was inevitable and it allowed him to say no to the counter proposal. You and I expected exactly that outcome.

Meanwhile Trump, agitated into one of his anti-Ukraine moods by Vance and egged on by Witkoff, who, to get a deal is actually telling the Russians how to handle Trump, while keeping it out of hands of the State Department and a Marco Rubio who loathes Vance and despises Witkoff. Rubio is playing a cunning game trying to balance the hideousness of the Trump regime with some semblance of professional stability.

The problem for Rubio is that Vance suspects just that, Witkoff knows he’s despised because he’s not a diplomat, and at the same time Trump divides and conquers by using none of them to get the Russian proposals to Zelensky, but through a convenient conduit, the visit of Dan Driscoll, Army Secretary to Kyiv, whose visit was upturned by having this thrust upon him.

Witkoff had his own plan to launch all this on Trump but it wasn’t going fast enough for the Russians, Putin wanted it moving far faster, so they leaked it to Axios and jump started the process.

So the question is what was the urgency? Why did Putin want this pushed ahead so fast? He knew the outcomes would be his ultimate refusal because the Ukrainians would re-work the deal laid out.

So the only conclusion must be that it was never about the deal in the first place and the whole thing was a giant distraction. But a distraction from what?

We all know the economic situation for Russia is dire and the new secondary sanctions regime is hammering their oil sales and the price of the oil they can sell. The sanctions only became effective on the 21st November but that was the final implementation date, the entire prior month was a grace period to allow Russian oil customers and Lukoil and Rosneft to disengage from their foreign assets.

Even worse was on the table. For months now Senator Lyndsey Graham has had as many as 85 co-sponsors for a set of flexible sanctions options that would see Russia collapse within six months. If they were fully implemented the war would be over by June and Russia in deep trouble.

Graham had been persuaded by Trump earlier this year not to bring the bill to a vote in the Senate. Trump knew the sanctions were end game for his pal Putin and he didn’t want to take that path. The endless ‘two weeks and we’ll see’ routine. The bill went back into the fridge and the heat was off. Until in mid November the senator said that the White House ‘has signed off on it’. On the same day, 19 November, he publicly stated that Trump had told Senate Majority Leader John Thune to ‘move the bill’, marking the latest clear instance of Graham reviving and pushing his sanctions package toward a vote.

Senators Graham and Blumenthal are the lead authors of the Sanctioning Russia Act of 2025 and its later revised text, and they coordinated the bipartisan group of original Senate cosponsors. Related House ‘companion language’ to aid passing the bill there, has been led by Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick, Mike Quigley, Joe Wilson, and Marcy Kaptur, who worked with the Senate sponsors as the package evolved. This was serious and, if passed, ground breaking.

A quick overview of the bill might be useful here, and you can start to understand why Putin was so anxious.

Trigger-based sanctions framework
• Sanctions are formally triggered if the U.S. president determines that Russia refuses to engage in good‑faith peace negotiations, violates a negotiated peace, or launches a new invasion or major offensive against Ukraine.
• Until such a determination, the bill functions as a conditional deterrent, signaling that escalation or bad‑faith behavior will automatically bring a very severe sanctions package into force.

Direct measures against Russia
• The bill mandates asset‑freezing and visa sanctions on senior Russian officials, military leaders, oligarchs, defense suppliers, and other actors materially supporting Russia’s war effort.
• It targets Russia’s financial system by requiring blocking sanctions on major Russian banks and entities (including the central bank and large state‑linked lenders), and sharply limits their access to dollar transactions and U.S. capital markets.

500% tariffs and secondary pressure
• A headline provision is the imposition of tariffs of at least 500% on imports of Russian‑origin goods and services into the United States, including energy and key commodities.
• The bill extends this pressure extra-territorially with 500% tariffs and secondary sanctions on countries and companies that continue to buy Russian oil, gas, uranium and other designated products, with the explicit aim of cutting off Russia’s shadow energy trade and, in particular, China’s and other partners’ purchases.

The whole point of these sanctions was that Russia, if it entered into bad faith negotiations, could be placed into a set of onerous conditions to force it back to the table.

The mere act of getting Russia’s new proposals out to Washington immediately caused Trump to push back against his earlier agreement to enact the bill. And the process, which could have been resolved by years end, was stalled again indefinitely. Trump again listens to Moscow, starts blaming Ukraine and Moscow breathes another sigh of relief as the sanctions bill is again put back in the fridge.

Trump doesn’t want the bill passed because if he has the powers then he will be cajoled into using them – Putin obviously doesn’t want that, so its better for him to give Trump a bone to chew on, watch the bill fall out of favor again and live to fight another day.

It’s this that I believe was at the core of the past week or so at the shenanigans that have surrounded it. Nothing else makes any sense. Putin certainly does not want to draw attention to the bill, nothing could be further from his mind, but getting it placed on indefinite hold again, (its locked in committee with Trump looking to water it down) that’s his aim and his victory. The rest is smoke and mirrors.

The Analyst

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