larry johnson has little faith in any 'peace talks';

Wednesday will be a very active day on the diplomatic front with respect to Ukraine and Iran. Let’s start with Ukraine. The New York Times reports:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio decided on Tuesday to skip the next stage of the Ukrainian cease-fire talks, while Ukraine rebuffed one of President Trump’s key proposals for a deal that would halt the fighting with Russia.

Negotiators from the United States, Europe and Ukraine will still meet in London on Wednesday to continue hammering out a cease-fire proposal. But the back-to-back developments are a double blow, raising fresh questions about how much progress is being made toward winding down the three-year war.

Short answer… no progress. Rubio’s statement last week, following a meeting on Ukraine in Paris, is that unless there is movement towards a peace agreement this week, the United States is going to exit the process and leave it to the Europeans and Ukraine to decide how to bring an end to the war in Ukraine. The meeting in London will reportedly focus on the Kellogg Plan, which was actually written by former CIA officer, Fred Fleitz, in April 2024, but carries the name of Kellogg. Here are the key elements of this plan:

In their April 2023 Foreign Affairs article, Richard Haass and Charles Kupchan proposed that in exchange for abiding by a cease-fire, a demilitarized zone, and participating in peace talks, Russia could be offered some limited sanctions relief. Ukraine would not be asked to relinquish the goal of regaining all its territory, but it would agree to use diplomacy, not force, with the understanding that this would require a future diplomatic breakthrough which probably will not occur before Putin leaves office. Until that happens, the United States and its allies would pledge to only fully lift sanctions against Russia and normalize relations after it signs a peace agreement acceptable to Ukraine. We also call for placing levies on Russian energy sales to pay for Ukrainian reconstruction.

By enabling Ukraine to negotiate from a position of strength while also communicating to Russia the consequences if it fails to abide by future peace talk conditions, the United States could implement a negotiated end-state with terms aligned with U.S. and Ukrainian interests. Part of this negotiated end-state should include provisions in which we establish a long-term security architecture for Ukraine’s defense that focuses on bilateral security defense. Including this in a Russia-Ukraine peace deal offers a path toward long-term peace in the region and a means of preventing future hostilities between the two nations.........more...........