Luttwak plan: Will it suit Kyiv and Moscow? Shereshevskiy's scenario

Edward Luttwak was born in Romania to a Jewish family in 1942, but his family escaped death in the Holocaust and he later became a US citizen. An economist, international politics specialist, historian and author of numerous scholarly works, Luttwak is also an unofficial spokesman for the White House.

As a political consultant to two powerful American departments - the State Department and the Pentagon, i.e., the US State Department and the Department of Defense, he can not only exert some influence on their policies, but also voice what, for various reasons, officials do not want to say out loud.

Former adviser to President Reagan, i.e., one of the American hawks, the architect of the policy that ruined the main enemy of the United States - the Soviet Union, Luttwak, nevertheless, this time voiced a peace plan. However, any armed conflict ends with peaceful negotiations and the division of territories between the powers in accordance with the results of the confrontation.

In an interview with RBC-TV, Luttwak for the first time expressed a very clear position of the United States vis-à-vis the events in Ukraine. His main thesis is as follows. The US refusal to supply Ukraine with combat aircraft, long-range weapons (ATACMS missile systems) and some other types of weapons is not an accident caused by bureaucratic delays and logistical problems, but an unambiguous message to the Kremlin from the Joe Biden administration. The message can be understood as follows: "We are turning on the green light for negotiations."

Complicated projects never work, Luttwak says, so things are pretty simple. The US wants to negotiate peace with Russia. They offer the Russian troops and the Armed Forces of Ukraine to cease fire. Then, under the auspices of neutral international observers, the United States proposes to hold a referendum on the ownership of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and with the participation of all people who were forced to leave from there in recent years, wherever they live. Also, Ukraine should abandon the Crimea. This is the maximum that the Americans offer Russia in terms of territories. In addition, Luttwak allowed the lifting of sanctions against Russia, but if these conditions are not met, they will be reintroduced.

In principle, the position of the United States, aimed at freezing the conflict in the spirit of Korea, has become obvious for a long time. Analysts have written a lot about its reasons: the United States does not want major defeats for the Russian Armed Forces, because the Kremlin has nuclear weapons (although, judging by the signals coming from Washington, they are less and less afraid of using them), because they, especially after the Prigozhin rebellion, they are afraid of destabilization in Moscow, they do not want the Russian Federation to break up into 20 toxic states possessing nuclear weapons, they do not want Russia to rapidly slip into dependence on China, etc.

However, Luttwak did not focus on this. Perhaps, the Americans in general are not very interested in all this. The main goal of their foreign policy today, as they constantly report, is to counter the new superpower that is gaining strength - China. The US would like to achieve relative stability in all other regions and to devote all the resources of its foreign policy to the confrontation with Beijing. It is for this purpose that the United States is forging new military and economic blocs.

Washington, according to Luttwak, has already demonstrated to Xi Jinping that in the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan, the Chinese economy will receive a powerful blow of sanctions, and China's peculiarity is that it is much more dependent on external supplies of energy resources and food than Russia. Turning back to Russia, Luttwak noted China's weak influence on current events in Ukraine, ridiculing China's plan for a peaceful settlement of the conflict, a plan that no one seemed interested in.

Judging by the fact that the interview was published in the Russian media (for example, headlined - "The US refusal to supply Kyiv indicates a desire to start negotiations"), the Kremlin took this initiative with interest. No wonder, because the United States, in the voice of Luttwak, frankly announced that they would give Ukraine enough weapons so that it would not lose, and would not give weapons that would allow it to win.

But there are nuances. Luttwak noted that the Americans insist that Russia should start negotiations before Ukraine receives F-16 combat jets and other types of long-range weapons. What does it mean? That Kyiv can still get all this over time if Moscow turns out to be intractable? That Russia's rejection of American proposals and the prolongation of the conflict will allow Ukraine to get more powerful weapons? The problem is that such threats can affect both Moscow and Kyiv's strategy, leaving room for complex unpredictable combinations.