the Soviet-born historian Sergey Radchenko, whose meticulously researched To Run the World has just been published by Cambridge and argues that the USSR leadership was motivated more by historically rooted psychological insecurities than by Marxist-Leninist ideology.

Finding ways to slander the USSR, in an article that has nothing to do with the USSR. Oh Bloomberg!

For reasons that future historians will struggle to understand, the US suspended its aid to Ukraine in late 2023

The reasons are clear, the author and/or the publication just don’t want to admit them. Ukrainian corruption. Russian forces adapting and finding ways to destroy/incapacitate NATO equipment that was thought to be technologically superior, and of course Russian forces utterly beating the crap out of the vaunted “Summer counter-offensive”, which was designed, prepared and coordinated by NATO. The US and NATO cannot afford any more humiliation.

Obviously, there’s also the Republicans holding hostage the most recent aid packages until they gained concessions in other policies, but that’s just something that happened after the fact.

The result is that Kyiv listens much less to Washington than it did in 2022 and 2023 — hence the recent spate of deep drone strikes aimed at Russia’s energy infrastructure, operations that cannot possibly have been approved by Team Biden

I have to disagree here. Ukraine might gain some advantage by wrecking Russian oil refineries. But they also attacked Russian radar systems whose sole purpose is to detect incoming nuclear strikes against Russia. The only one who benefits in this case, is someone with missile-mounted nuclear warheads, like the US. It is quite likely that those recent strikes had indeed been approved by Team Biden.

Thanks to Samuel Charap and Sergey Radchenko, we know now that, when their invasion was going badly in early 2022, the Russians were ready to negotiate a peace deal with Ukraine.

We know that the invasion was not going badly at all. We know that Russia always intended to settle the whole thing peacefully, that the SMO was just a way to force Ukraine to the negotiating table quickly, and that retreating was a gesture of good will.

Any chance of a negotiated peace is vanishingly small so long as Putin believes he can win this war because the US has no staying power.

Any chance of a negotiated peace is inexistent, so long as Zelensky has made it illegal for anyone to initiate peace talks with Russia. The Russians have stated multiple times that they are willing to talk at any time. They’ve made their terms known for a while now.

If this guy is a historian, I’ll eat my hat. Events seem to be passing him by unnoticed. His only interpretation of what’s going on is Western media and the propaganda they propagate.