Strategic Culture Foundation | October 23, 2026

Diplomacy, as the saying goes, is the art of the possible. A peaceful settlement to the war in Ukraine is possible if all sides were to engage in genuine diplomacy. That’s the easy, more civilized way.

If not, Russia will achieve peace the hard way through complete military victory.

Diplomacy is being prevented because European politicians, in particular, are held hostage by their own twisted ideology and false propaganda.

Ironically, the NATO proxy war in Ukraine was intended to “strategically defeat” Russia. It turns out, however, that it is the NATO axis that is staring at a historic defeat. The chaos surging across Europe is a manifestation of that failure, driven by higher energy prices and reckless, unsustainable militarism.

Thus, peace in Ukraine is concomitant with peace in Europe, and diplomacy would expedite that to obviate more instability and suffering.

But diplomacy is incompatible with parties who possess a diseased mentality of Russophobia.

Diplomatic engagement involves putting pragmatic interests first, ahead of ideological bias. The pragmatic interest of everyone surely should be to find an end to this nearly five-year war that has caused millions of casualties and runs the risk of escalating to a general war in Europe.

The Trump administration appears to be renewing peace efforts by dispatching a presidential envoy to Russia this week. Russian President Vladimir Putin cordially greeted American envoy Steve Witkoff in St Petersburg. It is unimaginable that any European politician or envoy would be capable of that rudimentary courtesy. Putin reiterated that Russia’s door is open for negotiations.

Diplomacy can create a path to peace sooner, as internationally renowned Professor Jeffrey Sachs advocated in an eminently reasonable presentation this week.

Key issues for a peace agreement include: 1) indivisible security for all; 2) permanent neutrality status for Ukraine; 3) an armistice, not a temporary ceasefire, based on current lines of conflict; and 4) a declaration by NATO to halt its eastward expansion.

The framework for peace proposed by Sachs is similar to Russia’s position. It addresses the causes of conflict rather than only its symptoms.

Professor Sachs points out that these are not new principles. They were recognized and agreed upon in the past by the United States, its European allies, and Ukraine. In the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, the U.S., Soviet Union, and European states accepted the principle that security is not a zero-sum game. All states must have a mutual right to security.

On the issue of permanent neutrality of Ukraine, that was declared in its constitution when it established independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. The seeking of NATO membership for Ukraine overturns that principle. It was the United States under President GW Bush that initiated the drive for NATO membership with the Bucharest Declaration in 2008, which was repudiated by Russia with the warning that it would inevitably lead to conflict, as history proves.

Sachs also points out that the United States and its NATO allies must return to the pledge made to the Soviet Union in 1989 that there would be no eastward expansion of the military bloc. It is basic common sense that the encroachment of NATO forces on Russia’s borders is destabilizing and a source of confrontation. The relentless expansion is a violation of the principle of indivisible security. Would the United States accept a situation where Mexico was installing Russian or Chinese military forces?

As for the cessation of hostilities and the drawing of territorial lines, that is a thorny issue. Moscow claims that it has a historical right to the territories east and south of the Dniper River, including Sumy, Kharkov, Kherson and Odessa, in addition to the Donbass and, of course, Crimea.

What is unrealistic is for Ukraine to claim the total return of territories that Russia has taken since 2022 (and 2014 in the case of Crimea). From Russia’s point of view, and many international historians would concur, the post-1991 composition of Ukraine was an artifice. It arbitrarily incorporated lands that were historically always part of Russia. These lands were donated to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic by Soviet leaders in dubious schemes of demographic manipulation that did not respect the antecedent cultural Russian ties.

In any case, a framework for a permanent peaceful settlement is feasible if all sides engage in honest discussions that recognize the historical background.

When U.S. President Donald Trump met Russia’s Putin in Anchorage back in August 2025, there seemed to be an acceptance by the American side of Russia’s perspective on addressing “root causes”. Subsequently, Trump failed to follow through on what appeared to be a breakthrough meeting in Anchorage. Part of the problem was the Europeans and the Kiev regime thwarting Trump’s initiative and throwing obstacles in the way of negotiations. European leaders insisted on a temporary ceasefire and NATO peacekeepers, and have persisted in treating Russia like a pariah.

The international context has shifted in a way that makes Trump more amenable. His disastrous war with Iran has blown fuel prices sky-high for American consumers. With the mid-term elections only weeks away, the White House needs some good news to prevent a political wipeout for the Republicans.

Trump made a deal with Putin two weeks ago for diesel supplies from Russia to ease the pain at the pump for American voters. Essential to that is for Ukraine to stop air strikes on Russian oil facilities. The corrupt puppet president in Kiev, Vladimir Zelensky, is defying Trump with churlish remarks and threats to keep striking Russian oil refineries and depots.

One positive thing from the rift with Zelensky is Trump viewing him as the obstacle to a peace deal. Trump is now openly castigating the Ukrainian former comedian and calling for a new president in that country.

The cocaine addict Zelensky, with his loathsome war racketeering, is hanging on to power by a thread, and only because of continuing support from European leaders. These elitist European politicians are driven by anti-Russian ideology and servility to the futile geopolitical agenda of strategically defeating Russia. Europe is witnessing a social upheaval bordering on revolution over the fallout from the soaring cost of living, which is, in turn, a consequence of the NATO proxy war in Ukraine. But the elites have no way to address the chaos because they are the problem.

For all his flaws, and there are many, at least Trump is willing to engage in diplomacy. He is not encumbered with hatred of Russia. His understanding of the root causes of the war may be limited. But at least his administration has the basic quality of respecting Russia as an equal and listening to Russia’s perspective. That is a modicum for negotiations and the art of the possible.

By contrast, the European elites and their pet regime in Kiev are incapable of engaging in any diplomacy. They are obsessed with unattainable and sinister ideological prejudices that hark back to Nazi Germany and the belief that Russians are “subhumans” to be conquered. They have no respect for Russia, nor are they capable of any intelligent, honest discussion about the causes of conflict.

Jeffrey Sachs contends that Trump could promptly end the war and create peace if he were to make a clear policy announcement that the United States is returning to a position whereby it respects indivisible security for all, including Russia, accepts permanent neutrality of Ukraine with no future as a NATO member, and declares that NATO ends its eastward expansion. A rational path to peace is possible.

There will be howls of condemnation from the Kiev regime and its European sponsors. There will be howls too from within the U.S. establishment who share the European ideology of demonizing and belligerence towards Russia. Trump may be so weakened by the mid-term elections that it is not politically possible for him to make such a policy announcement.

So be it. Russia will continue to win its military objectives and demand its rightful terms of peace. Diplomacy offers an easy way to peace. But if the West insists on the hard way, then Russia will deliver that way too. The Europeans and Kiev regime will pay an even higher price with their own implosion.

By Patrick LAWRENCE | Strategic Culture Foundation | October 24, 2026

Given the gush of vitriol and condemnation since Oct. 9, when Donald Trump announced his deal to import 5 million metric tons of Russian diesel, roughly 37 million barrels, one would think the president had surrendered the United States’ sovereignty to the Kremlin, or handed over the Ukrainians to the Russian army, or rankly betrayed the Europeans or altogether renounced what we picturesquely call Western civilization.

This is, indeed, what we read daily in the corporate press these days and what we are supposed to think. It is 2016 redux, it seems. Another round of Russiagate may not be far off, given 16 House Democrats have introduced a Prohibit Corrupt Russia Oil Deals Act and 12 senators now attack the diesel accord as “a gift to our adversary.”

If there is one thing essential to recall about those dreary years it is that the wobbly-from-the-first Russiagate edifice, the whole of it, was made of mis– and disinformation, hyperbole, innuendo, extravagant abuses of office and propaganda incessantly disseminated in corporate media.

It was, in short, the Deep State’s attempt to scuttle any effort to advance beyond the poisonous Russophobia it had spent a decade cultivating (taking my date from Vladimir Putin’s era-defining speech to the Munich Security Conference in 2007).

It is the same again as Trump tries once more to end the war in Ukraine and refashion East–West relations, a project the old “MICIMATT”— the military-industrial, congressional, intelligence, media, academic and think tank blob — simply cannot abide.

Let us listen to this new round of rubbish with the recent past in mind.

“Donald Trump, meet Neville Chamberlain.” That is Tom Friedman, writing in The New York Times last week under the headline, “Trump’s Democracy–for–Diesel Deal Shames Us All.”

“When future students search online for ‘sellout,’ ‘appeaser’ or ‘traitor to his country’s core values,’” Friedman elaborates, “their two pictures will come up first, side by side.” There is no matching our Tom when it comes to overdrawn historical reference dressed up as intellectual gravitas.

Harold Meyerson, writing in The American Prospect Tuesday under the headline, “Why Putin Is Now Our Ally,” is unhappy that Americans are not angrier and more contemptuous than they appear to be in response to Trump’s latest démarche to Russia.

“We’ve grown so inured to Trump’s outrages,” he writes, “that his alliance with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s neo–Tsarist imperialist regime hasn’t yet stoked the level of horror and rage it deserves.”

Putin’s neo–Tsarist imperialist regime. We’re back to this, are we?

We’re also back to the good old Trump–Putin “bromance” bit, it seems, as in “Trump’s man-crush on the Russian dictator has been well documented and need not be recounted in all its unctuous detail.”

This bizarre suggestion of homophilia repeats a tiresome trope from the Russiagate years — never in the slightest documented, for the record — and this time comes from Tom Nichols, a neoliberal hack of long standing. Writing Oct. 18 in The Atlantic, Nichols wants us to see matters this way:

“Donald Trump has now abandoned pretense and is openly aiding the Kremlin in its war against a friend and partner of the U.S. The American commander in chief has abandoned the Western order, the most successful — and powerful — security arrangement in human history.”

Are we clear on all this? The corrupt, Nazi-infested regime in Kiev is America’s friend and partner, simple as that.

The Western order as we have it is the finest thing humanity has ever managed, and Donald J. Trump has forsaken this finest-ever order.

All because the Trumpster signed an agreement whereby the United States will purchase, all in, about two weeks’ worth of Russian diesel fuel.

Paranoia strikes deep, as should be plain to all as the imperium proceeds into its self-inflicted decline. Into the pages of The Atlantic it will creep whenever the topic is “Putin’s Russia” (as against “Russia”).

Trump’s ‘Simple’ Decision

How to account for this outpouring of nitwittery from all these pseuds? Why so suddenly does the world seem to be coming to an end? These are our questions.

Trump II has proven disastrously worse than Trump I, to state the obvious. He had a few good ideas the first time around: end the wars of adventure, bring the soldiers home, decommission NATO, a new détente with Moscow.

This time — and you have to credit the Trumpster for this, strange as it is to credit him with anything — he has only one. He still wants to restore relations with Russia to a working order of some kind, and this must begin with ending the war the Biden regime provoked very quickly after Trump was voted out of office.

Trump is a Manhattan property man for whom everything is transactional, we have to remember. Exploring “deals” does not figure at the higher end of statecraft — certainly not given all that is at issue between Russia and the West — but this is a question of method, not purpose. Let us not get lost in the former while losing sight of the latter.

Peaceful, constructive relations with Russia, based on an enduring settlement of benefit to all sides, are a good thing altogether to be welcomed, however often Americans and West Europeans are told any such eventuality would amount to the horror of horrors.

As everyone thinking about this has remarked, Trump’s immediate intent in striking his diesel deal is to get prices down as best he can before the midterm elections and to pretend the price crisis has causes other than the U.S.–Israeli assault on Iran.

I’m for setting the politics aside. A few days’ worth of diesel — all that can possibly arrive from Russian refineries before Nov. 3 — won’t make any difference, and Trump cannot but know this.

My mind goes to a remark Trump made on Truth Social, his digital bullhorn, at the beginning of this week in response to all the shrieking and shouting that followed his Oct. 9 announcement:

“My decision on Russia is a very simple one. I am in the process of negotiating Peace in the war between Russia and Ukraine, and don’t want to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table.”

It is important to read this together with other things the Trump regime has got up to lately. While the United States is in plausible-denial mode, Kiev reports that it has disrupted some of the early-warning satellite intelligence vital to Ukraine’s defenses.

Elon Musk, apparently after consultation with the White House, has restricted Ukraine’s use of Starshield, the military-grade version of the Starlink communications system.

These are day-to-day lifelines. So is the Prioritized Ukraine Requirement List, the arrangement whereby the United States sells arms to the Europeans, who send them on to Ukraine. To date the volume of shipments through the P.U.R.L. channel has come to $7 billion. Trump is reportedly threatening to end the program.

Atop all this he has suspended implementation of a sanctions bill he signed into law only a month ago. Concurrently, the Witkoff–Kushner duo presented Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian dictator, with a new settlement proposal that reads to me like a condensed version of the very creditable 28–point plan they presented a year ago next month.

Something is afoot, it seems to me. I see a thought-through strategy in all this. I see renewed determination on Trump’s part.

Trump is out of the closet at last — and perfectly accurate — as he asserts that Zelensky is the principal impediment to a settlement accord and, so, should be either removed from office or forced to accept defeat and recognize Russia’s legitimate interests.

Trump’s new push to bring the Ukraine crisis to a close, to be clear on this point, is not a betrayal of the Ukrainian people. It is just the opposite.

There are a lot of reasons to question how far Trump will get either in ending the war or restoring relations with Russia to a livable détente. But if he maintains the present momentum, we may be watching the beginning of the endgame in Ukraine.

This is a “may,” conditional verb required. But it is this prospect that has all the warmongers in the MICIMATT complex in a dither.

Strange it will be if a president so wrong about so much manages to achieve the peace he is after. But maybe the Tom Friedmans and the Tom Nichols and the rest of their kind are useful as a mirror.

Maybe the extent of their panic is a measure of the Trumpster’s chances of success this time around.

The HighWire with Del Bigtree | October 22, 2026

From military speeches to civil-defense drills, Europe’s leaders are openly preparing their countries for conflict. Jefferey looks at the warnings coming out of Britain and the polling that suggests the public may not be ready to answer the call.

RT | October 23, 2026

‘Cambridge Analytica’ is by now a byword for the social media Wild West of 2016, when regulations were non-existent and unscrupulous brokers sold personal user data to advertisers and political operatives. RT explores the scandal that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg still can’t dodge.

On October 22, Meta was ordered by a New Mexico judge to pay $25 billion in civil penalties over the collection of personal data from 44 million Facebook users by Cambridge Analytica more than a decade earlier.

The judge concluded that Meta’s misconduct warranted a penalty exceeding $219 billion under state law, but reduced the amount to $25 billion, making it one of the largest fines ever imposed on an American corporation.

Meta, operating at the time as Facebook, knowingly and systematically deceived users about how it managed their personal data and allowed its harvesting by third-party companies like Cambridge Analytica. The jury also found Meta’s senior executive team knew of, and lied about, deceiving users about how it planned to investigate data-harvesting companies after the Cambridge Analytica scandal became public.

To understand how Meta ended up owing an eighth of its annual revenue in just one judgment, it’s necessary to go back to 2013, when Cambridge Analytica emerged from Britain’s shadowy private intelligence sector.

What was Cambridge Analytica?

Cambridge Analytica was founded in 2013 as a subsidiary of SCL Group, a London-based private intelligence firm that has provided data analytics and “behavioural analysis” services to the British Defense Ministry and Foreign Office.

Cambridge Analytica CEO and SCL Group Director Alexander Nix has admitted under oath that his companies worked with American and British intelligence agencies, provided psychological warfare training to several Western militaries, employed multiple staff with security clearances in the UK and US, and hired former Israeli spies.

SCL Group’s work for NATO, Israel, Ukraine, and other governments and militaries was extensive, and Cambridge Analytica drew on its parent company’s experience in military psyops to become one of the world’s most effective election influence operations, according to whistleblower Christopher Wylie. On the other hand, SCL insists that its military and political wings were separate entities. Whichever account is true, Cambridge Analytica had been hired by political candidates in 200 elections by 2018, according to company documents. These included parliamentary elections in the Czech Republic, India, and Italy, the Brexit referendum in the UK, and most infamously, the 2016 presidential election in the US.

What did Cambridge Analytica do in 2016?

Cambridge Analytica was paid nearly $6 million by then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign in the runup to the 2016 election. The company used its unprecedented access to Facebook user data to identify persuadable voters and potential donors, select effective markets for television ads, and target certain Hillary Clinton supporters for “deterrence” – adverts discouraging them from going to the polls on election day.

How did this become a scandal?

Cambridge Analytica did not break any laws to obtain this data. It was scraped from tens of millions of Facebook users who had, unbeknownst to themselves, given a third-party Facebook quiz application access to their messages, their profile data, and that of their friends.

Cambridge Analytica hired a Cambridge University professor, Aleksandr Kogan, to develop a personality quiz app, named ‘This is Your Digital Life’. Between 250,000 and 270,000 American Facebook users took the quiz in 2015, and by accessing their data, but crucially, under Facebook terms, accessing the data of all of their friends on the platform, Cambridge Analytica was able to compile detailed psychological profiles on roughly 87 million users.

Cambridge Analytica employee Christopher Wylie revealed the workings of the scheme to The Observer in 2018, telling the British newspaper that “we exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles, and built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”

Was Cambridge Analytica the only data-scraper doing this?

“Facebook never cared,” Kogan told NBC News in 2018, explaining that “tens of thousands” of developers created apps like his quiz, and sold user data to companies like Cambridge Analytica. Among the developers were CubeYou, which used a “one-click personality test” app to gather information for commercial use, and LocalBlox, which scraped data from 48 million users, which it then sold to marketers.

AggregateIQ, Global Science Research, and Eunoia Technologies all used data gleaned by Kogan for political ends. However, long before these companies existed, Blue State Digital, an American political consultancy, surreptitiously harvested Facebook data, including friends’ data, for use by Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign.

Cambridge Analytica, however, had its work for the Trump campaign exposed at the height of the ‘Russiagate’ hoax, at a time when Democrats and liberal media outlets were convinced that Russia intervened in the election on behalf of Trump. Cambridge Analytica’s data-scraping dovetailed neatly into a narrative of “Facebook bots” and “Russian military hackers” working with the Trump campaign, and the company became a whipping boy for an industry that transcended partisan lines.

US Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee eventually investigated claims that Cambridge Analytica helped the Russian government target political ads at American voters, but both determined that these claims were untrue, and neither investigation found any proof of “collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.

Has Facebook been punished?

At the time that the information was collected, Facebook had stopped allowing third-party apps to access friends’ data. However, a loophole allowed apps active on the platform before this change to continue harvesting information through 2015. Within days of Wylie’s revelations hitting the headlines, SCL Group and Cambridge Analytica were suspended from Facebook. Two months later, both companies ceased operations, leaving Facebook to handle the fallout.

Facebook initially went into damage control mode, insisting that “People knowingly provided their information” to Kogan’s app, and that “everyone involved gave their consent.”

However, the US Federal Trade Commission determined that Facebook made its privacy settings deliberately opaque, spreading them out over 20 separate screens and opting users into sharing data with third-parties by default. Facebook settled with the FTC for $5 billion in 2019, setting the stage for a series of similar payouts in the following years.

In 2018, Zuckerberg told lawmakers on Capitol Hill that Facebook was aware that user data had been transferred from Kogan to Cambridge Analytica (this transfer was in breach of its policies) since 2015, but opted not to inform users. He said that Facebook asked Cambridge Analytica to delete the data, but never followed up and made sure the company did. “We considered it a closed case,” he told Congress.

The following year, the US Securities and Exchange Commission accused Facebook of misleading investors by presenting “the risk of misuse of user data as merely hypothetical,” when it knew since 2015 that “a third-party developer had actually misused Facebook user data.” Facebook settled the case with the SEC for $100 million.

In 2022, Meta settled a $725 million class-action lawsuit brought by a group of Facebook users, who alleged that the company violated privacy and consumer protection laws by misrepresenting its data-sharing laws and failing to protect their personal information.

Meta attempted to shut down further legal action over the Cambridge Analytica scandal this August, when it reached an $18 billion settlement with 51 attorneys general across US states, territories, and the District of Columbia. Although the cases concerned the addictive design of Meta’s platforms and their effect on children’s mental health, the settlement included a clause resolving a multistate investigation into Facebook’s sharing of user data with third parties “whether known or unknown,” including Cambridge Analytica.

Even if participating states were to discover new facts about the data sharing, they have now waived their right to sue Meta. New Mexico was one of two states that was not party to this agreement, hence the $25 billion penalty.

Did Cambridge Analytica get Trump elected?

Ten years after the fact, it remains unclear how prominent a role Cambridge Analytica played in Trump’s victory over Clinton. The Trump campaign’s use of Facebook and X (then called Twitter) is widely cited as instrumental in his win, but the campaign’s digital director, Brad Parscale, has since said that he stopped using the company’s data several months before election day, considering it inaccurate.

What about Brexit?

Cambridge Analytica worked with Nigel Farage’s Leave.EU organization in late 2015 and early 2016, and carried out some preliminary data analysis for the campaign. However, the data was never used, and the UK Information Commissioner’s (ICO) office concluded in 2020 that the company had no impact on the referendum. As in the US, the ICO found no links between Cambridge Analytica and Russia, and no evidence that Russia interfered in the vote.

Is Zuckerberg in the clear?

The $25 billion judgement handed down on October 22 may be the largest fine ever imposed on Meta, but it does not mark the end of Zuckerberg’s legal woes. In addition to a Washington DC lawsuit holding him personally responsible for the Cambridge Analytica debacle, Zuckerberg’s company is being sued by investors in California over Facebook’s alleged efforts to conceal the misuse of user data by the company.

Meta will likely settle the latter case, just as it did with the similar SEC case in 2019. However, should Zuckerberg fight the lawsuit, he could find himself in the dock, as the plaintiffs have sought recorded depositions from him, former COO Sheryl Sandberg, and former CFO David Wehner – all of whom could be forced to shed more light on just how much Facebook knew about the scandal, and when.