6 August 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

In order to understand what the final settlement terms for the war in Ukraine will be, what is first essential is to understand that ever since the petering-out of what had been for Ukraine a remarkably successful expansion of the war into Ukraine’s invading (via drones and missiles) even deep into Russia itself during the first six months of 2025, the fundamental dynamics of this war have always been the enormous outproduction, by Russia as opposed to the entirety of NATO, both of weapons and of ammunition, which vast outproduction has been causing a more-than three-to-one ratio of Ukrainian soldiers killed for every one Russian soldier killed. As the head of NATO, Mark Rutte, put it, on 13 February 2025, “Russia is producing in three months in ammunition, what the whole of the Alliance is producing in the year.” With an advantage like that, Ukraine’s defeat in this war has been inevitable, and the only questions have been when it will occur and what the after-War settlement of it will be.

The definitive study of the casualty-numbers in this war was “Debunking the Ukrainian Claim About Russian Casualties”, by the retired CIA analyst Larry C. Johnson on 30 May 2025, and reported (beside those casualty-ratios):

In 2024, Russian forces fired an estimated 12 to 17 million artillery shells in Ukraine. This figure reflects a significant escalation in artillery usage compared to previous years.

Here are the ratios by year comparing Russian artillery barrages to those of Ukraine:

2022, Russia vs Ukraine — 7 to 1.

2023, Russia vs Ukraine — 4 to 1.

2024, Russia vs Ukraine — 23 to 1. …

Here is what NATO Secretary General, Mark Rutte, told the NATO Ministers of Defense in February:

“We will discuss today the defence industrial base and how to produce more. We are not producing enough. And this is a collective problem we have, from the US up to and including Türkiye, and including the whole European Union, Norway, UK, we have fantastic defence industries, but we are not producing enough,” Rutte said.

The alliance’s Secretary General emphasized that NATO does not produce enough weapons compared to Moscow.

“No, I wanted to say Russia is producing in three months in ammunition, what the whole of the Alliance is producing in the year, and this is simply not sustainable.

Then, on June 4th, Spain’s El Pais newspaper, which like all mainstream news-media in the U.S. and its colonies (including Spain), is a propaganda-agency for U.S.-and-allied billionaires in order to keep their preferred politicians in power, represented nonetheless a good summary of what Russia’s settlement-terms for this war were, at that time, which was near the end of Ukraine’s successful attacks deep into Russia. (The situation for Russia has improved considerably since that time, and the situation for Ukraine has by now become desperate.) The newspaper headlined “Russia demands unacceptable conditions for peace from Ukraine”, and reported (with its typical omissions and misrepresentations of the historical background of, and of Russia’s national-security needs for, these terms as being the minimal requirements in order for Russia NOT to be invaded by Ukraine or by NATO after this war is settled) that Russia was demanding:

the “complete withdrawal” of the Ukrainian army from the regions it wants to occupy: Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia. Ukrainian troops must also withdraw from the Russian border “to a distance to be agreed upon by the parties.” That is, Kyiv would have to pull back its army from the trenches that prevent Russia from advancing on Kyiv and Kharkiv from the north, leaving Odesa unprotected in the south. …

a package of concessions from Zelenskiy that includes “the cessation of mobilization [of new recruits] and the beginning of demobilization [of current forces]”; the end of arms supplies and foreign military assistance to Ukraine, “including the provision of satellite communications and intelligence services,” and “Ukraine’s renunciation of sabotage on Russian territory [including occupied areas of Ukraine].” …neutral status for Ukraine; that is, Kyiv’s renunciation of its NATO membership bid and any other defensive alliances with third countries. Moscow demands the country’s disarmament in another section: it asks to “establish a maximum number of personnel, weapons, and vehicles of the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” as well as to disband its “nationalist” units and the National Guard.

The Kremlin is also attempting to destabilize Ukrainian politics by demanding “the outlawing of nationalist parties and organizations.” According to official Russian discourse, which denies the existence of Ukraine. …

Moscow links this demand to its proposal to “outlaw Nazi propaganda.”

Moscow also demands that Kyiv “guarantee all the rights of the Russian-speaking population and grant Russian the status of an official language.” This is a sensitive issue: in order to reinforce their independence from Moscow, Ukrainian governments began restricting the official use of the country’s second language following the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, the incursion into eastern Donbas that same year, and the full invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Finally, Moscow is demanding that Kyiv waive any future compensation for damages caused by an invasion that has devastated cities and killed tens of thousands of people. …

In order to understand why all of those demands were essential in order for the Russian people NOT to continue (as has been the case ever since the U.S. coup in their neighboring nation of Ukraine overthrew the democratically elected neutralist leader of Ukraine and replaced him with a rabidly anti-Russian U.S. stooge and thus started the Ukraine war, very violently, on 20 February 2014), please click here for the complete explanation of why. Consequently, for example, the propagandist’s having written that “demanding ‘the outlawing of nationalist parties and organizations’ … denies the existence of Ukraine” was alleging that to remove and replace the Hitler-admiring Ukrainians whom the U.S. and its colonies have been financially backing and placing into power in Ukraine ever since 2014 “denies the existence of Ukraine” — as-if Russians, whose country had lost 13,950,000 dead from Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa (the all-time largest-ever foreign invasion force) invasion of Russia, have no real reason to demand that those individuals, and others such as them, must NEVER AGAIN occupy positions of power in their next-door-neighbor, Ukraine. That’s a crazy (not to say outright stupid) assumption. [Editor's Note: The Soviet Union lost 27 million people, between soldiers and civilians, in the "Great War of Patriotic Liberation".)

Consequently, with all of that essential prior history of this war having now been fully documented via those links to the essentiall evidences, it is, by now, clear that the June 2025 Russian demands will be met in the final settlement of this war; and the only remaining question therefore is whether this settlement will be with, or without, the public acceptance by America’s temporay king, Donald Trump. His only option as an alternative to accepting it is to continue maintaining — instead of now to start exposing — the lies that the U.S. Government (and its colonies) have been spreading to the contrary, ever since 2014 (and even before). For him NOT to accept this as being Russia’s minimal terms for settling this war (which has been a proxy-war by the U.S. against Russia in the battlefields of Ukraine using almost exclusivelly Ukrainian troops and U.S.-and-allied weaponry and satellite intelligence) will be for Trump to escalate this war into World War Three by trying to nuclearly decapitate Russia’s central command in The Kremlin and so — he then would be hoping to — ‘win’ WW3.

Presumably, the meeting today between Trump’s representative Steve Witkoff and Vladimir Putin in The Kremlin is either going to end in the annihilation of life on Earth as we know it, or else in the crafting of a euphemistic (face-saving for the U.S. Government and its NATO) peaceful settlement, agreed-to not ONLY between Russia and Ukraine, but also with the endorsement by the U.S., and by its NATO. Presumably, specific wordings of such a peace-treaty were presented by Putin and discussed with Witkoff, and will be considered by Trump. Russia will not allow itself to become a U.S. colony (such as U.S. Presidents — with the exception of JFK — have been expecting ever since 25 July 1945). Iff Trump demands it to become a U.S. colony, then the result will be WW3. Trump alone will make the decision. However, if he decides for WW3, then there might first be a discussion in Congress as to whether it should announce a Declaration of War against Russia — or else Trump would do the invasion without that, and thus clearly be violating the U.S. Constitution (if that’s the way he would be trying to ‘win’ WW3 — by means of an unwarned nuclear blitz-attack annihilating Moscow). His options at this time are all bad, because he did NOT, as soon as he entered office on January 20th, announce that the U.S. and NATO will NOT continue what he lyingly calls “Biden’s war.” (It’s actually Obama’s war — continued first by Trump, and then by Biden.) That would have been the best option for him (and for the world), but he has always been a neocon at heart, and so this present moment for him is EXTREMELY unattractive — because he had previously been expecting Russia to yield itself up to become just another U.S. colony. Russia had never given any indication whatsoever that it would, and it never will, do that. So, this ball is now fully — and only — in Trump’s court.