NATO is currently not interested in peace with the Russian Federation because NATO is comprised of functionally bankrupt destitute nations that are technocratic tyrannies run by wildly unpopular bureaucrats who are willing to sacrifice their own people to try to subdue Russia and plunder Russia’s resources.

A real framework for peace would involve recognition of core interests and working around those core interests.

If there is to be genuine peace between Russia and the West, it will have to begin with reform in the United States, because the EU nations are too far gone to be reasoned with; they can only be dictated to, and they must be made to live with the consequences of their policies. This will require American-Russian unity to compel the EU nations to stand down and stop their campaign of anti-Russian hysteria and hate.

In that sense, I will speak primarily from what the USA can and must do if it wishes to achieve peace and cooperation with Russia, as opposed to what the EU could or would need to do, because the EU won’t be doing anything of the sort. The EU technocrats in Brussels are too drunk on their own sense of their supposed ideological superiority to recognize that they are not the end-all be-all of metaphysical truth and political progress. Americans are, at least occasionally, capable of momentary flashes of sober insight and inspiration.

Some concrete steps that need to occur for a Russian-American détente and for the foundation to be laid for genuine long-term cooperation.

The unfreezing/releasing of all Russian foreign assets, along with the release of all interest on those assets. This should be done unconditionally simply as a moral and economically sound practice, for nobody would trust a bank where the banker proclaims a right to freeze an account due to an ideological or political dispute. Imagine if your banker froze your retirement account because he disliked who you supported for mayor in a city election.

Cessation of all intelligence and military aid to Ukraine.

Revocation of American recognition for the Zelensky regime, as Zelensky (aside from his being wildly unpopular) has used the ongoing war to suspend elections and extend his term, dispensing with any pretense of a democratic mandate.

Formal recognition of Russian territorial sovereignty over the Crimea and the oblasts of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia.

Withdrawal of any applications by Ukraine to join NATO or the EU (which operates as “NATO Light”), along with a guarantee by the United States not to expand NATO into any additional territories that formed the Russian Empire as of 1917 or the Soviet Union as of 1990. NATO should not have expanded into Finland, Poland, or the Baltic States, but it is too late to do much about that at the present time, but it is crucial to prevent further NATO expansion into Armenia, Georgia, or Azerbaijan, or anywhere else in the sphere of influence of core Russian interests.

Cessation of all attempts by Western/US NGOs (which in fact are thinly veiled intelligence fronts financed by Western governments) to cause a colour revolution, civil war, collapse, or any sort of instability in Belarus or Russia or any of the former Soviet Republics in the Caucasus or Central Asia.

Recognition by the US of the actual legitimate government of Mr. Lukashenko in Minsk, with the revocation of recognition of the Brussels-backed pretend government of Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, which operates in Lithuania and is nothing more than a ready-made puppet administration to assume daily management of Belarus in the event the West causes a coup in Minsk the way they caused a coup in Kiev in 2014.

All American funding or support for Mrs. Tsikhanouskaya should be ended, although I support her right to pretend to be in charge of Belarus, much as I support the right of the local lunatic in my city to walk around dressed like Napoleon while claiming to be Napoleon, even though he is clearly not Napoleon. We tolerate the lunatic, but we don’t finance him and offer him grants.

Resumption of normal diplomatic relations between the United States and Belarus with the appointment of an actual ambassador to Belarus; this would be a person engaging in diplomatic and economic negotiations, not working to undermine the host nation.

Recognition of core Russian national interests in the zones and spheres historically within the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union. For example, if for some reason the United States felt the need to send a light infantry battalion to Georgia for “joint training,” it should only occur with consultation and permission from Russia. If Russia were to respond to such a request with, “Yes, that is a good idea; we will participate as well and will send a motor rifle regiment,” then the idea should go forward, but if Russia were to respond along the lines of, “No, we don’t believe that is appropriate at this time,” then the United States should respect that response and abide by it.

It would also make sense for there to be certain security guarantees about force limitations in the Baltic States, perhaps no more than one NATO /American battalion in any Baltic State, for a limitation of three battalions in the Baltic States, along with limitations regarding deployments along the Finnish /Russian border, and ideally nuclear-free zones such that no nuclear weapons are deployed (ready for use) or even stored in depots in any NATO nation except the United States, United Kingdom, and France, which are nuclear powers in their own right.

There should be no forward staging of nuclear weapons in non-nuclear NATO powers, and no initiation of nuclear weapons programs by nations such as Poland and Germany. Russia should agree not to stage or deploy nuclear weapons in Kaliningrad or Belarus and to respect the territorial integrity of the Baltic States nations so long as those nations respect the cultural and linguistic rights of their citizens of Russian ethnicity. The Baltic states should also negotiate with Russia to provide some mutually agreeable transit rights for Russia to transit personnel and material to Kaliningrad by land, in a way that would not compromise their sovereignty.

The United States is the world’s premier maritime power and for the longest time was enjoying immense prosperity from global trade, the sort of global trade made possible by the US Navy maintaining open access to the shipping lanes for American commerce. Everything functioned best when the United States avoided being bogged down in foreign conflicts or getting drawn into large-scale ground combat in some distant theatre of operations.

This system began to break down in the late 1980s and certainly by the 1990s and 2000s with the successive administrations of a variety of red and blue neo-conservative presidents, such that essentially every president since Reagan has been a neo-conservative interventionist who sees the US military as unstoppable and every opponent as weak as 1991 or 2003 Iraq. The United States is an unmatched naval power that lives in a fantasy world where it is also an unmatched ground power, and this is simply not the case.

If Russia is the premier ground power in the world, which it may be (I leave such calculations and conclusions to those who are more versed in such matters), it makes sense for the premier naval power to seek accommodation and cooperation with Russia, particularly as there are no significant national core interests on the part of Russia that conflict with the significant national core interests of the United States. In some sense, it is not a contest between who has the most land power or naval power; the USA and Russia both clearly have significant power and national advantages unique to their own situations. It would be tragic if they wound up exhausting and spending their power in a conflict with each other.

Under the leadership of numerous successive neo-conservative administrations from George H.W. Bush to Clinton, Bush II, Obama, Biden, and sometimes Donald Trump (whose ideas and policies seem to change like a wind vane because, while intelligent, he isn’t a true statesman with a well-developed worldview), the United States has presided over the devastation, dismantling, or destruction of multiple nations across the world, mostly in the area of North Africa and the Middle East.

This three-decade-long neo-con military misadventure has only been possible because of the geopolitical tragedy of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the unipolar world as of 1991, although the unipolar world has effectively ended as of at least several years ago, if not as of 2014-2016. However, the elites in the deep state inside the USA will not accept this new reality and will instead go to any lengths, from weaponization of the dollar, to pouring billions in military aid into Ukraine, to try to prevent an ascendant Russia from being in a position to counter American moves.

These deep state elites fear a new status quo where Russia is sufficiently capable of acting on a global stage to prevent things such as the NATO-coordinated destruction of Libya. I am convinced the destruction of Libya couldn’t have happened in 2019 or 2020 because Russia would have been in a much better position to intervene as a check against NATO aggression.

Peace with Russia is possible and attainable; indeed, it is entirely within reach if the American people are able and willing to counter the influence of the deep state elites who are ready to plunge the world into a war to shore up their declining power base. Under the status quo, it seems the future will be more American bombing campaigns, drone strikes, and nation-wrecking across the Global South, with tens of millions of refugees pouring into Europe, welcomed with open arms by Brussels technocrats, and native indigenous Europeans being silenced, censored, and suppressed if they so much as raise an objection to their population being increased by 10% in two years and their adult children being unable to afford housing because the housing stock was given away to the newcomers. The future that European elites in Brussels imagine for their people seems to be straight out of some dystopian novel.

Peace and cooperation with Russia are entirely possible, but only if foolish, childish talk of “inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia” is countered and such pathetic and delusional notions are put to rest. Like the lunatic walking around my city claiming to be Napoleon, it is charming and quaint, so long as thousands of people don’t listen to him and ask him if they can join his Grande Armee and march to Moscow with him; then it would become scary because it takes on an air of reality.

When a war-hawk radio host with 500 listeners shouts some Russophobic nonsense and calls for a nuclear war, it is easy to shrug off and move on with life. When the calls for escalation come from the Élysée Palace, the situation becomes more dire, because we expect responsible, even-handed policy from such heads of state. Although we might do well to remember that Macron is no Napoleon, any campaign he leads into Russia will meet with a far more disastrous result than the historical campaign did. At least with the lunatic wandering around my city, we all recognize he isn’t Napoleon; somebody might need to remind Emmanuel, “You’re not Napoleon.”

Presently, there are no serious national-level voices in the West advocating for peace with Russia, and in that sense peace will elude the world because the West isn’t preparing for peace; it is agitating for war, although it isn’t prepared to win a war, and it cannot even articulate a coherent reason for why this war has to take place.

As a practicing attorney, at some point during the intake process I will ask a prospective client, “Do you really need to sue this person? What do you hope to achieve?” around the same time as I ask myself and contemplate, “Is this proposed case winnable?” If you don’t need to do it, or you have no idea what you hope to achieve, it doesn’t even make sense to talk about whether it can be won.

At present in the West, all of the talk is focused around, “Can we defeat Russia?” with the sycophant corporate legacy press insisting, “Yes, we can defeat Russia; they go into battle armed with shovels!” I assure you, this is not a Hollywood movie where half of the Russian infantry are sent into battle unarmed and are told to pick up rifles from those who die; Russians are quite well-armed. However, before we get into that discussion, why isn’t anybody on the national level asking, “Why do we seek war with Russia? What do we hope to achieve? Assuming we can win, why would we want to go to war with them?”

The most important question Americans need to ask (and answer) is, “Do we as Americans have a crucial national interest that can only be secured and assured by waging war with Russia?” The answer is clearly, “No, we do not.” Do we have differences and some adversarial relations with Russia? Perhaps in some regards, yes, but nothing that rises to the level of justifying, let alone requiring, a war to resolve.

I usually remind clients that no matter what they think about how their case is likely to go, lawsuits are like wars; once they begin, they take on a life of their own, and anything is possible. I can make general, and sometimes even specific, predictions based on the desired outcome, the evidence available, the logistics /funding, and the court that the case will be litigated in, but outcomes cannot be guaranteed. Once the ball begins to roll, it is impossible to guarantee where it will stop. If the collective West, or the USA on its own, initiates a war with Russia, be prepared for anything, because the war will take on a life of its own.

Finally, America is supposedly a majority Christian nation, and in the gospels peacemakers are blessed, and warmongers are not. It is time for Americans to show the world whether we take our faith seriously, or if it is just a cheap fashion accessory for social credibility. We don’t have to go to war with Russia; it serves no valid or legitimate purpose. Negotiations with Russia are very possible, but only if we acknowledge Russia is a great power and we stop treating them as though they are a third world banana republic.

Bryan Anthony Reo is a licensed attorney based in Ohio and an analyst of military history, geopolitics, and international relations. Courtesy

https://journal-neo.su/2025/09/21/an-actual-framework-for-peace-and-cooperation/