During this vacation season it is hard to avoid taking a look at Russia’s Ukrainian War. I wish I could avoid doing so. It’s embarrassing.

Last week Vlad scored an absurdly predictable win. Putin took up DJT’s invitation to rejoin the “normal” world with talks in Alaska. The chess-playing Russian dictator seems to have persuaded the “why stick to your word when you can just say anything that comes in to your head” American President that placing further sanctions on Russia would be pointless and that the easiest, quickest solution to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will be (gasp!): just give Russia everything it has ever wanted.

With negotiators like this who needs armies, eh? Or bombs? Or schools, really.

This farce of an Alaskan Summit was then followed by a throw-yourself-behind-the-sofa-to-avoid-the-embarrassment meeting between Trump and a newly-besuited Zelensky with the Seven Dwarves (Starmer, Macron, Merz, Meloni, Stubb, Rutte and von der Leyen) at the White House on Monday.

What on Earth was the point? Engaging with the Brownian Motion randomiser that is Donald Trump produces nothing. A huge confection of nothingness:
“We’ll do hard sanctions.”
“We’ll do sanctions faster to help stop the killing.”
“Let’s meet.”
“They’ll do a land swap.”
“Oh, the Russians just mean they’ll keep everything they’ve invaded and want some more too.”
“Hold the sanctions.”
“I’m pretty sure that we’ll get a ceasefire out of today’s talks.”
“No-one’s interested in a ceasefire, it would be much better to move straight to a peace treaty.”
“We’ll help with security guarantees.”
“The Russians will be fine with European troops on the ground in Ukraine.”
“There won’t be any need for US involvement in security guarantees.”
“No, of course, the Russians won’t accept any European military deployment in Ukraine.”

Starmer, morphing in to everyone’s groan-worthy “oh let’s just have a knockabout before the match, shall we?” slightly dim GCSE Geography teacher, emerged heralding the announcement of US commitment to involvement in substantial security guarantees for Ukraine. This coup was briefed to journos on the flight back to Blighty, but was walked back by The Don while Keir was still in the air and was totally meaningless by the time the PM landed back in the UK.

It’s all just the most gigantic waste of everyone’s time. The European leaders pygmies’ rush to Washington DC (now under Federalised law enforcement of course) was just nonsense: it would have been far better for everyone to meet in Paris or Berlin (or via Zoom) to work out how quickly they could send a 3-4 Brigade strength formation to Eastern Ukraine under the NATO banner (or NATO exUS, if necessary.)

I can not escape despair at the total predictable stupidity of this.
Complete and utter nonsense.

Russia-UKRAINE GAME THEORY

However, rather than wallowing in that total despair I have decided to run a compact 5-round, non-zero-sum, repeated-game scenario with the assumptions that:
– Russia currently holds significant military advantage at the current battlelines,
– Ukraine’s positions are strained,
– USA will step back from its rôle as negotiations convenor when Putin demonstrates that he is not willing to negotiate anything real,
– UK/France/Germany/others ramp up direct equipment supplies in short-term, deploy Brigade level “tripwire” forces in 6-12 months and attempt to replace US SIGINT on basis of significantly expanded UK NCGI/GCHQ capabilities over 12-24-month term.

Randomised 20,000-run MonteCarlo gameplay. Results tomorrow. Sigh. I hope someone at MoD is doing something more concrete to try to pilot some sensible actual deliverables. My prediction: mostly an eternal stalemate with European troops on the ground capping Ukrainian active troop losses at 100,000 per annum until someone removes Putin from the board.