Strategic & Military Analysis for everyone
Posted on November 26 by The Analyst
Vladimir Putin is not a strategic genius or some military savant. What he is, is a bully, a master manipulator and professional distorter of facts and perceptions. He plays to his strengths, using them to get the outcomes he wants and expects. He has been that way since he was teenager, throughout his career in the KGB/FSB. He carried on doing the same thing as he effectively ran St Petersburg quietly but efficiently behind the scenes. Later he took the same path of quiet manipulation all the way to the Prime Ministership under Yeltsin, and eventually the presidency. And he still does it today.
For Putin the world is about the art of smoke and mirrors, misdirection and sleight of hand. Like a magician, he dangles the keys over there while his hand is your pocket stealing your phone and wallet.
You’re never subject to one trick either, there are several happening at the same time so that when you inevitably see through one because he’s played you so often, you haven’t seen the secondary or tertiary efforts he’s already at work with. Your brain cannot see the wood for the trees but his brain is looking down from above and he sees the entire plan, whichever way out you try and go he’ll be covering it.
Having looked at what’s been achieved, with this let us not forget, Russian originated plan, a plan given to a gullible American realtor who has no concept of right and wrong, freedom and justice, no real concern for the 44 million Ukrainians – a country he is happy to negotiate away as long as it ends the war and gives Trump what he wants, and where he has not even set foot; ultimately we see nothing. No deal, no result and nothing has changed.
Ukraine said no to the original deal. Putin knew that was inevitable and it allowed him to say no to the counter proposal. You and I expected exactly that outcome.
Meanwhile Trump, agitated into one of his anti-Ukraine moods by Vance and egged on by Witkoff, who, to get a deal is actually telling the Russians how to handle Trump, while keeping it out of hands of the State Department and a Marco Rubio who loathes Vance and despises Witkoff. Rubio is playing a cunning game trying to balance the hideousness of the Trump regime with some semblance of professional stability.
The problem for Rubio is that Vance suspects just that, Witkoff knows he’s despised because he’s not a diplomat, and at the same time Trump divides and conquers by using none of them to get the Russian proposals to Zelensky, but through a convenient conduit, the visit of Dan Driscoll, Army Secretary to Kyiv, whose visit was upturned by having this thrust upon him.
Witkoff had his own plan to launch all this on Trump but it wasn’t going fast enough for the Russians, Putin wanted it moving far faster, so they leaked it to Axios and jump started the process.
So the question is what was the urgency? Why did Putin want this pushed ahead so fast? He knew the outcomes would be his ultimate refusal because the Ukrainians would re-work the deal laid out.
So the only conclusion must be that it was never about the deal in the first place and the whole thing was a giant distraction. But a distraction from what?
We all know the economic situation for Russia is dire and the new secondary sanctions regime is hammering their oil sales and the price of the oil they can sell. The sanctions only became effective on the 21st November but that was the final implementation date, the entire prior month was a grace period to allow Russian oil customers and Lukoil and Rosneft to disengage from their foreign assets.
Even worse was on the table. For months now Senator Lyndsey Graham has had as many as 85 co-sponsors for a set of flexible sanctions options that would see Russia collapse within six months. If they were fully implemented the war would be over by June and Russia in deep trouble.
Graham had been persuaded by Trump earlier this year not to bring the bill to a vote in the Senate. Trump knew the sanctions were end game for his pal Putin and he didn’t want to take that path. The endless ‘two weeks and we’ll see’ routine. The bill went back into the fridge and the heat was off. Until in mid November the senator said that the White House ‘has signed off on it’. On the same day, 19 November, he publicly stated that Trump had told Senate Majority Leader John Thune to ‘move the bill’, marking the latest clear instance of Graham reviving and pushing his sanctions package toward a vote.
Senators Graham and Blumenthal are the lead authors of the Sanctioning Russia Act of 2025 and its later revised text, and they coordinated the bipartisan group of original Senate cosponsors. Related House ‘companion language’ to aid passing the bill there, has been led by Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick, Mike Quigley, Joe Wilson, and Marcy Kaptur, who worked with the Senate sponsors as the package evolved. This was serious and, if passed, ground breaking.
A quick overview of the bill might be useful here, and you can start to understand why Putin was so anxious.
Trigger-based sanctions framework
• Sanctions are formally triggered if the U.S. president determines that Russia refuses to engage in good‑faith peace negotiations, violates a negotiated peace, or launches a new invasion or major offensive against Ukraine.
• Until such a determination, the bill functions as a conditional deterrent, signaling that escalation or bad‑faith behavior will automatically bring a very severe sanctions package into force.
Direct measures against Russia
• The bill mandates asset‑freezing and visa sanctions on senior Russian officials, military leaders, oligarchs, defense suppliers, and other actors materially supporting Russia’s war effort.
• It targets Russia’s financial system by requiring blocking sanctions on major Russian banks and entities (including the central bank and large state‑linked lenders), and sharply limits their access to dollar transactions and U.S. capital markets.
500% tariffs and secondary pressure
• A headline provision is the imposition of tariffs of at least 500% on imports of Russian‑origin goods and services into the United States, including energy and key commodities.
• The bill extends this pressure extra-territorially with 500% tariffs and secondary sanctions on countries and companies that continue to buy Russian oil, gas, uranium and other designated products, with the explicit aim of cutting off Russia’s shadow energy trade and, in particular, China’s and other partners’ purchases.
The whole point of these sanctions was that Russia, if it entered into bad faith negotiations, could be placed into a set of onerous conditions to force it back to the table.
The mere act of getting Russia’s new proposals out to Washington immediately caused Trump to push back against his earlier agreement to enact the bill. And the process, which could have been resolved by years end, was stalled again indefinitely. Trump again listens to Moscow, starts blaming Ukraine and Moscow breathes another sigh of relief as the sanctions bill is again put back in the fridge.
Trump doesn’t want the bill passed because if he has the powers then he will be cajoled into using them – Putin obviously doesn’t want that, so its better for him to give Trump a bone to chew on, watch the bill fall out of favor again and live to fight another day.
It’s this that I believe was at the core of the past week or so at the shenanigans that have surrounded it. Nothing else makes any sense. Putin certainly does not want to draw attention to the bill, nothing could be further from his mind, but getting it placed on indefinite hold again, (its locked in committee with Trump looking to water it down) that’s his aim and his victory. The rest is smoke and mirrors.
The Analyst
militaryanalyst.bsky.social
“For months now Senator Lyndsey Graham has had as many as 85 co-sponsors for a set of flexible sanctions options that would see Russia collapse within six months. If they were fully implemented the war would be over by June and Russia in deep trouble.”
That’s why Krasnov is working so hard for his child-murdering nazi friend.
That sanction bill is a “paper tiger.” Giving TACO the option to implement the sanctions means it’s meaningless. Don’t know why Graham and Blumenthal gave in to the WH and put in that slimy language. They had a veto proof majority or at the very least would have show cased the pro Putin senators
Comment from :
Mating Bee
Thank you TA, after all the hype and drama over the last few days, I’ve been looking forward to this, your analysis of the situation. I have zero experience of working with people like Putin and his mindset, but do realise that there are a small number of those in power that have no scruples whatsoever when they plan their response to difficult situations. I very much doubt your analysis tells the whole story and strongly suspect that Vance has a role to continue Putin’s wishes once Trump is removed from office. It is likely that Witkoff’s role is coming to an end and Trump’s position is probably becoming more precarious. The main thing is that the so-called peace deal is dead and Graham may feel it’s time to dust off his “Sanctioning Russia Act” yet again. What will Putin’s response be to that and will Trump and/or Graham survive? One thing for sure, it will be a long time, if ever, that we are fully informed about what is and has been going on.
JCKWEBB
November 26, 2025 at 17:05
Its a deeply flawed political system where one man has so much power and all those flaws are coming out into the open now that the man with that power has such compromised loyalties and limited cognative capacity. I can’t see anything positive coming out of the USA as long as Trump remains in power.
This begs the question, who is running our country; the fat tangerine, who has been nothing but a series of disasters, or the evil vampire? Either way, it’s becoming more clear that this cannot go on like this anymore, regardless of which one of these subhumans is holding the reins. I hope that our Congress will finally do something, as thin as this hope is.
Vance Feb 2022 :
“I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”
This cokksukka was an absolute nobody.
Until that psychopathic outburst attracted the attention of Krasnov.
Did Krasnov’s controllers order him to pick VanZkov as VP to ensure continuity of putinaZi groveling in the event of his demise?
Any depraved thought you can come up with, is probably what’s happening behind the scenes in this despicable administration.
“Rubio is playing a cunning game trying to balance the hideousness of the Trump regime with some semblance of professional stability.”
I wouldn’t even give him credit for that.
He’s proved himself to be a rotten, lousy turncoat. A normal politician turned trumputlerist.
Wonderful article. Wonderful in terms it takes all the individual and separate media reports and puts it into one analysis. Some of the conclusions could be wrong but nice it’s all in one place rather than parsing through the various and many times wrong “lame street media” reports.