It’s about to get “nuts” for retired U.S. Army Lt. General Keith Kellogg.
President-elect Donald Trump has tapped him as his special envoy to Ukraine and Russia. Trump is tasking the former Special Operations Command Europe and 82nd Airborne Division commander with finding a comprehensive peace settlement between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The Kremlin is likely expecting Trump’s interim national security advisor to cave to Putin’s every demand. And its demands will be tantamount to the complete capitulation of Ukraine.
Those types of demands typically come from a position of strength, however, and the Kremlin has none. Thirty-four months and 747,340 casualties into what was supposed to be a 10-day “special military operation” in Ukraine, Russia is now dependent upon Iran and North Korea for munitions and soldiers. The Russian navy has now also abandoned the Mediterranean seaport of Tartus as Syrian rebels advance toward Damascus.
Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeyev clearly believes Kellogg is as good as duped. Putin’s crony, also known as the Orthodox Oligarch, told the Financial Times that when “Kellogg comes to Moscow with his plan, we take it and then tell him to screw himself, because we don’t like any of it.”
Malofeyev continued saying, “That’d be the whole negotiation.” And then he proceeded to argue that any negotiation must “encompass the future of Europe and the world, not just the future of Ukraine.”
Sorry, Konstantin, but that isn’t going to happen. Kellogg is not going to roll over or allow himself to be steamrolled. He is not a politician and knows a smoke screen when he sees one.
Kellogg is no obsequious Tucker Carlson type. Nor will he be as easily fooled at a time when the scent of the Kremlin’s weakness is stinking up the room.
For his part, Carlson was back yet again in Moscow earlier this week to interview Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. In a promo touting his sit-down with Lavrov, Carlson made it clear that he had bought into Putin’s latest nuclear bluff. Carlson naively argued that “the Biden administration has driven the U.S. ever closer to a nuclear conflict with Russia.”
In reality, we are nowhere near nuclear war. Carlson may be afraid of Putin’s nuclear arsenal and state-owned RT’s incessant nuclear fear mongering. But Kellogg is not. He knows that Putin cannot resort to the use of nuclear weapons, which would be game over for everyone. In the 60s, it was called mutual assured destruction. Rather, as evinced in his recent interview on Fox News, Kellogg recognizes that Russia is now finding itself desperate as Putin’s military and diplomatic positions around the world rapidly deteriorate and fall apart under his failed wartime leadership.
Syria is just the latest example, where Russian ground forces have been forced by rebels to retreat southward toward Damascus. Russia has maintained a naval presence at Tartus since 1971, and presently the port is Putin’s only Mediterranean facility. This comes after Moscow was forced to leave naval ports in Crimea and the Sea of Azov, and also after Russian aggression induced Sweden and Finland to join NATO, effectively turning the Baltic Sea into a NATO lake. This has handcuffed Russian naval operations in Kaliningrad and St. Petersburg.
The situation is also rapidly falling apart for Putin’s allies in Georgia. Ongoing democracy protests in Tbilisi, that nation’s capital, are threatening longtime influence and effective control of the country. The unrest also jeopardizes Putin’s anticipated new Black Sea Fleet headquarters, which are being constructed in Abkhazia.
Other erstwhile Russian allies are thumbing their noses at Putin as well. Moldova just voted to join the European Union in October. Kazakhstan President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev recently brushed off Putin’s reference to his nation as a “Russian-speaking country” by addressing his citizens in his native Kazakh.
Syria, Georgia, Moldova and Kazakhstan all have one thing in common. Putin is too overstretched for an effective military intervention in any of them. Russian colonialism may finally have run its course.
Kellogg knows this going into January 20. Now is a time for Trump’s “maximum pressure” foreign policy to be brought to bear on Putin. It is not a time to capitulate in Ukraine or to fall for Putin’s nuclear bluffing.
Kellogg also knows that Russia is, in effect, perpetrating a global war against the U.S. and its Western allies. It is not, as we have often stated, Hollywood’s version — no atomic mushroom clouds or catastrophic day-after radioactive scenarios. Rather, it is a third global war fought with a thousand small cuts.
Putin’s is a multi-regional and multi-domain war being fought in Ukraine and in the Sahel in Africa and in many places in between, including the areas of Israel struck by Hamas’s heinous Oct. 7 terrorist attack, which served as cover for his counteroffensive in Avdiivka, Ukraine. Other arenas of this war include Russia’s weaponization of space, espionage, sabotage and assassination campaigns against targets in Europe and the U.S.
Putin even took aim at the Paris Olympics in 2023 by hinting at terrorist attacks. Likewise, a plot with Russian origins was discovered that was intended to take down DHL freight aircraft along routes between Europe and the U.S. and Canada.
Although Putin’s conventional military has failed on Ukrainian battlefields, his intelligence services have been successful at creating chaos throughout the world and undermining democracies.
Kellogg also recognizes that this has become a truly global war. A Western loss in Ukraine to Russia would represent a win for Putin’s Axis of Evil allies in China, Iran and North Korea. Ukraine, simply put, cannot be separated from the other strategic and existential threats facing the U.S. and its national security.
Come January, Kellogg’s greatest challenge will perhaps be ensuring that Trump realizes Putin and his Kremlin cronies are counting on him to make a bad deal that will come at the expense of Western security interests in Eastern Europe.
Kellogg cut his teeth with the 101st Airborne in the killing fields of Vietnam. That experience surely prepared him well for this moment. If the need arises, he is the right man to tell Putin and Lavrov “NUTS!”, just as his 101st Airborne forebear, Gen. Anthony McAuliffe, bluntly told the Nazis at Bastogne during World War II.
Mark Toth writes on national security and foreign policy. Col. (Ret.) Jonathan Sweet served 30 years as an Army intelligence officer.
