July 6—As students of American baseball know, every good double play combination needs three members: the Shortstop, the Second Baseman and the First Baseman. So were the Chicago Cubs legendary early 20th Century double play combo of Shortstop Joe Tinker to 2nd Baseman Jonny Evers to 1st Baseman Frank Chance immortalized in a poem that originally appeared in the July 12, 1910 edition of the New York Evening Mail, and who made their names known to kids and baseball fans down through the ages. (They were all, by the way, pretty good ball players, who are in the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY).
Some well-placed intelligence sources say that the key to peace in the Ukraine has been to search for a reliable third party, who could actually broker a deal, between the warring parties. They say that the process has started with not-so secret negotiations going on between the Russian Armed Forces and the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which were initiated by the former Commander in Chief of those Ukrainian forces, Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, now exiled as Ukraine’s Ambassador to the UK, having been stripped of his command by NATO’s sock puppet dictator of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
But the real player on Ukraine’s side is not the sock puppet, whose legal authority expired with his Presidential term May 20 and who rules only through the power of Nazi thugs in such outfits as the Azov Brigade, employed by NATO, who are not really under anybody's command, despite assertions in the media otherwise. No, the real power is the military command itself, whose discipline has been broken under the weight of savage casualty levels that have seen more than 600,00 of their troops perish in NATO’s war on Russia. The Ukrainian military has long ago realized the war is lost, and it seeks a peace with some dignity, a peace that might yet preserve the sovereignty of their nation, albeit with some loss of Russian-speaking regions.
On the Russian side, the military negotiations have always had the backing of President Vladimir Putin, the man NATO has all along wanted to depose via its Ukrainian war with Russia. Putin has now launched a peace offensive, which includes a land-for-peace deal for Ukraine, but which also seeks a new, more broader security architecture for Eurasia, and a path to the de-escalation of tensions, driven to lunatic levels by the war hawks in the West, including inside the U.S. administration bearing the name tag “Sleepy Joe” Biden.
Importantly, those war hawks have not found any traction for their drive, via their authorization of attacks on Russian civilians and other targets in Russia’s homeland, using NATO and American weapons systems, supplied to the Ukrainians, but programmed and effectively launched by the U.S/NATO axis.
To make a peace scenario work, and mostly to sell any peace deal to the West, regardless of what the soon-to-be-history Zelenskyy thinks or says, a third player is required.
Now, Putin—and the world—may have found a partner in the double-play combo: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who on July 1 got the clout he needed, when Hungary took over the Presidency of the European Union (EU). As Hungary’s head of state, Orbán assumed the position of President of the European Council, a position that rotates among the EU member states every six months.
Orbán has been a critic of the war since its launch in February 2022, but who has also favored negotiations, counter to NATO’s policy of endlessly arming the Ukrainians to fight a war in which they have died in huge numbers.
No sooner had Orbán assumed his new post than he flew to Kyiv and forced a meeting with Zelenskyy in which he proposed a ceasefire and negotiations. Then, he was off to Moscow. Various EU luminaries, all of whom are insane war promoters, began jumping up and down, screeching that he had no mandate to speak for the EU and negotiate on its behalf, and therefore he was on his own with Putin. But there he was in a joint press conference July 5 with the Russian President, who himself was sounding very John Kennedy-like, saying that he did not fear but would welcome a serious negotiation and a ceasefire, if the parties were serious about reaching an accord.
These events, if played backward, explain also the timing of Putin’s now famous peace proposal of June 14, which the EU, NATO, and Sleepy Joe all denounced.
At the July 5 Putin-Orbán press conference in Moscow, there was little talk of those foolish comments, but only words about finding a pathway for peace and prosperity for all of Eurasia and the world—comments made in the shadow of a rising potential for thermonuclear confrontation with especially a United States, led by a President who has shown the world repeatedly—and not just recently—that he is frequently, or rather mostly, not there.
Another Player in the Field?
But there is also possibly another player in all this, waiting on the bench and eager to enter the game—the presumptive Republican U.S. Presidential nominee and putative winner against Sleepy Joe or any replacement the Democratic National Committee could come up with, and that is former President Donald Trump. The former president says he can and does get along with Putin, and that they “understand each other.”
Trump has also said, most recently during his crushing defeat of Sleepy Joe in the June 28 nationally televised Presidential debate, that, if he had been in office, Putin would not have launched his Special Military Operation in Ukraine (perhaps because he (Trump) would have implemented the Minsk accords for peace that his team negotiated, but which Biden discarded, backed up by the Europeans who claimed to have signed the deal but never planned to implement it). Now, Trump says that if elected he will end the war there and have a peace deal signed between the time he is elected in November and his inauguration on January 20, 2025.
Trump also regards Orbán as a diplomatic friend, and then two met at Trump's Mar-al-Lago estate ikn Florida in March and went to a symphony concert together; Orban, who Trump effusively praises as a "great leader," did not meet with any member of the Biden administration on his short U.S. visit. All this has led to some speculation that Orbán’s current actions are being coordinated with the former President and his team. Such conduct would be highly irregular not to mention potentially constituting illegal interference in the conduct of foreign policy. If true, the Biden White House “would be all over Trump,” a source said.
“No, It’s much more informal than that. The broad outlines of the peace plan are on the table. Biden and whoever follows him, if they have backed this senseless stupid war on Russia, will not want to have any deal come through before the election, as they will not want to admit to a total crushing defeat of their policy. They will continue to prop up that stupid sock puppet, while promising him and his wife Olena an exit strategy when it all comes crashing to halt.
"While Biden can’t push through a deal, and while Orbán can put things on the table, but can’t get the EU to follow him, Trump can and will end this mess. Biden’s weakness and whatever follows will likely give some power to those in the Establishment that want to walk some things back a bit.”
So, maybe in the end, when the deal is made, Orbán will step back a bit, for his friend and ally Donald Trump to step in as the third person required to bring home this play for peace in Ukraine. “That is, if the crazies don’t kill him first,” said the source ominously.
