IT is clear that in the current talks around the war on the territories of Ukraine and Russia, Vladimir Putin is not minded to surrender in negotiations anything that has been won on the battlefield.

At present, that includes almost all the territory, originally Russian, that the post-revolutionary regimes of Lenin and Stalin gifted the Soviet Socialist Ukraine, as well as Crimea, which was similarly gifted (over some local opposition) by the USSR in the 1950s.

If his opposite number, Donald Trump, can be judged in command of any subject, it is his recognition of this unassailable fact.

The great Chinese philosopher of war, Sun Tzu, argued: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained, you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

For the moment, Britain’s involvement in this war consists largely of money and munitions (with covert Special Forces and military assistance), for it is certain that Keir Starmer, David Lammy and the ludicrous John Healey fulfil the last condition.

It was such ignorance that led to the MI6-sponsored invasion of Russia’s Kursk region and its inevitable failure. Perhaps no-one in British intelligence knew that the battle of the Kursk salient — the largest battle in the history of warfare — was a key turning point in the defeat of Nazi Germany and of enormous political and cultural significance to Russians who have maintained a clear view of contemporary Ukraine’s reincarnated fascist militias long after the Western media found it convenient to forget.

For all his manifest inadequacies, Trump appears to have a realistic grasp of Putin’s position and accordingly has allowed this to inform his own. He better knows himself, and he has a superior understanding of his adversary than the entire constellation of European leaders, including our own Starmer, whose incompetence in these matters is exceeded only by that of his Foreign Secretary.

When Russia’s foreign minister sported a CCCP T-shirt recently, he was perhaps reminding us that he has a longer grasp of Russian and Soviet political realities than his opposite numbers and that he was trained and came of age as a diplomat in the services of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

And when he dismisses as “childish” EU claims that Russia’s “attack” on Ukraine was unprovoked, he is situating the present battlefield and diplomatic realities in the context of both the US-inspired and organised Maidan coup which led to the secession of the former Russian bits of Ukraine and the several decades before in which Nato advanced eastwards in violation of the undertaking given by US secretary of state James Baker whose famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about Nato expansion was given to the then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9 1990.

This was a vital component of the diplomatic traffic of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to the Soviet officials throughout the betrayal of German socialism in 1990 and on into 1991.

Those today who challenge the accuracy of Lavrov’s recall should consult declassified US, Soviet, German, British and French documents posted recently from the US National Security Archive at George Washington University.

US strategic interests at present do not appear to compel a challenge to Russia over its acquisition of Ukrainian territories, and unless Starmer thinks he can persuade a population sickened by his complicity in the Gaza genocide to risk an EU-sponsored war with Russia, his posturing is so much demeaning cosplay.