The editors at Counterpunch seem to think they have something now by frontpaging Boris Kagarlitsky's "My Peace Plan." There are some things that might genuinely lead them to believe they have something. Kagarlitsky is arguing for peace; he's a smart guy; he understands a sort of marxist (as opposed to mainstream) view of global history. These are all good things.

(Just as a side-point here: the reason why it's good to think of the marxists as better than the mainstream thinkers is that the mainstream thinkers make a fetish of capitalists and of capitalism. The central concept destroying mainstream thought is what the late Mark Fisher called "capitalist realism" -- the idea, simply put, that it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. Not being mainstream, then, is a point in Kagarlitsky's favor)

At any rate, with Kagarlitsky, too, we are still, despite these advantages, at the point of what Cornelius Castoriadis called "the complete atrophy of political imagination." Let's take a look at his plan:

Let’s try to imagine a real plan that would actually work to end the confrontation, and not simply to extend the Putin oligarchy. It could consist of four main points:

1. Stop fighting on both sides;

2. Cessation of any supply of foreign weapons and ammunition to both Ukraine and Russia;

3. Abandonment by the Russian Armed Forces of the territory of Ukraine as of February 1, 2014 (“zero option”);

4. The UN and its peacekeeping forces are temporarily introduced to the territories left by the RF Armed Forces.

Okay, so Putin sucks. We get that. Let's take a look at the points. Point 2 would be good for the Ukrainian people because said foreign weapons do not really help them; rather, said foreign weapons give Zelensky a pretext for continuing pointless "counter-offensives." So Zelensky would never agree to it. Point 3 would be a non-starter for the Russians.

Part of the Russian claim against point 3 is that there were supposedly referenda in which the residents of the Donbas and of Crimea supposedly chose to be part of Russia. To which Kagarlitsky says:

If you believe the Kremlin propaganda, one of the mouthpieces of which is Simonyan herself, there have already been “referendums” in these regions, but now she is proposing to hold new ones. So then, you will admit that what happened before was a circus, and not a vote?

Actual democracy (meaning, literally, "people-rule," in classical Greek) would mean that we asked the people what they wanted, and then everyone would do that. Mere votes are held to show powerful authority-figures "look, the people have chosen," without reference to how the votes were rigged or coerced or manufactured in some way. So this complaint is also a non-starter. Is Kagarlitsky hoping that ethnic Russians in those regions can be gotten to "vote" to be part of Ukraine at this time? The elections are all circuses.

Kagarlitsky concludes with a principle:

The left must offer a program of an honest peace without territorial conquest or any further aggressive policy, with remuneration for all destruction, not from the pockets of the working people, but at the expense of those who unleashed this massacre.

"Those who unleashed this massacre" should, in general, not be allowed to keep what they stole from the people, out of whose "pockets" all remuneration will come. General principle: the people created this world; the elites merely ride the wave of that creation. Proudhon's "property is theft" is the general principle covering all cases.

As I've explained before, the current war is a con job. People like Kagarlitsky can rebut this argument by saying "well, Putin started it," but Putin has merely turned the tables upon the forces of the West, basically NATO and the bankers' cliques, who were interested in acquiring Ukraine from the moment it was created as a nation-state. The fact that Putin is the unintended beneficiary of this con job ought to worry anti-Putinists like Kagarlitsky. Instead, they write "peace plans" which are really "Putin loses plans," in short, non-starters.

The con job will end when Zelensky runs out of resources with which to entice NATO into the war further. Right now NATO pretends that Zelensky can run "counter-offensives" without benefit of NATO air cover. It's a really stupid pretense, one costing Ukraine hundreds of thousands of casualties, but bringing NATO into the war further risks nuclear war. This is why we like peace -- not because NATO sucks, not because Putin sucks, and even though depreciating the stock of both of those entities would be a good thing. Rather, we like peace because it's better than nuclear war. Okay? Okay.