WHAT FOLLOWS IS A TALE OF HORROR FROM A JOURNALIST WHO HAS SPENT TOO MANY YEARS HATING PUTIN AND RUSSIA — IN ORDER NOT TO SEE THE ROLES PLAYED BY THE TWO WITCHES — THE CIA AND MI6 TRYING TO DESTROY RUSSIA BY WHATEVER MEANS...

Trump’s latest Ukraine offer may only tempt Putin to step up his war

BY Nick Paton Walsh

The ‘Shell Bay format’ is an unlikely phrase for history to digest.

Named after a 150-acre golf course and luxury residential complex owned by Steve Witkoff, it appeared Thursday as the moniker for the next phase of the Trump administration’s effort to end the biggest conflict in Europe since the 1940s.

Witkoff’s fellow peace-envoy and property magnate, Jared Kushner, used the term in a ponderous X post on Thursday, in which he suggested a wide-ranging peace deal was needed in Europe. “For more than 30 years, Europe and Russia have struggled to establish a sustainable security framework,” he wrote.

President Trump bolstered the idea after meeting Moscow’s envoy Kiril Dmitriev at the White House, suggesting Thursday. “I can’t tell you what I discussed. But I’m just telling you, it’s going to be a big agreement,” he said. “It’s going to involve more than Ukraine, and I could even say it might involve all of Europe.”

Three European officials contacted by CNN Friday morning did not know what Kushner or Trump were referring to. Speaking to CNN’s Jack Tapper on Friday, Ukraine’s President Zelensky said he knew few details of the proposal and warned it would not be simple.

Kushner’s post extolled five key goals: “permanent security consultations, reliable crisis communications, greater military transparency, reciprocal measures to reduce escalation risks, and an enduring framework for long-term European security and stability.” It said NATO would be key, even if the above seems to suggest a smaller role for the alliance the United States is the irreplaceable, founding member of.

Kushner’s ambitious word-salad did not mention Russia’s invasion of two of its neighbours and two wars with Chechnya in that same post-Soviet period. Moreover, it seemed to suggest any deal would complement NATO, rather than undermine its reason for being.

Top NATO and European officials have been meeting in Brussels in the past 72 hours to discuss economic and security concerns around Ukraine, ahead of US-led talks between Russia and Ukraine next week in Abu-Dhabi. There, the US will try and re-ignite discussions on resolving the conflict. Moscow has sent Vladimir Medinsky to lead its delegation, a diplomat fond of historical lectures, whose appointment has led many to think the Kremlin seeks to turn the clock back to May 2025, when the last such talks were held. In truth, months of discussions in Miami, Abu Dhabi, Alaska, Istanbul and Geneva have proven only one thing: Moscow wants its war goals satisfied before it’ll end the war.

But the “Shell Bay format” - not a ‘company’, ‘game’, but a bay - emerges at a time when Trump, crestfallen and wounded after the mid-terms, will soon face greater obstacles in his domestic agenda, and perhaps seek to forge his legacy in foreign policy, where he is less restrained.

Iran is a less likely candidate for defiant action, given how Trump and many top Republicans blame the war for this week’s electoral drubbing. A form of peace in Ukraine is perhaps a sweeter alternative, and maybe Trump sees, through his ongoing rapprochement and sympathy with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a way he can truly reshape the world, enrich a choice few Americans, and get the US out of bolstering cumbersome European security.

READ MORE: https://edition.cnn.com/2026/11/06/europe/trump-ukraine-grand-bargain-risks-intl 

GUS NOTE: NICK PATON WALSH IS A BULLSHITTER....

Nick Paton Walsh is a multiple Emmy Award-winning Chief International Security Correspondent for CNN.

Based in CNN’s London bureau, Paton Walsh reports on conflict, global security and intelligence stories across TV and CNN Digital. With 25 years experience reporting from over a dozen conflict zones around the world and deep knowledge and contacts across the international security and intelligence communities, Paton Walsh reports on and provides informed context and analysis of key global security-related issues out in the field and in the studio.

Paton Walsh plays a pivotal role in CNN’s coverage of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, and in 2023 was part of the CNN team which won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Live Breaking News Coverage for their reporting on this story. He has extensively reported from the frontlines, where drones have re-imagined warfare.

In 2023, his team crossed the Darien Gap on foot for the Whole Story documentary, which earned Paton Walsh his second Emmy for writing. In 2023, his reporting from Haiti’s gang warfare won France’s prestigious Prix Bayeux for war reporting.

Paton Walsh covered the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 2021 and led two investigations into the deaths of over 170 Afghans and 13 Americans at Abbey Gate, outside the capital’s airport. The first, in 2022, won an Edward Murrow award for investigations, and the second, two years later, sparked Congressional demands for a repeat inquiry. He was based in Kabul in 2012 as the network’s correspondent, at the chaotic close of NATO’s campaign.

During the pandemic in 2020 he reported from Brazil, Iran and Coventry, England, and broke an exclusive on what China knew in the opening weeks of the pandemic. Prior to that he reported from inside Venezuela undercover as its 2019 crisis unfolded, revealing key details and videos about the plot to assassinate Nicolas Maduro with commercial drones, and the hugely profitable drug routes that run north through the embattled country, enriching its military and elite.

Since joining CNN in 2011, Paton Walsh has been at the center of some of the network’s most award-winning coverage during Syria’s civil war and the rise and fall of ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

His reporting on the Turkish incursion into Syria won the network a 2020 Emmy Award in the Outstanding Breaking News Coverage category. He received the David Kaplan Award from the Overseas Press Club in 2018 for his reporting on the fall of ISIS; two 2018 Emmy Awards for ‘The Fall of Raqqa’; two Edward R. Murrow Awards in 2013 and one in 2018; three Peabody Awards for CNN’s coverage of Syria’s civil war (2012), for its ISIS reporting (2016) and for the network’s coverage of the fall of ISIS in Iraq and Syria in 2018.

Fluent in Russian, he has also covered the 2014 deadly crackdown on protests in central Kyiv, the Russian-backed invasion of Ukraine, and expansion of the fighting into Donetsk, and was the first Western reporter into Debaltseve in 2015 when the key city fell to separatists.

Additionally, Paton Walsh has covered many key environmental stories as well as natural disasters in the Caribbean, Turkey, and the Philippines. He won an Eppy award in 2018 for his reporting on gang violence in El Salvador and one in 2017 for CNN’s ‘Midway Island’ report on plastic pollution in the Pacific.

Paton Walsh first reported for CNN from Pakistan in March 2011, as the network’s first correspondent reporting live from Abbotabad covering the death of Osama Bin Laden, where he obtained exclusive video from inside the al-Qaeda leader’s compound and broke the story that a courier’s cell phone signal had led American troops there.

Previously he spent several years working in Asia for the UK’s Channel Four News, focusing on Afghanistan where he gained rare access to a tiny and isolated American outpost near the Pakistani border - COP Keating - which was overrun by insurgents, and covered the 2009 presidential election crisis.

While Asia and foreign affairs correspondent at Channel Four News he secured a rare and exclusive interview with the Russian alleged arms dealer Viktor Bout, while his team’s reports on alleged human rights abuses in Sri Lanka at the end of the civil war led to their forced deportation from the country.

From 2002 to 2006, Paton Walsh was the Moscow Correspondent for the Guardian newspaper during the rise of Vladimir Putin. He reported on both the Dubrovka theatre siege and the Beslan school hostage crisis, alongside the revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan and developments from the troubled North Caucasus.

Paton Walsh won the British Press Awards’ Young Journalist of the Year in 2000, aged 22. He won Amnesty International’s Gaby Rado Award for a reporter at the start of their career in 2006 for his work in the former Soviet Union, and their television award for his work in Sri Lanka in 2010.

GUS IS ONLY A CARTOONIST [POLITICAL COMMENTATOR, POLYMATH, MATHEMATICIAN, HISTORIAN, TEACHER, ARTIST] WHO HAS SEEN BULLSHIT FOR A LONG TIME AND HAS COMMENTED ABOUT IT SINCE 1951....

THE LIES ARE WELL DISGUISED BY NOT REVELALING THE INTENT OF THE EMPIRE WHILE CLEVERLY BLAMING THE VICTIM. THE TACTIC IS USED BY THE "PUTIN HATERS" WITH GREAT EFFECT. PUTIN IS NOT A SAINT EITHER, BUT HE DESERVES BETTER THAN THIS CRAP FROM NICK PATON WALSH....

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         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….

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