Nel dicembre 2021, la Russia presentò agli Stati Uniti e alla NATO due bozze di accordi formali per ottenere garanzie di sicurezza legalmente vincolanti, facendo intendere che se non fossero state accolte ci sarebbero state delle conseguenze.

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In effetti, dopo il rifiuto di Washington di prenderle in considerazione, il 24 febbraio 2022 la Federazione Russa intraprese l’Operazione Militare Speciale in Ucraina, ancora in corso.

Tra le richieste avanzate allora da Mosca sottolineiamo:

• Blocco dell’allargamento della NATO: l’impegno formale a impedire ulteriori espansioni dell’Alleanza Atlantica, escludendo esplicitamente l’adesione dell’Ucraina.
• Limitazioni alle Forze Militari: il divieto per la NATO di dispiegare truppe o armamenti nei Paesi entrati a far parte dell’Alleanza Atlantica dopo il maggio 1997.
• Basi negli ex Stati sovietici: il divieto per gli Stati Uniti di stabilire basi militari o sviluppare cooperazione bilaterale nei Paesi dell’ex URSS che non fanno parte della NATO.
• Missili a raggio intermedio e corto: il divieto reciproco di dispiegare missili a raggio intermedio e corto in aree da cui possano colpire il territorio dell’altra parte.
• Attività militari: la limitazione delle esercitazioni e delle attività militari della NATO in Europa orientale, nel Caucaso e in Asia centrale.

Stati Uniti e NATO nel 2021 rifiutarono le richieste principali (in particolare il veto sull’allargamento della NATO e il ritiro delle infrastrutture militari ai confini del 1997), offrendo invece di negoziare su temi specifici come il controllo degli armamenti e la trasparenza delle esercitazioni.

Perciò, il 17 febbraio 2022 Mosca consegnò una contro-risposta formale agli Stati Uniti, lamentando la mancanza di disponibilità a fornire garanzie vincolanti e preannunciando la necessità di adottare misure ‘tecnico-militari’: pochi giorni dopo ci fu l’invasione dell’Ucraina.

La Russia aveva fondati motivi per ritenere che Kiev stesse per entrare nella NATO e uno dei bersagli inziali dei suoi missili balistici (13 marzo e 17 maggio 2022) furono proprio i centri di addestramento ucraini di Yavoriv (nella zona di Leopoli, vicino al confine polacco ma all’interno dei confini ucraini), a tutti gli effetti infrastrutture della NATO, come visibile nelle mappe della stessa Alleanza Atlantica (1).

Tralasciando le questioni diplomatiche e l’auspicata volontà comune di riaffermare i principi delle Nazioni Unite che venivano espressi nel documento presentato da Mosca e sui quali l’Amministrazione Trump ha tirato oggi una riga definitiva, è interessante capire se siano stati compiuti dei passi da parte dell’attuale presidenza statunitense per venire incontro alle richieste russe (2).

All’art. 1: Russia e U.S.A. non intraprenderanno azioni né parteciperanno o sosterranno attività che pregiudichino la sicurezza dell’altra Parte; non attueranno misure di sicurezza – adottate da ciascuna Parte individualmente o nell’ambito di un’organizzazione internazionale, di un’alleanza militare o di una coalizione – che possano compromettere gli interessi fondamentali di sicurezza dell’altra Parte.

Sul supporto decisivo dell’intelligence USA e dei grandi gruppi tecnologici statunitensi (da Starlink a Palantir, entrambi vicini all’Amministrazione Trump) all’Ucraina al fine di colpire il territorio della Federazione Russa ho già ampiamente scritto in precedenza e perciò non mi soffermo (3).

Articolo 2

Le Parti si adopereranno affinché tutte le organizzazioni internazionali, le alleanze militari e le coalizioni a cui partecipa almeno una delle Parti si attengano ai principi sanciti dalla Carta delle Nazioni Unite.

Abbiamo assistito recentemente alla doppia aggressione condotta dalla “Coalizione Epstein” all’Iran, senza alcun fondamento nel diritto internazionale e senza alcuna considerazione dei “principi sanciti dalla Carta delle Nazioni Unite”. Per non parlare del supporto statunitense ai bombardamenti israeliani su Siria, Libano e Yemen (aggressione alla quale contribuisce in gran parte l’Arabia Saudita) o del rapimento illegittimo del Presidente venezuelano Maduro.

Articolo 3

Le Parti non utilizzeranno i territori di altri Stati allo scopo di preparare o compiere un attacco armato contro l’altra Parte o altre azioni che pregiudichino gli interessi fondamentali di sicurezza dell’altra Parte.

Naturalmente, la violazione di questo articolo non avviene solo utilizzando il territorio ucraino per colpire la Russia; recentemente, sul sito del Ministero della Difesa di Mosca è comparso un elenco di venti aziende europee accusate di essere parte integrante dell’apparato militare-industriale ucraino. Quattro hanno sede in Italia, tre in Germania, due in Gran Bretagna, due in Polonia, due in Turchia, due in Repubblica Ceca, poi sono rappresentate anche imprese con basi in Israele, Spagna, Paesi Bassi, Lituania e Lettonia. Tutto ciò avviene con il consenso implicito degli Stati Uniti. Anche le infrastrutture della NATO e le basi militari statunitensi in Europa (Sigonella ad esempio in Italia nel 2022) contribuiscono così ad alimentare questo conflitto (4).

Articolo 4

Gli Stati Uniti d’America si impegneranno a impedire un’ulteriore espansione verso Est dell’Organizzazione del Trattato del Nord Atlantico e a negare l’adesione all’Alleanza agli Stati dell’ex Unione delle Repubbliche Socialiste Sovietiche. Gli Stati Uniti d’America non stabiliranno basi militari nel territorio degli Stati dell’ex Unione delle Repubbliche Socialiste Sovietiche che non siano membri dell’Organizzazione del Trattato del Nord Atlantico, né utilizzeranno le loro infrastrutture per attività militari di alcun tipo, né svilupperanno con essi una cooperazione militare bilaterale.

Senza trascurare l’immediato ingresso di Svezia e Finlandia nella NATO all’inizio dell’Operazione Militare Speciale, l’attuale Amministrazione a Washington ha annunciato l’invio di ulteriori 5.000 soldati statunitensi in Polonia e l’istituzione di una nuova base militare permanente nel Paese (ridenominata “Fort Trump”). Ma gli U.S.A. non si sono fermati qui; in Armenia, nazione che fa ancora formalmente parte dell’Organizzazione per il Trattato di Sicurezza Collettiva e dell’Unione Economica Eurasiatica, lo scorso settembre Washington e Erevan hanno tenuto un nuovo ciclo di consultazioni bilaterali sulla difesa e firmato un verbale congiunto d’intesa (jointly agreed minutes) per dare seguito alla Charter on Comprehensive Strategic Partnership sottoscritta nel maggio 2026. Gli accordi discussi riguardano:

Supporto alla trasformazione e riforma delle Forze Armate armene.

Addestramento di sottufficiali (NCO), istruttori, comandanti junior e personale per il mantenimento della pace (peacekeeping).

Istruzione militare ed esercitazioni congiunte.

Sviluppo delle capacità industriali della difesa e potenziale fornitura di equipaggiamenti tramite il programma Foreign Military Sales (FMS) e programmi educativi come l’IMET, orientando l’Armenia verso una progressiva modernizzazione degli standard militari occidentali.

Articolo 5

Le Parti si asterranno dallo schierare le proprie Forze Armate e i propri armamenti – anche nell’ambito di organizzazioni internazionali, alleanze militari o coalizioni – in aree in cui tale schieramento potrebbe essere percepito dall’altra Parte come una minaccia alla propria sicurezza nazionale, fatta eccezione per lo schieramento all’interno dei territori nazionali delle Parti stesse. Le Parti si asterranno dal far volare bombardieri pesanti equipaggiati con armamenti nucleari o non nucleari, o dallo schierare navi da guerra di superficie di qualsiasi tipo – anche nell’ambito di organizzazioni internazionali, alleanze militari o coalizioni – in aree situate rispettivamente al di fuori dello spazio aereo nazionale e delle acque territoriali nazionali, dalle quali sia possibile colpire obiettivi nel territorio dell’altra Parte.

Poco più di un mese fa, si è tenuta un’esercitazione aerea della NATO nel nord-est della Polonia, nelle vicinanze di Kaliningrad con alcune decine di velivoli. All’esercitazione hanno partecipato caccia statunitensi e norvegesi, un aereo di sorveglianza NATO E-3A Sentry AWACS, velivoli per il rifornimento in volo e un aereo statunitense EA-37B per la guerra elettronica: Mosca teme che si tratti di manovre preparatorie all’isolamento dell’enclave russa dal resto della Federazione e ha risposto duramente ma soltanto sul piano diplomatico.  Inoltre, la NATO Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD), la difesa antimissile balistica dell’Alleanza Atlantica, è una rete costituita da sensori e da sistemi missilistici che i Paesi Membri offrono quale contributo nazionale alla struttura, i cui punti di riferimento in Europa sono lo European Phased Adaptive Approach (EPAA), statunitense, con il sistema americano Aegis Ashore schierato in Romania e Polonia e le navi Aegis per la BMD, stazionate nelle acque spagnole. Il sistema radar della IAMD si trova in Turchia, mentre l’infrastruttura di comando e controllo in Germania (5). Nel 2016 (grazie all’annullamento del Trattato ABM deciso da Trump) gli Stati Uniti hanno prima messo in funzione una base ABM in Romania, un sistema che utilizza lanciamissili Aegis potenzialmente in grado di lanciare Tomahawk con testata nucleare ad oltre 2400 chilometri di distanza, successivamente nel 2022 hanno costruito un sito Aegis in Polonia, ancora più vicino ai confini russi. Gli Stati Uniti hanno sempre sostenuto che i siti ABM hanno lo scopo di fermare le testate puntate sull’Europa dall’Iran o dalla Corea del Nord. Mosca ovviamente non la pensa così; François Geleznikoff, direttore delle applicazioni militari presso la Commissione per l’energia atomica e le energie alternative, intervenne nel marzo 2019 in audizione presso l’Assemblea Nazionale francese sull’argomento contraddicendo Washington: “Negli Stati Uniti, la Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) non si rivolge realmente alla Corea del Nord (gli americani hanno armi che permetterebbero loro di vetrificare il Paese più volte) ma piuttosto alla Russia, in risposta alle dichiarazioni del presidente Putin” (6).

Articolo 6

Le Parti si impegnano a non dislocare missili a raggio intermedio e a corto raggio lanciabili da terra al di fuori dei propri territori nazionali, né in aree dei propri territori nazionali dalle quali tali armi possano colpire obiettivi situati nel territorio nazionale dell’altra Parte.

Il 22 settembre 2026, Stati Uniti, Danimarca e Groenlandia hanno firmato a New York un accordo di sicurezza trilaterale che prevede l’apertura e la gestione di due nuove basi militari americane e la modernizzazione di quella esistente. Gli Stati Uniti ottengono ampie libertà di movimento (aria, terra e mare) per collegare le basi e la possibilità di utilizzare l’isola per il sistema di difesa missilistica (la Pituffik Space Base – ex Thule Air Base – nel nord-ovest dell’isola, ospita sistemi radar d’allerta precoce per i missili balistici). Il sistema difensivo pensato dagli Stati Uniti si evolverà da una presenza concentrata in un unico punto a una rete di strutture distribuite su tutta l’isola. Anche perché le due nuove basi non saranno le uniche installazioni militari che si insedieranno sull’isola (7).

Articolo 7

Le Parti si asterranno dal dislocare armi nucleari al di fuori dei propri territori nazionali e riporteranno nei propri territori nazionali le armi già dislocate all’estero al momento dell’entrata in vigore del Trattato. Le Parti elimineranno tutte le infrastrutture esistenti per il dislocamento di armi nucleari al di fuori dei propri territori nazionali. Le Parti non addestreranno personale militare o civile proveniente da Paesi non dotati di armi nucleari all’uso di tali armi. Le Parti non condurranno esercitazioni o attività di addestramento per forze convenzionali che prevedano scenari di impiego di armi nucleari.

A partire dal 13 ottobre 2026, si svolgerà in Italia Steadfast Noon, ‘Mezzogiorno risoluto’, l’esercitazione che l’Alleanza atlantica svolge ogni anno e che coinvolgerà le basi aeree di Aviano, in provincia di Pordenone, e Ghedi, nel Bresciano, oltre a diverse località in tutta l’area di responsabilità ben oltre il Nord del Paese. “È necessario il contributo congiunto di tutti gli Alleati: si tratta di un’iniziativa che non può limitarsi a un singolo Paese”, ha riferito il colonnello David Bull, capo delle operazioni nucleari della Nato, facendo riferimento al fatto che anche lo spazio aereo dei Paesi limitrofi potrebbe essere coinvolto. Vi parteciperanno velivoli in grado di svolgere missioni convenzionali e nucleari, anche se l’esercitazione non prevede l’impiego di armi atomiche. “Ma siamo in sintonia con Roma sul fatto che si tratti di un’esercitazione nucleare”, ha poi precisato Barrows. Gli Stati Uniti saranno presenti con equipaggi di volo e personale addetto alla manutenzione. Secondo gli stessi documenti del Pentagono, in Italia sarebbero dislocate circa 80 ordigni nucleari sotto controllo statunitense nelle basi militare italiane a Ghedi e Aviano (8).

Conclusioni

Il sintetico panorama offerto da questo articolo vuole dimostrare che la Russia non potrà cantare vittoria nemmeno dopo aver completato la conquista del Donbass, perché l’inizio dell’Operazione Militare Speciale in Ucraina è legato a considerazioni di sicurezza geopolitica tuttora irrisolte se non addirittura aggravatesi rispetto al 2022.

Se qualcuno al Cremlino crede che dopo un eventuale accordo con l’attuale Amministrazione U.S.A., la Russia verrà lasciata stare si sbaglia di grosso, perché l’Occidente collettivo si sta già preparando non solo al dopo Putin ma anche al dopo Trump.

L’obiettivo degli Stati Uniti non è altro che prendere tempo in attesa del verificarsi di almeno una delle due condizioni: l’allontanamento di Mosca dalla partnership strategica con Pechino e il conseguente rallentamento della dedollarizzazione – gli Stati Uniti non pagheranno di certo il diesel russo in rubli – e la fine della preparazione da parte della NATO ad un conflitto diretto contro la Russia – termine individuato nel 2030, quando sicuramente Trump non sarà più alla Casa Bianca.

Dal punto di vista occidentale la considerazione della Russia non è cambiata molto da quando il direttore della rivista “Foreign Policy”, l’israelo-statunitense John Feffer, la definì una “Nigeria con le armi nucleari”; secondo questa visione, Mosca deve tornare ad essere una sorta di ‘colonia estrattiva’ o ‘appendice di materie prime’ a esclusivo vantaggio delle industrie euro-statunitensi. A maggior ragione nel momento in cui la competizione tecnologica con la Cina necessita da parte degli Stati Uniti di quelle risorse strategiche di cui la Federazione Russa è ricca.

Pochi giorni fa, i 32 membri del Comitato Militare della NATO (quello statunitense in primis), erano a Kiev per ribadire il loro sostegno incondizionato all’Ucraina “rimasta costantemente al centro delle valutazioni, delle decisioni e della pianificazione futura dell’Alleanza”. Prima di fare qualsiasi altra concessione a Washington, Vladimir Putin dovrebbe pensarci bene: passare da una vittoria tattica ad una sconfitta strategica potrebbe essere più semplice di quanto sembra.

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(1) https://www.nato.int/structur/nmlo/links/yavoriv-training-centre.pdf. Il sito internet è oggi irraggiungibile (forse per mascherare le prove?), ma la sua presenza come infrastruttura dell’Alleanza Atlantica era rintracciabile ancora nel giugno 2024. Come ammise anche il “Corriere della Sera”, i morti furono più di 300 e tra di essi numerosi soldati e addestratori della NATO: Giulia Fasano, Nella base militare di Yavoriv i morti sono stati trecento, 26 marzo 2022. Anche secondo il quotidiano “Repubblica”: “Il ‘Centro internazionale per la pace e la sicurezza’ di Yavoriv ospitava istruttori occidentali, come conferma il Ministro della Difesa di Kiev”.

(2) Il documento completo è stato pubblicato sul sito internet del Ministero degli Esteri della Federazione Russa: Treaty between The United States of America and the Russian Federation on security guarantees, 17 dicembre 2021.

(3) Ad esempio, cfr. Le basi della CIA in Ucraina: chiave del contenimento anti-russo in Europa, “Strategic Culture Foundation”, 11 aprile 2026.

(4) Nel contesto del conflitto in Ucraina e della postura di deterrenza della NATO, le basi militari presenti sul territorio italiano (gestite sia dalle Forze Armate italiane che dagli Stati Uniti) svolgono funzioni chiave di sorveglianza aerea, intelligence, logistica e comando, cfr. ad esempio Federico Petrangeli, Supporting Kyiv: Italy’s Military Assistance between Strategic Continuity and Political Division, IAI, 11 giugno 2026.

(5) Senato della Repubblica italiana, Schema di decreto ministeriale di approvazione del programma pluriennale di A/R n. SMD 32/2025, relativo all’ammodernamento, al rinnovamento e al potenziamento della capacità nazionale di difesa aerea e missilistica a protezione del territorio nazionale e dell’Alleanza Atlantica, alla protezione di teatro delle forze schierate in aree di operazione, inclusa la componente navale (n. 377), Resoconto sommario del 4 febbraio 2026.

(6) Stefano Vernole, La forza di dissuasione nucleare francese, Focus CeSEM, 3 maggio 2022.

(7) Stefano Vernole, Gli Stati Uniti hanno messo le mani sulla Groenlandia dimostrando la totale irrilevanza dell’Unione Europea, “Strategic Culture Foundation”, 5 ottobre 2026.

(8) Redazione Peacelink, L’esercitazione nucleare della NATO Steadfast Noon 2026 comincerà sui cieli italiani il 13 ottobre.

Ursula von der Leyen has the answer. Borrow even more money. Borrow like there’s no tomorrow.

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Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

The most remarkable thing about the rapid demise of the U.S. is that when it hits the bottom of the ocean floor economically, it will be in a better state than the EU. The panic among EU leaders, in particular Ursula von der Leyen, is breathtaking. Barely a week passes before she makes another crackpot policy announcement, gives herself a salary increase, or makes a statement about needing to give even more money to Ukraine. But in recent months these announcements have become more radical and existential, and we are seeing a new dawn now in the EU where the only solution to cover up the feral spending and borrowing is to fabricate a war with Russia and then blame Putin for the whole fiasco.

Every now and again we get a sober reminder about the economic situation of the U.S., EU and Russia. The recent news that Putin is going to sell around 2 million tonnes of diesel oil to “global markets” (as U.S. media phrases it), the lion’s share going to the U.S. before, during and just after the midterm elections in a bid to stabilise the price to help Trump. We will have to assume that countries who buy some of their diesel from the U.S. will continue doing so, but it might, in fact, be Russian oil.

There’s a lot of fake news buzzing around originating from Trump, who likes to distract journalists away from the top issues. It’s hard to see how the American public will respond to Trump’s latest decision to buy Russian diesel, but it’s hard to see this being a solution to the global oil crisis, let alone Trump’s record-low ratings. Will Trump really go ahead with a new wave of strikes on Iran after the midterms, as he has said? Or is it that his own intelligence agencies have picked up information that Iran is poised for a massive strike, and so therefore he is obliged to send even more troops, plus a carrier, to the region?

Regardless of how France and Germany get their diesel in the coming weeks, after Trump forced these governments to dip into their own reserves by threatening a U.S. export ban, it’s hard to see how the Achilles heel of most EU economies – crude oil products – can still be controlled by Moscow. While intellectually challenged figures like Mark Rutte make such stupid comments about how Russia could never win a war with NATO based on comparative GDP data, this latest move might be a huge wake-up call for Macron and Merz, the latter facing dismally low poll ratings. How do you continue to fund a war in Ukraine with the ‘frenemy’ relationship pushed to breaking point, such as is the case now with the U.S. having to buy diesel from Russia? EU countries loathe Putin, as the one hope they had to magically breathe new life into EU economies by taking Ukraine under its wing was shattered when Russian forces invaded. Putin is everything they are not. Nobody can deny Putin is a leader – the very thing that is so desperately lacking in EU countries. Leadership.

But the situation now has reached farce. With a global diesel crisis brought about by Trump’s war with Iran, EU countries are expected to buy diesel on the international market, topped up by Russia. In fact, buying oil from your enemy is nothing new. Countries have been doing this for decades. Even in Syria, we saw terror groups in the north-east of the country take over the oil infrastructure and then sell oil back to the Assad regime.

It’s hard to see how EU countries will draw a line in the sand between their geostrategic military objectives and their very realistic need for a stable oil supply. But in the midst of this chaos, Ursula von der Leyen has the answer. Borrow even more money. Borrow like there’s no tomorrow. Her latest proposal is to expand the current seven-year EU budget to 2 trillion euros, and there is only one way this can be achieved, as member states are never going to cough up more for the EU experiment. She will be forced to borrow from international banks to replace a previous loan of 750 billion euros for COVID. This is the solution for failing economies. Where once for so many years EU apparatchiks would defend the EU’s failure to implement its own rule book, in preference for constantly adopting new legislation, now this seems to have been replaced by ‘create a panic about Russia and make the EU a sort of executive of NATO without a single trace of democratic virtue’. Von der Leyen doesn’t stipulate what this massive increase is for, but we can assume some of it will be siphoned off for Ukraine. Madness on steroids. But hidden in the text is a new series of taxes which the EU itself could impose on individuals, and so in the smoke-and-mirrors confusion we see there is a back-door way to start taxing EU citizens, something Brussels never touched before. How long has the whole project got?

Ukraine has loosened its reliance on Washington but still depends on the United States in three military areas that let US President Donald Trump keep pressuring Kyiv, The Telegraph wrote on 12 October. That pressure now centers on the energy ceasefire Trump declared on 11 October, with US officials reportedly warning Kyiv not to hit Russian energy during the truce. Kyiv backs a mutual truce, but Moscow has not confirmed it, and Russian strikes on Ukraine’s grid have continued.

The paper named three such ties: satellite intelligence, Patriot interceptors, and American weapons bought with European money. A pause in any of them would hit just as Russia’s winter campaign begins. Ukraine says an intercepted document reportedly lays out up to 1,000 Russian missiles, drones, and bombs for 60 critical sites this winter, so any pause in US intelligence, interceptors, or PURL deliveries would land as that campaign gets under way.

Satellite intelligence: the US still holds the key

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other US services still pass precise satellite data that help Ukrainian forces hit targets inside Russia, by the paper’s estimate. Trump briefly suspended that flow in March 2025 to pressure Zelenskyy. A Ukrainian official told Axios that Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner threatened during 9 October talks in Miami to cut off US intelligence.

Patriot interceptors: no quick substitute

The Telegraph called interceptor missiles the second and probably sharpest dependency. Only American Patriot systems can down Russia’s most powerful missiles, which strike Ukrainian cities daily, the paper wrote. Kyiv’s PAC-3 stocks ran dry mainly because US reserves were diverted to the Middle East after America’s war against Iran, the paper added. Kyiv had warned in March that a long Middle East war would squeeze its PAC-3 supply.

Five European defense firms—Destinus, MBDA Deutschland, Safran, Airbus, and Thales—signed a letter of intent in July to develop a joint interceptor, but a testable prototype is not expected before next year, the paper wrote. Ukraine is also building its own interceptor with European allies under the FREYJA program.

US arms bought with European money

The third is buying American arms with European money through the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL), a NATO-run purchasing scheme. US officials have reportedly warned Europe that Trump may halt those supplies if Ukraine keeps striking Russian oil refineries.

par Russia TRUTH

Une succession rapide de manœuvres diplomatiques a permis à Donald Trump d’être publiquement réhabilité, à Vladimir Poutine de garder le contrôle stratégique total et à Volodymyr Zelensky de sombrer dans une rage sans bornes :

• L’accord bilatéral sur le diesel : La Maison Blanche et le Kremlin ont conclu un accord en vertu duquel le Trésor américain accorde une dérogation renouvelable aux sanctions sur les exportations russes de diesel jusqu’au 7 avril 2027. En contrepartie, Moscou a accepté de lever son interdiction temporaire d’exportation nationale de distillats moyens, apportant ainsi un soulagement immédiat, tant psychologique que concret, à un marché mondial du diesel mis à mal par les interdictions de transport maritime imposées au Moyen-Orient.

• L’effondrement du mythe de la «trêve énergétique» : Les rumeurs relayées par les médias occidentaux alléguant que Moscou aurait accepté une cessation provisoire des frappes aériennes et des tirs de missiles sur le réseau électrique ukrainien en échange d’un allègement plus large des sanctions ont été totalement discréditées. La position russe reste inébranlable : pas de cessez-le-feu provisoire ni sur terre, ni en mer, ni dans les airs.

• Moscou suspend officiellement les négociations : Lors d’un point presse officiel rendant compte du sommet téléphonique entre Poutine et Trump, le conseiller du Kremlin en matière de politique étrangère, Youri Ouchakov, a lancé une bombe diplomatique : la Russie a officiellement révoqué sa décision de septembre dernier de reprendre les négociations trilatérales avec Washington et Kiev. Invoquant les tentatives d’attaques par drones menées par l’Ukraine contre des bureaux de vote russes lors des élections à la Douma d’État, Poutine a informé Trump que le processus de négociation est suspendu indéfiniment tandis que les forces russes progressent sur l’ensemble du front.

• Rupture entre Washington et Kiev : Axios a confirmé que Donald Trump a personnellement adressé six exigences distinctes à Zelensky, lui ordonnant de mettre immédiatement fin aux raids de drones ukrainiens visant les raffineries russes. Zelensky a défié ces six exigences. Piégé par la dépendance de son pays aux financements occidentaux, Zelensky s’en est ouvertement pris à Trump, qualifiant le dialogue entre Washington et Moscou de «trahison en coulisses» et accusant la Maison Blanche d’utiliser les réunions à Miami comme écran de fumée pour traiter directement avec le Kremlin.

1. La transaction sur le diesel : un levier stratégique négocié contre un répit électoral

L’accord conclu entre Washington et Moscou est présenté par la Maison Blanche comme une avancée majeure. En réalité, cet accord marque le recul logique d’une puissance hégémonique surendettée, confrontée aux réalités économiques à l’approche des élections de mi-mandat de novembre :

• Le mécanisme de la dérogation : tout comme le Trésor américain a discrètement délivré des licences renouvelables pour permettre aux raffineries indiennes d’acheter du pétrole brut russe acheminé par voie maritime à la suite des premières escalades dans le golfe Persique en février, Washington a de nouveau accordé une dérogation d’urgence pour le diesel russe. Confronté à la réalité des pénuries de diesel agricole et routier, Trump a cédé sur ce que son dispositif de sanctions s’efforçait d’empêcher depuis des années.

• Le levier calculé de Novak : le vice-premier ministre russe Alexandre Novak a signalé il y a plusieurs semaines que les stocks nationaux de diesel en Russie affichent un excédent, la récolte agricole de cette année étant suffisante et comparable à celle de l’année dernière. L’interdiction russe des exportations, loin d’être un acte de désespoir déclenché par les frappes de drones ukrainiens, constituait un instrument de levier géopolitique. Moscou a retenu les distillats hors du marché jusqu’à ce que Washington soit contraint de négocier un assouplissement des sanctions.

• L’arithmétique du réel : comme l’ont démontré les analystes énergétiques, les volumes de diesel exportables par la Russie couvrent environ neuf jours de consommation intérieure américaine. Le véritable moteur de la crise énergétique mondiale reste le blocus du golfe Persique et de la mer Rouge. Pourtant, en acceptant de libérer ce volume, Moscou a obtenu une concession politique majeure de la part de Trump tout en démontrant aux pays du Sud que les régimes de sanctions occidentaux sont mis de côté dès que les prix intérieurs menacent une élection américaine.

2. Le point presse d’Ouchakov : la Russie claque la porte des négociations

La révélation géopolitique cruciale du jour provient du compte-rendu officiel de Youri Ouchakov sur le sommet téléphonique Poutine-Trump.

Pour la première fois depuis le lancement de l’opération militaire spéciale en 2022, la Fédération de Russie a officiellement et publiquement retiré son offre de pourparlers diplomatiques :

Poutine expose à Trump la doctrine russe durcie :

Les tentatives du régime de Kiev de perturber notre processus démocratique par des attaques terroristes contre des bureaux de vote ont réduit à néant toute possibilité de négociations. Nos forces armées détiennent l’initiative et avancent avec assurance. C’est à nous de déterminer si et quand des pourparlers auront un sens.

Il s’agit là d’un tournant décisif.

Tout au long du conflit, Moscou a maintenu une position cohérente : nous restons ouverts à un règlement politique et diplomatique selon nos conditions.

En lançant des attaques massives de drones contre les capitales provinciales russes et les bureaux de vote pendant les élections à la Douma, Bankova a fait le jeu de l’état-major russe.

Poutine a profité de cet incident pour mettre définitivement fin à cette voie de négociation, informant Trump que la Russie n’envisagera pas de discussions trilatérales tant que ses forces auront l’initiative opérationnelle totale.

Selon Ouchakov, Trump n’a pas réagi ; il a promis d’envoyer des «signaux» fermes à la délégation ukrainienne qui attendait à Miami.

3. Le coup de folie de Bankova : six défis, l’arnaque des 27 milliards d’euros et la rupture de Séoul

À Kiev, la prise de conscience que Donald Trump négocie des accords énergétiques directement avec Vladimir Poutine a provoqué une réaction démesurée de la part de Volodymyr Zelensky :

• Les six exigences : un reportage d’Axios a confirmé que la Maison Blanche a émis six directives distinctes à l’intention de Bankova, ordonnant la fin immédiate des attaques contre les infrastructures de raffinage russes. La motivation de Trump est purement intéressée : chaque frappe contre un craqueur de catalyseur russe fournit aux traders de Wall Street un prétexte pour faire grimper les cours à terme du diesel. Zelensky a rejeté toutes ces directives. Mettre fin aux frappes reviendrait à admettre que toute la campagne estivale de drones n’a abouti à aucun résultat stratégique.

• Le racket des 27 milliards d’euros : les dirigeants ukrainiens ne peuvent se permettre d’arrêter l’offensive de drones, car celle-ci constitue leur principal argumentaire utilisé pour extorquer des fonds à Bruxelles. Des responsables du ministère ukrainien de la Défense ont récemment déclaré que sans 27 milliards d’euros de subventions européennes immédiates, le montage de drones sur le territoire national serait interrompu. En déployant des munitions volantes pour incendier des réservoirs de stockage périphériques dans des villes de province russes, Bankova fabrique des images destinées à persuader des dirigeants européens comme Friedrich Merz et Ursula von der Leyen de continuer à faire affluer l’argent des contribuables dans les caisses du régime.

• La crise diplomatique avec Séoul : l’irritabilité diplomatique de Zelensky s’est étendue au-delà de Washington. Après la capture de deux soldats nord-coréens dans la région frontalière de Koursk, un accord a été conclu avec Séoul pour transférer secrètement les prisonniers en vue de les interroger. Ignorant la demande explicite de confidentialité formulée par la Corée du Sud pour éviter tout conflit avec Pyongyang, Zelensky a annoncé publiquement l’opération à des fins de relations publiques. Lorsque Séoul a protesté, Bankova a refusé de présenter des excuses, déclenchant une rupture diplomatique sans précédent qui a abouti au retrait par la Corée du Sud de son ambassadeur à Kiev — s’aliénant inutilement un partenaire qui avait fourni plus de 500 000 obus d’artillerie de 155 mm pour la campagne de 2023.

4. Le théâtre de la décapitation : sous-stations, centres de la SBU et le «Collegium» de Surovikin

Tandis que les diplomates échangent leurs reproches, la campagne aérienne stratégique russe contre Kiev est entrée dans une phase opérationnelle meurtrière :

1. La destruction du réseau électrique : des observateurs indépendants du secteur électrique confirment que les frappes russes sur la sous-station de Kievska de 750 kV et les nœuds de transformation du nord ont contourné les boucliers de protection en béton en ciblant les transformateurs de réduction de tension, les disjoncteurs et les parcs de refroidissement. Toute la rive droite (moitié ouest) de Kiev reste plongée dans une coupure d’électricité totale. Le réseau de métro étant à l’arrêt et les pompes de relevage d’eau à haute pression hors service, l’assainissement municipal a cessé de fonctionner, provoquant des refoulements d’eaux usées généralisés dans tout le centre administratif.

2. Les ogives coupe-câbles : les Forces aériennes russes (VKS) ont introduit des sous-munitions spécialisées, déployées par des appareils Geran-4 à propulsion à réaction, conçues spécifiquement pour sectionner les lignes aériennes à haute tension. En coupant les lignes reliant la production nucléaire de base de l’ouest à Kiev, les forces russes s’assurent que, même si les transformateurs des sous-stations sont réparés, le courant ne puisse physiquement atteindre la capitale.

3. Le collège de Surovikin : des sources militaires faisant autorité confirment que, bien que le chef d’état-major général Valery Gerasimov conserve officiellement le commandement suprême, le général Sergei Surovikin dirige activement la campagne d’interdiction et de destruction des infrastructures sur l’ensemble du théâtre d’opérations, à la tête d’un collège restreint de généraux supérieurs, dont Andrey Mordvichev et le vice-ministre de la Défense Yunus-Bek Yevkurov. Les caractéristiques de ce groupe de commandement — blocus systématique des ponts, ciblage méthodique des nœuds administratifs du SBU et publication de coupes architecturales du bunker souterrain de Zelensky situé sous la rue Bankova — indiquent une opération destinée à rendre la capitale fonctionnellement inhabitable pour le régime.

5. Usure sur le front : Dobropillya nettoyée, mines saisies, poches encerclées

Sur le terrain, les formations interarmes russes progressent à un rythme accéléré à travers les dernières lignes de fortifications ukrainiennes :

• La prise d’assaut de la mine de Dobropilska : le ministère russe de la Défense a confirmé que des groupes d’assaut de la 51e armée interarmes et des formations spécialisées d’infanterie de marine ont nettoyé les secteurs ouest de Dobropillya, pénétrant dans les galeries fortifiées de la mine de charbon de Dobropilska. Plus de 82 structures fortifiées ont été nettoyées en l’espace de 24 heures. La prise des imposants terrils de la mine offre aux observateurs d’artillerie russes un contrôle de tir direct et panoramique sur les lignes arrière de Druzhkivka.

• La liquidation des poches de résistance du nord : dans le nord-est de l’oblast de Kharkiv, les dernières poches de résistance du groupement frontalier ukrainien, fort de 1 700 hommes, ont été éliminées. Les forces russes ont libéré les hameaux centraux de la région, déplaçant ainsi le centre de gravité opérationnel du Groupe de forces Nord vers l’encerclement direct du nœud logistique de Velykyi Burluk. Au nord de Soumy, les positions avancées ukrainiennes le long des lisières de forêt se sont effondrées, rapprochant les détachements russes avancés à portée d’artillerie des limites municipales de Soumy.

• Le couloir mortel du Dniepr méridional : à Zaporijia, la fermeture du pont de Vantovyi (Khortytsia) a transformé les voies d’approvisionnement de la rive est en champ de bataille meurtrier. Les opérateurs de drones FPV russes, bénéficiant d’une ligne de visée ininterrompue au-dessus des fonds asséchés du réservoir de Kakhovka, ont établi un contrôle total des tirs sur tout le trafic routier tentant de renforcer le front sud.

Le crépuscule de la guerre par procuration

Les événements du 10 octobre 2026 marquent la fin d’une époque dans l’art de gouverner moderne :

• Donald Trump a obtenu sa dérogation temporaire sur le diesel pour protéger ses arrières sur le plan politique intérieur, reconnaissant ainsi que l’arme unipolaire des sanctions est inopérante.

• Vladimir Poutine a fait savoir que la Fédération de Russie ne se prêtera plus au jeu des négociations trilatérales théâtrales alors que ses soldats traversent les lignes défensives ukrainiennes.

• Et à Kiev, Volodymyr Zelensky est confiné dans une capitale plongée dans l’obscurité et envahie par les eaux usées — hurlant des insultes à ses protecteurs américains, rompant ses liens avec ses fournisseurs asiatiques et regardant ses brigades d’élite périr dans les tourbières du Donbass.

La transaction est conclue. Les illusions sont brisées.

Le maître impérial a conclu son accord parallèle sur le carburant, son mandataire a été abandonné à son sort, et la machine militaire souveraine de la Fédération de Russie achève méthodiquement la guerre dans la steppe eurasienne.

Publiéà l’origine par RussiaTruth 

Traduction:  ReseauInternational

US President Donald Trump’s envoys told Kyiv that letting Russia sell diesel could draw Moscow back to peace talks, Reuters reported. In the same meeting, they said Russia’s leader was not ready to negotiate. Since then, Moscow has offered nothing in return, and Trump has brushed off claims that Russia helps Iran.

Washington is pressing Ukraine to stop striking Russian refineries and offering Moscow economic incentives to return to peace talks, even though Russia has made no commitment in return. Yesterday, Russian ballistic missiles hit Kyiv before air raid sirens sounded, amid disputed warnings that the US could cut intelligence support. Meanwhile, Ukraine is being asked to halt its long-range campaign against the oil infrastructure that fuels and finances Russia's war.

The pitch: a diesel deal as a signal to Moscow

Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner met the Ukrainian delegation in Miami on 9 October. They described Russian President Vladimir Putin as unprepared to negotiate but said the diesel deal could help restart three-way talks, two of the sources said.

The third source said the deal could “soften” Moscow because it “sends a signal that Trump is open to do things” with Russia. One of the sources described the plan:

“The idea was that the US could go back to Russia and say ‘See, the Ukrainians stopped striking and we gave you this deal. Now it’s your turn to do something.’”

Ukraine’s part was to stop hitting Russian refineries. Kushner repeated Trump’s request at the meeting, noting the administration had made it several times, two sources said.

Kyiv was asked to hold its fire on Russian oil

The Ukrainians agreed to nothing formally, Reuters’ sources said. They signaled they would accept an energy ceasefire if Russia did the same, but saw the US approach as an attempt to appease Russia with business deals.

Two days later, Trump declared an energy ceasefire, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine was ready if Russia reciprocated. Euromaidan Press has monitored official and unofficial Ukrainian and Russian sources and found no reports of new Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries after Trump’s announcement. One of the last, on the night of the diesel announcement, knocked out more than half the tanks at a fuel-export terminal in Rostov-on-Don.

Three sources told Reuters the envoys did not threaten to cut US support over the refinery strikes. A Ukrainian official told Axios, however, that the envoys warned Trump could cut Ukraine off from US intelligence, which a US official denied. US officials are also believed to have told European allies that Trump would halt PURL, the NATO scheme for Europe-funded US weapons for Ukraine, unless the strikes stopped, according to FT.

What Moscow has offered in return

A person close to the Kremlin told Reuters that Putin would return to the table only when he gets “the remaining 11% of Donbas.” Ukraine refuses to cede more land. During the 9 October call that produced the deal, Putin declined to commit to resuming talks, his aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters, Axios reported.

Moscow has not confirmed the energy ceasefire either. Trump insisted on 12 October that the sides had agreed “because I said they agreed,” RFE/RL reported. On the evening of 12 October, Russian munitions collapsed an apartment stairwell in Kharkiv, killing four people. Russian Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandr Novak, meanwhile, claimed diesel exports could reach 3.0–3.5 million tons a month by year-end, above the volumes Trump announced.

“Too much to lose”: Trump on Russia and Iran

Late on 12 October, Trump wrote on Truth Social that he did not believe Russia and China were helping Iran, since they have “too much to lose.” In March, he told Fox News that Putin “might be helping them a little bit.” Asked about Russia’s possible support for Iran, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News on 2 September that his message to everyone was to “stay away.” That month, a Financial Times investigation found Russia secretly helping Iran develop supersonic cruise missiles that could threaten US warships.

James Whorton Jr. | Longreads | October 13, 2026 | 5,932 words (25 minutes)

I live in Edgewood, a subdivision of quarter-acre lots in the town of Brighton, New York. Before the house was here, Edgewood was a farm, and before the farm, there was a forest. On a July day in 1788, a 55-year-old man named Hugh Maxwell set out to cross the forest in straight lines.

Not kind of straight. Maxwell’s job was to walk 1,100 miles on ruler-straight lines through this vast, obstacle-filled forest, to divide it into a grid of parcels that could eventually be sold as property. To shrink it down to the scale of human imagination. To look at the forest and see something else in its place.

I first learned about Maxwell from Mary Jo Lanphear, Brighton’s town historian. I had gone to Lanphear to research the racially restrictive housing covenants that made home ownership in Brighton exclusive to white people for decades. Whose fault was this? I wanted to know. Some racist real-estate developer? Something to do with the Federal Housing Administration? Lanphear printed out a copy of an old deed linking the Edgewood land to the Phelps and Gorham Company, a group of New England speculators. For a bargain price, Phelps and Gorham had acquired the title to 2.6 million acres of forested country along the Genesee River, in what is now western New York. The company then hired Maxwell—a Revolutionary War veteran, father of seven, and the first recorded white person to pass within shouting distance of the place where I now live—as surveyor. 

As Maxwell crossed the forest, he imagined the nation he believed would one day replace it. “The land in this country is exceedingly good, but it wants good inhabitants,” Maxwell wrote to his wife, Bridget, imagining “many worshipping assemblies of Christians where now the wild beasts howl.” In place of the forest, he envisioned schools, churches, cash crops, and county clerks. However, he wrote, “these things are in the womb of futurity, and will be brought about in the proper way and time, as also by the proper means.” 

Maxwell’s walk—through leechy ponds and tick-infested brush, down and up creek banks, over the rocky exposures that rattlesnakes prefer, in those remarkably straight lines—was like the act his fellow new citizens were performing daily, striving and pretending a nation into being. At the time he set out, the United States were only loosely joined, under the Articles of Confederation. Alexander Hamilton, writing in the first essay of The Federalist Papers, had recently asked “whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend, for their political constitutions, on accident and force.” Neither the new government nor the grid of lots for sale were to be discovered on the ground. They were ideas in people’s heads, notes on paper. In the “womb of futurity,” maybe. 

The forest, however, was real. 

Have you ever retraced your steps looking for some lost thing you had no hope of ever finding again? More than two centuries after he walked the forest into the future, Maxwell’s path persists, as lines on a map and on the ground in my neighborhood. I wanted to find the forest he walked through. 

So I set out to follow Hugh Maxwell—through books and archives, on maps and over the ground, across the state of New York and, finally, across my neighborhood, looking for traces of the forest in what is here now.

---

On July 25, 1788, Maxwell set off from the southeastern corner of the Phelps and Gorham purchase, on the Pennsylvania line, headed due north. He led a small crew, whose job it was to drag a Gunter’s chain, a surveyor’s tool used to measure distance. The chain was 66 feet long; 80 chains made a mile. Every six miles he marked a township corner, hacking Roman numerals into the sides of a convenient tree, Vs and Xs being easier to cut in bark than 5s and 10s. 

While his helpers dragged the chain, Maxwell carried the grid in his head. The job was to lay this imaginary grid over the forest itself, to parcelize the land into numbered squares—to cut it up and shrink it. In a notebook that first day, he wrote:

From the 82 mile Stone

120 Rods the groth is Beech

Maple birch ash Basswood

and Hemlock mixt

Throughout Maxwell’s young life, the forest had been a chaotic place, subject to accident and force, to the wars that would determine its fate. During the French and Indian War, Maxwell, in his early 20s and part of a Massachusetts militia, barely escaped a violent death at Lake George. Following a surrender, Indians pulled militia men from the retreating lines, killing some on the spot and taking others prisoner, to be ransomed in Montreal. Maxwell was pulled aside, too, and had his boots, coat, and shirt stripped from his body. But he got loose somehow and escaped into the forest, running at least 14 miles to Fort Edward, barefoot in his pantaloons. Later, during the Revolutionary War, Maxwell was shot at the Battle of Bunker Hill. A musket ball entered his body just beneath the right collar bone, breaking Maxwell’s shoulder blade and exiting through his back. He survived field surgery and gangrene, and wrote home to Bridget with his left hand, fretting that his nurses fussed too much over him.

Now, as Maxwell walked off the eastern line of the Phelps and Gorham purchase, the forest wars were coming to an end. Still, the forest itself resisted him in its way. It did not lend itself to being crossed in straight lines, as though it were a blank page awaiting the pen’s touch. Branches snagged his clothes. “I am of the opinion,” he wrote to Bridget from his walk, “that if I live to return, I shall stand in need of some winter shirts for I think my old ones will be pretty much worn out.”

What makes a forest? How do I know when I’m standing in one, and not just under some trees?

To reach Maxwell’s starting place—his “82 mile stone,” a roadside block of granite 82 miles west of the Delaware River—I drove a hundred miles south to Caton, New York. A welcome to caton sign marked the town line, which was also the state line. I took my phone out, opened a map on the screen. The phone is able to locate itself using pings from four satellite systems: GPS (“a global public service brought to you by the US government”), GLONASS (same, but brought to you by Russia), Galileo (European Union), and BeiDou (China). The screen suggested there should be a marker right in front of me.

Crouched inside a brushy spot, I shoved skinny branches out of my face and slapped at my hair. I found a tangle of rusted barbed wire. I found a deer skeleton. But no mile marker. Feeling things crawling on me, I climbed out into the sunlight and slapped down my shirt and pants. 

The growth I saw around me now was not so mixed as what Maxwell described in his notebook. I was standing on a stone chip road, looking across a hay field. My phone screen showed a satellite image with a red pin to the west of the road, in the brush I’d climbed out of, and a blue dot in the road, which was me. This had to be the spot, though. I walked to my car, felt my head for ticks again. Then I walked back up the road, to check under the welcome to caton sign. There, I found a block of pink and gray granite with an “82” cut into the side and several loops of orange surveyor’s tape tied around it. It wasn’t hidden—I’d simply been looking on the wrong side of the road. Looking for what was in my head instead of seeing what was there.

It was a slow march from here for Maxwell and his crew, dragging their chain in a straight line through the thickness of mixed trees and across creek cuts. It took them two weeks to cover the first 54 miles. For me it was an easy drive, a straight shot north between fields of sweet corn. I stopped to examine an occasional historical marker, and again at a roadside farm stand, hoping to say hello to someone who lived on this line. The little stall was well stocked with honey and dried garlic, but there was nobody to say hi to: Sales were on the honor system, with a Mason jar on the counter to leave your cash in. I had only brought a credit card.

Maxwell’s notebook was a memento of a different world. He passed massive chestnut trees such as I could only read about. One spot he judged “moist and good and springy,” another “good for grass.” He noted with approval where a stream was big enough to support a sawmill. And yet the gaps in his notes are astonishing. A few weeks into his survey, he crossed “some old clear land” and “through the old castle.” Castle was the colonial way of referring to an Indian town. Here was proof on the ground of what Maxwell already knew: People had been living in this forest for a very long time, cultivating this land in a different way than European settlers did. And yet Maxwell found little to note about the old castle. He carried on instead with his catalog of trees—”white ash, basswood, elm, &c.”

---

What makes a forest? How do I know when I’m standing in one, and not just under some trees?

The Latin precursor of the word “forest” meant something like an unenclosed outdoor space. In early English law, the silva forestis was a place for lords to chase game and for ordinary people to gather wood. In the 13th century, as the Magna Carta encoded the rights of English barons, the Carta de Foresta laid out the rights of commoners to pasture cattle in the open places among the English forests. Similarly, the forest Maxwell entered in the summer of 1788 was more than just mixed trees. Its openings included the towns, orchards, and farm fields of the Seneca Nation. The Senecas had long used fire to manage areas of the forest, clearing thick undergrowth to attract deer, and they moved their farming fields from time to time to prevent exhausting the soil.

A forest is too big to see all at once, and maybe too big to describe. Writing about it, one is moved to grand language and weird leaps of perspective. The historian Francis Parkman devoted his career to what he called “a history of the American forest,” which is really a history of empires. Writing in the 1880s, with no satellite photos at hand, Parkman borrowed the point of view of a flock of Canada geese flying north from Albany. “As the aërial travellers winged their way, the seat of war lay spread beneath them like a map. First the blue Hudson, slumbering among its forests, with the forts along its banks. . . .” Parkman’s geese paid special attention to military architecture, noticing Fort William Henry by the “glistening breast of Lake George” and the white flag of the French at Ticonderoga. Onward they flapped: 

“Lake Champlain now spread before them, widening as they flew: on the left, the mountain wilderness of the Adirondacks, like a stormy sea congealed; on the right, the long procession of the Green Mountains; and, far beyond, on the dim verge of the eastern sky, the White Mountains throned in savage solitude.” 

This is silly poetry, but I am in deep sympathy with it, having also spent countless hours staring at different maps, trying to transplant a whole forest into my head. 

At the heart of Parkman’s seven-volume France and England in North America was a question about property. “To whom belonged this world of prairies and forests?” he asked. Parkman wrote that France had “claimed it by right of discovery and occupation,” adding that the French had an “excellent system” for distributing land: “Whoever received a grant from the Crown was required to improve it, and this within reasonable time. If he did not, the land ceased to be his, and was given to another more able or industrious.” The English eventually outdid the French in this regard, Parkman wrote: “New England was pre-eminently the land of material progress . . . nay, in defiance of the four Gospels, assiduity in the pursuit of gain was promoted to the rank of a duty.” The quickest way to gain from the forest was to sell or burn the timber and put a cash crop in the ground. 

Sir Albert Howard, an English botanist, saw the forest as a model for sustainable farming. In what he called “Nature’s agriculture,” variety is the first rule: “Many species of plants and of animals all live together,” he wrote in the early pages of An Agricultural Testament, published in 1940. Economy is another rule: “Nothing is wasted” and “nothing is lost.” Somehow, life and decomposition continue across millennia with no one in charge. 

Wendell Berry, referencing Howard in The Unsettling of America, writes that the forest is a place where “the forces of growth and the forces of decay are in balance.” I like this way of putting it very much. A forest tree dies in place, and its slow decay swells with life—mosses, fungi, beetles, and things that eat beetles. A living hardwood tree throws its leaves away every year. In The Great American Forest, Rutherford Platt calls this “the deciduous idea”—a funny way to imagine it, as though the founding fathers of the forest had written this leaf-shedding principle into their charter. But it is a brilliant idea, a world-changer. In balance, growth and decay work in cycles. The mat of discarded leaves becomes the food of millipedes and the habitat of worms. In spring, the snow sinks into it. A thick, black soil builds.

This is silly poetry, but I am in deep sympathy with it, having also spent countless hours staring at different maps, trying to transplant a whole forest into my head.

I had already traveled to Maxwell’s starting place; now, it occurred to me that I had never followed Hugh Maxwell’s route where he passed nearest to my house, along the eastern township line, which is not a road at all and which happens to be covered over with trees. From my front door, I followed the sidewalk along Edgewood Avenue, where the utility poles shrink away into the distance like an exercise in single-point perspective. 

The place where I live has gone through a lot of changes in the 20,000 years since the most recent ice age, from deglaciation to migration and cultivation. At the time Maxwell began his walk, the towns, orchards, and farm fields of the Seneca Nation were openings in a vast forest that still covered half of North America, from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River. The houses in my part of Brighton were built beginning in the 1930s, but the older eras of this place are visible on any road map. The early roads go from some important place to some other important place. Monroe Avenue, a very old road, follows a route from the north end of Canandaigua Lake to a shallow, fordable spot in the Genesee River. It is not straight, but bends sensibly between Cobbs Hill and Pinnacle Hill. People have been walking that way for a long time, since long before Maxwell arrived. 

After Maxwell, there came an era when all new roads were cut parallel to his township lines. The logic of the Brighton-Henrietta Town Line Road, for instance, has nothing to do with terrain, and the things one passes when driving it—an auto body shop, a small church with three steeples, an Asian market, a sex shop, Dunkin’—have little to do with each other. It’s as though Maxwell set the place to auto-arrange, so that every major surface road for the next two hundred years would snap to grid. 

I stopped at the former site of the old Rowland farm. My friend Roger lived next door to the farm as a boy. Mr. Rowland had a stand of virgin timber on his place, Roger recalls, and the soil in his fields was so fertile that a person had to take care not to get knocked over by his produce. “Dig a hole, drop a seed in, and stand back,” Mr. Rowland warned. 

As late as the 1950s, there still were some farms along Edgewood Avenue. But it wasn’t long before they were subdivided into residential lots.The timber now is mostly whatever people have chosen to set out in their yards. Norway maples are common—tough street trees, not from around here, indifferent to road salt and car exhaust. Rows of arborvitae make living privacy fences. Shading the Briar Manor apartments are seven big sycamores, handsome monsters with paint-by-number bark of yellow, gray, and lilac brown.

Past the row of sycamores, I turned onto a paved bicycle path that follows a chain-link fence. A little further, a sign marked the town line. I found a low place in the fence and stepped over, into the trees, following Maxwell again.

It was dark under the high canopy, and the underbrush was sparse. Maxwell had once described this section of his route as “very good beech and maple land with a mixture of ash, elm, oak, basswood, etc.” I found a beech tree, its pale sides smooth, its trunk a good two feet across. Beneath the beech tree was a shattered porcelain toilet. There was no plumbing attached; somebody had brought this toilet out here, set it on the ground, and taken a hammer to it.

I checked the map on my phone. In the satellite photo, the woods were more or less featureless except for the town line, superimposed in yellow over the treetops, and a blue dot, me, on top of that yellow line. I was still on Maxwell’s course. There was no trail on the ground for me to follow, though. The only trails were the soft, narrow animal trails that passed under blown-down branches or veered away into low cover.

The growth was mixed: saplings, mature trees, dead standing, and dead fallen. I found a red maple with circular fractures erupting like a target in its bark. I found an ash tree, its bark split open and buckling, the meandering tracks of an emerald ash borer scoring the bare wood. A lean musclewood with ten trunks, one with its bark chewed at the height of my knee. A basswood with a stripe of red spray paint on it and rings of woodpecker holes.

If this was a forest, it was a half-wrecked one. Much of the soil was exposed and cracked from flooding. Variety was here, though, and life among the decay. Deer tracks crossed a muddy trench. Bright moss blanketed the softening fallen trunks, and ferns grew. I heard chattering overhead and a rainlike sound in the leaves. Somebody was up there taking nuts apart. Chunks of green and yellow hull hit the ground around me, cycling back to the soil. 

---

In September of 1788, Hugh Maxwell took a fall in the woods and hurt his shin. He made things worse, he wrote, “by wading in the swamp and through wet brush.” For three weeks, he was laid up in the Seneca town of Kanadesaga, where he had nothing to do but think and write home.

He missed Bridget. “I feel anxious for your welfare,” he wrote to her. “I long to hear from you and love to hear from you.” He reminded Bridget to have their son get the haying done, get some long shingles to fix the roof, cart the dung to the field, plow the field on time, and do the sowing.

He also missed church. Shortly after his near-death experience at Lake George as a young man, Maxwell had joined a church and, judging from his letters, devoted himself to a stern code under which he must strive constantly for an approval that he would never earn. For Maxwell, life on earth became a moral exercise, an attempt to deserve immortality. God, he wrote, “is Daily Loading us with his Benefits, though we are evil and unthankfull.” Now, once more wounded far from home, Maxwell wrote to his wife of “unprincipled fellows and drunken savages,” adding, “Religious society is quite out of the question here.” 

It had been only nine years since the Continental Army’s expedition across Seneca country. After Senecas joined with Tories to raid White settlements along the Mohawk, the young United States had set aside European conventions of war in an attempt to drive Seneca communities from their land. “The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible,” George Washington wrote in his orders. “It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.” At Kanadesaga, the Continental Army had burned at least 50 Seneca houses, tore ripe corn and beans from the fields, and bayoneted pumpkins. A whole orchard of apple trees was girdled, a circle of bark stripped from around each trunk, creating an unhealable, fatal wound. The Continental Army took few hostages: The Senecas moved west just ahead of the approaching troops and then returned again when the troops went home, rebuilding their houses and replanting their fields. 

Nine years later, laid up in Kanadesaga while his shin healed, Maxwell now found himself surrounded by Indians. “I am in hopes their time with us here is short,” Maxwell wrote to Bridget. “I do think that the Great Governor of the universe is about to plant a glorious gospel in this wilderness,” he predicted—with the help of his own survey, of course. “May it be so and soon spread over this land.” Maxwell, in effect, had two tough jobs: crossing the forest in straight lines, and convincing himself that he was a good person for doing so.

After more than a month’s recovery, Maxwell resumed his survey. “First mile through excellent land,” he wrote from the woods, on the line of a future township along the east bank of the Genesee River, noting nearly a half-dozen different trees in the area. The next mile: “Same sort of excellent land and growth but considerable mixed with chestnut.” The third mile was less good: “80 rods over a wet low land.” Then more very good land again. He crossed a brook that ran one way, then the other. Both Maxwell and the brook were headed to the same place, north to Lake Ontario. The brook took the easy way, downhill. Maxwell took the straight way, leading his team and their chain through swamp and timber, mile after mile.

At the end of the 18th mile, he chopped a “XIII” into the side of a small basswood tree, marking a corner of the 13th township—“with trees marked for witness about it,” he wrote, for the benefit of some future settler searching for the corners of his lot. 

Maxwell, in effect, had two tough jobs: crossing the forest in straight lines, and convincing himself that he was a good person for doing so.

When the blue dot on my phone told me I had reached the southeast corner of the town of Brighton, I spent some time looking for the basswood tree with the XIII in its bark. But I was kidding myself, of course. Maxwell’s hatchet marks were meant to last years, not centuries. I slapped at mosquitoes, scanning for some connection between the forest Maxwell had walked through and the place I was in. A scrap of fluorescent pink tape caught my eye. I’ve been seeing this stuff in the woods for my entire life, weatherproof trash that will outlive me and, I suppose, every other individual living thing in the woods as well. I looked past it, because I can’t pick up every piece of garbage in the woods and carry it out. Then I looked again and my understanding of the place shifted. 

The pink plastic was a piece of surveyor’s tape, tied to a branch. Near the branch was a short, square concrete pillar. This was the marker—a “monument,” in surveyor-speak—that had taken the place of the basswood with the XIII in its side. It was a more durable monument than a tree, and though it was short and unobtrusive, the little non-decaying flag of pink plastic made it hard to miss, even for me. 

Maxwell wrote of this site:

The line of this town is very

good land covered with a thick

growth of Beech Maple Elm Basswood

Ash Butternut &c. Not very uneven.

No elms now, but I had seen the others he mentioned. This wasn’t “virgin timber”: The nearest big tree was a two-trunked silver maple, second growth, sprouted back from a stump. This was the place, though. 

I stayed there awhile doing nothing, a little dazzled, a little jarred by the impression of two forests coming together—the one Maxwell crossed and the one I was in. The forest wasn’t gone, but it had changed, and so had the way we live with it. In imagining the forest as a wild place, it seemed to me, we had imagined ourselves right out of it. It’s become a place to visit, a resource or a park, not our home. 

Or something like that. Half-stumped, I managed to stand there motionless long enough that a red fox, not noticing me, stopped nearby with its nose in the air and its tail extended. I watched it for a while as it watched something else. Then a leaf blower whined, and the fox and I went our separate ways.

---

In a healthy forest, the forces of growth and the forces of decay are in balance. But those same forces are the conditions of life everywhere—balanced or not.

Reaching Lake Ontario, Maxwell cut his initials into a tree, then went home to Heath, Massachusetts. In years to come he served as a deacon and justice of the peace in that town. He applied for an invalid officer’s pension, but was denied. At 67 years old, in debt, he bought some horses and embarked with them for the West Indies, where the animals, along with enslaved humans, were in demand on sugar plantations. It was a nightmare world where both humans and horses were routinely worked to death in brutal heat. I wonder how he justified that new venture to himself. Maxwell took a profit from the sale, but died of yellow fever on the voyage home, and his body was buried at sea.

I couldn’t visit Maxwell’s final resting place. Instead, I drove to western Massachusetts, to his house. On Route 2 I locked on to an excellent Albany radio station whose signal held through the Taconic Mountains as far as Williamston, Massachusetts. The road had been graded and guard-railed in the 1920s, on top of an older road that people had been walking since the last ice age, for all one can know. The road sided a stream tumbling over rocks. And what was so important about that? Why did I love it? I loved this road because it was no one’s idea. A glacier put this road here, and people followed. 

The house that once belonged to Maxwell was surprisingly modern-looking, with its solar panels and a Prius in the driveway. I knocked and a woman came to the door. Sue, the owner, invited me in. In the kitchen, one wall was almost all fireplace, paneled above with a single blond board 20 inches wide—spruce, Sue thought. In the next room, there was more of that broad paneling, and a row of cupboards over a smaller fireplace with a grow-light installed inside it over a collection of potted cacti. Sue showed me a copy of Maxwell’s only portrait, a silhouette on horseback that was made during the Revolutionary War. She also had a copy of The Christian Patriot, a biography written by Maxwell’s daughter, Priscilla, who recalled her father’s strong singing voice and a gory song about the courage of the Bunker Hill heroes that he liked to sing for the children. Near the house was a cemetery with a marker for Maxwell, a tall obelisk with worn stories in its sides.

I also drove to Lake George to see the place where 22-year-old Maxwell had first spied death coming for him through the forest. I followed US Route 9 past a sprawling outlet mall and Bloody Pond, where the bodies of slain men had been thrown at the end of that chaotic day early in the French and Indian War. Then I emerged from under clustered trees to what Thomas Jefferson once called “without comparison, the most beautiful water I ever saw.” Lake George was “ limpid as crystal,” he wrote, the mountains on either side “covered with rich groves of thuja, silver fir, white pine, aspen, and paper birch.” Today the groves of thuja are interrupted with summer mansions and the sandy parking lot by the beach is jammed with cars, but the mountains are still mountains and the long lake still stretches far away between them. When I arrived, the beach was crowded with boogie boarders, volleyballers, and people just splashing. A man threw a tennis ball into the lake, and a dog took a fierce running leap to retrieve it. 

I’d booked a camp site nearby at the Lake George Battleground Campground. A few pines were all that separated my site from Route 9, its four lanes roaring with traffic. I set up my folding camp stool by the sidewalk, across from an Exxon. 

I tried to picture a young Maxwell loping through here shirtless in his bare feet, enveloped by the forest and afraid for his life. Among the English-speaking settlers, the events at Lake George would be remembered as a massacre, and the Indigenous people whose home this was, whose conventions of war did not match those of the European empires, were called savages. It was powerful storytelling, indispensable to the colonial project. 

Every story I could imagine about this place, and about Hugh Maxwell, seemed another work of fiction, a mechanism for assigning blame.

Maxwell trained himself on a version of that story: He had outrun death, sought God, and sought profit while declaring himself unthankful. He hardened himself into a professional fighter, banking on the next life while he improved an ancient forest by drawing a checkerboard on it. He wrote home about the “womb of futurity,” a bizarre metaphor I still do not understand. Whom did he think made futurity pregnant? Was it God, or the Phelps and Gorham Company? I didn’t understand the guy. On the other hand, I didn’t go to war when I was 22. I was working in a restaurant and writing stories. 

Every story I could imagine about this place, and about Hugh Maxwell, seemed another work of fiction, a mechanism for assigning blame. Blame has to be assigned—Indigenous communities did not displace themselves, nor did the forest wreck itself—but it is also necessary to keep looking and to try to keep noticing how much one does not understand. Among the Native allies who joined the French at Lake George all those years ago was a band of ten Iowas who had traveled a thousand miles, from beyond the Great Lakes, to fight the English. What were they thinking, and what had their journey been like? They had only themselves to tell their story to, because no one at Lake George spoke their language. 

As I tried to conjure the experiences of these men nearly 270 years ago, it occurred to me that I ought to be more concerned for the daring pedestrians trying to cross Route 9 from the campground to the MiniMart attached to the Exxon. There was a crosswalk, but the traffic was coming in fast. 

There was too much here for me to make sense of. The seat of war was now a vacation spot. War is violent and so are four-lane highways. Lake George is beautiful, and it puzzled me to notice that the MiniMart was pretty, too, with its high-wattage red-and-white Exxon sign and its glass front glowing softly yellow.

I walked over. Inside, the MiniMart was lit up like a minor carnival, aggressively air-conditioned, and it had a sweet, grimy, convenience-store smell of burnt coffee and potato logs. People were getting chips, jerky, gasoline, and party ice. The forces of growth and the forces of decay were jostling. I liked being there. I selected two cold singles, thanked the cashier, and followed the crosswalk safely back to my campsite and my folding camp stool, from which I watched the people coming and going late into the night.

---

When Hugh Maxwell wrote home to Bridget with his story about the womb of futurity, he got a couple things wrong. 

He was right that the country was changing. While he was in the forest tramping out lines, trying to get his head around this thing that was too big to fit inside anyone’s head, the United States ratified their second constitution. The document was a little over 4,000 words long, and it relied heavily on the word “shall,” a modal verb used to indicate a future action, which was used 191 times. The official copy covered four big sheets of parchment in ink made from oak galls. 

He was wrong about the Senecas’ time being short. They are still here. On the Tonawanda Territory, an hour’s drive west from my house, Senecas still govern themselves according to the Great Law of Peace—a constitution established by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and recorded in white wampum before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. The Tonawanda Seneca Nation is currently fighting a plan to build a data center next to their woods.

He was right about the coming of new inhabitants. The grid he’d laid over the forest became a map in a land office, and his employers were soon marking squares SOLD in small cursive. Settlers arrived slowly, then in booms, cutting trees, burning stumps, shooting wolves, and plowing the black ground with teams of oxen, raising vegetables for their families and wheat to sell over the Erie Canal.

The land in Township 13, my township, turned out to be mixed. The ground was clay in some parts. Brighton became known for brickyards. That industry is gone now, but the high school had an ugly surprise this year when it tried to replace a grass playing field with plastic turf. Chunks of brick, glass, and metal were buried a few inches down; tests showed high levels of arsenic, lead, and semi-volatile organic compounds. The field where my daughter played soccer is now sheeted in plastic while the state decides what to do next.

In Edgewood, the earth is as rich as Maxwell said it was, but he might have been surprised to learn how briefly that would matter. Soil fertility is mostly beside the point, and even an inconvenience, since lawns have to be mowed, leaves blown into piles, and pollen hosed off windshields in the spring. 

No description, no story, is big enough to capture the forest Maxwell walked through. The best I can think to do is to keep looking for better questions about it. Here’s one: If a forest had a constitution, what would it say? Its coequal branches might be soil, air, water, and sun. It certainly would have no president. Its bill of rights might hold that differences exist, that living things may strive, that life includes an accumulation of wealth, and that death includes the release of that wealth. Nothing is wasted, nothing is lost, but eventually everything has to be let go of. When you die, you simply spread out your wealth on the ground.

---

James Whorton Jr. grew up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.  He is the author of three novels, and his writing has appeared in The Best American Essays, The Oxford American, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Washington Square Review, The Gettysburg Review, and The Washington Post.  He teaches at SUNY Brockport.

Editor: Brendan Fitzgerald
Fact-checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Meanwhile Donald Trump has dismissed calls for more regulation, saying the United States needs to maintain its edge over China in the AI race.

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A new poll indicates that 64 percent of Americans believe artificial intelligence (AI) is developing “too fast.”

The Associated Press-NORC Center poll released on Oct. 8 showed that just 27 percent say the development is “about right,” and less than 10 percent think it’s moving “too slow.”

Of the polled adults, more Democrats (76 percent) than Republicans (54 percent) think AI is moving too fast. However, 70 percent of those under 30 years old think the technology should be slowed, and 60 percent of those 60 years old and older think the same.

The findings come amid growing concern over the technology’s potential threat to humanity, which has led to industry leaders and politicians calling for a slowdown and more regulation.

President Donald Trump has dismissed calls for more regulation, saying the United States needs to maintain its edge over China in the AI race. Major AI companies recently signed a voluntary accord with the White House that calls for internal and external reviews.

According to the poll conducted Sept. 24 to 28, about half of respondents think the government’s support is about promoting technological innovation, and a little fewer say they think it’s about competition with China.

Meanwhile, 80 percent of Americans say it’s “extremely” or “very” important for the United States to ensure AI stays under human control.

Recent months have seen several incidents of AI agents from major tech firms breaching websites of private companies, research institutions, and multiple government agencies.

Notably, ChatGPT developer OpenAI acknowledged in July that its AI agents broke out of a testing environment and hacked into Hugging Face, an open-source community for AI.

In September, OpenAI canceled the release of its latest model, GPT-6.1 Astra, slated for October, over safety concerns. It also postponed plans for its initial public offering this year.

Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have proposed a range of measures to regulate the technology, but none are likely to advance anytime soon with Congress in recess ahead of the midterms.

Confidence in politicians’ handling of AI is low, with 23 percent trusting Democrats to do a better job and 21 percent favoring Republicans, while 39 percent trust neither party.

Mistrust of AI appears to have extended to the realm of politics, as very few adults are using AI as a source of information for the upcoming election. The poll indicated that only about 21 percent of respondents said they use or plan to use AI to gather information about a candidate or ballot issue.

Even fewer (12 percent) said they will use AI for information about how to vote, and only 10 percent said they would use it for information on voter registration.