Europe is a different matter entirely. The European Union bureaucrats and the leaders of France, Germany and the UK want to keep the war going.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister, Sergei Rybakov, provided a pithy definition of the Russian position:

All I'm seeing the U.S. do to appease Russia in the short term is repealing completely pointless resolutions, empty gestures and good faith promises.

We've seen this before and until something concrete happens from the U.S. side I'll remain pessimistic.

By the time you read this, the second meeting between the United States and Russian delegations will be underway in Saudi Arabia. The Russian plan is already on the table. We have to wait to see what the Trump team is proposing.

I hope the Russians understand that Donald Trump's views towards Russia reflect a minority view in the United States. Most of the Republican and Democrat politicians, as well as the majority of intelligence and defense officers, see no difference between the Russia that exists today and the Soviet Union. Today, for example, a friend shared an email with me that he received from his buddy, a recently retired CIA case officer who is still doing contract work for the Agency. I am an acquaintance of that former CIA officer. In the email he voiced outrage at Trump "cozying up" to Putin and exclaimed: "I've spent forty years fighting those bastards and Trump is surrendering."

The US foreign policy establishment is like a prehistoric bug frozen in amber. They are trapped in the past. They have a fixed image of Russia as an authoritarian communist dictatorship and cannot accept the reality that modern Russia has reverted to its nationalist, Christian roots.

The foreign policy mavens in the US labor under the delusion that the United States has some leverage over Russia. They fail to understand that Russia does not need a damn thing from the United States. The same cannot be said for the US, which relies on Russia's ability to supply fertilizer and some enriched uranium.