All smoke and mirrors

Quite why the Foreign Office has chosen to leak details of secret talks with the Russians at this time remains a mystery to the bourgeois media that unquestioningly published the story earlier in the week.
These sort of clandestine talks were, of course, the norm during the Cold War.  Hot lines and secret diplomatic exchanges via go-betweens in neutral countries remained open during the height of the imperialist confrontation with the Soviet Union. Vital links for spy deals, prisoner swaps and back-door channels to avoid misunderstandings that could rapidly escalate into a nuclear war that neither side could win. But if we are to believe the Foreign Office the only matters raised with the Russians at a number of covert meetings around the world were on routine issues of grain supplies and nuclear safety. These are issues that could usually be dealt with at ambassador level. They certainly would not normally justify covert liaisons in all sorts of places like New York and Vienna.
The Foreign Office is at pains to stress that at no point has the UK sought to enter peace talks around finding a diplomatic end to the conflict. If so what was the point of all these cloak-and-dagger meetings?
We can only guess at what was on the agenda but one thing’s for sure, and that is that the British envoys were acting as errand boys for the Americans. Though the Americans have been quite open about their own talks with the Russians they like to use trusted allies, like Britain and Japan, to raise issues without compromising their own position  in advance of any future direct negotiations.
Though Boris Johnson liked to pose as the man who persuaded  the Ukrainians to go for total war and break off peace negotiations with the Russians last year everybody knows that Johnson was only doing the bidding of Joe Biden and the American war-lobby which has used the conflict to tighten their grip over all their European allies.
Ukraine is essentially a protectorate of US imperialism. A vassal state that fights with NATO’s guns and lives on imperialist aid only keeps up the fight because the war is still in the American interest. 
No-one, beyond the chosen few in America’s ruling circles, knows what Biden’s war aims are but he’s clearly has got most of what he wanted when the war US imperialism provoked broke out in February 2022. NATO has taken over the once neutral states of Scandinavia. Russian gas and oil exports to Europe have been cut and US imperialism is now supreme in the UK and the European Union. It has come at a price that has largely been paid in blood by the hapless Ukrainians. But it has also cost the American tax-payers plenty in billions of dollars-worth of military supplies that can never be repaid. Now that bill is coming under scrutiny in the run-up to the next US presidential election.
Donald Trump is on the come-back trail claiming he could stop the Ukraine war in a day by talking directly to Putin. On the other hand the Democrats, still unsure on whether Biden is capable of fighting the next election, want to concentrate on their domestic reform platform which they believe will secure them a second term in office. They need a cease-fire to stop this becoming a campaign issue. But only time will tell whether the Biden administration is now ready to seriously talk about ending the war.