Tag: donald trump

Trump Says Ukraine Should Give Up Territory in Donbas to End War

President Donald Trump said on Oct. 19 that Ukraine should give up territory in the Donbas region already under Russian control in order to end the war.

“We think that what they should do is just stop at the lines where they are, the battle lines,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One.

“They should stop right now at the battle lines. Go home. Stop killing people and be done.”

When asked what should happen to the eastern Donbas region, Trump said: “Let it be cut the way it is. It’s cut up right now. I think 78 percent of the land is already taken by Russia.

“You leave it the way it is, right now. They can negotiate something later on down the line.”

The president, however, said that he never discussed ceding the whole Donbas territory to Moscow during his recent meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

On Oct. 17, Trump hosted Zelenskyy at the White House, during which the president expressed hope that he would be able to resolve the Russia–Ukraine war without sending Tomahawk missiles to Kyiv.

The visit followed what Trump called his “very productive” phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Oct. 16.

“I think he wants to end the war,” Trump said of Putin as he met with Zelenskyy in the Cabinet room at the White House. “I spoke to him yesterday for two-and-a-half hours.”

Keep reading

European Countries Back Trump’s Call for Cease-Fire on Current Lines in Ukraine

A coalition of European leaders on Oct. 21 publicly endorsed President Donald Trump’s cease-fire plan for Ukraine, signaling support across the continent for a negotiated end to the war based on current front-line positions.

In a joint statement, the nations—which included the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Ukraine—threw their support behind Washington’s call for the fighting to stop immediately, and that the current line of contact should be the starting point for lasting peace negotiations.

The endorsement marks the first coordinated European backing of Trump’s push for a ceasefire that reflects battlefield realities—an approach that has divided Western policymakers since the president first publicly floated the idea in August.

“Russia’s stalling tactics have shown time and time again that Ukraine is the only party serious about peace. We can all see that Putin continues to choose violence and destruction,” the statement read.

“Therefore, we are clear that Ukraine must be in the strongest possible position—before, during, and after any ceasefire.”

The statement added that pressure needed to be ramped up on “Russia’s economy and its defense industry,” until Russian President Vladimir Putin is “ready to make peace,” and that measures were being developed “to use the full value of Russia’s immobilized sovereign assets so that Ukraine has the resources it needs.”

Keep reading

A Warning from Lebanon

In not quite one year since the ceasefire deal in Lebanon, Israel has broken the ceasefire 4,600 times. It has killed hundreds of people, including infants, demolished tens of thousands of homes and annexed five areas of Lebanon. It was supposed to withdraw completely.

This situation is being replicated in detail in Gaza. In particular, the ceasefire in Lebanon is “guaranteed” by the USA and France and overseen by an international committee referred to as “the Mechanism”. The “Mechanism” is chaired by the USA. Accordingly the guarantors have refused to acknowledge a single breach of the ceasefire because the US-controlled “Mechanism” calls them counter-terrorist operations aimed at disarming Hezbollah.

The United Nations defers to “the Mechanism” and thus to the USA, and the presence of UN peacekeeping troops in Southern Lebanon is therefore useless. Lebanon is now under control of the US/Israeli puppet administration of General Aoun and effectively being run by US Special Envoy Tom Barrack.

Barrack stated that the borders of Israel and Syria are meaningless and that “Israel will go where they want, when they want, and do what they want to protect the Israelis and their border to make sure on October 7th it never happens again”. This is from the “guarantor” of the Lebanese ceasefire agreement.

There can be no doubt that Trump’s US-chaired “Board of Peace” for Gaza will take exactly the same line as “the Mechanism” in Lebanon. It is axiomatic that Israel will never honor any agreement. They never have.

Keep reading

Trump bet $40B on Milei, but what do Americans get out of it?

It has been a busy week for U.S. policy towards Argentina.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced Wednesday that the U.S. would be doubling the assistance it is marshaling for Argentina from $20 billion to $40 billion. The increase comes ahead of legislative elections on October 26 that will elect half the lower house and one-third of the upper house, and represents an increasingly strenuous effort in Washington to bolster Argentine President Javier Milei financially and politically.

Ironically, one reason for an even bigger bailout package might have been a comment by the White House itself. Heading into a meeting with President Donald Trump on Tuesday, an optimistic Milei is reported to have said “we will have dollars pouring out of our ears.” During the meeting, Trump burst that bubble, remarking that “if he loses, we’re not going to be generous with Argentina,” a remark that immediately hit markets.

A day later, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tried to remedy the situation, saying that beyond the original amount the U.S. had committed to lend Argentina, the Trump administration was coordinating the delivery of another $20 billion for the country from banks and sovereign wealth funds. Bessent invoked an “economic Monroe Doctrine” and said the outcome of upcoming elections in Chile and Colombia depended on the fate of Milei’s presidency. He thus grounded the need for assistance in the possibility that electorates in those countries might follow the cue from Argentine voters despite their very different circumstances (as detailed below).

Milei’s first term ends formally in 2027, but he is under severe pressure from domestic politicians and international investors. Argentina was a darling of the markets following Milei’s election in 2023 as he pushed through radical reductions in the size of government by decree, arguing that it was the only way to deliver the country from a long history of high inflation and serial defaults.

However, in early September, his party received a drubbing from voters tired of austerity in the province of Buenos Aires, home to roughly 40% of the population. This hit Argentine bonds and led to a sharp depreciation of the Argentine peso. Local and foreign investors fled, worried that the results in the provincial election were a harbinger of worse to come in the congressional polls.

By the end of September, the U.S. had stepped in, offering Milei’s government a level of support practically unprecedented in recent history (and yet apparently still not enough). The Treasury offered an arrangement where Argentina could borrow dollars against pesos, hinted that it might buy the country’s debt, and later even purchased the country’s currency in foreign exchange markets.

While Mexico did receive ample support from the U.S. in 1995, when that country suffered its own devaluation shock, the U.S. Treasury did not actually buy Mexican pesos on that occasion, unlike its actions during the current intervention in Argentine markets. And the U.S. rescue efforts for Mexico were for a country that was a member of the North American Free Trade Agreement, already the U.S.’s third-largest trading partner (it is now the biggest), and supported a new president about to enter a six-year term after an election.

Keep reading

Will Trump really attack Venezuela?

It’s ironic that in the same week that President Donald Trump escalated the drug war in the Caribbean by unleashing the CIA against Nicolás Maduro’s regime in Venezuela, the Department of Justice won an indictment against former National Security Adviser John Bolton, the architect of the failed covert strategy to overthrow Maduro during the first Trump administration.

The one thing the two regime change operations have in common is Marco Rubio, who, as a senator, was a vociferous opponent of Maduro. Now, as Secretary of State and National Security Adviser, he’s the new architect of Trump’s Venezuela policy, having managed to cut short Richard Grenell’s attempt to negotiate a diplomatic deal with Maduro. Regime change is on the agenda once again, with gunboats in the Caribbean and the CIA on the ground. What could go wrong?

Donald Trump’s penchant for turning the metaphorical war on drugs into a real one by deploying the U.S. military dates back to his first administration, when he threatened to designate drug cartels as foreign terrorists and proposed launching missiles to blow up drugs labs in Mexico. During the recent presidential campaign, he declared, “The drug cartels are waging war on America—and it’s now time for America to wage war on the cartels.” Apparently, he meant it.

Back in office, he named six Mexican cartels, the Salvadoran gang MS-13, and the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) and ordered the Pentagon to draw up plans for military action against them. Early on, White House officials seriously debated military strikes against cartel leaders and infrastructure inside Mexico, but decided that cooperation with the Mexican government would be more fruitful. Nevertheless, the unusual appointment of a veteran Special Forces military officer to head the Western Hemisphere Affairs office of the National Security Council signaled that Trump was still was serious about resorting to military force to wage the war on drugs.

The focus then shifted to Venezuela. The day before the New York Times broke the story about Pentagon planning for action against cartels, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the U.S. government was offering a $50 million reward for information leadings to Maduro’s arrest, accusing him of the “use cocaine as a weapon to ‘flood’ the United States.” Trump claimed Maduro was directing Tren de Aragua in “undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare against the territory of the United States,” a claim that the intelligence community concluded was untrue, despite pressure from Trump political appointees to make the estimate conform to Trump’s claim. The two senior career intelligence officers who oversaw preparation of the estimate were summarily fired.

In August, the Trump administration deployed a naval task force to the Caribbean, including three guided-missile destroyers, an amphibious assault ship, a guided-missile cruiser, and a nuclear-powered attack submarine. The following month, U.S. forces began air strikes on vessels allegedly smuggling narcotics in international waters off the Venezuelan coast. When Democrats and some Republicans questioned the legality of summarily killing civilians who posed no immediate threat, Trump informed Congress that he had determined that the United States was in a state of “armed conflict” with unnamed “drug cartels,” whose drug trafficking constituted an attack on the United States. Therefore, traffickers were “unlawful combatants” subject to being killed on sight. Admiral Alvin Holsey, commander of U.S. Southern Command, resigned on Thursday, reportedly because of concerns over the extrajudicial killing of civilians in the air strikes.

Keep reading

Trump urged Ukraine’s Zelensky to make concessions to Russia in tense meeting: Sources

US President Donald Trump pushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to give up swaths of territory to Russia during a tense meeting on Oct 17 that left Kyiv’s delegation disappointed, according to two people briefed on the discussion.

Mr Trump also declined to provide Tomahawk missiles for Ukraine’s use, and mused about giving security guarantees to both Kyiv and Moscow, comments that the Ukrainian delegation found confusing, added the two sources, who requested anonymity to discuss a private conversation.

After his meeting with Mr Zelensky, Mr Trump publicly called for a ceasefire on the current frontlines, a position that the Ukrainian President then embraced in comments to reporters. A third person said Mr Trump came up with that proposal during the meeting after Mr Zelensky said he would not voluntarily cede any territory to Moscow.

“The meeting ended with (Trump’s) decision to make a ‘deal where we are, on the demarcation line’,” the third source said.

Mr Trump underscored that position in remarks to reporters on Oct 19.

“We think that what they should do is just stop at the lines where they are, the battle lines,” he said on Air Force One. “The rest is very tough to negotiate if you’re going to say, ‘you take this, we take that’.”

Keep reading

On the Precipice of Authoritarian Rule

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump threatened to unleash the armed forces on more American cities during a rambling address to top military brass. He told the hundreds of generals and admirals gathered to hear him that some of them would be called upon to take a primary role at a time when his administration has launched occupations of American cities, deployed tens of thousands of troops across the United States, created a framework for targeting domestic enemies, cast his political rivals as subhuman, and asserted his right to wage secret war and summarily execute those he deems terrorists.

Trump used that bizarre speech to take aim at cities he claimed “are run by the radical left Democrats,” including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. “We’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room,” he said. “That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.” He then added: “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”

Trump has, of course, already deployed the armed forces inside the United States in an unprecedented fashion during the first year of his second term in office. As September began, a federal judge found that his decision to occupy Los Angeles with members of California’s National Guard — under so-called Title 10 or federalized status — against the wishes of California Governor Gavin Newsom was illegal. But just weeks later, Trump followed up by ordering the military occupation of Portland, Oregon, over Governor Tina Kotek’s objections.

“I am directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists,” Trump wrote on Truth Social late last month. And he “authoriz[ed] Full Force, if necessary.”

When a different federal judge blocked him from deploying Oregon National Guardsmen to the city, he ordered in Guard members from California and Texas. That judge then promptly blocked his effort to circumvent her order, citing the lack of a legal basis for sending troops into Portland. In response, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act — an 1807 law that grants the president emergency powers to deploy troops on U.S. soil — to “get around” the court rulings blocking his military occupation efforts. “I think that’s all insurrection, really criminal insurrection,” he claimed, in confused remarks from the Oval Office.

Experts say that his increasing use of the armed forces within the United States represents an extraordinary violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. That bedrock nineteenth-century law banning the use of federal troops to execute domestic law enforcement has long been seen as fundamental to America’s democratic tradition. However, the president’s deployments continue to nudge this country ever closer to becoming a genuine police state. They come amid a raft of other Trump administration authoritarian measures designed to undermine the Constitution and weaken democracy. Those include attacks on birthright citizenship and free speech, as well as the exercise of expansive unilateral powers like deporting people without due process and rolling back energy regulations, citing wartime and emergency powers.

Keep reading

Trump-Zelensky Was Reportedly a ‘Tough’, ‘Bad’ Meeting That ‘Ended Abruptly’ – US Will NOT Provide Long-Range Tomahawk Missiles to Ukraine at This Point

Not the meeting Zelensky was dreaming of.

For the last few weeks, both Kiev regime leader Volodymyr Zelensky and the Mainstream Media were convinced that US President Donald J. Trump had a change of heart and was now fully supporting Ukraine’s war effort.

And what’s more, the wishful thinkers brushed past the fact that Trump was still not willing to spend another dollar in the conflict, and focused on the latest ‘wunderwaffe’: long-range Tomahawk missiles.

But yesterday (17), as Zelensky was headed to Washington, DC for the Trump meeting, his world came crashing down, as news circulated of the Trump call with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and the upcoming meeting in Hungary.

The part of the meeting that was open to the press proceeded reasonably well, but reports say that after the press left, it became a tense meeting, in which Trump told Zelensky that he doesn’t intend to provide long-range Tomahawk missiles.

Zelensky was led to hope for commitments around new weapons, but Trump was ‘in a totally different state of mind’.

The US President stated that his priority now is diplomacy, and sending Tomahawk missiles could undermine it.

Keep reading

Venezuela regime change means invasion, chaos, and heavy losses

Maximum pressure has long been President Donald Trump’s stance towards the government of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela — he slapped crippling sanctions on the country during his first term — but in recent days the administration has pushed the stakes even higher.

The Caribbean is currently hosting an astonishing quantity of American naval and air assets, including four Arleigh Burke–class destroyers, a guided missile cruiser, an attack submarine, a Marine Amphibious Ready Group, and a flight of F-35 multirole fighters.

These are ostensibly deployed as part of an antinarcotic and drug interdiction operation, but the volume of firepower employed for what is normally a relatively sedate task has created broad suspicion at home and in Venezuela that a military intervention against the Bolivarian Republic is on tap. Maduro recently sent a letter to the United Nations stating that he expected an “armed attack” against his country in “a very short time.”

His concerns have probably not been assuaged by the formation of a new Joint Task Force last week (again ostensibly for anti-narcotics operations) in SOUTHCOM under the II Marine Expeditionary Force, precisely the kind of unit that would be deployed in a Venezuelan military intervention, still less by the recent New York Times report that Trump has authorized lethal covert operations by American intelligence agents within his borders.

The administration has made its interest in removing Maduro quite clear: it views him as the head of a narcoterrorist organization that is responsible for exporting crime, drugs, and illegal immigrants to the United States. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has declared that Maduro is not the legitimate president of the country, due to his government’s obvious falsification of results in the 2024 election, and the Justice Department doubled the bounty for his capture to $50 million.

But while Maduro is, without a doubt, a usurper of the presidential office and a tyrannical dictator, he is no less the president and head of state of Venezuela. Ideological harangues about the sanctity of democracy will no more remove him from power or render his government moot than American disapproval of the Chinese Communist Party could affect the democratization of Red China, something both sides are well aware of. Removing Maduro will require more than sanctions, threats, or pressure: it will require war, and that possibility looks increasingly likely with each passing day.

While ending Maduro’s dictatorship would certainly be a boon to the Venezuelan people, the intervention comes with a number of costs and risks American policymakers should bear in mind and carefully weigh against the potential benefits of intervention. There is no free lunch in geopolitics.

The most obvious costs are those of the initial invasion. The American invasion of Panama in 1989, to overthrow the government of General Manuel Noriega, was carried out by a force of some 27,000 U.S. troops, 23 of which were killed and hundreds more wounded. Venezuela is vastly larger than Panama, and while its military is very poorly equipped, it likewise dwarfs the forces that were available to Noriega. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates an invasion of Venezuela would require nearly 50,000 troops, some of which will not return home. Any American government should be extremely conscientious about the causes on which it spends the lives of American soldiers.

Keep reading

Bipartisan senators to force vote blocking ‘unauthorized war’ in Venezuela

A group of bipartisan senators will force a vote on a War Powers Resolution to block the use of force by American troops within or against Venezuela after President Trump raised the possibility of attacks against Nicolás Maduro’s regime.

The measure is being led by Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) are co-sponsors. 

Trump said Wednesday he had authorized the CIA to carry out covert operations inside Venezuela, saying he was focused on “land” operations and raising the specter the president is looking to remove Maduro from power.  

“The American people do not want to be dragged into endless war with Venezuela without public debate or a vote. We ought to defend what the Constitution demands: deliberation before war,” Paul said in a statement. 

The effort marks the second time senators have sought to block Trump’s buildup of force in the Caribbean Sea. A vote on a War Powers Resolution last week failed 48-51, although it garnered support from Paul and one other Republican, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska).

“Americans don’t want to send their sons and daughters into more wars—especially wars that carry a serious risk of significant destabilization and massive new waves of migration in our hemisphere,” Kaine said in a statement. 

“If my colleagues disagree and think a war with Venezuela is a good idea, they need to meet their constitutional obligations by making their case to the American people and passing an Authorization for Use of Military Force. I urge every senator to join us in stopping this Administration from dragging our country into an unauthorized and escalating military conflict.”

Keep reading