Tag: russia

UNREPORTED: Ukraine’s parliament fails to extend Volodymyr Zelensky’s presidential term

Ukrainian Parliament failed to pass the vote recognizing Zelensky as president until the inauguration of a new Head of state.

This is a signal: Leave.

Through this vote, the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament) made clear to Zelensky there will be no indefinite mandate.

Europe expected “stability” and “support” for him, but saw a parliament setting a countdown timer for Zelensky.

EU leaders arrived in Kiev today to stand in solidarity with Zelensky.

The vote was held to disprove of Trump’s 4% statement but that didn’t happen, an agreement could not be reached on the legitimacy of Zelensky as president.

This is a slap in the face by Parliament to Zelensky, essentially telling him your days are numbered.

The U.S. will have to negotiate with those who will come to power. Ukraine needs not temporary figures but leaders who act firmly and pragmatically—without hysteria, illusions, or artificial power retention scenarios.

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France Eyeing Deployment Of Nuclear-Armed Rafale Fighters To Germany: Report

France is apparently looking at the possibility of deploying air-launched nuclear weapons to Germany, a consideration that’s being made amid growing concerns that the United States will no longer guarantee European security under NATO. Broader discussions about nuclear deterrence among European leaders point very clearly to the deepening crisis in the transatlantic alliance under U.S. President Donald Trump, emphasized by calls from German leader-in-waiting Friedrich Merz for talks with his British and French colleagues about European “nuclear sharing or at least nuclear security.”

According to a report in the British newspaper The Telegraph, which cites an unnamed French official, “Posting a few French nuclear jet fighters in Germany should not be difficult and would send a strong message” to Russia, which would aim to bolster Europe’s nuclear deterrent.

While it’s unclear how seriously the proposal is being discussed at the highest levels in France, there is a logic behind raising the idea at this point in public.

In France, there is now an increasing focus on building up Europe’s capacity to provide a defensive bulwark against Russia, as Trump shifts to embrace Moscow. The result has been a growing rift between the United States and its European NATO allies, with differing positions on the continued provision of support for Ukraine looming large.

Evidence of this fractious relationship was provided in a meeting between Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron in Washington yesterday, in which Ukraine was again atop the agenda. Trump refused to provide security guarantees to Ukraine once a potential peace deal is signed.

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We Can, and Should, Negotiate with Putin

One thing at least is now indisputable. We live in a multipolar world. Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted as much during his wide-ranging interview in January with Megyn Kelly. The recognition that multipolarity is now the kind of world we live in came about, in the first instance, because Russia has not been defeated in Ukraine. Rather the reverse. 

To be sure, acceptance of the fact of multipolarity does not dictate the nature of our response to it. Secretary Rubio’s preferred response, as he made clear during his interview, is to embrace—one is tempted to say relearn how to do—the “hard work of diplomacy.”   

Other responses are certainly possible. A team writing for Foreign Affairs last fall suggested reinstating a far-going policy of containment of Russia, such as existed during the first Cold War. Former British defense secretary Ben Wallace, for his part, went considerably further: he suggested, in an article published in January, placing Russia “in a prison” and “building the walls high.” 

Which path is the right one? Rubio’s strikes me as the best approach, especially if supplemented by what is sometimes termed civilizational realism, a school that does not—as the pure realists are sometimes prone to do—exclude moral considerations from the practice of foreign affairs. Civilizational realists accept the necessity of virtue, but they also have the sophistication to recognize that liberal democracies are not the only states capable of practicing it. As for the idealists, their problem is a tendency to get divorced from reality, and they have an annoying habit of imposing their own version of morality on everyone everywhere—or at least, trying to. 

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The US Needed Russia to Invade Ukraine


The U.S. got its war in Ukraine.

Without it, Washington could not attempt to destroy Russia’s economy, orchestrate worldwide condemnation and lead a proxy war to bleed Russia, all as part of an attempt to bring down its government.

Joe Biden has now left no doubt that it’s true.   

The president of the United States confirmed what Consortium News and others have been reporting since the beginnings of Russsiagate in 2016, that the ultimate U.S. aim is to overthrow the government of Vladimir Putin.

“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden said on Saturday [March 26, 2022] at the Royal Castle in Warsaw. The White House and the State Dept. have been scrambling to explain away Biden’s remark. 

But it is too late.

“The President’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region,” a White House official said. “He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.”

On Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, “As you know, and as you have heard us say repeatedly, we do not have a strategy of regime change in Russia, or anywhere else, for that matter,” the last words inserted for comic relief. 

Biden first gave the game away at his Feb. 24 [2022] White House press conference — the first day of the invasion. He was asked why he thought new sanctions would work when the earlier sanctions had not stopped Russia. Biden said the sanctions were never designed to prevent Russia’s intervention but to punish it afterward.

The U.S. therefore needed Russia to invade in order to punish it in the hope of undermining its economy and Putin’s rule. 

“No one expected the sanctions to prevent anything from happening,” Biden said.  “That has to sh- — this is going to take time.  And we have to show resolve so he knows what’s coming and so the people of Russia know what he’s brought on them. That’s what this is all about.” 

It is all about the Russian people turning on Putin to overthrow him, which would explain Russia’s crackdown on anti-war protestors and the media.

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EU To Send More Military Aid To Ukraine, More Sanctions Against Russia, Denmark Say ‘Peace More Dangerous Than War’, Zelenskiy ‘Very Angry With Trump Team

Europe tries to rally around Ukraine as EU diplomats and officials flock to Kyiv to meet with Ukrainian President Zelenskiy.

The Financial Times reports that Zelenskiy was ‘very angry’ during recent meetings with the Trump team and was shouting under Trump pressure.

Meanwhile, according to estimates from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), The Continent purchased more Russian hydrocarbons last year than aid was sent to Ukraine, highlighting European hypocrisy.

Europe will not send ‘peacekeepers’ to Ukraine said Kaja Kallas, the head of European diplomacy. “In order to send peacekeepers, you first need peace,” she declared.

Ukrainian Official Olesky Aresovych said on his X account that a new Ukrainian Recovery Fund will soon be announced totaling $1T, with 40% coming from the U.S., 40% from Russia, and 20% from China and Gulf States. The official said $350B in frozen Russia assets will be added.

The E.U. doesn’t like ‘Russian narratives’ coming from the United States.

Russia said it sees no reason to begin talks with Europe.

Former British PM Boris Johnson said reports of him pushing to start the war in Ukraine are untrue.

Danish PM Mette Frederkisen said there is a threat that peace in Ukraine could be more dangerous than the current war.

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What Are Realistic Expectations for Peace in Ukraine?

I was born in a Jewish family in Leningrad – Russia and lived in Kharkiv – Ukraine for 30 years before emigrating to the United States 40 years ago. Back then, the war between Russia and Ukraine was unimaginable. Today, after hundreds of thousands on both sides are dead and memorable places of my youth have been reduced to rubble, I am trying to make sense of it and wonder how it is going to end.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine developed a desire to join the European Union rather than remain Russia’s little sister. The West and NATO saw it as an opportunity to strengthen its Eastern flank, which was the case with the Baltic countries Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. However, Ukraine’s strong ethnic, cultural, economic, and historic ties to Russia made it more problematic. Watching the U.S. effort to convert Ukraine into an anti-Russian state through millions of dollars injected into Ukrainian politics by organizations like USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, Russia developed a strong mistrust of the U.S. intentions. Unfulfilled promises of the U.S. leaders that NATO would not be expanding to the East made Russians think that Ukraine was next on the list, and this was where Russia drew the red line.

The coup d’etat orchestrated in 2014 by Ukrainian nationalists with guidance from the Obama-Biden administration led to the Russian annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. Russia was worried that with an anti-Russian government in Kyiv, Sevastopol – the home to the Russian Navy would become a NATO base. Crimea was crucial to Russia’s historic naval dominance in the Black Sea and its influence in the Middle East and Africa. From that time on, Russia’s relations with Ukraine and NATO countries went downhill. They were exacerbated by Ukraine’s effort to subdue militarily the Russian-speaking population of Donbas that refused to recognize the insurrectionist government in Kyiv. Following the 2014 coup d’etat, an estimated fourteen thousand people were killed in Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. Glorification of Nazi collaborators who fought against Russia in the Second World War, and the expulsion of Russian literature, music, and art from Ukrainian schools and cultural institutions deepened the divide between the two countries.

Meantime the U.S. and NATO began to openly pour weapons into Ukraine and train paramilitary units like the Azov battalion. These efforts were assisted by Ukrainian oligarchs who pocketed significant sums of Western money. In late 2021, Russia amassed troops on the Ukrainian border while Russian President Vladimir Putin desperately tried to obtain guarantees from U.S. President Joe Biden that Ukraine would not become a member of NATO. Had Biden made that promise the war could have been avoided but the Russian request fell on deaf ears — the U.S. foreign policy doctrine was to weaken Russia, and listening to Putin’s concerns was not on the table. Russia was told it was up to Ukraine to decide whether to join NATO. I wonder what would happen if during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev told U.S. President John F. Kennedy that it was up to Cuba to place Russian missiles on its territory. Wouldn’t the U.S. have invaded Cuba?  Would it be considered unprovoked aggression? Isn’t that what happened in Ukraine? The result was death and destruction leading to the Russian annexation of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson provinces of Ukraine. One can only wonder what has happened to the wisdom that world leaders exercised in the 1960s.

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Trump vs. Zelensky: Fact-Checking the New Ukraine War

There may come a day when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky regrets taking the bait and, at what may be the conclusion of three years of fighting Russia, being drawn into a verbal war with U.S. President Donald Trump. Over the last few days, Trump has called Zelensky a dictator who started the war, and Zelensky has said that Trump is “caught in a web of disinformation.”

As negotiations are being prepared, and Zelensky needs more than ever to be in the shadow of Trump’s goodwill, this may be the worst time to become entrenched as an enemy of Trump. Vice President J.D. Vance said that Zelensky has been getting “bad advice,” adding “[t]he idea that Zelensky is going to change the president’s mind by badmouthing him in public media… everyone who knows the president will tell you that is an atrocious way to deal with this administration.”

The war of words began with Trump scolding Zelensky on his handling of the war, saying Ukraine “should have never started it. You could have made a deal.” Zelensky responded that he “would like to have more truth with the Trump team.”

Trump is wrong about the first point and right about the second. The beginning of the war in Ukraine is complex, and it roots go back many years before the Russian invasion. Despite Western claims of an unprovoked war, Russia was the recipient of multiple serious provocations. Request for their security concerns to be addressed in negotiations went ignored. NATO broke its promise and continued its expansion east to Russia’s borders even promising that Ukraine’s path to membership was irreversible. Ethnic Russians who were citizens of Ukraine were being threatened and their rights were being revoked. 60,000 elite Ukrainian troops massed on the eastern border with Donbas and Ukrainian artillery shelling into the Donbas had dramatically increased. There was genuine alarm in Russia that Ukraine was about to invade the Donbas. But it was Russia that illegally invaded Ukraine. The West provoked Russia, but Russia attacked Ukraine. On this, Trump is wrong.

But he is not wrong that Ukraine could have made a deal. He is wrong to ignore that before Ukraine could have made a deal, the U.S. and NATO could have made a deal instead of ignoring overtures by Putin on the eve of the war to negotiate a new security architecture and taking discussions of NATO membership for Ukraine off the table.

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Yes, Ukraine Started the War

The outcry spread quickly across the Western world: Donald Trump dared say Ukraine started the war.  

The New York Times accused Trump of “rewriting the history of Russia’s invasion of its neighbor.” The paper’s White House correspondent wrote: 

“When Russian forces crashed over the borders into Ukraine in 2022 determined to wipe it off the map as an independent state, the United States rushed to aid the beleaguered nation and cast its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as a hero of resistance.

Three years almost to the day later, President Trump is rewriting the history of Russia’s invasion of its smaller neighbor. Ukraine, in this version, is not a victim but a villain. And Mr. Zelensky is not a latter-day Winston Churchill, but a ‘dictator without elections’ who somehow started the war himself and conned America into helping.”

The BBC reported: 

“Ukraine didn’t start the war. Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, having annexed Crimea in 2014.

The annexation came after Ukraine’s pro-Russian president was ousted by popular demonstrations.”

CNN howled: “President Donald Trump has now fully adopted Russia’s false propaganda on Ukraine, turning against a sovereign democracy that was invaded in favor of the invader. … Trump wrongly accused Ukraine of starting the conflict.”

“In comments to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Trump falsely claimed Kyiv had started the conflict, the largest on European soil since the second world,” complained the Financial Times. 

It was pretty much the same thing across the Western media landscape, which spoke with one voice.

The media takes speaking with one voice as confirmation that they are right. But it’s often just massive confirmation bias for the story Western intelligence services and political leaders tell them, rather than an independent examination of the facts. 

In this case the facts show that Trump is right. 

The central question in all this is: when did the Ukraine war actually start? The Western mainstream leads masses of people to believe it began Feb. 22, 2022, when the Russian regular army intervened in what was already an eight-year old civil war, which was very much begun by Ukraine, with U.S. help. 

That’s the part they don’t tell you.   

The key to the falsehood is what the BBC calls “Ukraine’s pro-Russian president” being “ousted by popular demonstrations.” [Emphasis added.]

Of course Trump didn’t explain that. He’s not a great public speaker. He too often fails to lay out the context needed to understand what he’s talking about. 

Trump’s fleeting remark at a press encounter at his Florida estate last Tuesday set off the international furor.

“Today I heard: ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited’ [to the talks in Saudi Arabia with Russia],” Trump said about Ukrainian president Volodmyr Zelensky. “Well, you’ve been there for three years … you should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”

It was those six italicized words that ignited the firestorm. The rest of what he said in that sentence was ignored. 

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Allies Bluff, They Cannot Make It Without the US in Ukraine

Because Trump is rightly tired of the U.S. paying for Ukraine’s defense, the world is turning on him. Ukrainian officials are criticizing America, Europe is calling Trump “Hitler,” and Ukrainian soldiers on Twitter are removing American flags from their uniforms—all because the American gravy train is about to dry up. With Trump demanding a better deal for the American people, the world will have to fend for itself. Europe is experiencing adolescent angst now, as it is forced to man-up, come of age, and move out from under the U.S. protective umbrella.

Fact: The U.S. WILL NO LONGER BE PAYING FOR IT!
It’s time for Europe to step up and defend itself. While it’s unfortunate that many Europeans may die unnecessarily, part of me anticipates the vindication of watching weak, woke European militaries—crippled by declining birthrates and a post-Christian, soy-boy-vegan culture—be decimated by Russian conscripts.

The consensus among many on Twitter and in liberal media that the U.S. has burned its bridges with Europe and that Europe will now move on without the U.S. as a trade and defense partner is absurd. The U.S. cannot be replaced as a market. With a population of 330 million and an average income exceeding $82,000 annually—more than double Europe’s average—there is no viable replacement. And if such a replacement exists, why wasn’t Europe trading with this mythical nation before?

For decades, the U.S., China, and Russia have invested heavily in defense, leaving Europe far behind. Europe would need to spend 10% of GDP each year to catch up over the next 20 years. However, in that same period, the U.S., Russia, and China would continue increasing their spending. Realistically, it would take about 30 years for Europe to reach any semblance of parity. And this assumes that Europe lifts its restrictions on nuclear weapons and other advanced weapons that the U.S., Russia, and China possess. And with Europe’s demographic decline, the pool of military-aged men and women will continue to shrink.

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“We Created A Monster With Zelensky”: White House Isn’t Backing Down In Growing Rift

Axios has released a devastating report full of quotes from Trump admin officials which strongly suggests the growing rift with Zelensky is only about to worsen. 

The Ukrainian leader is seen as having overstepped by the White House. A US administration official involved in peace negotiations with Russia bluntly told the publication that “Zelensky is an actor who committed a common mistake of theater kids: He started to think he’s the character he plays on TV.“ 

“Yes, he has been brave and stood up to Russia. But he would be six feet under if it wasn’t for the millions we spent, and he needs to exit stage right with all the drama,” the unidentified official said. This strongly suggests that Trump is pursuing a full political transition in Ukraine at this point.

Another official, also involved in negotiations described that “We created a monster with Zelensky,” and that “these Trump-deranged Europeans who won’t send troops are giving him terrible advice.”

Speaking of which, one Saturday headline has revealed the European Union is still seeking ways to seize part of Russa’s frozen $280 billion in assets held abroad. So while Washington under Trump is trying to strike peace and compromise, the Europeans look content to try and sabotage what they already see as a ‘bad deal’ to end the war.

Yet another US official was quoted in Axios as reviewing that “In the course of a week, Zelensky rebuffed President Trump’s treasury secretary, his secretary of state and his vice president, all before moving on to personally insulting President Trump in the press.“

The unnamed official followed with, “What did Zelensky think was going to happen?”

Meanwhile a mineral deal is said to be close, with some Friday night headlines claiming a final deal was ‘hours’ away – but Zelensky’s office has said it’s still mulling over the first draft. “President Trump is obviously very frustrated right now with President Zelensky,” National Security Advisor Mike Waltz underscored in Thursday comments.

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