Tag: ukraine

DEVELOPING: Putin Ready to Discuss Truce with Ukraine After Trump Threatens Russia with “Large Scale Banking Sanctions” and Tariffs

Russian President Vladimir Putin is reportedly ready for a truce with Ukraine after President Trump threatened to sanction Russia.

President Trump on Friday morning threatened Russia with “large scale” banking sanctions and tariffs until Vladimir Putin reached a ceasefire and final settlement on peace with Ukraine.

“Based on the fact that Russia is absolutely “pounding” Ukraine on the battlefield right now, I am strongly considering large scale Banking Sanctions, Sanctions, and Tariffs on Russia until a Cease Fire and FINAL SETTLEMENT AGREEMENT ON PEACE IS REACHED. To Russia and Ukraine, get to the table right now, before it is too late. Thank you!!!” Trump said on Truth Social on Friday.

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Ukrainian Journalist Who Was Previously Awarded by Zelensky Calls for President Trump’s Assassination: “Where is Lee Harvey Oswald When The Country Needs Him So Badly?”

A Ukrainian Regime journalist, who is allegedly linked to Hillary Clinton and the DNC, publicly called for the assassination of President Trump in a Facebook post on Friday.

Vadym Karpiak is a veteran journalist with nearly 30 years under his belt. He suggested Friday that America needs a “Lee Harvey Oswald,” the man who reportedly assassinated John F. Kennedy. 

The post, screenshotted below, asks, “Where is Lee Harvey Oswald when the country needs him so badly? And not just one?”

One of the networks Karpiak has hosted on-air coverage for was used as “a major tool of Ukraine’s information war, praised by the government officials who regularly appear on it for its role in countering Russian disinformation and maintaining morale,” according to the New York Times. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called it a “weapon,” but viewers in Ukraine have grown sick of the propaganda they push for the Ukrainian government.

Zelensky has even reportedly awarded Karpiak with “the Order ‘For Merit’ of the 3rd degree.”

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UKRAINE: Justifying A False Narrative Through A Bad Picture

I was sent this picture a few days ago and asked if it reflected reality geographically or geopolitically. My answer was a simple one to start:

“No, if Russia wanted to try to invade and control the rest of Europe, there are faster and easier routes to do that. This picture reflects a false narrative whereby too many want to draw the United States and the West into another unnecessary conflict based on an unrealistic and dishonest threat scenario where Russia’s goals and capabilities are inaccurately advertised.”

Expanding on my statement, let’s consider the following from solely a geographical perspective.

· To claim that Ukraine is the path Russia would choose to use to pursue the remainder of Europe is like saying the United States intends to invade Mexico but only use the Baja Peninsula. Each of these examples is choosing the hardest path forward and would make no sense if, in Russia’s case, Europe was the goal and not only Ukraine in total or in part.

· History instructs us that any invading army would use three routes to move east or west. One is generally through the Baltics, the second through Belarus, and the third through Ukraine. As someone who planned many contingency operations for large-scale possibilities on multiple continents, I would never recommend that Russia invade Europe by way of Ukraine. There is no logical military reason to do so when the central and northern routes allow much faster access to Europe with fewer impediments. Cutting Ukraine off from Europe would also be more effective than invading Ukraine at its strongest defensive points.

· I could go on, but these points are the major ones necessary to answer the question I was asked. The contingencies I planned for in Eastern Europe take up multiple binders; there is no way to account for that in a short essay.

But it’s more dangerous than a simple lack of understanding of what is happening in Europe and the world today. This picture reflects the assumptions of those who’ve bought into the false narrative intended to lure the Western world into a wider conflict. This conflict could grow to its worst form, a nuclear exchange between two of the world’s superpowers, though I think the odds of that are low.

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How Biden Botched the Chance To End the War in Ukraine

As President Donald Trump attempts to engage Russia to end the conflict in Ukraine, supporters of the proxy war in Washington, Europe, and Ukraine claim that President Vladimir Putin is an evil dictator who cannot be trusted. The implication is that talking with the Kremlin is equivalent to surrender for Kiev because Putin wants all of Ukraine, and will use any pause in fighting to gear up for the next invasion.

However, history disproves that assertion. For Moscow, the war was never about seizing Ukrainian territory or attempting to reconstitute the USSR, but pushing back on NATO expansion after the bloc threatened to add Kiev as a member.

Before the invasion and in the early months of the war, Putin made serious offers to both Washington and Kiev to allow eastern and southern Ukraine to remain under Kiev’s control if the country agreed not to join NATO.

The Joe Biden administration outright refused to negotiate on those terms, even if they were acceptable to Kiev. Preventing those talks from occurring first provoked the Russian invasion, then prevented it from ending within a few months.

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Europe faces ‘nightmare scenario’ on Ukraine, as diplomat says countries must pay for defense ‘every day until Trump is dead’

European leaders are finally waking up to the “nightmare scenario” that they face on the Ukraine war — and realizing that they now have to foot the bill for their own defense thanks to President Trump’s “America First” policies, diplomats said.

After years of slacking off on defense spending, Europe now needs to rearm massively “until Trump is dead,” a European diplomat was quoted as telling Politico.

“Defense spending is becoming a fixed cost. We have switched off the sun and now we need to pay every day for the heating. Every day you need to pay for ammunition, at least for several years, until Trump is dead,” the anonymous diplomat said.

The dire assessment comes as European leaders are set to meet Thursday for a summit on the Ukraine war with the hopes of coming up with an agreement that will give them some say in a peace deal.

“The nightmare scenario is that the US announces a deal soon that accepts most of Russia’s demands and then tells Ukraine and Europe to take it or leave it,” Malcolm Chalmers, deputy director general at the Royal United Services Institute in London, told Politico.

During his election campaign earlier this year, Germany’s Chancellor-in-waiting Friedrich Merz told voters that the continent is “five seconds to midnight” when it comes to its own defense. French President Emmanuel Macron said Europeans need “an incredible awakening.”

Macron spoke out in opposition to Trump’s ceasefire negotiations on Ukraine and also warned that Europe’s relationship with the US had changed, in a drastic ramping up of tensions.

Peace “cannot be achieved at any cost, under Russian dictates, or through Ukraine’s capitulation,” he told his nation in a TV address on Wednesday.

“We have to be ready if the US is no longer by our side,” he added.

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Europe fails to reach deal on Ukraine, rearmament after emergency talks end without agreement

Europe remains divided on how to support Ukraine and shore up its defenses in the face of Russian aggression, as emergency summit talks ended without a consensus on Thursday.

A statement on Ukraine was signed by all but one of the 27 EU members with a lone country — believed to be Hungary — holding out.

As leaders pledged to ramp up defense spending, the main European powers couldn’t agree on what exactly that support for Ukraine might look like and how Europe should adapt to what many see as a new world order under President Trump.

“Europe is weak without the United States,” Bulgaria’s Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov told reporters on Thursday. He added that he hoped “the US remains committed to our collective security, which is based on shared values.”

However, there was a major point of contention between the European nations over the seizure of some $227 billion in frozen Russian central bank reserves that have been held in Europe’s financial system since the start of the Ukraine war.

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Top Trump Admin. Officials Allegedly Hold Secret Talks With Zelensky’s Possible Replacements

On Thursday Politico claimed that members of President Donald Trump’s ‘entourage’ have begun talks with rivals of Ukrainian Dictator Vladimir Zelensky in the hopes of replacing the wartime ruler with someone new in an election.

“Four senior members of Donald Trump’s entourage have held secret discussions with some of Kyiv’s top political opponents to Volodymyr Zelenskyy, just as Washington aligns with Moscow in seeking to lever the Ukrainian president out of his job,” Politico said Thursday.

The discussions revolved around the possibility of having Ukraine hold elections soon, something the country’s dictator has repeatedly refused to do.

“The senior Trump allies held talks with Ukrainian opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko, a remorselessly ambitious former prime minister, and senior members of the party of Petro Poroshenko, Zelenskyy’s immediate predecessor as president, according to three Ukrainian parliamentarians and a U.S. Republican foreign policy expert,” Politico said Thursday.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick denied the President was “weighing into Ukrainian politics,” clarifying that all Trump wants is a partner for peace.

In February Trump called Zelensky a dictator without elections, perhaps signaling he wants Ukraine to hold elections. On Monday Trump suggested that Zelensky won’t be around for very long if he refused to make a deal with Russia.

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British-supplied Storm Shadow missiles are useless in Ukraine now President Trump has blocked US intelligence from being shared with allies

Britain’s long-range Storm Shadow missiles are feared to have been rendered useless in Ukraine after President Donald Trump blocked US intelligence from being shared with allies.

In a huge blow to Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russia’s invasion, Trump froze American military aid to Kyiv before suspending intelligence sharing with President Volodymr Zelensky’s war-torn country.

The UK, which has vowed to stand by Ukraine throughout the three-year war, is among the countries who have been banned from sharing Washington intelligence with Kyiv.

It comes amid an ongoing transatlantic rift after Trump and Zelensky dramatically clashed in a heated Oval Office row last week, sparking a wave of support for Ukraine from European allies including Britain.

MailOnline revealed on Tuesday that UK intelligence agencies and military outlets have received an order expressly forbidding the sharing of US-generated intelligence, previously known as ‘Rel UKR’ – short for Releasable to Ukraine’. 

The impact is likely to have major ramifications as British-supplied Storm Shadow cruise missiles, a critical asset used inside Russia’s Kursk region by Ukraine, require US data to hit their targets. MailOnline has contacted the MoD for comment.

Storm Shadow missiles, jointly developed by the UK and France who call it Scalp, are precision-guided munitions used for deep-strike missions as they can hit targets up to 250km (155miles) away. 

The effective missiles, believed to cost roughly £2million each, allow Ukraine to penetrate hardened bunkers and ammunition stores and down critical infrastructure, command centres and logistics hubs at huge ranges.

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Romania – The first “post-election” democracy?

In December 2024, a Romanian court cancelled the second round of the planned Presidential election and annulled the completed first round, citing (totally theoretical) “Russian interference”.

This caused massive protests in Romania, as you can imagine. The first round had been won by right winger Călin Georgescu following a social media-based campaign, and he was predicted to quite easily win the second round as well.

The Romanian opposition – denied a likely victory – took their case to the European Court of Human Rights.

Then, earlier today, the ECHR threw the case out without even hearing it. Apparently, the Romanian courts were perfectly within their rights to simply indefinitely postpone their election on the basis of unproven allegations, and all those people who already voted and wanted to vote again can just go to hell.

This is the ECHR, which lectures the world on rights and democratic norms on the regular.

And everyone is apparently just fine with it. It’s crazy.

Imagine the outrage in the media if Putin or Trump had suddenly cancelled elections they looked like losing because “they weren’t going to be fair”.

Anyway, now Călin Georgescu has been arrested, and his supporters are taking to the streets, while  the Romanian government is set to crack down on “conspiracy theories” and other “misinformation”.

This anti-election narrative is growing outside of Romania too.

Ukraine, of course, hasn’t had any elections in years either. They also outlawed certain political parties, religions and television channels. Meanwhile, laundering billions of dollars/pounds/euros through the Ukrainian government to boost the bottom line of arms manufacturers is considered “defending democracy”.

Last month, former EU chairman Thierry Breton remarked that they had already had to cancel the Romanian elections, and might have to do the same in Germany. (As it happens the “right side” won in Germany, so I guess that election was fair).

To a smaller extent, nine local elections across the UK have been “postponed” for at least a year for unknown reasons.

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US Planes Carrying Arms To Ukraine Were Turned Around Midflight

After President Trump and Vice President JD Vance accused Ukraine’s Zelensky of being ‘ungrateful’ amid last Friday’s explosive row in front of media cameras in the Oval Office, the White House on Monday announced the suspension of military aid to Ukraine. 

But it was initially unclear precisely when the pause in arms deliveries would take effect, or whether Trump was merely previewing a future suspension. New information revealed in fresh reports sheds more light on the matter, and clearly Trump means business. It was immediate upon the announcement.

“US weapons deliveries to Ukraine came to an abrupt halt on Monday evening after President Donald Trump ordered a pause on all aid to the war-torn country, the Pentagon confirmed on Tuesday,” USA Today reports, based on an admin official.

Inbound shipments on military and transport plans literally turned around midflight, per the report:

“After the order was given, all U.S. weapons shipments to Ukraine came to a stop, as of 6 p.m. on Monday evening, according to a defense official. Planes carrying supplies en route to Ukraine would have had to turn around, the official said.“

“It was unclear, as of Tuesday, whether Ukraine’s direct contracts with U.S. weapons manufacturers, procured through the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, would also be impacted,” USA Today continues. “As of mid-December, $1.7 billion out of the $21.2 billion fund had not been used.”

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