Showing posts with label Vladimir Putin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vladimir Putin. Show all posts

Monday, May 26, 2025

Putin pummels Kyiv for a third consecutive record night, makes a fool of Trump and his naive peace overtures and Friedrich Merz's promise of cruise missiles if elected in Germany

The West is supine before a third world dictator equipped with gas stations and nuclear weapons.
 
 

... The Russian bombardment on Sunday night included 355 drones, Yuriy Ihnat, head of the Ukrainian air force’s communications department, told The Associated Press.

The previous night, Russia fired 298 drones and 69 missiles of various types at Ukraine in what Ukrainians said was the largest combined aerial assault during the conflict. From Friday to Sunday, Russia launched around 900 drones at Ukraine, officials said. ...

Russia has this month broken its record for aerial bombardments of Ukraine three times. ...

 




Thursday, May 15, 2025

We'll probably never know whether weak Russian invasion of Ukraine headlines like these at CNBC contributed to Trump's thinking that Ukraine started it

Shrinking from calling what Russia did an invasion was a temporary flight from reality for CNBC, probably motivated by keeping people from panicking and selling stocks.

It's all about the money, for Trump no less than for CNBC. And also for Vladimir Putin.

It should be about something else.

 



Tuesday, May 13, 2025

The devastating truth about the end of US Houthi attacks is that US forces failed after spending more than $1 billion

 The thread is here.

The limits of conventional power have been reached.

Putin has been experiencing the same in Ukraine and could have been defeated, too, had Trump not given him a lifeline with his stupid peace talks.

The future of Taiwan is in great peril.

 


 

Friday, March 28, 2025

Andrew Sullivan today: The GOP Congress has long since become the equivalent of Putin’s Duma — a rubber-stamp body designed solely to support the executive branch

 Here.

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(shadow banned by Elon Musk)

Latest Trump minerals deal with Ukraine carves up the invaded country between Trump and Putin even worse than before


 

Trump's minerals deal with Ukraine is an expropriation document, demanding half of its oil and gas, almost all of its metals, and now also much of its infrastructure in reparations.

Black radicals want reparations from whites. The radical Trump wants to gobble up most of Ukraine.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, here:

Donald Trump is holding a gun to the head of Volodymyr Zelensky, demanding huge reparations payments and laying claim to half of Ukraine’s oil, gas, and hydrocarbon resources as well as almost all its metals and much of its infrastructure.

The latest version of his “minerals deal”, obtained by The Telegraph, is unprecedented in the history of modern diplomacy and state relations. ...

It dovetails with parallel talks between the US and Russia for a comprehensive energy partnership, including plans to restore West Siberian gas flows to Europe in large volumes, with US companies and Trump-aligned financiers gaining a major stake in the business.

The revived gas trade would flow through Ukraine’s network, and later via the Baltic as the sabotaged Nord Stream pipelines are brought back on stream. ...

Prof Riley said: “It is not compatible with EU membership, and perhaps that is part of the purpose. I have to wonder whether the real intention might not be to force Zelensky to reject it.” ...

Germany’s Bild Zeitung said talks have been underway for weeks in Switzerland to reopen the Nord Stream 2 pipelines, conducted secretly by ex-Stasi agent Matthias Warnig and Mr Trump’s envoy Richard Grenell, a man known for his Kremlin sympathies.

The terms would give US contractors operational control and a fat revenue stream, creating money out of “thin air”. A cynic might call it a legal “donation” to Mr Trump’s circle by the Kremlin.

“There is talk about Nord Stream. It would be interesting if the Americans put pressure on Europe, to make them stop refusing our Russian gas,” said Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister. ...

All evidence so far is that Trump & Putin Inc is a perfectly harmonious joint venture.

 

The new Axis of Evil: Putin and Trump are tag-teaming to carve up the world


 

 Russia’s Putin says it would be a ‘profound mistake’ to dismiss Trump’s push for Greenland

“In short, the United States has serious plans regarding Greenland. These plans have long historical roots, as I have just mentioned, and it is obvious that the United States will continue to consistently advance its geo-strategic, military-political and economic interests in the Arctic,” Putin said.

 

Tuesday, March 18, 2025

Mad King Ludwig flies into a rage all because a judge told him Nay Nay

Ordinarily after successfully pulling off such a deportation coup, which may or may not be legal, you would think Trump would be gloating, but you would be wrong.

Nothing is ever good enough. He is never satisfied. He is never secure.

"He who is the real tyrant," said Plato, "whatever men may think, is the real slave, and is obliged to practise the greatest adulation and servility, and to be the flatterer of the vilest of mankind."
 

 
 
"He has desires which he is utterly unable to satisfy, and has more wants than any one, and is truly poor, if you know how to inspect the whole soul of him: all his life long he is beset with fear and is full of convulsions, and distractions, even as the State which he resembles."

 


Friday, March 14, 2025

Trump lets Putin select America's negotiating team, removes Keith Kellogg from Ukraine-Russia negotiations after objections from Putin, objections which may have been transmitted by Steve Witkoff

 Kremlin told U.S. it didn't want Trump's Ukraine-Russia envoy at peace talks

President Donald Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia was excluded from high-level talks on ending the war after the Kremlin said it didn't want him there, a U.S. administration official and a Russian official told NBC News. 

Retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg was conspicuously absent from two recent summits in Saudi Arabia — one with Russian officials and the other with Ukrainians — even though the talks come under his remit.

“Together,” Trump said in announcing Kellogg’s nomination in November, “we will secure PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH.”

But Kellogg did not attend U.S.-Russia talks in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, on Feb. 18. Russian President Vladimir Putin thought he was too pro-Ukraine, a senior Russian official with direct knowledge of the Kremlin’s thinking told NBC News. ...  

Thursday, March 13, 2025

Hey look! Root causes are back in the news again after a brief hiatus

 The root cause of the Ukraine war is Vladimir Putin and the root cause of the illegal immigration problem was Joe Biden.

 



 

Thursday, March 6, 2025

Putin launches ballistic missile at hotel in Zelenskyy's hometown, kills four after Trump turns off warning technology

 ... Ukraine's air force reported 112 drones and two missiles launched into the country overnight, with 68 drones shot down and 43 lost in flight.

The air force reported damage in the Kharkiv, Sumy, Odesa and Dnipropetrovsk regions.

In Dnipropetrovsk, a ballistic missile hit a hotel in the city of Kryvyi Rih -- Zelenskyy's hometown.

"A ballistic missile struck an ordinary hotel," the president wrote on social media. Four people were killed with more than 30 others injured, he added. The attack came shortly after a group of foreign humanitarian volunteers checked into the hotel, Zelenskyy said. None were hurt.

Sources told ABC News that two U.S. citizens were among the volunteers who survived the strike, working for the Charity fund Freedom Trust and Ukraine Relief organization. ...

U.S. intelligence sharing with Ukraine had allowed Kyiv to give warnings to targeted areas ahead of Russian drone and missile strikes, tracking Russian aircraft taking off, drones being launched and missiles being fired. ...

 

Monday, March 3, 2025

The Current Big Lie: There was an agreement in 1991 when the Soviet Union fell apart that prevented former Eastern bloc countries from joining NATO

 

‘There was no promise not to enlarge NATO’ - Harvard Law School

Mar 16, 2022 By Jeff Neal

When President George H.W. Bush sat down with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to negotiate the peaceful end of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany, former Under Secretary of State Robert Zoellick ’81 was in the room where it happened.

During the 1990 summit, Zoellick says President Gorbachev accepted the idea of German unification within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, based on the principle that every country should freely choose its own alliances.

“I was in those meetings, and Gorbachev has [also] said there was no promise not to enlarge NATO,” Zoellick recalls. Soviet Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, later president of Georgia, concurred, he says. Nor does the treaty on Germany’s unification include a limit on NATO enlargement. Those facts have undermined one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s justifications for invading Ukraine — that the United States had agreed that former Warsaw Pact nations would never become part of the North Atlantic security alliance.

Zoellick, a former deputy and undersecretary of state, deputy White House chief of staff, U.S. trade representative, and World Bank president, shared his recollections about the Cold War’s end and its ties to the ongoing war in Ukraine as part of a broader conversation with Harvard Law Today about the 75th anniversary of the Truman Doctrine, an American foreign policy aimed at containing Soviet expansion following World War II.

He is the author of “America in the Word: A History of U.S. Diplomacy and Foreign Policy.” An alumnus of both Harvard Law School and Harvard Kennedy School, where he is a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Zoellick believes Putin’s false claim about NATO enlargement is part of a disinformation campaign by the former KGB agent to mask his true intentions.

Zoellick vividly recalls the White House meeting he attended nearly three decades ago in which Bush asked Gorbachev if he agreed with the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe principle that nations are free to ally with others as they see fit. When Gorbachev said yes, he says, the Soviet leader’s “own colleagues at the table visibly separated themselves.”

Sensing the import of the possible breakthrough, he says a colleague at the meeting, Robert Blackwill, sent him a note checking what they had heard and asking if they should ask Bush to repeat the question. “Gorbachev agreed again,” Zoellick recalls, to the principle that Germany could choose to enter NATO.

“The reality was that, in 1989-90, most people, and certainly the Soviets, weren’t focusing on whether the Eastern European countries would become part of NATO,” Zoellick says. Knowing Soviet and Russian diplomacy, he believes Moscow would have demanded assurances in writing if it believed the U.S. had made such a promise. And even in 1996, when President Bill Clinton welcomed former Warsaw Pact nations to join NATO, he says that, “[o]ne of the German diplomats involved told me that as they discussed the enlargement with the Russians, no Russian raised the argument that there had been a promise not to enlarge.”

But if the West never gave the promise Putin has used to explain his decision to invade Ukraine, what does Zoellick think motivates the Russian president’s decision to inflict death and destruction on one of Russia’s nearest neighbors? “Putin does not see Ukraine as an independent and sovereign state,” he says. “He has a view of Russian history where the Rus [the medieval ancestors of the people who came to form Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine] began in Kyiv. He believes that they are all Russians, living in a greater Russia. And I think at age 69, Putin feels that this is a question not only of Russian history, but his place in Russian history.”

Zoellick says that when Putin’s earlier attacks in the Crimea and country’s eastern regions failed to halt Ukraine’s drift towards the West, the Russian leader believed he had no other choice but to invade. “That’s his motivation. And I think we need to be aware that he’s going to double down. The resilience and resolve of the Ukrainian people to resist has been a surprise to him and everybody else. I don’t think he’s going to ultimately be successful. In addition to today’s brutal battles, Russia faces a difficult occupation and insurgency, even if it can seize cities and territory.”

The experienced diplomat also credits Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with rallying the Ukrainian people by refusing to flee Kyiv and through adept use of social media and language.

“We’re seeing that the skills that he developed as an entertainer and a communicator can be used in different ways, just as Ronald Reagan did,” he says. “It does raise a concern that, if something happens to Zelensky, what will that do to morale? Will he be a martyr or will his loss break the public will?”

Zoellick also notes that, as the war in Ukraine has garnered the world’s attention, many of the questions being asked today about the West’s relationship with Russia are similar to those he had dealt with at the end of the Cold War, including “Russia’s sense of whether it feels like a great power or threatened by NATO … those are the issues that are at very much at play in dealing with Ukraine.”

“Can Russia forge peaceful, constructive ties with the West?” he asks. “Failed economic and political reforms left Russia behind. Its economy depends on energy production. Putin played off public frustrations, but many Russians don’t want war and isolation.”

When thinking about global diplomacy and the factors that might have led to the Russian invasion, Zoellick harkens back to a comment made by his boss for eight years, James Baker, who served both as secretary of state and the treasury, as well as White House chief of staff: “As you address the problems of one era, you’re often planting the seeds for the next set of challenges. History doesn’t stop.”

More than 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Zoellick says the legacy of decisions made at the end of the Cold War are echoing throughout Europe today: “Would we keep NATO alive? Would it enlarge into Central and Eastern Europe? How far? What would be the effects on Russia of its loss of empire?”

“That leaves the question of whether the U.S. could have avoided Russia’s turn,” he says. The answer, he believes, depended on Russia’s choices. “Certainly, we wouldn’t have wanted East and West Germany to remain divided.” The related questions are many: What if Eastern European countries had been barred from joining NATO and therefore remained, like Ukraine, outside the western security umbrella? And how would they react to the Russian threat and being left again as “lands between” Germany and Russia? The U.S. and Europe, he notes, offered Russia partnerships, but Russia felt humiliated by the loss of its empire.

“I was the U.S. negotiator for German unification,” he says. “We wanted to make sure that a democratic Germany was unified in NATO. I don’t think anybody would think that’s a bad idea today. And if anything, we’re now seeing Germany stepping up to a security role for NATO and the European Union.”

In 1989-90, Zoellick was also focused on the idea that Poland — long subject to invasions by Russia and Germany — should be able to eventually join NATO. He made sure that the treaty on German unification kept that possibility open. “Given Putin’s behavior, can you imagine what the effect would be on Poland today if it weren’t in NATO? I think it’s wise to have Poland and Germany on the same side. The Baltic countries were a tougher choice for NATO, not because they don’t deserve the security, but they’re very hard to defend.” Nevertheless, he adds, because the Baltic states are now NATO members, he believes we must “take serious steps to defend them from both direct and hybrid threats.”

Ultimately, he believes supporting Ukraine economically and supplying arms for self-defense, rather than opening the potential for eventual NATO membership, would have been a better approach than the one the West has taken in recent years.

“If NATO gives a security guarantee, it has to mean it,” he says. “It has to be serious about providing deterrence under Article Five of the North Atlantic Alliance treaty. … I support Ukraine’s economic reforms and its democracy, [but] I doubted that the American people were ultimately willing to fight for Ukraine. The worst thing to do was to suggest Ukraine might join NATO, but without a serious pathway to membership.”

The U.S., he adds, “isn’t going to defend everybody all the time, everywhere in the world; we have to know what we will and won’t defend. Having said that, I think the Obama and Trump administrations erred by not giving more military support to Ukraine. I believe that we should help the Ukrainians defend themselves. But those are the exact issues debated today.”

https://hls.harvard.edu/today/there-was-no-promise-not-to-enlarge-nato/

Sunday, March 2, 2025

Elon Musk 1940: Londoners keep dying because Winston Churchill refuses to make peace with Hitler lol

 


Imagine FDR telling Churchill in August 1941 to make peace with Hitler and fork over Britain's coal to America


 

A Day of American Infamy

Bret Stephens, The New York Times

... If Roosevelt had told Churchill to sue for peace on any terms with Adolf Hitler and to fork over Britain’s coal reserves to the United States in exchange for no American security guarantees, it might have approximated what Trump did to Zelensky. Whatever one might say about how Zelensky played his cards poorly — either by failing to behave with the degree of all-fours sycophancy that Trump demands or to maintain his composure in the face of JD Vance’s disingenuous provocations — this was a day of American infamy. ...


Saturday, March 1, 2025

Lindsey Grahamnesty epitomizes everything that's gone wrong with the GOP and America generally: America's interests abroad are purely about money, not at all about freedom


 

John McCain would not be happy with his old friend. McCain was a main agitator for freedom in Ukraine and its alliance with the West. The policy wisdom of that was controversial, but it wasn't framed as purely economic.

Lindsey used to be for freedom in Ukraine like McCain. Lindsey used to be an immigration liberal who advocated for amnesty. Now he's a suck-up to Trump as bad as Marco Rubio, who also used to talk about the old American values preached by Ronald Reagan.

They are shapeshifters all, just like the formerly NeverTrump J. D. Vance.

You cannot trust any of these people any more than we can trust Vladimir Putin. 

Lindsey Graham here:

I told Zelensky we'll talk about security guarantees. We'll talk about ceasefires and how the war ends. This is a process. You have a new relationship with America, a 500 billion, half trillion, dollar deal that President Trump is proud of that gives us an interest worth defending.      

In other words, if it's not about money it's not worth defending.

 

Thy money perish with thee.

-- Acts 8:20

Friday, February 28, 2025

Trump-Vance orchestrate an ambush of Zelenskyy, and when they are bested in the debate by Zelenskyy, Vance accuses Zelenskyy of orchestrating it for the media

 The chutzpah is amazing.

This is the moment when the whole meeting descended into chaos and hurtled toward failure.

Here Zelenskyy explains how Ukraine tried diplomacy with Putin after Putin took Crimea in 2014, but Putin broke the agreements they made.

J. D. Vance then attacked Zelenskyy, as if Zelenskyy had orchestrated this media shit show in the first place to make him look bad.

But J. D. looked bad all by himself. He didn't need any help at all.

What a disgrace.