Writes President Trump, at Truth Social.
That made me want to quote this passage from Trump's inaugural address: "We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end. And, perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into. My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier. That's what I want to be. A peacemaker and a unifier." And: "We will be a nation like no other — full of compassion, courage and exceptionalism. Our power will stop all wars and bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent, and totally unpredictable."
The world has been totally unpredictable — that reminds me of something I saw in this new NYT article: "In Rare Criticism, Trump Says Putin Is ‘Destroying Russia’/President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia praised President Trump’s second inauguration, but the American leader did not return the compliment."
“He can’t be thrilled, he’s not doing so well,” Mr. Trump told reporters Monday evening, referring to Mr. Putin’s war. “Russia is bigger, they have more soldiers to lose, but that’s no way to run a country.”... [C]elebrations of Mr. Trump’s return to the White House have been muted in Russia in recent months: Russian officials know that Mr. Trump is unpredictable....
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Art of the Deal is in motion.
The sun and the wind had a bet as to who could strip a man of his coat. The wind went first, huffing and blowing with great force, but alas the man held onto his coat. Then the sun took his turn and so warmed the !an he removed his coat.
The message to Putin, a deal can be had, don't be a harass and you can get most of what you originally wanted.
Trump will find something that Putin wants, to add to the deal.
Of everything I've read, A) Ukrainian NATO membership now or in the future is a non-starter and B) Russia will not be giving up any Donbass or DPR territory won on the ground. Aside from that, I think everything is negotiable.
Russian concert audiences don't clap at the wrong time, is one mark of intelligence.
That proves it! He's Putin's puppet! Schiff was right all along.
Tarriff instead of landmine! Sign me up for that solution.
No, message to Putin is "a deal can be had, and let you step back from getting shot in the back"
It is enjoyable to watch the negotiator in action.
Trump: "We will be a nation like no other — full of compassion, courage and exceptionalism." EXCEPTIONALISM! White supremacy code!
Neither of those are acceptable conditions.
Putin has to lose for starting a war, or else he will start more wars.
The proper play is to give Ukraine more weapons to hurt Russia more, and keep on doing it until Russia decides that war against the neighbors is a bad idea.
They can take over Belarus. Ukraine must be off the table
A stable genius. And we must never forget the number of dead - on both sides _ who died because of Biden's incompetence.
...Then Trump will fail in ending the war. After the Minsk debacle Putin and Russia view America and especially NATO as 'agreement incapable'. Guess we'll all see where the art in this deal really lies, won't we.
The incompetence of the Biden Administration is getting the exposure it deserves.
Trump is making Putin an offer he can't refuse.
Sure Russia can give up territory, for the right bargain. They fell back from the city of Kherson and can't seriously retake it, much less have a serious shot at Odessa. If they could have taken over Zapo, they would have done it at some point inside three years. Yes, they destroyed the Ukrainian army, but now the priority is making sure NATO isn't able to unify and "intervene." Basically any treaty aside from total Russian capitulation would snap apart NATO and even the EU. Conversely, maximalist demands risk WWIII. Relaxing economic sanctions is so good for Russia and MAGA America, while being an absolute disaster for globalists and Banderites, that both sides should be incredibly eager for it no matter what their public face is.
But I am not even remotely worried. President Trump and VVP know how to play this game, even if Medvedev is a "hardliner" and the neocons want to persuade Trump away from peace.
He will throw Putin a bone and he will sprinkle Ukraine with the rough equivalent of that poop powder in your dog catalog.
"Putin has to lose for starting a war, or else he will start more wars."
He already has lost - perhaps up to 1M men, and the Russian economy is in shambles. Trump pointing that out so plainly struck me as brilliant. (And Trump was supposed to be the dumb, rambunctious, fascist dictator type. Ha!)
Or do you think that "Putin losing" can only mean the west should back Ukraine to move eastward, overrun Russia, take over Moscow, and install a democracy? That's absurd.
I expect Putin to refuse it. We will see what happens next.
The bully pulpit in action.
There are a million reasons why any proposed treaty to end the war will never work. But if the prospect is not even on the table, there will never be an end to the war. Trump says lets get this done, and that the full power of the US (including the power to make things unpleasant for Putin) will be in service to that end.
Sure, settling that war would be great but the real issue is being tackled on page 1 by today's San Francisco Chronicle. Front page headline: Climate Change Impacting Time Itself. Take that, Einstein. Subhead: Research suggests polar ice melt is slowing Earth's faster spin.
The world has not been unpredictable. Wesley Clark listed all of the wars we were going to fight right after the fall of the USSR, and sure enough, he got them right. But remember, we blundered into each one. Mika's dad wrote the book The Grand Chessboard, which proposed using Ukraine to collapse the Russian Federation at a time when the Maidan people were a minority, and the population of Ukraine strongly favored good relations with Russia and rejected NATO membership. And if you read Brzezinski's book, none of the wars we have been involved in since would have come as a surprise to you either.
I think that Trump is woefully uninformed, well, actually, I think that he is being lied to by people who do not want this war to end, and there are a lot of them. I hope he figures it out.
If Putin makes a bad deal for Russia, he will be deposed, and he knows it, just like he would have been had he allowed Ukraine to waltz in to NATO. This is an existential war for the Russian Federation, and they will take a lot more pain before they accede to having NATO nukes installed in Ukraine, which would lead to the collapse of Russia.
That's how he is talking. But I don't see how anything less than a UN Security Council resolution on Ukraine's neutrality is going to work for starters. Ukraine and the US have a history of simply ignoring inconvenient treaties with Russia. So there is the problem of the US having lied so many times that trust is non-existent.
"Neither of those are acceptable conditions."
So how many more Ukrainians have to die over the expansion of NATO. Here is one of Biden's advisors on the war talking about the strategizing at the start:
“We were deliberately not talking about the territorial parameters,” says Eric Green, who served on Biden’s National Security Council at the time, overseeing Russia policy. The U.S., in other words, made no promise to help Ukraine recover all of the land Russia had occupied, and certainly not the vast territories in eastern Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula taken in its initial invasion in 2014. The reason was simple, Green says: in the White House’s view, doing so was beyond Ukraine’s ability, even with robust help from the West. “That was not going to be a success story ultimately. The more important objective was for Ukraine to survive as a sovereign, democratic country free to pursue integration with the West.” —Time
https://time.com/7207661/bidens-ukraine-win-zelensky-loss/
In other words, we never believed that Ukraine could win.
Casualty figures for that conflict are all over the place. I'm not sure I believe any of them, suffice to say that Ukraine can absorb them orders of magnitude less than Russia can. Both men and women, Ukraine has lost a generation both in those buried in its soil and those that will never return to it. And saying the Russian economy is in tatters is like talking about bouncing rubble. It's always on the verge of solvency and your average Russian barely notices or cares until it impacts staple prices at the market.
Never underestimate the Russian ability to countenance suffering. Few nations on earth have their expertise, even if it is mostly self-inflicted.
"Putin has to lose for starting a war, or else he will start more wars."
Hmmm. Does that also apply to Victoria Nuland? where is Vicky, anyway? Enjoying her well-earned pension?
Its the USA/Ukraine which killed the deal in April 22. And its the USA/Ukraine that has kept the war going. Until recently Zelensky has demanded Russia evacuate all Ukrainian territory, and absurd non-starter.
Reality No 1 - Russia will never give back the territory its taken. Those places have been bought with Russian blood and are officially part of Russia.
Reality No. 2- Putin will never accept Ukraine in NATO. Nor more then we would accept a Mexico with a large army allied to Russia/China.
What Russia will give up other than that I don't know. Sad if the war goes on. But it could be this thing will never end till Zelensky is gone and Russia has all the territory east of the Dneiper.
Hard to imagine any solution that does not also permanently disarm what's left of Ukraine, and lift sanctions. The experience of the Minsk Accords is too strong for Putin to be able to trust NATO, and it would be foolishness for Trump not to do something to bring back Putin in line with the US and away from China. Yes, it was a stupid war. Let's not have a stupid peace.
From an American standpoint its simply irrelevant who controls the Donbass or whether Russia dominates Ukraine. Its not our dog, not our fight. We should never have pushed the Russians with NATO expansion and arming Ukraine. Putin's not our enemy. Just more imperial overreach.
BTW, Trump is doing his usual of trick of getting things wrong so people will notice the tweet. The USSR did not lose 60 million. Probably more like 20 million. And the 800000 lost in the current war, includes wounded. And that's still too high.
If Trump lets Russia keep the eastern Russian provinces of Ukraine, keep the Black Sea Ports, and says Ukraine will not join NATO... what does Putin have to lose? Who gives a shit if Russia keeps the eastern provinces? Wouldn't have happened if Kamalama ding dong and Crooked Joe left things alone. But, they chose to boke the bear, and punch the tar baby flirting with Ukraine joining NATO.
I thought the official accepted figure was 27 Million Soviet citizens.
So are you saying that Trump intentionally lies just so people will notice him. That is fucking pathetic.
Simply put by Trump and will be simply answered by Putin, "Sure, we want lasting peace, so we need solid guarantees of NO NATO in Ukraine and to keep the territories we took". Then the games may begin.
Trump can't pay the political price that will come with Putin's demands. So the burden of acceptance will be put squarely on Ukraine. Ukraine would have to amend the Constitution to satisfy any of those Russian demands, which is not likely to happen at all. Also keep in mind that the British will be constantly interfering and undermining any deals that do not result in serious Russian humiliation.
We ( the west ) forced Russia into this war by declaring Ukraine would be part of nato. After encroaching on his sphere of influence for decades. We forced it, probably to make money for Biden and the deep state. Ukraine into nato is a non-starter ( as it should be ) for Russia.
Glad to hear Trump actually criticize Putin for once.
It'll be interesting to see how Trump's message that Russia's economy is failing because of the war in Ukraine — which is entirely correct — will be received in Russia. Doubtless there are thousands of Russians following Trump on Truth Social and there is already discontent among the oligarchs about the endless war and its economic devastation.
Putin is very unlikely to budge in his demands, however. The Ukraine war is his legacy and to back away from his maximalist demands would be to admit failure. But in addition to keeping the Russian economy afloat, and continuing to fuel the Russian war machine, Putin also has the increasingly difficult task of keeping his power base intact. It'll be three years next month since the start of the war, and even Russians eventually grow tired of wars that bring nothing but lower standards of living.
Sorry you're so disappointed the death in Ukraine is about to end Freder and US tax resources can be turned toward home to help US citizens. I realize foreign death and domestic suffering have been very stimulating for your TDS.
Incoming !!!!!
Freder. What is really pathetic are chicken hawk libs like you who would rather another 100K plus Russian and Ukrainian soldiers die, so Trump doesn't get credit for a brokered peace deal a promised. Actually pretty sick.
Tariffs on the zero goods sold by Russia to the USA? How does that work?
One thing that most people don't realize is that the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, as well as Zaporzhizhia and Crimea, were all either an integral part of Russia or firmly in Russia's orbit within living memory. They were colonized by Czarist Russia in the 18th and 19th Centuries after being seized from the Turks by Catherine the Great.
These areas were part of what was called the "Wild Fields" and subsequently Novorossiya (New Russia). While there were some Ukrainians in the mix of colonists, from what is now Western Ukraine, they were only one ethnic group among many, dominated by Russians.
The people there still mostly speak Russian rather than Ukrainian, and before the war, they did not share Western Ukraine's pro-European/pro-NATO orientation. I forget why Stalin decided that these peoples and territories should be made part of Ukraine, but between the 1930's and 1950's this was done, and all of these regions were assigned to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
The resistance to Western Ukrainian domination came to a head in 2014 when Crimea was seized and pro-Russian revolutionaries in the other oblasts declared independence, and from that time until the main Russian invasion in 2022, there was ongoing conflict that at times included artillery shelling by the Ukrainian armed forces that killed civilians in pro-Russian areas.
All of this is not to pardon Putin or condemn the Ukrainians, but merely to point out that this war did not arise de novo when Putin woke up on the wrong side of the bed one morning and decided to become an imperialist. If the principle of self-determination of distinct peoples is to have any validity, then the wishes of the Russian-speaking population of Eastern Ukraine needs to be taken seriously in any final settlement that ends the war.
Putin is very unlikely to budge in his demands, however.
I expect that Putin is at least as smart as you are, and if you can see the problem, so can he. I bet even DJT can see it. The key to the brokered deal is to find the best outcome for both sides. Each will start with their "best" price, but eventually will compromise until they realize the deal is better than the alternative. If there is no deal, the one side thinks the alternative is better. Change that calculus and move the deal forward. Unlike Hamas, Russia does not get the benefit of a favorable press, so will more likely deal.
Yeah, the walls are closing in on Putin. Just like they were for Trump.
In truth, the best deal is so obviously great for both sides- supercharge the global economy while leaving the EU and American globalists totally humiliated and discredited- that I'll be gobsmacked if Presidents Trump and Putin don't drive hard towards it. Literally everything else is tough guy talk to appease certain demographics, and neither man genuinely cares about "Ukrainian independence" or most of the other side issues.
Both want prosperity, and they're likely to get it.
As Jaq says, the western allies have been lying to Russia for a long time. They admitted the previous agreement was just a phony, used to buy time so they could arm Ukraine Putin wont accept any "Guarantees" or "Promises" unless he was concrete reasons to do so.
Personally, I think Putin has been far too nice in this war. He imagined after the intitial blitzkrieg, Zelensky would negotiate and that would be that. But then Zelensky back out of the April 22 deal, due to Western promises of zillions in aid, military and otherwise. And here we are, almost 3 years later.
He should bite the bullett, call up enough men, and go all the way to the Dnieper. Ukraine would then be a rump state. Harmless to Russia. And no more need to believe in Western promises.
Right, all the products Russia sells to the United States.
Never clap at concerts. Its a sign of weakness.
The idea that Ukraine joining NATO would mean putting US nukes there is simply insane. Most NATO countries have no nukes in them, and, as I have pointed out before, Latvia is almost as close to Moscow as Ukraine is. (And Estonia and Finland are far closer to St. Petersburg, Putin's home town, than Ukraine is.) If we wanted to put nukes in NATO countries on the Russian border, we wouldn't need Ukraine: we could put them in Latvia. But we haven't, and we won't. This is, as usual, bullshit Russian propaganda.
It's also a clear case of projection, since Russia has been putting nukes in Belarus over the last year or so. As usual, Putin accuses the West of what he is doing, and his lapdogs here lap it up. (Guess that's why they call them "lap" dogs!)
Hassayamper said
“ I forget why Stalin decided that these peoples and territories should be made part of Ukraine, but between the 1930's and 1950's this was done, and all of these regions were assigned to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.”
Probably to stabilize public opinion and keep Ukraine loyal.
RSP: "until it impacts staple prices at the market"? It's already doing that, on a huge scale. They've been locking butter up to avoid shoplifters for months now, and have started doing that with cheese. Inflation is soaring, the Sovereign Wealth Fund is melting away, airplanes and trains are falling apart, and the look on top economist Elvira Nabiullina's face is grimmer every month.
The fact is that Biden's attempt to preserve Russia as a single state is almost certain to fail. He (or Sullivan, or whoever) has been trying to keep Ukraine from losing while also keeping Russia from losing, so it won't collapse, but that has only made things worse. A short sharp Ukrainian victory a year or two ago would have been the death of Putin, but would have kept Russia in one piece. Collapse, and a massive civil war between newly independent provinces, seems inevitable now.
Trump should make Cuba part of the negotiation.
The other thing to remember is that the Ukrainian government basically has no agency - it is completely dependent on, and is thus subservient to, the wishes of its funders, namely the US and the EU. Whatever deal is made will meet the interests of those groups only, and this deal may or may not include an interest in maintaining some sort of fig leaf to appease critical political constituencies whose political future would be damaged by the "We abandoned Ukraine" narrative, and that does not necessarily include Zelensky's government. But let's also be clear - they were always pawns and that was always going to be the outcome once the Neocons lost their authority and once the rest of the world got fed up with the current narrative. What a tragedy.
"Collapse, and a massive civil war between newly independent provinces, seems inevitable now."
I've screencapped this so we can have a follow-up discussion in 5 years when nothing's happened.
Here's Estonian @wartranslated on Twitter translating Russian reactions to Trump's statement - short version: they're not happy (link with pictures of their actual words):
"Today's rather sharp statement from Trump has been interpreted by Russian radicals not only as an ultimatum but also as a direct insult. They are convinced that their patron Putin would never agree to any concessions, which in their eyes means Trump is deliberately sabotaging the negotiations. As a result, Russians are furious, since they’ve been unable to achieve a breakthrough on the frontlines. Even the full occupation of the four claimed regions remains a distant and uncertain goal, if it’s even achievable at all.
"Trump didn’t bother to outline a plausible scenario for such a deal. Surely, he must understand that Putin cannot simply stop the war—his hordes have no alternative but to keep going forward. No one wants them back in russia."
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