Sickening. Shameful. And in the
end, useless. Those were the words that came to mind when we watched the Alaska
Summit unfold. On our screens, a blood-soaked dictator and war criminal
received a royal welcome in the land of the free — as his attack drones headed
for [Ukrainian] cities.
In the lead-up to the meeting in Alaska, U.S. President Donald Trump declared he
wanted a “ceasefire today” and that his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin
would face “severe consequences” if he didn't go for it.
Yet after a 2.5-hour closed-door
meeting, Trump and Putin emerged to share… nothing. “Progress” was made and some “understanding” reached, but the two
didn’t come to an agreement on “the most significant point” — clearly, Ukraine.
Trump didn’t get what he wanted. But Putin? He sure did. From the moment he stepped off the
plane on U.S. soil, the Russian dictator was beaming. No longer an
international pariah, he was finally getting accepted – and respected — by the
leader of the free world. Trump’s predecessor once called Putin a murderer;
Trump offered him a king’s welcome.
Trump greeted Putin with a red
carpet, warm handshakes, a flyover of U.S. bombers, and a backseat limo ride. The
chummy display stood in stark contrast to Trump’s hostile reception of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office six months ago. Ukraine’s
president endured a public shaming. Russia’s was pampered. Both episodes were
disgraceful.
Trump seemed to believe that a
warm meeting could appease Putin and make a ceasefire more likely. But there’s
a lesson Trump still hasn’t learned: The Russian leader doesn’t really make
deals — he takes. He takes what is offered to him and then takes some more —
he keeps taking until stopped by force. That is the Russian art of the deal.
Trump fails to grasp that Putin
isn’t transactional about Ukraine — he is messianic. He wants Ukraine for
Russia, period. For Putin and his inner circle, Ukraine’s independence is an
accident, and they are correcting it.
The Russian delegation made no
effort to hide their mockery of the talks. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov
arrived in Alaska wearing a USSR sweatshirt — bluntly asserting Russia’s claim
on Ukraine. Kremlin journalists wrote about how they were served chicken Kyiv
on the government plane to Alaska — a not-so-subtle hint that Ukraine was
“cooked.” The Russians clearly never took the “peace talks” seriously.
And there was another reason
behind Putin’s grin in Alaska. The Russian dictator was gloating because of how
unsettling the meeting was for all U.S. allies, far beyond Ukraine. It sent a
discomfiting signal to the viewers across the pond. And strategically, undermining the
transatlantic alliance is an even more important Russian objective than taking
control of Ukraine.
Putin returns from the Alaska
Summit with a win — but not a sweeping victory he could have had. If the two
presidents failed to reach an agreement, it means that, despite all the
chumminess on display, Trump didn’t approve of Russia’s absurd demands for
Ukraine — demands that amount to Kyiv’s capitulation.
Trump said he hopes to see Putin
again soon. If the U.S. president doesn’t want to hand the next meeting to
Russia as well, he needs to let Ukraine join the table. And he must position
himself as an ally of Ukraine, not as a referee between two fighting sides.
Only then might we avoid another
scene in which the leader of the free world indulges a bloody dictator — in the
name of 340 million Americans. After all, agreements with Russia don’t live
long. But the images of the U.S. military honor guards kneeling to roll out the
red carpet for a murderer? Those will last. And no one will remember this
meeting longer — or more vividly — than Ukrainians.
-The Kyiv Independent
Vlad gets red carpet, and Trump gets Epstein off the front pages. A submissive, groveling, obsequious Donald Trump was humiliated yesterday afternoon by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. The American president, accused by multiple women and teenage girls of raping or sexually assaulting them, joined the indicted war criminal and Russian president who has kidnapped over 100,000 children from Ukraine and sold most of them into God-only-knows-what in Russia. It was a disgusting, pathetic display of the moral collapse that is Donald Trump.
As Senator Richard Blumenthal said: “[M]y stomach turned when I heard the president of the United States characterize Vladimir Putin as his fabulously good friend. Vladimir Putin is a war criminal. He has directed soldiers to kill women and children and bury them in mass graves. He’s kidnapped children as we speak. The reality on the ground is that people are bleeding and dying all around Ukraine because Putin is continuing to bomb them.
And at the front, he’s continuing to pummel the brave Ukrainian soldiers who are defending the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, the town of Pokrovsk.” But Trump did succeed in getting Jeffrey Epstein off the front pages for several days. Will a discussion of the possibility that Trump was joining Epstein in raping young girls return to media prominence? Or has Trump succeeded in making it “old news”? Meanwhile, Putin gets a status boost all around the world as America is once again placed in the gutter by Donald Trump.
-Thom
Hartmann
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.