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Monday, June 22, 2026
"I want to tell you a bit about what it’s like to grow up in a country at war"
Sunday, May 31, 2026
A quick overview of the most important developments in Ukraine this week
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Wednesday, May 13, 2026
Are the Russian Attacks on Ukraine Coming to an End?
Pausing, turning and pointing, like hounds catching a new
scent, Europe’s leaders are
picking up a blood trail from the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin’s forces
were once the hunters – now they are bleeding and Ukraine has the
whiff of victory in its nose.
In the latest sign that Ukraine’s systematic new policy of trying to kill at least 50,000 Russians a month is working, Putin has told his people that the end of the war he started is near. And, in an act that was both desperate and doomed, he suggested that Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor, could act as Europe’s envoy in talks.
A longstanding ally and friend of Russia’s president, the former German chancellor has also had deep ties to Russian companies, like the oil giant Gazprom. The idea of Schröder being a European envoy was immediately dismissed. The reaction is best summed up by Kaja Kallas, the EU foreign policy chief.
“It’s clear why Putin wants him to be the person – so that actually ... he would be sitting on both sides of the table. If we give the right to Russia to appoint a negotiator on our behalf ... that would not be very wise.” In fact, there is every sign that this was a desperate act from the Russian leader. He has enjoyed the backing of the Trump administration, which has adopted Russia’s side in previous talks and cut all military aid to Kyiv for over a year. But his forces have stalled and have lost ground in his campaign to take Ukraine.
On the front lines, there has been a steady growth in
Ukrainian resolve during the winter. It has moved into outright confidence
among many soldiers who have enjoyed a turn in their fortunes due to their
dominance in drone warfare and successful long-range attacks deep into
Russia.
Ukraine controls the Black Sea, where it defeated
the Russian navy more than two years ago.
Now,
Putin’s own shows of strength are muted affairs. His last, the 9 May
Victory Parade to mark Russia’s triumph in the Second World War, went ahead
only after he had agreed a ceasefire with Kyiv. He was rightly fearful that
Ukraine’s home-made missiles and drones were capable of raining down on his
parade.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, mocked his enemy by issuing a decree, including the Red Square coordinates, ordering his forces to observe a ceasefire in a parody of a Kremlin-style order from the top. “I believe that things have started to change after the harsh winter. We have survived one of the most difficult winters in our history, despite Russia’s desperate attempts to destroy our critical infrastructure,” said Oleksandr Merezhko, chair of the foreign affairs committee in the Ukrainian parliament.
“On the front, Putin has failed and, strategically, he is losing. Ukraine has more deep strikes into the Russian territory, which is rather humiliating for Putin and Russia.” Ukraine has been hitting refineries and airfields more than 1,000km inside Russia, taking on targets around Moscow and conducting a series of assassinations of generals in Putin’s army inside the capital.
Since the beginning of this year, the level of medium-range attacks by Ukraine against Russian logistics in occupied territory has surged by 400 per cent. Ukraine hit 65 logistics and ammunition depots, 33 drone control points and workshops, as well as 17 troop command posts in both occupied Ukraine and in Russian border regions, Kyiv’s Ministry of Defence said.
The results have been incremental gains, like the reported recapture of Kupyansk, a strategic town on the Donetsk River, where Russian forces were cut off and surrounded. They have also been crucial in grinding down Russian air defences to allow Ukraine’s long-range Flamingo missile to hit military-industrial sites, including defence manufacturing facilities in the city of Cheboksary, more than 1,000 km deep inside Russia.
Ukraine’s aim is to collapse the Russian army without
having to assault it head on. The families of Russian soldiers are paid
$165,000 (£122,000) compensation if the soldiers are killed. If Ukraine manages
to kill 50,000 a month, then Moscow’s bill would be $8.25bn a month.
By wiping out its logistics and drone bases, the aim is
to undermine Moscow’s command and control systems so badly that Russian troops
abandon the fight altogether.
Before Russia’s president claimed that he saw an end to the war soon, the EU’s Kallas had made it clear Europe was not interested in acceding to Moscow’s demands ahead of any talks. “We should not humiliate ourselves by being the demandeurs, ‘Please we beg you to talk to us’, but we should put them in a position where they actually go from pretending to negotiate to actually negotiate,” she said.
Europe is taking a more robust line because it can, due to Ukraine gaining military momentum. And a powerful voice in international affairs. Gregoire Roos, director of Europe and Russia and Eurasia Programmes at Chatham House, said: “Ukraine has stopped presenting itself only as a victim and increasingly presents itself as a security provider. Zelensky is now selling Ukraine’s drone expertise abroad: nearly 20 countries are interested in drone deals with Ukraine, with several agreements already signed, including in the Gulf. “Second, Ukraine has become by far the most innovative and adaptive defence industrial lab in Europe.”
-Sam Kiley, Newsbreak
Wednesday, April 8, 2026
Russia threatens nuclear strike on Ukraine in 48 hours: "Wipe cities off Earth"
Russian state television has issued a chilling warning that nuclear weapons could be deployed to "wipe Ukrainian cities off the face of the earth" and eliminate Volodymyr Zelensky "in his bunker." The alarming threat emerges as Vladimir Putin faces setbacks in the conflict and acknowledges his inability to subdue Ukraine through conventional missiles, drones, and ground forces.
In the broadcast, Putin's propaganda figures brazenly refer to themselves as
the "Nuclear Maniacs Club." Kremlin TV military analyst Col. Mikhail
Khodarenok acknowledged to millions of viewers that Putin's approach over four
years of warfare has not achieved its objectives.
He proposed a threat comparable to the one Donald Trump made to Iran, though the Russian blueprint for destroying Ukraine involves the potential deployment of nuclear weapons. "The Ukrainian leadership will be faced with the question of whether the country will be left in complete ruins, or we move to some kind of peace agreement," he said. "The task isn't solvable with conventional weapons, the ones we have, so perhaps we should switch to special [nuclear] weapons and end this conflict within ten days, by May 1?"
Putin's chief TV propagandist, Vladimir Solovyov, responded: "Welcome to our Nuclear Maniacs Club. I've been calling for this for a long time." Khodarenok - a retired air defense forces commander - stated he no longer supported "caution." "If the [Ukrainian] leadership, the military-political leadership, certain high-ranking officials, political leaders, are hiding in underground bunkers, located at considerable depths... How can they be reached there, except with special weapons...?"
Russian state television has issued a chilling warning that nuclear weapons could be deployed. "For me, the time has come when the use of special weapons should not be considered an out-of-the-ordinary occurrence. "Because the conflict must be ended, ended as quickly as possible. This will save tens of thousands of lives. This will protect our country's infrastructure from attacks." Both he and Solovyov declared, "We don't care" regarding international backlash.
They suggested Ukraine should receive a Trump-style
ultimatum to accept a Moscow-imposed peace agreement, effectively capitulating
to Putin's demands, or face nuclear attacks within 48 hours. Solovyov issued a
stark warning: "Citizens living in Kyiv, Odesa, Mykolaiv, and Kharkiv,
leave your cities immediately.
"They will be wiped off the face of the earth."
-Antonio Scancariello and Will Stewart, Newsbreak, Military
Sunday, March 29, 2026
"The nighttime attack resulted in the deaths of two people and injuries to 12 others, including a nine-year-old boy"
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(Photo by Nina Liashonok/Ukrinform/NurPhoto via Getty
Images)
Sunday, March 15, 2026
A brief update on some of the key events in Ukraine this week
🔥 Large-Scale
Missile and Drone Attacks
Russia carried out another massive wave of missile and drone strikes across
Ukraine this week. According to Ukrainian officials, around 430 drones
and dozens of missiles were launched toward multiple regions,
including Kyiv, Kharkiv, Sumy, Zaporizhzhia, and Dnipro. Many were intercepted
by Ukrainian air defenses, but some strikes damaged homes, schools, and energy
infrastructure, causing casualties and power outages in several regions.
🛡️ Ukrainian
Forces Strike Key Russian Military Facility
Ukraine also carried out a significant strike on a microelectronics
plant in Russia’s Bryansk region that produces critical components
used in Russian missile systems. The facility reportedly supplies parts for
weapons such as the Iskander missile system, which has been used in attacks on
Ukrainian cities. The strike was intended to weaken Russia’s ability to produce
new missiles.
⚔️ Progress on the Front
Lines
Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations in parts of southern
Ukraine, pushing back Russian positions and reclaiming territory in some areas
after weeks of fighting. Military leaders say these operations are aimed at
disrupting Russian supply lines and preventing new offensives.
🌍 Ukraine’s
Experience Helping Allies
Ukraine’s expertise in defending against drone attacks is now helping partners
abroad. Ukrainian defense specialists have been sharing their experience with
countries in the Middle East that are facing similar drone threats —
demonstrating how the knowledge gained from defending Ukraine is contributing
to global security.
Through every challenge, Ukrainians continue to stand strong — defending their country, rebuilding communities, and supporting one another. Thank you for standing with Ukraine. When you wear Ukrainian Apparel, you turn solidarity into action — helping support humanitarian aid, essential equipment, and relief for those who need it most.
Slava Ukraini!
— The Ukrainian Apparel Team
Thursday, March 12, 2026
"Trump is Putin’s toady"
Seven of our American service
members are dead and over 140 wounded because Iran’s military has suddenly
gotten really good at targeting our soldiers, Airmen, and
Marines. News reports say they’ve been able to hit us with such precision
because Russia is using their extraordinary spy satellite, spy plane, and
advanced radar capabilities to help Iran’s military.
The Washington Post, which first reported on this, quoted a Russian military expert as saying that Iran is now “making very precise hits on early-warning radars or over-the-horizon radars,” seeming to validate the concern. The article added: “Iran possesses only a handful of military-grade satellites, and no satellite constellation of its own, which would make imagery provided by Russia’s much more advanced space capabilities highly valuable — particularly as the Kremlin has honed its own targeting after years of war in Ukraine…”
When asked about the reports,
Trump — who’d just returned from the soldiers’ bodies’ dignified transfer —
basically downplayed Russian efforts to hurt Americans, just like he did
when he learned in 2020 that Putin was paying Afghan
insurgents a bounty to kill our soldiers. He pointed out that the US had been sharing intelligence
with Ukraine during the Biden administration, so apparently, according to him,
Russia is justified in helping Iran kill American service
members:
“They’d say we do it against
them. Wouldn’t they say that we do it against them?”
His fellow real estate billionaire, Steve Witkoff (whose sons are making billions with Trump’s sons in the Middle East and has been regularly traveling to Moscow for private meetings with Putin) similarly shrugged off the report, telling CNBC: “I can tell you that yesterday, on the call with [President Trump], the Russians said they have not been sharing. That’s what they said. So, we can take them at their word, but they did say that.” Witkoff later added, “Let’s hope that they’re not sharing.”
Putin himself, though, was
nowhere near as circumspect, saying: “On my part, I want to confirm our unwavering
support of Tehran and our solidarity with our Iranian friends. Russia has been
and will remain the Islamic Republic’s reliable partner.”
As if to confirm that Trump
is Putin’s toady, just last week, in the wake of Iran shutting off the Strait
of Hormuz and cutting oil supplies to Asia and the Subcontinent, our president
signed a waiver to our Russia sanctions so Putin can now sell unlimited amounts
of Russian oil directly to India. Every time Putin says “Jump,” Trump
asks, “How high?” Which raises the question: “Why? Why does Trump always
give Putin whatever he wants and why is he so terrified of speaking out against
him?”
Is it possible that Trump is
actively working for Putin? What if Putin somehow owns him? Or is blackmailing
him? And has been running him as an Russian asset since at least
2017? That sort of treason would be more important than Russian agents
Robert Hanssen (life without parole), Aldrich Ames (life without parole), or
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg (death penalty).
And let’s not forget that
right after Trump won re-election in November of 2024, Russian state TV published explicit nudie pictures of Melania Trump and
their anchors were laughing about it and at Trump. Was this Putin’s first
assertion this cycle that he still owns Donald?
Jack Smith’s case in Florida was
limited to Trump stealing sensitive documents and sharing them on two publicly
known occasions (and didn’t even reference other known acts like Kid Rock’s allegation that Trump showed him Top Secret
maps in the White House: this was apparently a regular thing for Trump).
That said, you can bet your
bottom dollar that the FBI and other agencies worked as hard as they could to
contain the damage done by Trump’s leaving documents that could cause “grave
damage” to America in public places where spies could simply waltz in and take
cell-phone pictures of them by attending a wedding or paying $200,000 for
essentially unlimited access Club membership.
But what if it goes beyond
that? What if Putin has owned him for years? From Russian oligarchs
laundering money through Trump’s operations — real estate is the most common device used worldwide for money laundering
— to keeping him alive in his most difficult times, like those multiple
bankruptcies in the 1990s when he almost lost everything?
Or perhaps blackmailing
him? What if Putin got him the presidency, and he knows that if America
found out for sure, it would destroy him? Or has Epstein’s videos of Trump with
underage girls? Or his own pictures, taken when Trump was in Moscow for one of
his beauty pageants?
Which begs the question:
exactly how much damage might Trump have already done to our nation, and what
does he have planned for the next three years of this second term? And is
he getting ongoing day-to-day instructions from Putin, which explains why he’s
so reluctant to discuss their conversations, as Rachel Maddow recently documented?
In 2019 The Washington
Post revealed that, throughout his last presidency, Donald Trump was
having regular secret phone conversations with Russia’s
President Putin (over 20 have been identified so far, including
one just days before the 2020 election).
The Moscow Project from
the American Progress Action Fund documents more than 270 known contacts between
Russia-linked operatives and members of the Trump campaign and transition team,
as well as at least 38 known meetings just leading up to the 2016 election.
The manager of his 2016
campaign, Paul Manafort — who was previously paid tens of millions by Vladimir
Putin’s people to install a pro-Putin puppet as Ukraine’s president in 2010 —
has admitted that he was regularly feeding secret
inside-campaign strategy and polling information to Russian intelligence via
the oligarch who typically paid him on their behalf. Throughout the
campaign, Manafort let Russian intelligence know where Trump needed help, and
when, and it appears Russia jumped in to social media to provide the needed
help. Trump pardoned Manafort, which got him out of prison and ended any
investigations. He’s still fabulously rich from his work for Russia.
As The New York Times noted in 2020: “[I]nvestigators found enough there to declare that Mr. Manafort created ‘a grave counterintelligence threat’ by sharing inside information about the presidential race with Mr. Kilimnik and the Russian and [pro-Russian] Ukrainian oligarchs whom he served.”
There is no known parallel to
this behavior by any president in American history — one could argue it easily
exceeds Benedict Arnold’s audacity — and bringing documents to Mar-a-Lago was
just the tip of the iceberg.
The Washington Post reported in 2022 that Trump had a habit of carrying
top-secret information that could severely damage our national security,
leaving it in hotel rooms in hostile nations. Was he
bringing these documents with him to sell? Or just to show to leaders or
oligarchs in those countries to impress them? Or because Putin, who has agents
in those countries, told him to? Trump doesn’t put all that effort into
hauling things around unless it’s extraordinarily important to his ego or he
thinks he can make money off them. Or he’s scared.
“Boxes of documents even came
with Trump on foreign travel,” The Post noted, “following him
to hotel rooms around the world — including countries considered foreign
adversaries of the United States.”
When Robert Mueller’s FBI
team tried to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia and his possibly sharing
sensitive military information with them, they were stonewalled. The
Mueller Report identified ten specific instances of Trump himself trying to
obstruct the investigation, including offering the bribe of a pardon to Paul
Manafort, asking FBI Director Comey to “go easy” on General Flynn after his
dinner with Putin, and directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to limit
Mueller’s ability to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.
As the Mueller Report noted:
“The President launched
public attacks on the investigation and individuals involved in it who could
possess evidence adverse to the President, while in private the President
engaged in a series of targeted efforts to control the investigation.
“For instance, the President
attempted to remove the Attorney General; he sought to have Attorney General
Sessions un-recuse himself and limit the investigation; he sought to prevent
public disclosure of information about the June 9, 2016 meeting between
Russians and campaign officials; and he used public forums to attack potential
witnesses who might offer adverse information and to praise witnesses who
declined to cooperate with the government.”
It adds, detailing Trump’s specific Obstruction of Justice crimes: “These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”
There are, after all, credible assertions from American intelligence that
when Trump was elected, members of Russian intelligence and Putin’s inner
circle were literally partying in Moscow, celebrating a victory they
believed they made happen. And apparently Putin and his
intelligence operatives had good reason to be popping the champagne in November
2016. They were quickly paid off in a big way.
In his first months in
office, Trump outed an Israeli spy to the Russian Ambassador in what
he thought was going to be a “secret Oval Office meeting” (the Russians
released the photo to the press), resulting in MOSAD having to “burn”
(relocate, change identity of) that spy.
The undercover agent was
apparently working in Syria that year against the Russians, who were embroiled
in the midst of Assad’s Civil War and indiscriminately bombing Aleppo into
rubble. That, in turn, prompted the CIA to worry that a longtime American
spy buried deep in the Kremlin was similarly vulnerable to Trump handing him
over to Putin.
As CNN noted (when the story leaked two years later): “The source was considered the highest-level source for the US inside the Kremlin, high up in the national security infrastructure, according to the source familiar with the matter and a former senior intelligence official. “According to CNN’s sources, the spy had access to Putin and could even provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk.”
The CIA concluded that the
risk Trump had burned or was about to burn our spy inside the Kremlin was so
great that — at massive loss to US intelligence abilities that may even have
otherwise helped forestall the invasion of Ukraine — they pulled our spy out of Russia in the first year of Trump’s
presidency, 2017.
Similarly, when they met in
Helsinki on July 16, 2018, Trump and Putin talked in private for several hours
and Trump ordered his translators’ notes destroyed; there is also concern that
much of their conversation was done out of the hearing of the US’s translator
(Putin is fluent in English) who may have been relegated to a
distant part of the rather large empty ballroom in which they met.
The Washington Post reported, after a leak six months later, that when Trump met privately for those two hours with Putin the CIA went into “panic mode.” A US intelligence official told the Post: “There was this gasp’ at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. You literally had people in panic mode watching it at Langley. On all floors. Just shock.”
Three weeks after Trump’s
July 16, 2018 meeting with Putin in Helsinki, Senator Rand Paul made a solo trip to Moscow to personally hand-deliver
a document or package of documents from Trump to Putin. Its contents are still
unknown, although Paul told the press it was a “personal” letter of some sort.
Senator Paul has also
consistently taken Trump’s and Putin’s side with regard to the Ukraine war: he
single-handedly blocked a $40 billion military aid package in the
Senate. When the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, he responded with a call for
the repeal of the Espionage Act. He further suggested the FBI
may have “planted” Secret documents at Mar-a-Lago.
Ten days after Paul’s trip to Moscow, The New York Times reported that the CIA was freaked out because their sources inside Moscow had suddenly “gone silent”:
“The full reasons the sources have gone silent are not known,” the Times reported, but Trump having intentionally given a man working for the FBI to Putin — a man whose job at that time was to find and reveal Russian agents involved in or close to the Trump campaign — may also have had something to do with it:
“[C]urrent and former officials
said the exposure of sources inside the United States has also complicated
matters,” noted the Times. “This year, the identity of an F.B.I.
informant, Stefan Halper, became public after [Trump-loyal MAGA
Republican] House lawmakers sought information on him and the White House
allowed the information to be shared. Mr. Halper, an American academic based in
Britain, had been sent to talk to Trump campaign advisers who were under F.B.I.
scrutiny for their ties to Russia.”
Things were picking up the
following year, in 2019, as Putin was planning his invasion of Ukraine while
Trump was preparing for the 2020 election. In July 2019, Trump had
conversations with five foreign leaders during and just before a presidential visit
that month to Mar-a-Lago; they included Putin and the Emir of Qatar.
In one of those
conversations, according to a high-level US Intelligence source, Trump “made
promises” to a “world leader” that were so alarming it provoked a national
security scramble across multiple agencies.
As The Washington Post noted in an article titled, “Trump’s communications with foreign leader are part of whistleblower complaint that spurred standoff between spy chief and Congress”: “Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson determined that the complaint [against Trump] was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of ‘urgent concern,’ a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.”
On the last day of that
month, July 31, Trump had another private conversation with Putin. The
White House spokespeople told Congress and the press that Trump said that he
and Putin discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in
this car… But the following week, on August 2nd, The Daily
Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had that week asked the Office of
the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its
employees (including all our “spies”) who had worked there more than 90 days,
and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”
Perhaps just by coincidence,
months after Trump left office with cases of classified documents, The
New York Times ran a story with the headline Captured, Killed
or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants:
“Top American
counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the
world last week,” the Times’ story’s lede began, “about
troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the
United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.
“The message, in an unusual top
secret cable, said that the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center had
looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign
informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised. Although
brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival
intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence
officials typically do not share in such cables.”
And now, to complicate
matters, it appears Elon Musk took with him access to the payroll records of
all of our nation’s spies and other foreign intelligence agents. The Elon Musk
who, himself, The Wall Street Journal reports has also reportedly been
having his own secret conversations with Putin. If it turns out the Trump
has been acting as an agent for Russia, how long might this have been going on?
Czechoslovakia’s Státní
bezpečnost (StB) first started paying attention to Trump back in 1977,
as documented by the German newspaper Bild when the StB’s files were declassified,
because Trump married Czech model Ivana Zelnickova, his first wife, recently
buried on his golf course in New Jersey.
Czechoslovakia at that time was
part of the Warsaw Pact with the Soviet Union, and Ivana and her family had
been raised as good communists. Now that a Czech citizen was married into a
wealthy and prominent American family, the StB saw an opportunity and started
tracking Trump virtually from his engagement.
As 2016 and 2018 investigations by The Guardian found: “Ivana’s father, Miloš Zelníček, gave regular information to the local StB office about his daughter’s visits from the US and on his celebrity son-in-law’s career in New York. Zelníček was classified as a ‘conspiratorial’ informer. His relationship with the StB lasted until the end of the communist regime.”
An investigative reporting
breakthrough by Craig Unger for his book American Kompromat led Unger to Uri Shvets, a former KGB spy who’d been posted to
Washington, DC for years as a correspondent for the Soviet news agency TASS.
Shvets told the story — from his
own knowledge — of how Trump and Ivana visited Moscow in 1987 and were
essentially recruited or seduced by the KGB, a trip corroborated by Luke Harding in his book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped
Donald Trump Win.
Their trip was coordinated
by Intourist, the Soviet travel agency that was a front for the
KGB, and the Trumps’ handlers regaled Donald and Ivana with Soviet talking
points, presumably about things like the horrors of NATO.
The KGB’s psychological
profile of Trump had determined he was vulnerable to flattery and not much of a
deep thinker, so they told him repeatedly how brilliant he was and that he
should run for president in the US. Much to the astonishment and
jubilation of the KGB, Trump returned from Moscow to the US to give a
Republican presidential campaign speech that fall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
He then purchased a large ad in The New York Times,
The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe on
September 1, 1987 that questioned America’s ongoing support of Japan and NATO,
both thorns in the side of the USSR and their Chinese allies.
Trump’s ad laid it on the line: “Why are these nations not paying the United States for the human lives and billions of dollars we are losing to protect their interests? ... The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.”
As The Guardian reported in 2021: “The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful ‘active measure’ executed by a new KGB asset.
“’It was unprecedented,’ [Shvets
said.] … It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name
and that it will impress real serious people in the west, but it did and,
finally, this guy became the president.’”
Meanwhile, Putin was making
friends with powerful influence over American foreign policy.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan, who flipped his nation into a strongman neofascist state following an
unsuccessful attempted coup in 2016 (he imprisoned and tortured numerous
journalists and political opponents), has been deepening his relationship with Russian President
Vladimir Putin ever since that US election year.
In 2017, Erdoğan apparently
gained access to America’s deepest secrets by secretly paying off General Michael Flynn even as
Flynn became Trump’s National Security Advisor, who also had at least one secret phone conversation with Russian Ambassador
Sergey Kislyak after Flynn started working in the White House.
Flynn pleaded guilty in December
of 2017 to “willfully and knowingly” making “false, fictitious and fraudulent
statements” to the FBI about one of those conversations with Russian Ambassador
Kislyak. Flynn was also an unregistered agent of a foreign government while
working in the White House: he had taken about a half-million dollars from
Erdoğan.
Around the time he was
leaving office, Trump pardoned Flynn, essentially burying the entire
story. From campaigning to destroy NATO to selling out Ukraine to letting
Russia help kill American soldiers in the Gulf region, Trump’s goal appears to
be, to paraphrase Ron DeSantis, to “Make America Russia.” The big question
is, “Why?”
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Thursday, February 26, 2026
The war “won’t end until the Russians agree to stop fighting"
Four
years ago, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin launched a “special military
operation” involving dozens of missiles strikes on Ukrainian cities before
dawn. In 1994, in the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, Russia, along
with the United States and the United Kingdom, agreed not to use military force
or economic coercion against Ukraine, in exchange for Ukraine’s giving up the
Soviet stockpile of nuclear weapons left in Ukraine after the Soviet Union
crumbled in 1991. At the time, Ukraine had the third-largest stockpile of
nuclear weapons in the world. Russia violated that agreement when it invaded in
2014 after Ukrainians threw out Russia-backed oligarch Viktor Yanukovych.
Putin
had been eyeing Ukraine’s industrialized region since at least summer 2016,
when Russian operatives told then-candidate Donald J. Trump that they would
help Trump win the White House if he would look the other way when Russia
installed Yanukovych to govern a new “autonomous” republic there. Two days
before he invaded in 2022, Putin recognized “new republics” in Ukraine and
then, in his announcement of his invasion, claimed he had to protect the people
there from “persecution and genocide by the Kyiv regime.” He called for
“demilitarization” of Ukraine, demanding that soldiers lay down their weapons
and saying that any bloodshed would be on their hands.
Putin
called for the murder of Ukrainian leaders in the executive branch and
parliament and intended to seize or kill those involved in the 2014 Maidan
Revolution, which sought to turn the country away from Russia and toward a
democratic government within Europe, and which itself prompted a Russian
invasion. Putin planned for his troops to seize Ukraine’s electric, heating,
and financial systems so the people would have to do as he wished. The
operation was intended to be lightning fast.
But rather than collapsing, Ukrainians held firm. The day after Russia invaded, Zelensky and his cabinet recorded a video in Kyiv. “We are all here,” he said. “Our soldiers are here. The citizens are here, and we are here. We will defend our independence…. Glory to Ukraine!” When the United States offered the next day to transport Zelensky outside the country, where he could lead a government in exile, he responded: “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.”
During
his first term, Trump had weakened the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) that stood against Russian aggression, but once President Joe Biden took
office, he and Secretary of State Antony Blinken worked quietly to strengthen
NATO and ties with other allies and partners. They rallied the G7 (the world’s
seven wealthiest liberal democracies), the European Union, and others to supply
Ukraine with weapons and humanitarian assistance. Under Biden, the U.S. led the
international response, providing about $50 billion in military aid and about
$53 billion in humanitarian aid, as well as coordinating aid from allies and
partners.
The
U.S. and allies and partners also united behind extraordinary economic
sanctions, including, on February 26, 2022, the exclusion of Russian banks from
SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. SWIFT
is a Belgian-based network that enables banks to transfer payments across
international borders, and its ban on Russian banks isolated Russia’s economy.
Over
the next three years, Ukraine’s stand against Russia boosted the morale of
those defending their own countries against invaders and, in turn, captured the
imagination of people around the world hoping to stem the rise of
authoritarianism. Ukraine’s society transformed to bring the power of civilians
as well as soldiers behind the war effort. The Ukraine army grew to be the
largest in Europe, with a million people, even as Russian attacks killed
civilians as well as soldiers and destroyed hospitals, infrastructure, and the
energy sector. Ukraine became the global leader in drone technology, while
Russia’s economy faltered and its front lines dug in.
Last
year, foreign affairs journalist Anne Applebaum wrote: “The only way Putin wins
now is by persuading Ukraine’s allies to be sick of the war…by persuading Trump
to cut off Ukraine…and by convincing Europeans that they can’t win either.”
Indeed,
while Americans supported Ukraine, Trump never wavered from his support for
Russia. Although a bipartisan majority in Congress would have passed more
funding for Ukraine, after Republicans took control of the House of
Representatives, Trump loyalist House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) refused to
bring Ukraine funding to the floor for a vote.
Then,
in December 2023, MAGA Republican lawmakers said they would not pass a new
measure to fund Ukraine’s assistance without measures strengthening the border
between the U.S. and Mexico. Senators wrote the measure they demanded, only to
have Trump urge his congressional supporters to kill it in order to keep the
issue of immigration alive for the 2024 election.
By
the time Congress finally passed a measure appropriating $60 billion in aid for
Ukraine in April 2024, the lack of funding for six months had helped shift the
war in Russia’s favor.
Once
Trump was back in the White House, the U.S. position changed dramatically. As a
team from the Wall Street Journal later explained, even before
Trump took the oath of office, Putin was reaching out to Trump’s Middle East
envoy Steve Witkoff, a billionaire real-estate developer with no experience in
diplomacy, to negotiate over Ukraine. In February, Witkoff went to Moscow to
meet with Putin without a translator and without being briefed by the CIA.
On
February 12, 2025, the day after Witkoff returned, Trump talked to Putin for
nearly an hour and a half and came out from the “highly productive” call
parroting Putin’s justification for invading Ukraine. Two days later, Vice
President J.D. Vance used the Munich Security Conference to attack Europe and
its democratic values while declining to acknowledge the threat of Russian
aggression, indicating that the U.S. would no longer stand with Ukraine. Days
later, a readout of a call between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian
foreign minister Sergei Lavrov suggested that Russia was in dire need of relief
from economic sanctions.
Then,
on February 28, 2025, Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance ambushed Ukraine
president Zelensky in an Oval Office meeting that seemed designed to give the
White House an excuse for siding with Russia. The American leaders spouted
Russian propaganda, trying to bully Zelensky into accepting a ceasefire on
Russia’s terms and signing over rights to Ukraine’s rare-earth minerals, while
accusing him of being “ungrateful” for U.S. support. Zelensky didn’t take the
bait, and Trump ended up furiously defending Putin before walking out. Shortly
after, Zelensky and his team were asked to leave the White House.
In
August, Trump met Putin, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for
war crimes, on U.S. soil, greeting him in Alaska on a literal red carpet and
clapping as Putin walked to greet him, before taking him alone into the
presidential limousine to drive to the meeting site. Trump has placed a
photograph from that meeting on display in the White House.
Putin’s
attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine have increased dramatically since Trump
took office, even as Witkoff has been negotiating officially for an end to the
war and quietly over deals on oil, gas, and perhaps minerals. In April the U.S.
appeared to back a plan that essentially gave Russia all it wanted, including
the Ukrainian land it had invaded. Since then, the administration’s ongoing
“negotiations” with Russia resulted in demands of major concessions from
Ukraine but none from Russia. Those talks are ongoing, now with Trump’s
son-in-law Jared Kushner involved, although as recently as last week, Russia
had not wavered from its demands for Ukraine’s territory.
Today,
landmark buildings across the world that were lit up in blue and yellow to show
support for Ukraine included the Council of the European Union and European
Commission buildings in Brussels, Belgium; Canada’s Parliament and the Office
of the Prime Minister in Ottawa; the Freedom Monument in Riga, Latvia; The
Colosseum in Rome, Italy; the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France; the Brandenburg
Gate in Berlin, Germany; the Tower of Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen,
Denmark; Sebitseom in Seoul, South Korea; and the Empire State Building in New
York City, New York. European leaders vowed to “stand firm” with Ukraine, and
the United Nations General Assembly voiced support for Ukraine, passing a
resolution saying it was committed to “the sovereignty, independence, unity
and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognized
borders.” The U.S. abstained.
The
sudden switch of the U.S. away from its traditional allies in favor of Russia
has dramatically reordered the globe. With the U.S. stepping back, Russia has
provoked European countries by sabotaging their infrastructure and sending
drones over their airspace. Applebaum recently told Il Foglio that
Trump’s stance has shocked Europeans into a determination to shed its former
reliance on the U.S. and to be self-sufficient in terms of defense, to develop
its own technology companies, to build a stronger industrial sector, and to
integrate financial markets more fully. As U.S. funding for Ukraine has all but
disappeared, Europe is stepping up, although as Nick Paton Walsh of CNN noted
today, not as fast as it needs to in order to stop Russia’s aggression.
At
the end of its fourth year of war, Russia is weakened enough that the Institute
for the Study of War (ISW) assesses today that “Putin’s mismanagement of the
war and Ukraine’s resistance now confront Putin with challenging,
uncomfortable, and unpopular decisions about the war’s force generation
requirements and the Russian economy.” The need for more money and more men to
fight will be unpopular in the midst of an unpopular war in which Russia has
recently been losing territory, and the ISW assesses that Kremlin officials are
already trying to mitigate domestic backlash.
In
her interview with Applebaum in Il Foglio, Paola Peduzzi noted that
“[t]he Ukrainians have suffered the most from America’s distortion, because we
measure the transatlantic divorce in money and they in black bags: since Donald
Trump returned to the White House, Ukrainian civilian deaths have increased by
31 percent compared to 2024, and by 70 percent compared to 2023.”
Applebaum
told Peduzzi that Russia is not winning the war but said the war “won’t end
until the Russians agree to stop fighting, and they haven’t yet, nor have they
ever said they want to. So, the war can’t end: the Ukrainians are defending
their land and can’t stop, even if they wanted to.”
“Ukrainians
have changed the way they wage war; they no longer ask when it will end, but
only how,” Peduzzi wrote. She concluded: “Ukrainians are saving us all, and
unlike us, they don’t even ask us to say thank you.”
—Heather
Cox Richardson,
Notes:
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/sites-default-files-documents-report-volume5.pdf (p.
vi, 99).
https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/dl (pp.
139–140).
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/magazine/russiagate-paul-manafort-ukraine-war.html
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/02/24/world/russia-ukraine-putin
https://www.axios.com/2022/02/24/putin-delares-war-on-ukraine
https://www.businessinsider.com/putins-suit-war-declaration-ukraine-possibly-pre-taped-2022-2
https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/26/europe/ukraine-zelensky-evacuation-intl/index.html
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/06/republicans-ukraine-funding
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/28/tass-oval-office-trump-zelenskyy-00206739
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/02/putins-three-years-of-humiliation/681810/
https://www.wsj.com/world/putin-witkoff-russia-envoy-04da229d
https://www.axios.com/2025/04/22/trump-russia-ukraine-peace-plan-crimea-donbas
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgk2mlv2k1ro
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/29/trump-putin-white-house-photo
https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20220227003300315
https://www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/1997596/
https://thehill.com/opinion/international/5458252-alaska-summit-trump-putin-disaster/
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5455928-trump-putin-alaska-summit/
Bluesky: