Ukrainian fears grow as Trump threatens and humiliates Europe

 

This week, as the war in Ukraine took a dramatic turn, we welcomed Sasha Dovzhyk to the Guardian offices. Sasha is director of Index, a new institution in Lviv devoted to the documentation of the war. Sasha spoke movingly about Ukrainians’ hopes and fears after three years of war – including the situation for those living under the terror of occupation, with daily threats to life and safety from the Russian authorities.

She was in London for the launch of a book she helped bring together after its author, the brilliant Ukrainian novelist Victoria Amelina, was killed in a Russian missile attack before she was able to complete the manuscript. Margaret Atwood introduced our extract from this important book, and Charlotte Higgins’s review is in today’s magazine.

Also this week, Shaun Walker had an exclusive interview with Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv. In it, the Ukrainian president made it clear that Europe would not have the means to guarantee his nation’s security if the US were to withdraw defence support.

Not long after we published Zelenskyy’s words, new US defence secretary Pete Hegseth was in Brussels telling his European counterparts they would have to take the lead in defending Ukraine and that the US would no longer prioritise Europe’s safety. That was just the entree for an even bigger shift: Donald Trump announcing he’d agreed to begin negotiations with Vladimir Putin to broker a ceasefire.

It was another seismic geopolitical moment in the nascent days of the second Trump era. And it was “precisely what Putin had been waiting for”, according to the experts and insiders our Russian affairs correspondent Pjotr Sauer spoke to.

Global affairs correspondent Andrew Roth wrote that Trump “does not care who controls the blood-soaked soils of east Ukraine, so long as he can access the rare earth minerals that lie beneath” while Patrick Wintour gauged the scale of Europe’s diplomatic humiliation as the Munich security conference began.

Shaun Walker and Artem Mazhulin spoke to those on the ground in Kyiv, where reaction ranged from feelings of betrayal to grim relief the war may at least be ending.

Columnist and Europe expert Timothy Garton Ash was left flabbergasted by the dire consequences of Trump’s decision, writing that his “appeasement of Vladimir Putin makes Neville Chamberlain look like a principled, courageous realist”.

We’re entering a critical new stage for Ukraine, Europe and the Middle East as the world reorientates to Trump’s second presidency. Our live blogs remain essential in keeping up with the latest developments, while our correspondents and experts are committed to explaining how these overlapping stories are shaping the world for our readers and revealing their human impact on the ground.

-Owen Gibson, The Guardian

"All my life I have been an admirer of the United States and its people. But I am frightened of it now, and I am even more frightened of them"

 

Nothing mattered, in the end. Not the probable dementia, the unfathomable ignorance, the emotional incontinence; not, certainly, the shambling, hate-filled campaign, or the ludicrously unworkable anti-policies.

The candidate out on bail in four jurisdictions, the convicted fraud artist, the adjudicated rapist and serial sexual predator, the habitual bankrupt, the stooge of Vladimir Putin, the man who tried to overturn the last election and all of his creepy retinue of crooks, ideologues and lunatics: Americans took a long look at all this and said, yes please.

There is no sense in understating the depth of the disaster. This is a crisis like no other in our lifetimes. The government of the United States has been delivered into the hands of a gangster, whose sole purpose in running, besides staying out of jail, is to seek revenge on his enemies. 

The damage Donald Trump and his nihilist cronies can do – to America, but also to its democratic allies, and to the peace and security of the world – is incalculable. We are living in the time of Nero.

The first six months will be a time of maximum peril. NATO must from this moment be considered effectively obsolete, without the American security guarantee that has always been its bedrock. 

We may see new incursions by Russia into Europe – the poor Ukrainians are probably done for, but now it is the Baltics and the Poles who must worry – before the Europeans have time to organize an alternative. China may also accelerate its Taiwanese ambitions.

At home, Mr. Trump will be moving swiftly to consolidate his power. Some of this will be institutional – the replacement of tens of thousands of career civil servants with Trumpian loyalists. But some of it will be … atmospheric.

At some point someone – a company whose chief executive has displeased him, a media critic who has gotten under his skin – will find themselves the subject of unwanted attention from the Trump administration. It might not be so crude as a police arrest. It might just be a little regulatory matter, a tax audit, something like that. They will seek the protection of the courts, and find it is not there.

The judges are also Trump loyalists, perhaps, or too scared to confront him. Or they might issue a ruling, and find it has no effect – that the administration has called the basic bluff of liberal democracy: the idea that, in the crunch, people in power agree to be bound by the law, and by its instruments the courts, the same as everyone else. Then everyone will take their cue. Executives will line up to court him. Media organizations, the large ones anyway, will find reasons to be cheerful.

Of course, in reality things will start to fall apart fairly quickly. The huge across-the-board tariffs he imposes will tank the world economy. The massive deficits, fueled by his ill-judged tax policies – he won’t replace the income tax, as he promised, but will fill it with holes – and monetized, at his direction, by the Federal Reserve, will ignite a new round of inflation.

Most of all, the insane project of deporting 12 million undocumented immigrants – finding them, rounding them up and detaining them in hundreds of internment camps around the country, probably for years, before doing so – will consume his administration. But by then it will be too late.

We should not count upon the majority of Americans coming to their senses in any event. They were not able to see Mr. Trump for what he was before: why should that change? Would they not, rather, be further coarsened by the experience of seeing their neighbours dragged off by the police, or the military, further steeled to the necessity of doing “tough things” to “restore order?”

Some won’t, of course. But they will find in time that the democratic levers they might once have pulled to demand change are no longer attached to anything. There are still elections, but the rules have been altered: there are certain obstacles, certain disadvantages if you are not with the party of power. It will seem easier at first to try to change things from within. Then it will be easier not to change things.

All of this will wash over Canada in various ways – some predictable, like the flood of refugees seeking escape from the camps; some less so, like the coarsening of our own politics, the debasement of morals and norms by politicians who have discovered there is no political price to be paid for it. And who will have the backing of their patron in Washington.

All my life I have been an admirer of the United States and its people. But I am frightened of it now, and I am even more frightened of them.

-Andrew Coyne, Toronto Globe

Fight Back

 

“It’s important that we understand and recognize their effort to overwhelm us. They want us to give up. They want us to resign ourselves to the inevitability of whatever Trump is going to do for the next four years. That, of course, is what we can’t do. This is the time to summon our moral outrage, call it the coup that it is, and make sure we don’t let up on our senators, representatives, or even the White House; we must continue to express our concerns and our outrage.” -Joyce Vance

"I'm a liberal, but that doesn't mean what a lot of you apparently think it does..."

 

Let's break it down, shall we? Because quite frankly, I'm getting a little tired of being told what I believe and what I stand for. Spoiler alert: not every liberal is the same, though many liberals I know think along roughly these same lines:

1. I believe a country should take care of its weakest members. A country cannot call itself civilized when its children, disabled, sick, and elderly are neglected. PERIOD.

2. I believe healthcare is a right, not a privilege. Somehow that's interpreted as "I believe Obamacare is the end-all, be-all." This is not the case. I'm fully aware that the ACA has problems, that a national healthcare system would require everyone to chip in, and that it's impossible to create one that is devoid of flaws, but I have yet to hear an argument against it that makes "let people die because they can't afford healthcare" a better alternative. I believe healthcare should be far cheaper than it is, and that everyone should have access to it. And no, I'm not opposed to paying higher taxes in the name of making that happen.

3. I believe education should be affordable. It doesn't necessarily have to be free (though it works in other countries so I'm mystified as to why it can't work in the US), but at the end of the day, there is no excuse for students graduating college saddled with five- or six-figure debt.

4. I don't believe your money should be taken from you and given to people who don't want to work. I have literally never encountered anyone who believes this. Ever. I just have a massive moral problem with a society where a handful of people can possess most of the wealth while there are people literally starving to death, freezing to death, or dying because they can't afford to go to the doctor. Fair wages, lower housing costs, universal healthcare, affordable education, and the wealthy paying their share would go a long way toward alleviating this. Somehow believing that makes me a communist.

5. I don't throw around "I'm willing to pay higher taxes" lightly. If I'm suggesting something that involves paying more, well, it's because I'm fine with paying my share as long as it's going to something besides lining corporate pockets or bombing other countries while Americans die without healthcare.

6. I believe companies should be required to pay their employees a decent, livable wage. Somehow this is always interpreted as me wanting burger flippers to be able to afford a penthouse apartment and a Mercedes. What it means is that no one should have to work three full-time jobs just to keep their head above water. Restaurant servers should not have to rely on tips, multibillion-dollar companies should not have employees on food stamps, workers shouldn't have to work themselves into the ground just to barely make ends meet, and minimum wage should be enough for someone to work 40 hours and live.

7. I am not anti-Christian. I have no desire to stop Christians from being Christians, to close churches, to ban the Bible, to forbid prayer in school, etc. (BTW, prayer in school is NOT illegal; *compulsory* prayer in school is - and should be - illegal). All I ask is that Christians recognize *my* right to live according to *my* beliefs. When I get pissed off that a politician is trying to legislate Scripture into law, I'm not "offended by Christianity" -- I'm offended that you're trying to force me to live by your religion's rules. You know how you get really upset at the thought of Muslims imposing Sharia law on you? That's how I feel about Christians trying to impose biblical law on me. Be a Christian. Do your thing. Just don't force it on me or mine.

8. I don't believe LGBT people should have more rights than you. I just believe they should have the *same* rights as you.

9. I don't believe illegal immigrants should come to America and have the world at their feet, especially since THIS ISN'T WHAT THEY DO (spoiler: undocumented immigrants are ineligible for all those programs they're supposed to be abusing, and if they're "stealing" your job it's because your employer is hiring illegally). I believe there are far more humane ways to handle undocumented immigration than our current practices (i.e., detaining children, splitting up families, ending DACA, etc.).

10. I don't believe the government should regulate everything, but since greed is such a driving force in our country, we NEED regulations to prevent cut corners, environmental destruction, tainted food/water, unsafe materials in consumable goods or medical equipment, etc. It's not that I want the government's hands in everything -- I just don't trust people trying to make money to ensure that their products/practices/etc. are SAFE. Is the government devoid of shadiness? Of course not. But with those regulations in place, consumers have recourse if they're harmed and companies are liable for medical bills, environmental cleanup, etc. Just kind of seems like common sense when the alternative to government regulation is letting companies bring their bottom line into the equation.

11. I believe our current administration is fascist. Not because I dislike them or because I can’t get over an election, but because I've spent too many years reading and learning about the Third Reich to miss the similarities. Not because any administration I dislike must be Nazis, but because things are mirroring authoritarian and fascist regimes of the past.

12. I believe the systemic racism and misogyny in our society is much worse than many people think, and desperately needs to be addressed. Which means those with privilege -- white, straight, male, economic, etc. -- need to start listening, even if you don't like what you're hearing, so we can start dismantling everything that's causing people to be marginalized.

13. I am not interested in coming after your blessed guns, nor is anyone serving in government. What I am interested in is the enforcement of present laws and enacting new, common sense gun regulations. Got another opinion? Put it on your page, not mine.

14. I believe in so-called political correctness. I prefer to think it’s social politeness. If I call you Chuck and you say you prefer to be called Charles, I’ll call you Charles. It’s the polite thing to do. Not because everyone is a delicate snowflake, but because as Maya Angelou put it, when we know better, we do better. When someone tells you that a term or phrase is more accurate/less hurtful than the one you're using, you now know better. So why not do better? How does it hurt you to NOT hurt another person?

15. I believe in funding sustainable energy, including offering education to people currently working in coal or oil so they can change jobs. There are too many sustainable options available for us to continue with coal and oil. Sorry, billionaires. Maybe try investing in something else.

16. I believe that women should not be treated as a separate class of human. They should be paid the same as men who do the same work, should have the same rights as men and should be free from abuse. Why on earth shouldn’t they be?

I think that about covers it. Bottom line is that I'm a liberal because I think we should take care of each other. That doesn't mean you should work 80 hours a week so your lazy neighbor can get all your money. It just means I don't believe there is any scenario in which preventable suffering is an acceptable outcome if money is saved.”

-Lori Gallagher Witt

"It’s your country they are seizing with this burgeoning coup"

 

Rise up people and fast. Tyrant Trump and his Musk-driven gangsters are launching a fascistic coup d’état. Much of everything you like about federal/civil service for your health, safety, and economic well-being and protections is being targeted.

To feed Trump’s insatiable vengeance over being prosecuted, being defeated in the 2020 election, or now just being challenged, this megalomaniacal, self-described dictator is harming the lives of tens of millions of Americans in need and millions of Americans who are assisting them.

In his demented lawless arrogance, convicted felon Trump is nullifying the freedoms and protections of the American Revolution (King Donald is today’s King George III), and rejecting the Declaration of Independence (which listed the rights and abuses against the British Tyrant that Trump is shredding and entrenching).

He is defiantly violating the U.S. Constitution, its controls over dictatorial government, and its powers exclusively given to Congress.  The Constitution demands that we live under the rule of law, not the rule of one man.

While Trump enjoys Mar-a-Lago and his golfing, Madman Musk, a South African, is literally living in the Executive Office Building next to the White House, with his heel-clicking Musketeers, seven days a week (they brought in sleeping cots) guarded by a large private security detail.

Consider, people, that the world’s richest man, with billions of dollars of federal contracts, is unleashing his henchmen to wreck the daily work of public servants committed to providing critical services that have long and bi-partisan support.

Assistance to children, emergency workers, the sick and elderly, public school students, and people ripped off by business crooks. He is firing the federal cops on the corporate crime beat – whether at the FBI, the EPA, or the key Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which Trump/Musk are gutting.

Some headlines: “Laws? What Laws? Trump’s Brazen Grab for Executive Power” by the great reporter Charlie Savage (New York Times, February 6, 2025). Outlaws taking charge, driven by greed for the government’s honeypots of corporate welfare, and near-zero taxes for the rich and big corporations.

Or “Searching for Motive to Musk Team’s Focus on ‘Checkbook’ of U.S.” by Alan Rappeport, February 6, 2025, New York Times.

Or “White House Billionaires Take on the World’s Poorest Kids” by the super-reporter Nicholas Kristof (February 6, 2025. New York Times) shutting down The Agency for International Development’s distribution of AIDS medicines, and crucially stopping U.S. health agencies from countering rising, deadly pandemics in Africa that could come here quickly without U.S. defensive actions abroad. Already the devastating effects on children missing healthcare and food are erupting.

Kristof concludes that all this (and the dollar amounts are very small compared to their benefits) may seem like a game for Trump/Musk, but “… it’s about children’s lives and our own security, and what’s unfolding is sickening.” It is also criminal!

When the forces of law and order reassert themselves, Elon Musk may become known as felon Musk. He is not a properly appointed federal official. He has no authority to send his wrecking crews into one agency after another, demanding private information about Americans, pushing people out, and shutting down operations.

Musk, whose next target is the federal auto safety agency that has been enforcing the safety laws against Tesla and has not surrendered its regulation of self-driving cars (Musk’s next big project). Musk refuses to disclose his sweetheart contracts with the federal agencies nor has he disclosed his tax returns. Demand them.

What is very clear in the first 20 days of Trump’s lawless madness is that he is moving fast for a police state along with deepening the corporate state with and for Big Business. His prime victims are not the vast military budget at the Department of Defense, nor the big budgets of the Spy Agencies or of Musk’s lucrative fiefdom – NASA, the Space Agency. No, like the bullies they are, Trump/Musk are smashing people’s programs.  

They hate Medicaid (provided to over 80 million Americans) or the food programs for millions of children.  Crazed Trump is pushing to shut down many clean wind power projects and cut credits to homeowners installing solar panels while booming the omnicidal oil, gas, and coal industries. He wants many more giant exporting natural gas facilities near U.S. ports which could accidentally blow-up entire cities.

Musk’s poisoned Tusks have even reached Laos, Cambodia, and parts of Vietnam where mine-clearing efforts have been cut off. These are the U.S.’s Vietnam War era unexploded ordinances and bomblets that have killed tens of thousands of innocent residents, mostly children, in the past fifty years.

The Washington Post headline on February 6th, “Musk Team Taking Over Public Operations” understates the carnage. They are brazenly shutting down agencies, taking down thousands of government websites helpful to all Americans, and telling conscientious civil servants to obey or be driven out.

The Republicans in Congress, to their future shame and guilt, are surrendering their constitutional powers in the very branch of government our Founders assigned to check any rising monarchy in the White House.

The Democrats in the minority are just starting to protest, some in front of shuttered federal buildings. But they have not yet initiated unofficial public hearings in Congress to give voice to the surging anger of Americans (now flooding their switchboards) whose narrow majority of Trump voters are sensing betrayal big time. Demand unofficial lhearings now! Federal judges are starting to uphold the violated laws.

The media, itself threatened by Trump’s attacks, censorship, and who knows what is next from this venomous liar (see the Washington Post’s Glen Kessler’s January 26, 2025 piece “The White House’s wildly inaccurate claims about USAID spending” or “Trump’s gusher of misleading economic statistics at Davos”) will cover protests and testimony by people all over the country. The rallies and marches have begun and will only get larger as Trump and Musk sink lower with their tyrannical abuses.

The career military does not relish the reckless buffoon that Trump put over them as Secretary of Defense. American business cannot tolerate the chaos, the uncertainty, the tumult.  Thirty-nine million small businesses are already feeling the oncoming Trump tsunami.

Break with your routine, Americans. It’s your country they are seizing with this burgeoning coup. Take it back fast, is what our original patriots of 1776 would be saying.

 

-Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer and author of Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! 

CounterPunch

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When Fascism Comes to America by Glen Brown

When Fascism Comes to America by Glen Brown
(after Terry Ehret)
 
It will come as “a fat white slug, a Jabba the Hutt of privilege”
that perpetuates lies through distraction, threat conflation,
normalization and repetition to confuse and mislead the public.
It will come with a mind that is “a simple bot-like algorithm
of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.”
It will threaten our free press and call the news media:
"The enemy of the American people."
It will discount any information from mainstream media
and empower the worst reckless voices from the Far Right.
It will threaten free and fair elections, individual rights,
independent courts, and the Rule of law.
It will undermine the Separation of Powers
and threatened critics with prosecution and lawsuits.
It will utilize the complicity and cowardice of a Sycophantic Party.
It will demand that federal prosecutors target political opponents.
It will denounce the Justice Department
and the FBI as “the deep state.”
It will abuse pardoning powers and undermine military justice.
It will denigrate both living and dead American soldiers
and will refer to the more than 1,800 Marines who lost their lives
at Belleau Wood as "suckers for getting killed.” 

It will start wars without approval from Congress.
It will create and capitalize on chaos.

It will be friends of the Ku Klux Klan
and other white extremists and populists.
It will empower fascists and white nationalists.
It will not protect the nation and its political system
from damaging cyber-attacks by hostile foreign powers.

It will extol Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-Un, Rodrigo Duterte,
Jair Bolsonaro, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and other despots.
It will attack Volodymyr Zelenskyy and NATO.
It will appoint oligarchs, Wall Street bankers,
industry insiders, and special-interest lobbyists
to plunder this country’s resources and money.
It will be a serial abuser of discretionary powers
and ignore the legislative and judicial branches of government
and their Balance of Power.
It will attack the U.S. Intelligence Agencies.
It will heighten polarization and partisanship. 
It will be contemptuous and ignorant
of the Constitution of the United States of America.
It will never "faithfully execute the Office of President
of the United States" and "preserve, protect,
and defend the Constitution of the United States of America.”

When are we going to REBEL?

 

When are we going to rebel against an authoritarian bully who has not and will never "faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States" and "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States"; a bully who is contemptuous and ignorant of the Constitution of the United States of America, specifically the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments; a bully who also violates Article II, Section 1 and Section 3 of the Constitution of the United States of America; a bully who ignores the legislative and judicial branches of government and their Balance of Power; a bully and his cohorts who are attacking our Democracy and the Rule of Law?

-Glen Brown

And when are we going to rebel against the oligarchy? We already have witnessed a takeover of the radical Republican Party; the undermining of democracy; the evisceration of campaign finance law; the weakening of U.S. labor unions; right-to-work laws to keep workers powerless; the shutting down of the federal government; the denial of climate change from the executive and legislative branches of government; ALEC-backed legislators who created bills to restrict minority voting and to manipulate the boundaries of their electoral constituency; the closing of nearly 1700 voting precincts, of which many of them are in Black and Latino communities; the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act; the scapegoating of teachers and the attacks on retirees’ and public employees’ pensions; the deprivation of university and college adjunct faculty; the systematic dismantling of public ownership and services; the privatized exorbitantly-priced healthcare system; the rewriting of the tax code to benefit the wealthiest Americans; the victimization of immigrant children and their parents and other forms of oligarchic oppression. Are we going to allow the continuing deregulation of our environmental protections; the continuing privatization of our public schools; the eradication of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; the transformation of the U.S. courts and the privatization of the justice system; the manufacturing of paranoia about migrant caravans of Mexican and South American immigrants seeking asylum; the current GOP's obstructionism, authoritarianism, xenophobia, unaccountable dark money, voter suppression, and their reinterpretation of the U.S. Constitution to successfully oppress the majority of Americans?  RESIST!

-Glen Brown