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不服啊不服
The American Betrayal of Ukraine Begins | Jim NR
On the menu today: Regarding the war, President Donald Trump says to the Ukrainians, “You should have never started it!” Somewhere in Moscow, Vladimir Putin must be grinning from ear to ear. Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio pledges that the U.S. will cooperate with Russia on “matters of mutual geopolitical interest and historic economic and investment opportunities,” despite the fact that those mutual geopolitical interests don’t exist, and here in Kyiv, a report of cartel thugs from Brazil signing up to fight on behalf of the Russians.
Trump Blames the Victim
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Kyiv, Ukraine — There’s still time for President Trump to turn it around. But so far in his second term, regarding the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Trump has offered to Vladimir Putin that Ukraine will not retake all its annexed and occupied sovereign territory, that Ukraine will not join NATO, that there will be no U.S. troops on Ukrainian soil after the war, and that the U.S. will lift sanctions on Russia. And Trump might even throw in a withdrawal of the extra 20,000 U.S. troops that Joe Biden sent to NATO’s eastern flank after the invasion of Ukraine.
And in exchange, Putin offered...well, nothing, really.
Yesterday in Saudi Arabia, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the U.S. and Russian governments had agreed to four key principles, including an effort to “lay the groundwork for future cooperation on matters of mutual geopolitical interest and historic economic and investment opportunities which will emerge from a successful end to the conflict in Ukraine.”
What “mutual geopolitical interest” do we have with the regime that fired a missile into Kyiv’s main children’s hospital? (The intensive care, surgical, and oncology wards of Ukraine’s largest children’s hospital were severely damaged, and its toxicology department — where children receive dialysis — was destroyed. Reportedly, 27 civilians, including four children, were killed, and 117, including seven children, were injured.)
Russia has killed more than 12,000 Ukrainian civilians, and more than 6 million Ukrainian citizens live under the brutal hand of occupying Russian forces, and our government is talking about “historic economic and investment opportunities” with them?
What exactly does Russia have to offer us that we want so badly? Grain? Oil? Natural gas? We already have that stuff; there is more than we need, and plenty is available for export. I thought the Trump plan was to build us into an energy production superpower. Why is the man who presciently warned Germany that it was becoming completely dependent on Russia for its energy now so eager to make it easier for people to buy Russian energy supplies?
Rubio also said, “We’re going to appoint a high-level team from our end to help negotiate and walk — work through the end of the conflict in Ukraine in a way that’s enduring and acceptable to all the parties engaged.” What “end to the conflict” does he envision could be “enduring and acceptable to all the parties engaged”? How much stolen territory does he visualize Ukraine conceding to Putin?
Does Rubio envision Putin recognizing Ukraine as a legitimate and independent country? He has never done that. Down to the marrow in his bones, Putin sees Ukraine as part of Russia that can never be allowed to pursue its own separate path.
(Back in 2014, Putin said, while discussing the origins of Russia’s culture, “Kyiv is the mother of all Russian cities.” Then-comedian Volodymyr Zelensky responded with a routine that called Putin a “mother****er” and joked, “Mommy is independent, got that? Maybe mommy even found a boyfriend. A rich one, a European. Oh, you want to share her with him? Mommy’s not that kind of girl.”)
Trump’s approach in his tirade yesterday was to blame the victim and offer greater and greater concessions to the aggressor.
“Today I heard, ‘Oh well, we weren’t invited’ — well, you’ve been there for three years! You should have ended it three years — you should have never started it! You could have made a deal,” Trump said of the Ukrainians, either oblivious to or in denial of the fact that Russia invaded Ukraine, not the other way around.
“We have a situation where we haven’t had elections in Ukraine, where we have martial law,” Trump fumed yesterday. I would urge him to look up what “martial law” means.
We’ve been through this several times since the war began. The Ukrainian government declared martial law at the start of the war. The Ukrainian constitution does not allow elections to be held when martial law is in effect.
Roughly 20 percent of Ukraine is occupied by Russian forces; obviously, those regions cannot participate in any Ukrainian election. (Russian forces allowing them to participate in the election would be de facto admission that they are Ukrainian citizens residing on Ukrainian territory.) This would be akin to running an American presidential election with only 40 of the 50 states able to participate. Distributing and collecting ballots from the troops in the field, under fire, would represent its own slew of logistical challenges.
Last time I was here, I spoke to Miroslava Luzina, a translator and independent political consultant, who described how attempting to hold a regular election during this war would simply make the Russian invaders’ goal of killing Ukrainians easier.
“If the Russians made an effort to target a wake with a missile in a village where 50 people are gathered to mourn a fallen soldier, what do you think will happen to polling stations?” Luzina asked. “The ballot boxes need to be under constant supervision by observers, there are procedures — if there is an air-raid alarm, and everyone is running to the shelters, what happens then? There are not that many places that have both a good basement or good type of a shelter, and that are also suitable to be a polling station. There are all these logistical questions. It would be endangering people, because Russia would target gatherings of these people, especially when Ukrainians are doing the sorts of things that make Ukraine a country.”
Zelensky is undoubtedly less popular than he was during the first year of the war. I’m just starting on my current round of interviews with Ukrainians, and there’s a lot of exhaustion from the war. But Trump’s absurd claim that Zelensky has a 4 percent approval rating is a hint that Trump is flailing and thrashing around, trying anything to justify his current de facto pro-Russian stance.
The most recent poll:
[The Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) conducted a telephone survey of 2,000 people living in Ukrainian-controlled territory between 2 and 17 December, around a month after Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, which reignited speculation about possible peace talks with Moscow.
According to the results, at the end of 2024, 52 percent of Ukrainians polled said they ‘trusted’ Volodymyr Zelensky, a sharp drop from the end of 2023 (77 percent).]
Zelensky is probably roughly as popular in Ukraine right now as Trump is in the United States.
Are Brazilian Cartel Thugs Fighting for Russia on Ukraine’s Battlefields?
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The lobby of the Hotel Intercontinental in Kyiv was packed with tech bros in suits and black turtlenecks, men in military fatigues, and a handful of women at a defense technology conference on Tuesday. I’ll have more on that conference as the week continues, but one of the most fascinating conversations I had was with Clara Magalhães Martins, a Brazilian volunteer in Ukrainian relief, who told me about her unplanned online run-ins with Brazilians who are fighting on behalf of Russia — men she suspects likely have past connections to Brazilian cartels.
Clara told me she met these men through Instagram; the number of Brazilians working in the Ukraine region is not huge, but because of the BRICS connection (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), there are more than you might think. There are foreign fighters from all around the world on both sides, including a Russian legion fighting on behalf of Ukraine.
She said she had ended up chatting with Brazilian men who had posted pictures with “a Soviet patch on their arms” and, in conversations, described themselves as “fighting the Nazis — very [much] the narrative of 2022. . . . They have absolutely swallowed the propaganda: ‘Russia is just protecting their land, Russia doesn’t want NATO on its borders, Ukraine is provoking this.’ Very weird.”
“There are other Brazilians here, former Blackwater, Wagner [private military contractors]. Now they’re fighting in Ukraine.” She added that she hadn’t wanted to talk to them for too long or reveal too much personal information to them. “We don’t know where they’re coming from; a lot of people come from cartels. . . . I don’t know if they’re now alive or dead.”
Brazil’s cartel problem is as bad as you would suspect, with the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) described as “a formidable global threat.”
Clara knows several Brazilians who are fighting on behalf of Ukraine. “Some come because they’re full-on mercenaries. They like the job. They like killing people. The Ukrainians need people to do this. Who am I to judge? Some others, they come because they really believe in the fight for freedom. A lot of them have the ideology, they need to protect Ukraine and freedom. And there is always the bunch that thinks that war is fun, and romantic, and they’re playing Counter-Strike, or Battlefield, and they come, and they get scared sh**less, don’t do anything, but go back to Brazil and go on TV. They tell stories of the 20 Russians that they killed, Rambo-style.”
She chuckled, saying that when some of these foreign fighters’ short-lived deployments end, they return to Brazil to tell exaggerated tales of their daring, but, hey, they’re at least raising awareness of Ukraine’s fight to Brazilian audiences. |
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