Ukraine Redux?

Trump hosted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and major European leaders in an effort to push peace talks on ending the Russo-Ukrainian war. Let me show you what Trump doesn't get about the war between Russia and Ukraine. 

But somehow, Trump managed to give a good show, expressing solidarity with European leaders and getting them to praise him for his relentless pursuit of peace guarantees for Ukraine and added that Vladimir Putin was open to such an idea.

There's just one thing - no one has told Putin that Putin is open to such an idea.

Trump made himself look like the reasonable leader in the room - he even got Zelensky to wear a suit to the White House this time =- and he was in such a good mood, he showed the Europeans his collection of Trump 2028 merchandise.  But all he really did was kick the can down the road - for Putin.  He set up an expectation for peace talks that won't amount to much of either peace or talks.

Peace In Our Time?

After his "summit" meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, Donald Trump should be arrested for indecent northern exposure.

Yesterday's tête-à-tête between the two democratically elected dictators was supposed to produce an end to the war in Ukraine that would benefit Putin - I call it "the final solution to the Ukrainian question," because that's how Putin would see it - but, thankfully, produced nothing.  Call it the art of No Deal.

The lack of a deal means that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his people live to fight another day, and he has solid support from a coalition of pro-democracy allies led by Canada, the country that should have taken that mantle back in 1945.

Prior to this Trump-Putin meeting, everyone was comparing Trump to Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who sold out Czechoslovakia by letting Hitler take over the Sudetenland from the Czechoslovakian people in the hope of avoiding an unavoidable war.  That's an insult to Chamberlain.  Chamberlain actually accomplished something.  Trump accomplished nothing in Anchorage.  Because he can't do anything right.

He can't even appease right! 

This Is Not Détente

Détente - that charming French word every American knew in the 1970s, which referred to a thawing of relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.  While the period of détente is generally thought to have started with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, the spirit of amicability between the two superpowers started as early as June 1967, when President Lyndon Johnson and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin met at a summit in Glassboro, New Jersey and sought to ease tensions over the fate of Vietnam and to cool tensions in the Middle East in the aftermath of the Israeli Six-Day War.  Once Nixon succeeded Johnson, détente flowered nicely, resulting in a couple of arms-limitation treaties, the Helsinki Accords, and the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project space mission.  There was a reason why many of us Generation Xers didn't worry about nuclear war in the 1970s and why even a few of us didn't know anything about nuclear weapons.  Détente was it.

Donald Trump came to power in 2017 in a different era.  The Cold War was over, the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union had split into separate countries, and Russia - the largest Soviet republic and the republic that had more or less created the Soviet Union - had tried democratic government under Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s, but economic hardships led to the autocratic Vladimir Putin a return of tensions between post-Soviet Russia and the West.  Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton for the Presidency in part because he wanted to stabilize Russo-American relations. As Trump himself said, it made sense to seek better relations with the other major nuclear power on the planet.  That is, détente. 

Fast forward to 2025.  The current Russo-American relationship is not détente.  It's more like an alliance.  Trump and Putin are dealing behind and sometimes in front of the scenes to bring an end to the war in Ukraine in a way that benefits everyone but the Ukrainians, hence their absence in the talks in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to end the Russo-Ukrainian War - a war Trump erroneously claims that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky started.  The "peace plan" being framed is not a friendly gesture in the way that Apollo-Soyuz in 1975 was.  It's a collaboration, and the objective isn't peaceful space exploration.

At the least, the Riyadh talks parallel the Munich Conference of 1938, in which British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was all too happy to let Hitler take over the German-speaking Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia without Czechoslovakian representatives in the talks - not to end a war but to prevent one, though Chamberlain's goal then was the same as Trump's is now - "Peace in our time."  But at least Chamberlain had no love for Nazi Germany and had no desire to collaborate with Hitler to create a new European order.  The deal Trump and Putin are trying to hammer out would not only give Russia the Russian-speaking Donbass area of Ukraine but entitle the United States to 50 - five-zero - percent of Ukrainian mineral rights to compensate for the money the U.S. has spent to aid Ukraine in the past three years.  This isn't Munich in 1938 - this is Moscow in 1939, when German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov signed a nonaggression pact that secretly divided eastern Europe between the Nazis and the Soviets. 

Trump has made it clear - he wants the United States and Russia to be allies, not just partners.  Neither Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, nor Jimmy Carter, whose death two months ago spared him the knowledge of what a Trump Mark Two regime would be like, would recognize this as détente.

They would call it "sleeping with the enemy."  

And Ronald Reagan, whose election not just signaled the end of the seventies but the end of détente, would call it "sleeping with the evil emperor."

Europe Rises, America Falls

Having not experienced an age of antiquity, a medieval period, or a Renaissance, and having broken all ties with our mother country, which has experienced all that, the United States has long lacked the maturity or the wisdom to be a world leader.  This was evident as soon as the U.S. replaced Great Britain and France as the leading power of the West in the late 1940s, when the Chinese Communists drove Chiang Kai-shek from the mainland to Taiwan and the leading paranoiacs in Washington rhetorically asked, "Who lost China?", as if a country so old even its laundry secrets date back to antiquity was ever ours to lose.  The one thing that gave us legitimacy as a world leader was our values system - our commitment to the rule of law, our generosity to other countries in the form of the Peace Corps and the United States Agency for International Development, and our support for international health and education standards - but most of all our commitment to other countries fighting for their freedom and for their sovereignty.  Yes, we made some blunders - overthrowing democratically elected socialist governments in Latin America, invading Iraq - but overall our commitment to freedom remained strong.

Not . . . any . . . more.

This past week, American leaders, from the Orange Man in the White House to his vice presidential lackey to the drunk running the Pentagon (replacing a brilliant black man like Lloyd Austin with Pete Hegseth to lead Defense is like a '60s oldies radio station playing Sam Cooke records switching to a '90s oldies format that plays Michael Bolton covers of Sam Cooke songs), have made it clear that they will no longer back Ukraine in its fight against Russia.  Not because we can't afford it, or because we care about the carnage in the war, but because . . . we just don't want to.  Our so-called leaders have decided that a commitment to a free and democratic Ukraine and a fair and just peace for Ukraine and for all of Europe is no business of ours.  This is the same country that never recognized the incorporation of the Baltic States into the Soviet Union, of which Ukraine was one of the original republics (though not by choice).  This is the same country that, until President Biden was gone, continued to commit to helping Ukraine in its fight against Vladmir Putin.  Trump, rather than redouble American efforts to aid the Ukrainians, chose instead to have a summit with Putin for which neither Ukraine nor the European Union were to be consulted, to discuss a peace deal that neither Ukraine nor the European Union support - one that would support Russian claims to Ukrainian territory.  

Oh yeah, and Americans would get the rights to half of Ukraine's mineral resources.  Trump tried to get Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to sign a document to that effect, but Zelensky refused.  Meanwhile, Pete Hegseth reaffirmed Russian claims to Ukrainian territory and its own regional interests by saying it was inconceivable that Ukraine regain its land from before the invasion of Crimea in 2014 and should not allowed to join the European Union or NATO.  (So, even while Trump and Putin were acting like Ribbentrop and Molotov in pilfering Eastern Europe, Hegseth was appeasing the Russians for peace in our time while in . . . Munich.)

Now the Europeans, with encouragement from President Zelensky and leadership from President Emanuel Macron of France, are planning to combine their military forces to come to Ukraine's aid.  Great Britain - no longer an EU member but still having an interest in Continental affairs - has committed more aid to Ukraine.  The nations of Europe are banding together to help Ukraine because they no longer trust us anymore.  Why should they?  A plurality of us just put Trump back into the White House and he's still getting broad support in the polls.  Not only is America withdrawing from its international commitments, American voters seem to be just fine - happy, even - with that.  The Europeans knew that Trump's return was inevitable, largely, because they've long known what I said at the beginning of this post - Americans are not mature enough and wise enough to lead the world, and the large support Trump enjoys among voters signified to them that we were no longer committed to a value system - the one thing that legitimized as as a superpower in the first place.  

When Joe Biden assumed the Presidency in 2021, he famously said, "America is back!"  To which world leaders replied, "But for how long?"  The answer - four years.  And even if "America is back"  in 2029 should a Democrat be elected President, the rest of the world won't want us back.  We're too unlearned and too foolish, too mercurial and too unstable, The question is no longer whether the European Union should lead the free world . . . they must lead it!   Because not only will Trump not lead it . . . he's too busy working with Musk to make sure we're no longer part of it. 

Dr. Steinister

The more I learn about Jill Stein, the more I regret voting for her in 2016.

As everyone knows, Dr. Stein, once again the Green Party presidential nominee, is setting her sights on Michigan, where she says she plans to win enough votes to deprive Kamala Harris of a victory there, which would of course make it easier for Donald Trump to win the White House and turn the United States into Der Amerikanisches Reich.  She is appealing to the large number of Michiganders of Arab heritage and/or the Islamic faith due to the unpopular Biden-Harris administration's policy toward Israel and the Palestinians.   I couldn't understand why Dr. Stein, who supposedly leads the ticket of a progressive minor party, would focus squarely on the Biden-Harris administration's missteps on the Middle East while ignoring Trump's racist attitudes toward the Palestinians and his unreserved support for Israel.  The only explanation that makes sense is that she's a pawn of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who hopes to interfere in the American election to help Trump.

Now, I've had a hard time accepting the notion that Dr. Stein is a Putin stooge, given her leftist views and his fascistic rule of post-Soviet Russia.  Oh, sure, I knew that she - and Michael Flynn, the Hermann Göring of Trumpworld - attended a dinner in Moscow in December 2015 to celebrate Russia Today (RT), the propaganda "news" channel tat had been founded in 2005, and sat at Putin's table, which I decided wasn't that much different from that scene in Bananas where Fielding Mellish has dinner with the President of San Marcos ("I could kill him now!  He brings cake for a group of people, and he doesn't even bring an assortment!"). 

And Dr. Stein had a plausible explanation for her presence there. She that while RT's American channel covered her presidential campaign extensively, the major networks ignored her. "And my own connection to RT, you know ironically, it takes a Russian television station to actually be open to independent candidates in this country and that is a shame. A shameful commentary on our own media."

The realization that Dr. Stein is full of snail snot came not when I saw that Michael Flynn and Vladimir Putin were seated at the same dinner table with her.  It came when I found out who her other seatmates were.

As the superimposed name tags show, all but four of the people seated with Flynn, Putin and Dr. Stein are all associates of . . . Putin.  The other three are Cyril Svoboda, a pro-Putin former deputy prime minister of the Czech Republic, Willy Wimmer, a pro-Putin German politician who has served in the German Bundestag, Bosnian pro-Putin film director Emir Kusturica, and his wife.

A person is judged by the company she keeps.

*SIGH* . . .  Once again, I have to explain my vote for Dr. Stein in 2016 because some of you may not have read my earlier blog posts on the subject . . ..  I live in New Jersey, which hasn't been a swing state since 2004, and I voted for the Green ticket in 2016 because I not only loathed Donald Trump but because I thought the Democratic National Committee had hijacked the party nomination for Hillary Clinton, whom I believed thought was entitled to it and because of how the Democratic National Committee had undermined Martin O'Malley, whose 2016 candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination I supported. I would have voted Green if Homey the Clown had been the nominee, because I wanted to help the Greens get enough of the vote to qualify for matching funds in 2020. They didn't.  And when the Democrats were in danger of going full Whig in 2017, I hoped progressives could call a convention and start a new party to fill in the void left by the Democrats once they died what I thought would be a richly deserved death. But progressives didn't call for anything, and the Democratic Party hobbled on.  Now I find out that Dr. Stein's seatmates at this dinner in Moscow were not just Putin and Flynn but Putin's Kremlin stooges and  pro-Putin Europeans?

I wish I hadn't voted for Dr. Stein.  I was wrong to do so.  There, I said it.  I don't regret voting for a minor-party presidential candidate, even though I did so more out of anger at the Democratic National Committee over how they treated Martin O'Malley than anything else, and besides, I knew Hillary would win a popular majority in New Jersey and its fourteen electoral votes, which she did.  However, I voted for the wrong candidate. I should have voted for Workers World Party presidential nominee Monica Moorehead. New Jersey was one of three states in which Moorehead was on the ballot.

As for Jill Stein, this doctor is out.

Putin It There Again

Back in March 2023, I wrote here that when the fighting broke out in Ukraine and numerous Ukrainian cities were mercilessly bombed by the Russians, Donald "Trump spoke with a great deal of rue, saying that [Vladimir] Putin had 'changed.' In fact, he hadn't."  I also wrote that "if Trump ends up still supporting Putin after all of this, he'll only prove that, once in awhile you'll get a sucker dumb enough to fall for the same scam a second time."

Well, it was I who was scammed.  Trump clearly knew who Vladimir Putin was before he invaded Ukraine, he knew exactly who Putin was in March 2023 (even if everyone else in the West had been fooled into thinking Putin was a good guy), and he certainly knows who Putin is now. Trump does continue to support Putin, and he's likely to take his side in any negotiations that take place to end the war in Ukraine should Trump return to the White House. 

The clearest evidence that Trump knows who Putin is is the summit between Putin and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, another buddy of Trump's, in which they are possibly discussing ways to stand together against international condemnation and plotting how to interfere in the 2024 U.S. presidential election . . . and Trump is obviously too unconcerned to comment on it.

Oh, yeah, and they just signed a mutual defense pact.

Nice flags, guys.

Americans are known for being easily fooled - after all, they've accepted rap as music, bought SUVs instead of sedans and hatchbacks, kept "Two and a Half Men" on the air for twelve years, and happily buy new houses in new developments with names like Forest Glen Heights in flat acreages were there are no forests and no glens and think they're living in the country instead of the suburbs - but if they go back to Trump after all this, God help us.   

Putin It On the Line

Even though the Senate passed a military aid package for Ukraine that also includes military aid for Israel and the Indo-Pacific region, and humanitarian aid for the Palestinians, Mike Johnson refuses to let the aid come up for a vote in the House until President Biden and congressional Democrats address the southern border.  They did that already, and Mike Johnson wouldn't let that come to a vote either.  Why?  Ask Mike Johnson.  I would love to hear his answer, because I know it won't include the sentence "Trump told me not to."  Even though that's the actual answer.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are letting Vladimir Putin become the most powerful leader in the Eastern Hemisphere.  And Trump will let him become the most powerful leader in the world if he himself gets back in power as a result of this year's U.S. presidential election.  But, that's probably going to happen . . . because Americans only care about the economy and think Trump will do a better job on the economy than Joe Biden by twenty points. 

House Democrats hope to get enough pro-Ukraine Republicans to sign a discharge petition to allow the Senate bill to come to a vote in the House, but pundits say the odds are against that.  How many GOP votes do the Democrats need to pass a discharge petition?

Five.

Five.  Only five.

And that's a long shot? 

And by the way, progressive Democrats, especially a certain bird from the Bronx (I won't mention her name, but her initials are A-O-C) also might oppose the bill because it gives military aid to the Israelis.  And oh yeah, I didn't want to bring it up, but the left famously ignored the struggle against Communism in Poland in the 1980s because they couldn't conceive the possibility that you could support Solidarity in Poland and the fight against apartheid in South Africa at the same time.  Or maybe they just didn't care about the Poles.

Gosh darn it, Putin is planning to put a weapon in space that can destroy American satellites!  And Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, just got killed while living in a penal colony north of the Arctic Circle.  And President Biden can't get the support of House Republicans to help Ukraine?  How is he going to get aid to the Ukrainians?  We need a way to funnel aid to Ukraine under the table without anyone, not even the President, aware of it.

Dammit, we need Oliver North!

It's a thought.

Slow Train Coming

North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Vladivostok, almost a stone's throw away from Russia's short border with North Korea, in which Putin promised Kim food and fuel for the North Korean people in exchange for North Korean arms for Russian soldiers in the war in Ukraine. 

This is a very worrisome development, and I have to admit that this will perpetuate instability in the world for the foreseeable future.  However, I have tried to find a silver lining to the Kim-Putin summit.

I did.  Kim traveled by train across the Tumen River, which separates the two countries.  He takes an armored train to avoid a rogue North Korean air force pilot taking out his plane.  The train moved painfully slowly to get to Kim's destination at Vladivostok.

So there you have it - at least once country has a train that's slower and less reliable than any train run by Amtrak! 😄  

Russia's January 6

When Wagner Group militia leader Yevgeny Prigozhin (below) became annoyed when his benefactor, Russian President Vladimir Putin, kept shortchanging and ignoring his requests for more materiel to fight the war in Ukraine,  he'd clearly had enough.  He led his mercenaries toward Moscow and exposed Putin's weakness as a leader  But Putin still had an ace card to play - the Russian air force - and their counterattack on the Wagner forces on their way to deposing Putin convinced Prigozhin, a one-time oligarch and restaurateur, to cut his losses.  He presumably made his way to Belarus, whose president, Alexander Lukashenko, granted him asylum in exchange for Putin to promise not to haul Prigozhin's butt before  Russian tribunal and tried for insurrection.

Putin got himself a reprieve, as Prigozhin's plan to storm the Kremlin never got that far, but Prigozhin has made it clear that Bad Vlad's days are numbered.  The war in Ukraine is going so badly for him that even Russian soldiers are turning against him.  Wagner mercenaries had been on his side, because that's their job, but that is clearly no longer true.  An inside coup perpetrated from a top Kremlin official is the likeliest outcome for Putin, and it could happen much sooner than any of us dare think.  Three things are for certain.  The first is that Putin will be gone soon, and the second is that Russia is going to be in even greater turmoil as the country figures out who's in charge.

And the third thing is that Donald Trump will have to find another sympathetic world leader to interfere in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. 

Mr. Zelensky Goes To Washington

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the United States last week to confer with President Biden and address a joint session of Congress.  In his speech to Congress, in which he wore army fatigues he extolled the virtues of freedom and vividly illustrated how the people of Ukraine have fought the Russians to preserve Ukrainian national sovereignty and how continued American support for Ukraine would benefit not just Ukraine and the United States but Europe and the entire world, as it would strengthen democracy in the world and also the global order.

"Your money is not charity.  It's an investment," Zelensky said.

You know, this guy can really communicate to people.  If he hadn't gotten into politics, he might have had a good future in show biz. 😉

The speech was well-received by members of Congress, even many Republicans.  But Republicans such as Lauren Boebert - who wanted to know what the money the U.S .was giving to Ukraine was going to and why we couldn't spend the same money to keep migrants out of the U.S. - and Matt Goetz were too busy checking their cell phones for orders from Trump - or Putin.  As far as they were concerned, Zelensky might as well have been reading  a chapter "The Crying of Lot 49."  

Remember, they're part of the incoming House Republican majority that's going to be deciding on future aid to Ukraine.

Putin is licking his chops. 😢

A Bridge Too Far

Just when Vladimir Putin thought he'd fixed things for good on the war in Ukraine by jacking up oil prices with Saudi Arabia's Mohammed bin Salman, the man who will be king, the Crimean Bridge, connecting Crimea - occupied by the Russians since 2014 - with the Russian North Caucasus region, was attacked.

An explosion did major damage to the road-and-rail bridge crossing the Kerch Strait, cutting off a vital supply line for Russia to aid the war effort in Ukraine and hold Crimea itself.

Putin celebrated this bridge as a big deal, and not just because it connects Russia and Crimea, given to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev (who grew up in Ukraine and who married a Ukrainian woman) at the expense of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic.  (Since Ukraine and Russia were both part of the Soviet Union, the best way to explain this land transfer is to imagine if President Eisenhower had transferred the Oklahoma Panhandle to Texas.)   Putin celebrated this bridge and officiated at its opening in 2018 because he saw it as technological marvel - twelve miles long over the Kerch Strait.

Uh, Vlad?  Dude?  Can I see you in my office?  Because we in the States have a seventeen-mile crossing - that's right, seventeen miles (about 27.3 kilometers) between Virginia Beach and Cape Charles on the Delmarva Peninsula.

The Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel?  Maybe you've heard of it.

I mean . . . it was built in 1964.

Did I mention the artificial islands made for the tunnel entrances?

Royal Pain

It was once said that there would come a day there would only be five kings that would matter - the king of clubs, the king of hearts, the king of spades, the king of diamonds, and the king of Great Britain.  King Charles III may matter somewhat, having just assumed the British throne at a time when Britain is undergoing an economic crisis and the Commonwealth is getting restless, but there is a sixth king that matters, a king that matters more than Charles.

Actually, Mohammed bin Salman isn't the king of Saudi Arabia yet, but as the country's crown prince and prime minister and the regent in light of his father's frailty,  he is king in all but name.  And his lust for power is becoming more apparent before he's even assumed the throne.

Mohammed bin Salman has already attacked rebels in Yemen, cracked down on feminists, assassinated Jamal Khashoggi, tapped Jeff Bezos's phone, and entered into an alliance with Russia.  Now, as a key player in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), in concert with OPEC+, a consortium of non-OPEC oil exporters that includes Russia, the crown prince has kicked the United States in the fanny.  After President Biden met with Mohammed bin Salman this past summer to maintain high oil production to keep prices low, Saudi Arabia has moved to cut production drastically - by two million barrels a day - and thus increase gasoline prices.

The Saudis and OPEC say that this production cut is meant to stabilize prices after radical swings back and forth, and that may be part of it.  But it also noncoincidentally allows Vladimir Putin to bring in more oil revenues to fund his war in Ukraine and, as MSNBC's Ali Velshi noted, hurts President Biden and the Democrats going into 2022 midterms.  The Saudis made out like bandits when Trump was President, making a lot of sweetheart deals with Trump and his family, and they also profited handsomely during George Walker Bush's administration despite the fact that Saudi nationals, including the late and decidedly unlamented Osama bin Laden, were involved in 9/11.  Biden is no friend of Big Oil, as his administration moves to supplement and eventually replace gasoline-powered vehicles with electric ones and cut back on fossil-fuel consumption to slow climate change.

And if and when the Republicans win back power in Washington, they're likely to crate a repressive, authoritarian society not unlike what Saudi Arabia has now.       

Congressional Democrats have had enough of trying to please Saudi Arabia with arms sales and military protection and are ready to pull the plug.  That will help weaken the Saudis, but until we have more plentiful alternative forms of energy for transportation, we have to do something about rising gas prices.  Biden has already said he'll release ten million more barrels of oil.  American oil companies, the same Big Oil Biden has demonized, have offered to increase production to offset OPEC production cuts. Kevin McCarthy has encouraged people to vote Republican as a sure way to make that happen.

No one dares suggest dumping our SUVs and getting automakers to supply the market with small cars like, ahem, the Volkswagen Polo.    

Uh, Mary Barra, doesn't GM still make small cars in China that you could bring over here in a pinch? Jim Farley, didn't Ford say it could being the Focus and Fiesta back here if the situation called for it? Toshihiro Mibe - yeah, you, pal! - how about re-introducing the Honda Fit here?  My mother has one and she loves it!  😡   

The Donbas Dumbass

That would be this guy.

Vladimir Putin held sham referenda in Russian-occupied oblasts, or regions, of Ukraine in which the vote to join the Russian Federation was 103 percent - 105 percent in some areas! Then, after Putin welcomed the regions into Russia - including the Donetsk Oblast - the Ukrainian army liberated Lyman, a key city in Donetsk.  

And the Ukrainian flag flies over the city once again!

Awk-ward!

Putin has promised that any attempt by the West to help Ukraine take back the four oblasts will lead to nuclear war.

Oh, I see - he threatens to unleash the sort of power that would wipe out cities in some of our most heavily populated areas?

Someone tell Putin that Hurricane Ian already did that in Florida! 

I'm sorry, I take my humor like my coffee - black. 

No sugar.

Welcome To the Club

It's official: The once-neutral countries of Sweden and Finland have been invited to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and will be fully initiated in a few months. President Biden was able to get Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to agree to the expansion of NATO despite Erdoğan's misgivings about letting them join over concerns of Kurdish terrorists (or freedom fighters, depending on your perspective) living in exile in both countries.  And the Turkish leader gets new American fighter jets in the deal.

Leaving that aside, this is what President Biden would call a big f**king deal.  Sweden, historically neutral, has not been in war since 1814, meaning that none of its veterans are alive today.  There are also dead soldiers in Finland; they're all Russian, causalities of the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union in 1939 and 1940.  Their abandonment of neutrality changes things dramatically.  Their proximity to the Baltic Sea will make Russian naval exercises there much more difficult, and now a NATO member - that would be Finland - shares a border with Russia that is 810 miles long, longer than the borders Russia shares with the Baltic States and Poland, all NATO members, put together.  This is precisely what Vladimir Putin did not want.

Oh, yeah, with St. Petersburg at the end of the Gulf of Finland, a body of water situated between Finland itself to the north and Estonia to the south, could make the city's maritime access, umm, complicated. Putin, who calls the city formerly known as Leningrad home, must be glad that the Russian capital has long since been moved to Moscow.

The only wrinkle is that Ukraine - the Russian invasion of which was the catalyst for NATO expansion in Scandinavia - has wanted to join NATO and has been held back, being told that it must go through a process.  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky believes that the Ukrainian people have paid for NATO membership with four months of war with Russia.  But, despite more American shipments of weapons to Ukraine, the country will not likely join NATO until after the war is over,  Because an attack on one NATO member is an attack on all, and if Ukraine joined NATO tomorrow, the alliance would be obliged to send troops their to face the Russians.

And you know what would happen after that?  World War III.  

Putin Expands NATO?

Finland has always had an uneasy relationship with Russia.  It was part of the old Czarist Russian empire until Russia's capitulation in World War I gave the Finns the opportunity to gain its independence, but when the Soviet Union sought to reclaim land from the old empire's western frontier and fortify it against a possible German invasion at the start of World War II, Joseph Stalin made demands of the Finns, who refused to accept them.  The Soviet Union invaded Finland in November 1939, and the Finns held out throughout the winter of 1939-40 in the so-called Winter War before bowing to the Red Army's superiority.  (Finns foolishly cast their lot with the Nazis when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, only to be on the losing side again.)  Finland had to promise to remain a neutral nation after World War II to maintain its independence, which meant not joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Now, however, the people who invented the Molotov cocktail in the Winter War are on the verge of joining NATO thanks to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where the the locals are mixing Molotov cocktails up in every kitchen sink they can find.  Finland is afraid of Putin possibly threatening its 800-mile border with Russia, and the Finns have begun a process to enter NATO membership.  Sweden - always hostile to Russian expansion and being the only country on Europe's far northern land mass that doesn't border Russia (yes, Norway borders Russia, check the map) - is even looking into the idea.

If Vladimir Putin thought he could intimidate NATO, he really screwed up big time.

But it's not all bad news for Putin.  French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen has proposed that NATO enter an alliance with Russia once the war in Ukraine - a war President Biden is helping Ukraine fight by giving it $800 million in additional military aid - is over.

Le Pen wants France and Britain to enter into an alliance with Russia?  What is this, 1914?

For more about Russo-Finnish relations, watch this video.

Bucha

The name of this Kyiv suburb will be forever linked with war crimes, like Auschwitz.

Ukrainian civilians tied up and shot by Russian troops.  Murdered in cold blood.  Many shot in the street and left for dead.  All without any rhyme or reason, as if there could be any rhyme or reason in killing noncombatants.  All courtesy of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. 

This is the man Donald Trump says is a genius?  Trump actually thinks that a deal with such a man - not for détente but for dirt on Joe Biden's son - is honorable?  

It's become more obvious that President Biden is right - Vladimir Putin must go!

Two Ukraines?

Vladimir Putin, realizing that the war un Ukraine that he started is now going badly (very badly), says that he considers the first phase operations to be a success, and now he's concentrating on what he really wants - two independent states in the eastern separatist region.

So, naturally, he attacked Lviv, which is in the western part of the country,  with missiles.

Now Putin is talking about partitioning Ukraine into two countries, a western republic that could join the European Union and an eastern Republic aligned with Russia.

Yeah, how did that plan work out for Germany?

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is hoping to talk directly with Putin, but he has vowed not to cede one square centimeter of territory to the Russians.  Good for him.

And yes, Joe Biden is right, Putin does have to go! Time for another Russian revolution! 

Putin Us On

Just before the start of the war in Ukraine, Donald Trump, a longtime friend, confidante and sucker of Vladimir Putin, said that Putin's effort to impose a pax Russiana on Ukraine by amassing troops along Ukraine's borders with Russia and Belarus was an act of "genius."  When the fighting broke out and numerous cities were mercilessly bombed by the Russian army, Trump spoke with a great deal of rue, saying that Putin had "changed."  In fact, he hadn't.

In fairness to Trump (I . . . can't believe I just wrote that!), he's not the only one to realize that Putin is not the nice guy he was once thought to be.  When Putin was democratically elected to succeed Boris Yeltsin as president of post-Soviet Russia in 2000, he came across as a young, dynamic, Westernized leader who would bring Russia into the twenty-first century.  He welcomed free-market capitalism and Western popular culture.  And he put on quite a charm offensive.  He took George Walker Bush for a ride in his classic Volga sedan when our forty-third President held a summit with him, and Bush later said he believe he "saw his soul" by looking into his eyes.  At a concert, Putin took to the stage and sang "Blueberry Hill" - in English - to the delight of an audience that included Western movie stars such as Gerard Depardieu, Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell.  He even got to meet Paul McCartney (below) when the former Beatle played Red Square in Moscow in May 2003.  He told Macca that he enjoyed listening to the Beatles because their music "was very popular, like a breath of fresh air, a window into the outside world."  At the concert, Putin took his seat just like any other Beatles fan.

Yes, many Westerners actually liked this guy.

He fooled everyone.  Everyone, that is, except Balts, Poles, Baltic-Americans, Polish-Americans, and Mitt Romney.  It was Romney, after all, who said back in 2012 that Putin was the greatest threat to world peace while running or President against incumbent Barack Obama.  Democrats laughed - just as they laughed at Ronald Reagan's Russophobic statements in the early eighties (except for Democrats with last names like Jonaitis or Malinowski).  Who has the last laugh now?  Well, Romney, who's suddenly being talked about as a 2024 Republican presidential candidate if the GOP comes to its senses and stops waiting for Trump.  Romney is also one of President Biden's strongest supporters on the Ukraine crisis from the Republican side of the aisle in the Senate.

Putin proved that P.T. Barnum was right, but if Trump ends up still supporting Putin after all of this, he'll only prove that, once in awhile you'll get a sucker dumb enough to fall for the same scam a second time.  Ironically, Trump is counting on his supporters to be stupid enough to fall for his scam . . . a third time.

And as to how Paul McCartney could have fallen for Putin's shtick . . . well, Macca was married to Heather Mills at the time, so you have to take that into account. 

A Nuclear Error

It's become obvious that Vladimir Putin will stop at nothing to make Ukraine submit to his will, even if it means making the entire country glow in the dark.

This is the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine, the largest one in the country and the largest such plant in all of Europe (and that's counting the one in Armenia, assuming you think of Armenia as a European rather than an Asian country).  The plan generates 20 percent of all the electricity generated in Ukraine and half of Ukraine's nuclear power.  Built in 1980 when Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union, the plant came under fire the other day from Russian forces and radiation allegedly leaked out.  We were spared another Chernobyl - that's also in Ukraine - when radiation levels proved to be normal, but it seems that Putin was ready to blow up the plant if he had to deny Ukrainians vital power.  Now the Zaporizhzhia plant is being operated by Ukrainian plant managers with Russian guns pointed at their heads.

And who know what Putin will do next with it.  He's certainly not going to let it keep operating unless he can personally benefit from it.

Quit holding out and draw another breath . . .. 😱

A Mushrooming War

The situation in Ukraine is getting worse by the hour, and it may get worst by the minute.

Vladimir Putin has continued to expand the the fighting and the bombing in Ukraine, and he says a third world war will be nuclear.

Oh, we knew that about a third world war - we've known it for seventy years.  But Putin is suggesting that this is the war that could end up being World War III.

You know, somehow COVID doesn't seem important anymore . . .