Mid-range missile test: U.S. Army photo
Mid-range missile test: U.S. Army photo
The plain fact is that Putin doesn’t just want the areas of Ukraine he has already taken. He wants all of Ukraine, every last inch of it.
Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV
The short answer is nothing good, and the reason for it is Donald Trump.
Look at the calendar for this month alone, the month that began with Trump saying he was close to bringing an end to the war in Ukraine. On August 6, Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff went to Moscow to meet with Vladimir Putin. That alone should have been enough for us to know that nothing good was going to happen. I mean, one of Trump’s real estate pals acting like he’s an international trouble shooter? I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in the Kremlin watching the laughter of those Russian killers as Witkoff’s visit approached. They eat experienced experts on international affairs and skilled diplomats for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert. Witkoff wasn’t even an appetizer.
Witkoff’s big offer was a face-to-face meeting with Trump. Now, if you were a serious negotiator, you would have laid that offer on the table and then spent about a week coming up with an agreement on what neutral territory the meeting would take place. I’m sure Putin’s people were ready for him: how about Alaska? It’s close to Russia…who knows what their rationale was. Witkoff, not knowing a thing about Russian politics, which has long held that Alaska was stolen and they should get it back, said sure!
Trump’s instinct, as always, is to put on a big show. The only thing he didn’t have waiting for Putin was gold leaf appliques along the red carpet on the tarmac at the U.S. airbase in Alaska. After their truncated meeting, Trump let Putin take the lead at the so-called press conference afterwards. Former U.S. diplomats and people who had worked in previous White Houses, Republican and Democratic alike, said they had never seen a time when the U.S. president, having hosted a foreign leader on our soil, had not taken charge of the press conference, set the stage with the U.S. position on how the talks had gone, and only then turned the stage over to his foreign guest.
But not Trump. He let Putin give the press, and himself, a lecture during which he regurgitated Russian talking points and rewrote history, leaving Trump in the position of either reacting to Putin with corrections, or keeping his mouth shut. Trump didn’t want to offend his guest, so he chose the second option, looking like a wounded puppy in the process.
Trump had announced that he would meet with President Zelenskyy of Ukraine after his session with Putin, so that meeting was duly scheduled for yesterday. The major leaders of Europe showed up with the Ukrainian president to make clear to Trump that they wouldn’t stand for either Zelenskyy or the rest of Europe being pushed around and lectured to, so the meeting happened without incident, but also without any discernible result that would have moved the needle on the war in Ukraine. In fact, Putin hit Ukrainian cities with several hundred attack drones and a flurry of ballistic missiles on the day Trump met with Zelensky and European leaders.
Click here to read the rest of this article.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
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