#KURSK CAMPAIGN

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Rick McKee, Augusta Chronicle

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 11, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Nov 12, 2024

The day after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Afghanistan’s Taliban offered its congratulations to the American people for “not handing leadership of their great country to a woman.” 

Taliban leaders expressed optimism that Trump’s election would enable a new chapter in the history of U.S-Taliban relations. They noted that it was Trump who suggested a new international order when he inked the February 29, 2020, Doha Agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban. That deal cut out the Afghan government and committed the U.S. to leave Afghanistan by May 2021, closing five military bases and ending economic sanctions on the Taliban. This paved the way for the U.S. evacuation of the country in August 2021 and the return of the Taliban to power. 

The Taliban prohibits girls’ education past the sixth grade and recently banned the sound of women’s voices outside their homes.

In Russia, Russian thinker Alexander Dugin explained the dramatic global impact of Trump’s win. “We have won,” Dugin said. “The world will be never ever like before. Globalists have lost their final combat.” Dugin has made his reputation on his calls for an “anti-American revolution” and a new Russian empire built on “the rejection of [alliances of democratic nations surrounding the Atlantic], strategic control of the United States, and the rejection of the supremacy of economic, liberal market values,” as well as reestablishing traditional family structures with strict gender roles. 

Maxim Trudolyubov of the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan foreign affairs think tank, suggested Friday that Putin’s long-term goal of weakening the U.S. has made him more interested in dividing Americans than in any one candidate. 

Indeed, rather than backing Trump wholeheartedly, Russian president Vladimir Putin has been undercutting him. He did not comment on Trump’s election until Thursday, when he said that the power of liberal democracies over world affairs is “irrevocably disappearing.” Although Ellen Nakashima, John Hudson, and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post reported that Trump and Putin had spoken on Thursday, Putin denied such a call as “pure fiction.”

Exacerbating America’s internal divisions and demonstrating dominance over both the U.S. and Trump might explain why after Trump became president-elect, laughing Russian media figures showed viewers nude pictures of Trump’s third wife, Melania, taken during her modeling career.

In an interview, Putin’s presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev said today: "To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them." Meanwhile, U.S. and Ukrainian officials report that Russia has massed 50,000 soldiers, including North Korean soldiers, to reclaim territory in the Kursk region of Russia taken this year by Ukrainian forces. 

Trump claims to have talked to about seventy world leaders since his reelection but has declined to go through the usual channels of the State Department. This illustrates his determination to reorganize the federal government around himself rather than its normal operations but leaves him—and the United States—vulnerable to misstatements and misunderstandings.

The domestic effects of Trump’s victory also reveal confusion, both within the Republican Party and within national politics. Voters elected Trump and his running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, but it’s hard to miss that billionaire Elon Musk, who backed Trump’s 2024 campaign financially, seems to be “Trump’s shadow vice-president,” as Nick Robins-Early of The Guardian put it. Sources told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that Musk has been a constant presence at Mar-a-Lago since the election, sitting in on phone calls with foreign leaders and weighing in on staffing decisions. Yesterday at Mar-a-Lago, Musk met with the chief executive officer of the right-wing media channel Newsmax.

Exactly who is in control of the party is unclear, and in the short term that question is playing out over the Senate’s choice of a successor to minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). In the new Congress, this Republican leader will become Senate majority leader, thereby gaining the power to control the Senate calendar and decide which bills get taken up and which do not. 

Trump controls the majority of Republicans in the House, but he did not control Senate Republicans when McConnell led them. Now he wants to put Florida senator Rick Scott into the leadership role, but Republicans aligned with McConnell and the pre-2016 party want John Thune (R-SD) or John Cornyn (R-TX). There are major struggles taking place over the choice. Today Musk posted on social media his support for Scott. Other MAGA leaders fell in line, with media figure Benny Johnson—recently revealed to be on Russia’s payroll—urging his followers to target senators backing Thune or Cornyn.

Rachael Bade and Eugene Daniels of Politico Playbook suggested that this pressure would backfire, especially since many senators dislike Scott for his unsuccessful leadership of the National Republican Senatorial Committee that works to elect Republicans to the Senate. 

Trump has also tried to sideline senators by demanding they abandon one of their key constitutional roles: that of advice and consent to a president’s appointment of top administration figures. Although Republicans will command a majority in the Senate, Trump is evidently concerned he cannot get some of his appointees through, so has demanded that Republicans agree to let him make recess appointments without going through the usual process of constitutionally mandated advice and consent.

Trump has also demanded that Republicans stop Democrats from making any judicial appointments in the next months, although Republicans continued to approve his nominees after voters elected President Joe Biden in 2020. Indeed, Judge Aileen Cannon, who let Trump off the hook for his retention of classified documents, was approved after Trump had lost the election.

All this jockeying comes amid the fact that while Trump is claiming a mandate from his election, in fact the vote was anything but a landslide. While votes are still being counted, Trump seems to have won by fewer than two percentage points in a cycle where incumbents across the globe lost. This appears to be the smallest popular vote margin for a winning candidate since Richard Nixon won in 1968.

While voters elected Trump, they also backed Democratic policies. In seven states, voters enshrined abortion rights in their constitutions. Two Republican-dominated states raised their minimum wage to $15 an hour; three enshrined mandated paid leave. In exit polls last week, sixty-five percent of voters said they want abortion to remain legal, and fifty-six percent said they want undocumented immigrants to have a chance to apply for legal status.

The gap between what Trump has promised MAGA supporters and what voters want is creating confusion in national politics. How can Trump deliver the national abortion ban MAGAs want when sixty-five percent of voters want abortion rights? How can he deport all undocumented immigrants, including those who have been here for decades and integrated into their communities, while his own voters say they want undocumented immigrants to have a path to citizenship? 

Trump’s people have repeatedly expressed their opinion that Trump was stopped from putting the full MAGA agenda into place because he did not move quickly enough in his first term. They have vowed they will not make that mistake again. But the fast imposition of their extremist policies runs the risk of alienating the more moderate voters who just put them in power.

In September, as the Taliban enforced new rules on women in Afghanistan, they also began to target Afghan men. New laws mandated that men stop wearing western jeans, stop cutting their hair and beards in western ways, and stop looking at women other than their wives or female relatives. Religious morality officers are knocking on the doors of those who haven’t recently attended mosque to remind them they can be tried and sentenced for repeated nonattendance, and government employees are afraid they’ll be fired if they don’t grow their beards. According to Rick Noack of the Washington Post, such restrictions surprised men, who were accustomed to enjoying power in their society. Some have been wondering if they should have spoken up to defend the freedoms of their wives and daughters.

One man who had supported the Taliban said he now feels bullied. “We all are practicing Muslims and know what is mandatory or not. But it’s unacceptable to use force on us,” he said. Speaking on the condition of anonymity because he feared drawing the attention of the regime, another man from Kabul said: “If men had raised their voices, we might also be in a different situation now.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[mariacallous]

Just before the recent advance of Ukrainian forces into Russian territory, there were signs that Americans were becoming somewhat less confident about Ukraine’s prospects in the war with Russia. Add to this that the United States is in the middle of a heated election season where Republican politicians have been less supportive of backing Ukraine, one might have expected a drop in American public support for Kyiv.

Yet, our new University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll with SSRS shows robust, even increasing, support for Ukraine.

The poll was carried out by SSRS among a sample of 1,510 American adults from their probability-based online panel, in addition to oversamples of 202 Blacks and 200 Hispanics, July 26-August 1, just before the Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Kursk region. The margin of error is +/- 3.0 %.  Here are some key takeaways.

Americans across the partisan divide are far more sympathetic to Ukraine than to Russia

A strong majority of Americans across the political spectrum sympathize more with Ukraine than Russia in the ongoing war: 62% of respondents express more sympathy with Ukraine than Russia, including 58% of Republicans and 76% of Democrats. At the same time, just 2% of respondents said they sympathized more with Russia in the conflict, including 4% of Republicans and 1% of Democrats. Republicans (20%) were more likely than Democrats (7%) to say they sympathized with neither side, while equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats (5%) said they sympathized with both sides equally.

More Americans want the United States to stay the course in supporting Ukraine as long as it takes

The percentage of respondents who said they want the United States to stay the course in supporting Ukraine grew from our October 2023 poll, reaching the highest level in our tracking since the spring of 2023. In our latest survey, 48% of all respondents said that the United States should support Ukraine as long as the conflict lasts, including 37% of Republicans and 63% of Democrats. All these numbers are new highs in our four polls since March-April 2023.

This shift among Republicans is especially striking considering recent campaign statements by the Republican candidates for president and vice president, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. Both members of the Republican ticket have made statements opposing further U.S. military aid to Ukraine.

Fewer Americans say Ukraine is winning and Russia is losing

Since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, our polls have tracked the American public assessment of Russia’s and Ukraine’s performance and prospects in the war, as we had reason to think that this assessment might influence the degree of public support for backing Ukraine. In the previous three polls, since March-April 2023, we found little change in that assessment. In the latest poll, there was a marked drop in the assessment that Ukraine is winning and Russia is losing.

Overall, 30% of respondents said Russia is failing in the latest poll, compared to 37% in October; and 21% said Ukraine is succeeding, compared to 26% in October. A plurality of about one-third said each side was neither winning nor losing. Democrats were more likely to think Ukraine (29%) is winning compared to those who said the same about Russia (9%). Republicans were more likely to express equal attitudes about the extent to which Russia (17%) and Ukraine (17%) are winning.

Fewer Americans view current levels of Ukraine funding as about right

American public attitudes on the level of funding for Ukraine remain highly partisan, with more Republicans saying the level is “too much” (52%) and more Democrats saying it’s about “the right level” (39%). Fewer respondents to the question about the level of U.S. support said, “they didn’t know” (26% compared to 33% last October). At the same time, there was an increase in the overall respondents who said the United States is spending too much (35% compared to 29% in October), and there was a simultaneous increase among those who said it is spending too little (15% compared to 10% in October).

The percentage of respondents saying that U.S. support for Ukraine is at the right level has dropped from 28% last October to 24% in July-August, with Republican support dropping from 18% to 15% and Democratic support dropping from 41% to 39%.

Americans support encouraging Ukraine to engage in conflict-ending diplomacy

We asked: “How much would you support or oppose the United States urging Ukraine to engage in diplomatic negotiations with Russia and the United States as soon as possible to end the war in Ukraine?”

We found strong bipartisan support for American urging of Ukraine to engage in diplomacy with Russia, though Republican support is more intense. Overall, 77% of respondents were supportive of diplomacy, with 40% saying they “strongly support” and 37% supporting “somewhat.” Republicans were more “strongly” supportive (53%) compared to Democrats (33%).

Conclusion

Before the recent advance of Ukrainian forces into Russian territory, the American public was growing less confident about Ukraine’s prospects in the war. Surprisingly, this has not undermined overall public support for Ukraine, especially the expressed commitment to stay the course for as long as it takes, which increased since last October. However, attitudes toward the level of support, while partisan, indicated some decline: A 6-point increase among those who say the support is too much, compared to only a one-point increase among those who say either that support is at the right level or too little (from 38% in October to 39% in July-August).

The most striking finding is the degree of bipartisan overall sympathy with Ukraine that encompasses majorities of Republicans and Democrats. The significant increase in the percentage of Republicans who want to see the United States stay the course in its support for Ukraine for as long as takes is especially notable as it occurs in the middle of a presidential campaign where the presidential candidates have taken contrasting views that might lead to a deeper partisan public divide. Early reports about the success of the Ukrainian advance into Russia may have impacted U.S. public support for Ukraine further, as in our previous studies, we found a positive correlation between the degree of perceived Ukrainian success on the battlefield and the degree of public willingness to support Ukraine.

[mercurygray]

HBOWW2 Rewatch: June-August 1943

Since Week 2's episodes really only take us through 3 months of 1943 there's not a lot of big picture stuff to get caught up on.

But man, oh man, are there some big things happening elsewhere.

June: The Zoot Suit Riots take place in Los Angeles when a group of sailors on leave get into a fight with Mexican American youth near the waterfront, leading to retaliatory action from many more sailors and soldiers in the following days. The riots last ten days, and are only stopped when the Army and Navy declare L.A. off limits to military personnel. (This is not the only race-related act of violence this month, but it is certainly the most well known.)

Charles de Gaulle and Henri Giraud are named co-presidents of the French Committee of National Liberation. This institution would challenge the legitimacy of the Vichy government and provide a unifying force for French forces abroad and at home. It will also function as a provisional government in Algeria, which has recently been liberated during the North Africa campaign.

The Tuskegee Airmen have their first encounter with the Luftwaffe as six P-40 Warhawks are attacked over the island of Pantelleria by 12 German Focke-Wulf 190 fighters. Pantelleria has recently surrendered and will serve as a jumping off point for the invasion of Sicily, which begins in July. (Lieutenant General Carl Spaatz is currently serving as the head of Mediterranean Air Force Command.)

The invasion of Sicily starts on July 9th as a combined US, British and Canadian force lands at points around the island, starting a month-long race by General Patton's forces to move from Licata in the south to Messina in the north in an effort to catch the Germans before they can evacuate to the mainland. (Sadly, most of the Germans do make it off the island.) Both this campaign, and the North Africa campaign that preceded it, are launched to redirect resources away from the Eastern Front - a move that largely succeeds.

Speaking of the Eastern Front, the battle of Kursk begins on July 9. It is the single largest battle in the history of warfare, and is a turning point for the entire European war. The use of air support in what is largely a tank battle leads to one of the single costliest days of aerial combat.

On July 19, Allied Air Forces bomb Rome, which leads, in some large part, to the resignation of Mussolini as Prime Minister on July 25th, ending a 17 year dictatorship.

On July 27th and 28th, the RAF bomb Hamburg. High winds and drought conditions lead to the greatest single-day loss of life in wartime as more than 30,000 city residents burn to death after bombs set the entire town aflame.

Also in June, the new town of Oak Ridge, Tennesee, which will house workers for the Manhattan Project, officially receives its first residents, and "Comin' in on a Wing and a Prayer" by The Song Spinners tops the Billboard singles chart.

Heading into August, Operation Tidal Wave, the bombing of Ploesti, Romania, begins as 177 B-24 bombers attack the oil plant. This will be the first of many, many bombing runs on this target, which is a sigificant source of fuel for the Axis. (And you can't outrun Patton in Sicily or fight tank wars in Russia if you don't have fuel)

The United States Women's Air Service Pilots, or WASPS, is officially formed under the auspices of Jackie Cochran and Nancy Love. The program consolidates 2 previous groups in an attempt to leverage civilian pilots for ferrying duties.

So. It's August of 1943. The Allies are eyeing mainland Italy for their next assault. The Russians are slugging away in Kursk. The 8th Air Force has just gotten through the Regensberg- Schweinfurt raid. September will probably hold much of the same. Or ...will it?

[petalsbleedingbeak666]

It's official - Zelenskij's Nazi regime is no longer defending and is now an aggressor

[darkmaga-returns]

October 23, 2024

Ukraine - Zelenski Begs Russia To Renew Deals He Had Botched

The actor who has been playing the President of Ukraine for a while is getting cold feet. Winter is coming and the energy networks of Ukraine are near to the point of total breakdown.

There could have been agreements in place to prevent that. But the Ukrainian side had botched those deals. Now Zelenski is begging to renew them.

In late 2022 the Russian military launched a bombing campaign against electricity switching stations in Ukraine. A lot of transformers got blown up. The Ukrainian military responded by concentrating its air defenses near electricity stations. That was exactly the effect the Russian's had asked for. The air defense installations, not the electricity stations, had been their real target.

After splitting from the Soviet Union, Ukraine had had the best air defenses money could buy. During the fall and winter of 2022 most of it had been destroyed. The Russian campaign against electricity stations came to a halt.

In 2023/24 the Ukrainian military started its own campaign against infrastructure in Russia. Several refineries were hit by drones and went up into flames. Gasoline production in Russia was falling significantly and export of gasoline had to be stopped for a while.

The Russians retaliated by renewing their campaign against Ukraine's electricity network. But this time the targets were not just switching stations but the generation facility themselves. The non-nuclear electricity production in Ukraine got decimated.

In its daily briefings the Russian Ministry of Defense called the attacks on Ukrainian electricity stations a direct retaliation for Ukrainian attacks on Russian proper. For example:

This morning, in response to the Kiev regime's attempts to damage objects of Russian power infrastructure and economy, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation delivered a group strike by long-range precision weaponry at objects of the Ukrainian military-industrial infrastructure and AFU aviation bases.

With their generation capacity in danger and under the threat of blackouts the Ukrainian government got to its senses - at least for a while. Secret negotiations were arranged in Doha, Qatar, to stop the infrastructure attacks on both sides.

In August 2024, shortly after the Ukrainian army had launched an incursion into the Kursk oblast of Russia, the Washington Post reported:

Ukraine and Russia were set to send delegations to Doha this month to negotiate a landmark agreement halting strikes on energy and power infrastructure on both sides, diplomats and officials familiar with the discussions said, in what would have amounted to a partial cease-fire and offered a reprieve for both countries. But the indirect talks, with the Qataris serving as mediators and meeting separately with the Ukrainian and Russian delegations, were derailed by Ukraine’s surprise incursion into Russia’s western Kursk region last week, according to the officials. ... For more than a year, Russia has pounded Ukraine’s power grid with a barrage of cruise missiles and drone strikes, causing irreparable damage to power stations and rolling blackouts across the country. Meanwhile, Ukraine has struck Russia’s oil facilities with long-range drone attacks that have set ablaze refineries, depots and reservoirs, reducing Moscow’s oil refining by an estimated 15 percent and raising gas prices around the world. ... A diplomat briefed on the talks said Russian officials postponed their meeting with Qatari officials after Ukraine’s incursion into western Russia. Moscow’s delegation described it as “an escalation,” the diplomat said, adding that Kyiv did not warn Doha about its cross-border offensive.

Ukraine had to pay a heavy price for the Kursk incursion. The elite troops it had sent failed to reach their target, a nuclear power station near Kursk, and soon got decimated. The attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure continued with full force.

Three month later, with the Kursk incursion as well as its electricity network near to total failure, the Ukrainian government is again changing course. It is begging to renew the deals it had botched.

[stele3]

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/several-people-dead-stabbing-incident-western-germany-bild-reports-2024-08-23/

[misfitwashere]

November 11, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Nov 11, 2024

The day after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Afghanistan’s Taliban offered its congratulations to the American people for “not handing leadership of their great country to a woman.” 

Taliban leaders expressed optimism that Trump’s election would enable a new chapter in the history of U.S-Taliban relations. They noted that it was Trump who suggested a new international order when he inked the February 29, 2020, Doha Agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban. That deal cut out the Afghan government and committed the U.S. to leave Afghanistan by May 2021, closing five military bases and ending economic sanctions on the Taliban. This paved the way for the U.S. evacuation of the country in August 2021 and the return of the Taliban to power. 

The Taliban prohibits girls’ education past the sixth grade and recently banned the sound of women’s voices outside their homes.

In Russia, Russian thinker Alexander Dugin explained the dramatic global impact of Trump’s win. “We have won,” Dugin said. “The world will be never ever like before. Globalists have lost their final combat.” Dugin has made his reputation on his calls for an “anti-American revolution” and a new Russian empire built on “the rejection of [alliances of democratic nations surrounding the Atlantic], strategic control of the United States, and the rejection of the supremacy of economic, liberal market values,” as well as reestablishing traditional family structures with strict gender roles. 

Maxim Trudolyubov of the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan foreign affairs think tank, suggested Friday that Putin’s long-term goal of weakening the U.S. has made him more interested in dividing Americans than in any one candidate. 

Indeed, rather than backing Trump wholeheartedly, Russian president Vladimir Putin has been undercutting him. He did not comment on Trump’s election until Thursday, when he said that the power of liberal democracies over world affairs is “irrevocably disappearing.” Although Ellen Nakashima, John Hudson, and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post reported that Trump and Putin had spoken on Thursday, Putin denied such a call as “pure fiction.”

Exacerbating America’s internal divisions and demonstrating dominance over both the U.S. and Trump might explain why after Trump became president-elect, laughing Russian media figures showed viewers nude pictures of Trump’s third wife, Melania, taken during her modeling career.

In an interview, Putin’s presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev said today: "To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them." Meanwhile, U.S. and Ukrainian officials report that Russia has massed 50,000 soldiers, including North Korean soldiers, to reclaim territory in the Kursk region of Russia taken this year by Ukrainian forces. 

Trump claims to have talked to about seventy world leaders since his reelection but has declined to go through the usual channels of the State Department. This illustrates his determination to reorganize the federal government around himself rather than its normal operations but leaves him—and the United States—vulnerable to misstatements and misunderstandings.

The domestic effects of Trump’s victory also reveal confusion, both within the Republican Party and within national politics. Voters elected Trump and his running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, but it’s hard to miss that billionaire Elon Musk, who backed Trump’s 2024 campaign financially, seems to be “Trump’s shadow vice-president,” as Nick Robins-Early of The Guardian put it. Sources told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that Musk has been a constant presence at Mar-a-Lago since the election, sitting in on phone calls with foreign leaders and weighing in on staffing decisions. Yesterday at Mar-a-Lago, Musk met with the chief executive officer of the right-wing media channel Newsmax.

Exactly who is in control of the party is unclear, and in the short term that question is playing out over the Senate’s choice of a successor to minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). In the new Congress, this Republican leader will become Senate majority leader, thereby gaining the power to control the Senate calendar and decide which bills get taken up and which do not. 

Trump controls the majority of Republicans in the House, but he did not control Senate Republicans when McConnell led them. Now he wants to put Florida senator Rick Scott into the leadership role, but Republicans aligned with McConnell and the pre-2016 party want John Thune (R-SD) or John Cornyn (R-TX). There are major struggles taking place over the choice. Today Musk posted on social media his support for Scott. Other MAGA leaders fell in line, with media figure Benny Johnson—recently revealed to be on Russia’s payroll—urging his followers to target senators backing Thune or Cornyn.

Rachael Bade and Eugene Daniels of Politico Playbook suggested that this pressure would backfire, especially since many senators dislike Scott for his unsuccessful leadership of the National Republican Senatorial Committee that works to elect Republicans to the Senate. 

Trump has also tried to sideline senators by demanding they abandon one of their key constitutional roles: that of advice and consent to a president’s appointment of top administration figures. Although Republicans will command a majority in the Senate, Trump is evidently concerned he cannot get some of his appointees through, so has demanded that Republicans agree to let him make recess appointments without going through the usual process of constitutionally mandated advice and consent.

Trump has also demanded that Republicans stop Democrats from making any judicial appointments in the next months, although Republicans continued to approve his nominees after voters elected President Joe Biden in 2020. Indeed, Judge Aileen Cannon, who let Trump off the hook for his retention of classified documents, was approved after Trump had lost the election.

All this jockeying comes amid the fact that while Trump is claiming a mandate from his election, in fact the vote was anything but a landslide. While votes are still being counted, Trump seems to have won by fewer than two percentage points in a cycle where incumbents across the globe lost. This appears to be the smallest popular vote margin for a winning candidate since Richard Nixon won in 1968.

While voters elected Trump, they also backed Democratic policies. In seven states, voters enshrined abortion rights in their constitutions. Two Republican-dominated states raised their minimum wage to $15 an hour; three enshrined mandated paid leave. In exit polls last week, sixty-five percent of voters said they want abortion to remain legal, and fifty-six percent said they want undocumented immigrants to have a chance to apply for legal status.

The gap between what Trump has promised MAGA supporters and what voters want is creating confusion in national politics. How can Trump deliver the national abortion ban MAGAs want when sixty-five percent of voters want abortion rights? How can he deport all undocumented immigrants, including those who have been here for decades and integrated into their communities, while his own voters say they want undocumented immigrants to have a path to citizenship? 

Trump’s people have repeatedly expressed their opinion that Trump was stopped from putting the full MAGA agenda into place because he did not move quickly enough in his first term. They have vowed they will not make that mistake again. But the fast imposition of their extremist policies runs the risk of alienating the more moderate voters who just put them in power.

In September, as the Taliban enforced new rules on women in Afghanistan, they also began to target Afghan men. New laws mandated that men stop wearing western jeans, stop cutting their hair and beards in western ways, and stop looking at women other than their wives or female relatives. Religious morality officers are knocking on the doors of those who haven’t recently attended mosque to remind them they can be tried and sentenced for repeated nonattendance, and government employees are afraid they’ll be fired if they don’t grow their beards. According to Rick Noack of the Washington Post, such restrictions surprised men, who were accustomed to enjoying power in their society. Some have been wondering if they should have spoken up to defend the freedoms of their wives and daughters.

One man who had supported the Taliban said he now feels bullied. “We all are practicing Muslims and know what is mandatory or not. But it’s unacceptable to use force on us,” he said. Speaking on the condition of anonymity because he feared drawing the attention of the regime, another man from Kabul said: “If men had raised their voices, we might also be in a different situation now.”

—

[dzthenerd490]

News Post

Palestine

UAE says it will not back post-war Gaza plans without Palestinian state | Israel-Palestine conflict News | Al Jazeera

Names of 710 Palestinian newborns killed by Israeli forces in Gaza published | Middle East Eye

Jury discharged in Pro-Palestine rooftop protest trial (bbc.com)

Ukraine

Russia begins efforts to expel Ukraine from Kursk but counter-attack is yet to gain momentum | CNN

Inside the U.S. arms factory making weapons for Ukraine : NPR

How Ukraine Turned Putin’s Own Trick Against Him (thedailybeast.com)

Man accused of trying to kill Trump wrote a book urging Iran to assassinate the ex-president | AP News

Sudan

Sudan civil war: Who was behind one of the conflict's deadliest attacks? (bbc.com)

Sudan: Fighting breaks out in el-Fasher following RSF attack | Middle East Eye

Opinion: Why are United States’ peace efforts in Sudan failing? - The Africa Report.com

South Sudan postpones December election by two years | Elections News | Al Jazeera

Other

‘Please take us to mum’: Families torn apart by Israel's occupation of Rafah crossing | Middle East Eye

At least three killed as trains collide in Egypt | CNN

Congo court sentences 3 Americans, 34 others to death on coup charges | AP News

The Taliban have suspended polio vaccination campaigns in Afghanistan, the UN says | AP News

Typhoon Yagi leaves at least 74 dead in Myanmar after flooding and landslides | CNN

[yourreddancer]

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

November 11, 2024 (Monday)

The day after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Afghanistan’s Taliban offered its congratulations to the American people for “not handing leadership of their great country to a woman.”

Taliban leaders expressed optimism that Trump’s election would enable a new chapter in the history of U.S-Taliban relations. They noted that it was Trump who suggested a new international order when he inked the February 29, 2020, Doha Agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban. That deal cut out the Afghan government and committed the U.S. to leave Afghanistan by May 2021, closing five military bases and ending economic sanctions on the Taliban. This paved the way for the U.S. evacuation of the country in August 2021 and the return of the Taliban to power.

The Taliban prohibits girls’ education past the sixth grade and recently banned the sound of women’s voices outside their homes.

In Russia, Russian thinker Alexander Dugin explained the dramatic global impact of Trump’s win. “We have won,” Dugin said. “The world will be never ever like before. Globalists have lost their final combat.” Dugin has made his reputation on his calls for an “anti-American revolution” and a new Russian empire built on “the rejection of [alliances of democratic nations surrounding the Atlantic], strategic control of the United States, and the rejection of the supremacy of economic, liberal market values,” as well as reestablishing traditional family structures with strict gender roles.

Maxim Trudolyubov of the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan foreign affairs think tank, suggested Friday that Putin’s long-term goal of weakening the U.S. has made him more interested in dividing Americans than in any one candidate.

Indeed, rather than backing Trump wholeheartedly, Russian president Vladimir Putin has been undercutting him. He did not comment on Trump’s election until Thursday, when he said that the power of liberal democracies over world affairs is “irrevocably disappearing.” Although Ellen Nakashima, John Hudson, and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post reported that Trump and Putin had spoken on Thursday, Putin denied such a call as “pure fiction.”

Exacerbating America’s internal divisions and demonstrating dominance over both the U.S. and Trump might explain why after Trump became president-elect, laughing Russian media figures showed viewers nude pictures of Trump’s third wife, Melania, taken during her modeling career.

In an interview, Putin’s presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev said today: "To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them." 

Meanwhile, U.S. and Ukrainian officials report that Russia has massed 50,000 soldiers, including North Korean soldiers, to reclaim territory in the Kursk region of Russia taken this year by Ukrainian forces.

Trump claims to have talked to about seventy world leaders since his reelection but has declined to go through the usual channels of the State Department. This illustrates his determination to reorganize the federal government around himself rather than its normal operations but leaves him—and the United States—vulnerable to misstatements and misunderstandings.

The domestic effects of Trump’s victory also reveal confusion, both within the Republican Party and within national politics. Voters elected Trump and his running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, but it’s hard to miss that billionaire Elon Musk, who backed Trump’s 2024 campaign financially, seems to be “Trump’s shadow vice-president,” as Nick Robins-Early of The Guardian put it. Sources told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that Musk has been a constant presence at Mar-a-Lago since the election, sitting in on phone calls with foreign leaders and weighing in on staffing decisions. Yesterday at Mar-a-Lago, Musk met with the chief executive officer of the right-wing media channel Newsmax.

Exactly who is in control of the party is unclear, and in the short term that question is playing out over the Senate’s choice of a successor to minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). In the new Congress, this Republican leader will become Senate majority leader, thereby gaining the power to control the Senate calendar and decide which bills get taken up and which do not.

Trump controls the majority of Republicans in the House, but he did not control Senate Republicans when McConnell led them. Now he wants to put Florida senator Rick Scott into the leadership role, but Republicans aligned with McConnell and the pre-2016 party want John Thune (R-SD) or John Cornyn (R-TX). There are major struggles taking place over the choice. Today Musk posted on social media his support for Scott. Other MAGA leaders fell in line, with media figure Benny Johnson—recently revealed to be on Russia’s payroll—urging his followers to target senators backing Thune or Cornyn.

Rachael Bade and Eugene Daniels of Politico Playbook suggested that this pressure would backfire, especially since many senators dislike Scott for his unsuccessful leadership of the National Republican Senatorial Committee that works to elect Republicans to the Senate.

Trump has also tried to sideline senators by demanding they abandon one of their key constitutional roles: that of advice and consent to a president’s appointment of top administration figures. Although Republicans will command a majority in the Senate, Trump is evidently concerned he cannot get some of his appointees through, so has demanded that Republicans agree to let him make recess appointments without going through the usual process of constitutionally mandated advice and consent.

Trump has also demanded that Republicans stop Democrats from making any judicial appointments in the next months, although Republicans continued to approve his nominees after voters elected President Joe Biden in 2020. Indeed, Judge Aileen Cannon, who let Trump off the hook for his retention of classified documents, was approved after Trump had lost the election.

All this jockeying comes amid the fact that while Trump is claiming a mandate from his election, in fact the vote was anything but a landslide. While votes are still being counted, Trump seems to have won by fewer than two percentage points in a cycle where incumbents across the globe lost. This appears to be the smallest popular vote margin for a winning candidate since Richard Nixon won in 1968.

While voters elected Trump, they also backed Democratic policies. In seven states, voters enshrined abortion rights in their constitutions. Two Republican-dominated states raised their minimum wage to $15 an hour; three enshrined mandated paid leave. In exit polls last week, sixty-five percent of voters said they want abortion to remain legal, and fifty-six percent said they want undocumented immigrants to have a chance to apply for legal status.

The gap between what Trump has promised MAGA supporters and what voters want is creating confusion in national politics. How can Trump deliver the national abortion ban MAGAs want when sixty-five percent of voters want abortion rights? How can he deport all undocumented immigrants, including those who have been here for decades and integrated into their communities, while his own voters say they want undocumented immigrants to have a path to citizenship?

Trump’s people have repeatedly expressed their opinion that Trump was stopped from putting the full MAGA agenda into place because he did not move quickly enough in his first term. They have vowed they will not make that mistake again. But the fast imposition of their extremist policies runs the risk of alienating the more moderate voters who just put them in power.

In September, as the Taliban enforced new rules on women in Afghanistan, they also began to target Afghan men. New laws mandated that men stop wearing western jeans, stop cutting their hair and beards in western ways, and stop looking at women other than their wives or female relatives. Religious morality officers are knocking on the doors of those who haven’t recently attended mosque to remind them they can be tried and sentenced for repeated nonattendance, and government employees are afraid they’ll be fired if they don’t grow their beards. According to Rick Noack of the Washington Post, such restrictions surprised men, who were accustomed to enjoying power in their society. Some have been wondering if they should have spoken up to defend the freedoms of their wives and daughters.

One man who had supported the Taliban said he now feels bullied. “We all are practicing Muslims and know what is mandatory or not. But it’s unacceptable to use force on us,” he said. Speaking on the condition of anonymity because he feared drawing the attention of the regime, another man from Kabul said: “If men had raised their voices, we might also be in a different situation now.”

[gurutrends]

Ukrainian front close to collapse

Russia has launched a counteroffensive in the Kursk region and is continuing its campaign along the entire eastern front of Ukraine. For over a year, Russia has been continuing its offensive. The Ukrainian operation in Kursk has not forced the Russian army to slow down its advance in an of its key areas. The main goal of Putin’s troops now seems to be to reach the administrative borders of the…

[liberty1776]

Earlier this week I pointed to a Ukrainian (South Korean, U.S.’) propaganda campaign which claims that thousands of North Korean soldiers will soon fight with on the Russian side against Ukraine: To have North Koreans fighting in Russia against the Ukrainian incursion in Kursk would make little sense. That incursion is for one already mostly defeated. Besides that the language and cultural problems would make the integration of such forces into Russian military operations nearly impossible. I am sure that the Russian military would be strongly against it. Zelenski’s claims were amplified through various proxies and media appearances: … I regard the … Continue reading →

[head-post]

Ukraine’s sell-out shames West

Ukraine is about to be sold off. If that statement sounds too harsh and convincing, consider the evidence: The Russians occupy one-fifth of its territory, and all the efforts of the Ukrainians have failed to drive out these invaders. Vladimir Putin’s army is acquiring increasingly sophisticated weapons, while the Ukrainians are struggling to maintain their own forces, Bloomberg reports.

Moreover, economically and energy-starved European countries are desperate for an end to the fighting on any terms other than Ukraine’s absolute surrender. If Donald Trump comes to power in the US, the general consensus, given his declared enthusiasm for Putin, is that the Ukrainians are finished. Even if Kamala Harris gets into the White House, it is likely that she will push for an end to the war because Washington does not see a victory scenario for Ukraine, despite sending $175 billion in US aid.

Escalating conflicts in the Middle East have diverted attention away from Ukraine, with tragic consequences for President Volodymyr Zelensky’s people. Fewer and fewer US weapons are available for delivery to Kyiv, and the eyes of Western governments are fixed mainly on Israel and Iran, even as Russian troops advance.

If these are the headlines, let’s look at some of the details. Russia is acquiring more effective weapons. The Russians are reported to have established a factory in China to build Garpiya-3 attack drones using Chinese expertise, according to Bloomberg.

Ukrainians are outraged that the Russians appear to be using Starlink’s illegal internet connections to enhance their surveillance and control capabilities. Although Elon Musk denies assisting Russia in this way, Ukrainians are deeply suspicious.

Russian bombing of Ukrainian energy infrastructure is devastating. This winter, many residents of Zelensky will be left without light and heat, which will be a serious blow to morale. The US refuses to allow Ukraine to use American weapons to retaliate.

As for foreign support, President Zelensky’s tour of Europe earlier this month to promote his so-called “Victory Plan” provided favourable rhetoric, but nothing more. The new head of NATO, former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, told reporters, “Supporting Ukraine in the fight with Russia is crucial for our collective security.” This is absolutely true. Privately, however, European countries are desperate to revive the old regime of cheap energy that depends on Russian oil and gas, Bloomberg reports.

The flow of European munitions to Ukraine, which was never strong, has now slowed to a trickle, not least because of sluggish production rates, which are not much better in the US. Economic sanctions against Russia remain highly impenetrable because of the West’s lack of will to enforce them.

In Ukraine itself, after nearly three years during which it was considered treasonous to talk of any acceptable outcome to the war other than victory and the expulsion of the Russians from Donbas, many people are now talking about negotiations. They recognise that it is unlikely to succeed in depriving Putin’s forces of their gains, which continue to grow.

This summer, the Ukrainians made a surprise incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, where, after occupying a territory of several hundred square miles, they met little resistance. It was seen as a blow to Putin’s prestige. However, the operation turned out to go nowhere. The attack may have contributed to Putin’s campaign to portray the war to the Russian people as NATO aggression against their homeland.

Now, as Ukraine and Russia approach winter, few can doubt that 2024 has been a successful year for Putin and a sad and difficult one for Zelensky. The latter said in Croatia a fortnight ago:

“Weakness of any of our allies will inspire Putin. That’s why we’re asking [the allies] to strengthen us, in terms of security guarantees, in terms of weapons, in terms of our future after this war. In my view [Putin] only understands force.”

Zelensky is right. But it is becoming increasingly difficult to persuade foreign political leaders and their nations, preoccupied with their own problems and frankly bored with Ukraine, to support a course of action that may require sacrifices at home.

One American strategy guru astutely predicted in the first summer of the war that while the Russians might not be able to conquer Ukraine, they could keep it in such a state that no sane person would want to live or invest in it. That is a realistic prospect. The 7 million Ukrainians who have left their country since February 2022 have little or no desire to return. Ukraine’s economy is tanking, according to Bloomberg.

The best guarantee of Ukraine’s security would be NATO membership. However, this remains unlikely. Putin would reject any settlement or even a ceasefire that includes such a provision. The US is wary of such a commitment. The Germans and perhaps other European members would veto it.

It is obvious and right that the Ukrainians will reject any deal that does not offer them a Western military guarantee in the event of renewed military conflict. But such an agreement would have to be individualised. It may also prove difficult to get the Russians to agree to any deal that includes the possibility of Ukrainian membership in the European Union.

The West has suffered a glaring failure of leadership. The only people who can argue that the best hours have been learnt from the war in Ukraine are the Ukrainians. Their allies are proving that they have neither the steel nor the stamina for a protracted conflict. Some analysts take solace in the fact that the West has so far supported Ukraine and made Putin pay a high price for very limited success.

Analysts believe that Putin’s conviction that the West is decadent and divided, and therefore vulnerable, is well-founded.

Read more HERE

[mariacallous]

In the summer of 1941, the United States sought to leverage its economic dominance over Japan by imposing a full oil embargo on its increasingly threatening rival. The idea was to use overwhelming economic might to avoid a shooting war; in the end, of course, U.S. economic sanctions backed Tokyo into a corner whose only apparent escape was the attack on Pearl Harbor. Boomerangs aren’t the only weapons that can rebound.

Stephanie Baker, a veteran Bloomberg reporter who has spent decades covering Russia, has written a masterful account of recent U.S. and Western efforts to leverage their financial and technological dominance to bend a revanchist Russia to their will. It has not gone entirely to plan. Two and a half years into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, Russia’s energy revenues are still humming along, feeding a war machine that finds access to high-tech war materiel, including from the United States. Efforts to pry Putin’s oligarchs away from him have driven them closer. Moscow has faced plenty of setbacks, most recently by losing control of a chunk of its own territory near Kursk, but devastating sanctions have not been one of them.

Punishing Putin: Inside the Global Economic War to Bring Down Russia is first and foremost a flat-out rollicking read, the kind of book you press on friends and family with proselytizing zeal. Baker draws on decades of experience and shoe-leather reporting to craft the best account of the Western sanctions campaign yet. Her book is chock-full of larger-than-life characters, sanctioned superyachts, dodgy Cypriot enablers, shadow fleets, and pre-dawn raids.

More than a good tale, it is a clinical analysis of the very tricky balancing acts that lie behind deploying what has become Washington’s go-to weapon. The risky decision just after the invasion to freeze over $300 billion in central bank holdings and cut off the Russian banking system hurt Moscow, sure. But even Deputy National Security Advisor Daleep Singh, one of the architects of the Biden administration’s response, told National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan that he feared the sanctions’ “catastrophic success” could blow up global financial markets. And that was before the West decided to take aim at Russia’s massive oil and gas exports, which it did with a series of half-hearted measures beginning later that year.

The bigger reason to cherish Punishing Putin is that it offers a glimpse into the world to come as great-power competition resurges with a vengeance. The U.S. rivalry with China plays out, for now, in fights over duties, semiconductors, and antimony. As Singh tells Baker, “We don’t want that conflict to play out through military channels, so it’s more likely to play out through the weaponization of economic tools—sanctions, export controls, tariffs, price caps, investment restrictions.”

The weaponization of economic tools, as Baker writes, may have started more than a millennium ago when another economic empire was faced with problematic upstarts. In 432 B.C., Athens, the Greek power and trading state supreme, levied a strict trade embargo on the city-state of Megara, an ally of Sparta—a move that, according to some scholars, sparked the Peloponnesian War. (Athens couldn’t break the habit: Not long after, it again bigfooted a neighbor, telling Melos that the “strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”) The irony of course is that Athens, the naval superpower, eventually lost the war to its main rival thanks to a maritime embargo.

It can be tempting to leverage economic tools, but it is difficult to turn them into a precision weapon, or even avoid them becoming counterproductive. The British empire’s 19th-century naval stranglehold and love of blockades helped bring down Napoleon but started a small war with the United States in the process.

Britain was never shy about using its naval and financial might to throw its weight around, but even the pound sterling never acquired the centrality that the U.S. dollar has today in a much bigger, much more integrated system of global trade and finance. That “exorbitant privilege,” in the words of French statesman Giscard D’Estaing, enabled the post-World War II United States to take both charitable (the Marshall Plan, for starters) and punitive economic statecraft to new heights.

The embargoes on Communist Cuba or revolutionary Iran were just opening acts, it turned out, for a turbocharged U.S. approach to leveraging its financial hegemony that finally flourished with the so-called war on terror and rogue states, a story well-told in books such as Juan Zarate’s Treasury Goes to War or Richard Nephew’s The Art of Sanctions. 

Osama bin Laden is dead, Kabul is lost, Cuba’s still communist, and a Kim still runs North Korea, but the love of sanctions has never waned in Washington. If anything, given an aversion to casualties and a perennial quest for low-cost ways to impose its will, Washington has grown even fonder of using economic sticks with abandon. The use of sanctions rose under President Barack Obama, and again under Donald Trump; the Biden administration has not only orchestrated the unprecedented suite of sanctions on Putin’s Russia, but also taken Trump’s trade war with China even further.

Despite U.S. sanctions’ mixed record, the almighty dollar can certainly strike fear in countries that are forced to toe a punitive line they might otherwise try to skirt. Banks in third countries—say, a big French lender—could be forced to uphold Washington’s sanctions on Iran regardless of what French policy might dictate. Those so-called secondary sanctions raise hackles at times in places such as Paris and Berlin, prompting periodic calls for “financial sovereignty” from the tyranny of the greenback. But little has changed. Countries that want to continue having functioning banks have little choice but to act as the enforcers of Washington’s will.

What is genuinely surprising, as Baker chronicles, is that the growth of sanctions as the premier tool of U.S. foreign policy has not been matched by a commensurate growth in the corps of people charged with drafting and enforcing them. The Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Treasury Department’s main sanctions arm, is overworked and understaffed. A lesser-known but equally important branch, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, struggles to vet a vast array of export controls and restrictions with a stagnant staff and stillborn budget. Post-Brexit Britain has faced even steeper challenges in leaping onto the Western sanctions bandwagon, having to recreate in the past few years a new body almost from scratch to enforce novel economic punishments.

Punishing Putin is not, despite the book’s subtitle, about an effort to “bring down” Russia. The sanctions—ranging from individual travel and financial bans on Kremlin oligarchs to asset forfeiture to sweeping measures intended to kneecap the ruble and drain Moscow’s coffers—are ultimately meant to weaken Putin’s ability to continue terrorizing his neighbor. In that sense, they are not working.

One of the strengths of Punishing Putin is Baker’s seeming ability to have spoken with nearly everybody important on those economic frontlines. She details the spadework that took place in Washington, London, and Brussels even before Russian tanks and missiles flew across Ukraine’s borders in February 2022, and especially in the fraught days and weeks afterward. It takes a special gift to make technocrats into action heroes.

The bulk of Baker’s wonderful book centers on the fight to sanction and undermine the oligarchs loyal to Putin who have helped prop up his kleptocracy. Perhaps, as Baker suggests, Western thinking was that whacking the oligarchs would lead to a palace coup against Putin. There was a coup, but not from the oligarchs—and it ended first with a whimper and then a mid-air bang.

There are a couple of problems with that approach, as Baker lays out in entertaining chronicles of hunts for superyachts and Jersey Island holding companies. First, it’s tricky to actually seize much of the ill-gotten billions in oligarch hands; the U.S. government is spending millions of dollars on upkeep for frozen superyachts, for example, but can’t yet turn them into money for Ukraine. And second, the offensive has not split the oligarchs from Putin: To the contrary, a Kremlin source tells Baker, “his power is much stronger because now they’re in his hands.”

At any rate, while the hunt for $60 billion or so in gaudy loot is fun to read about, the real sanctions fight is over Russia’s frozen central bank reserves—two-thirds of which are in the European Union—and the ongoing efforts to strangle its energy revenues without killing the global economy. Baker is outstanding on these big issues, whether that’s with a Present at the Creation-esque story of the fight over Russia’s reserves and the ensuing battle to seize them, or an explanation of the fiendishly complicated details of the “oil price cap” that hasn’t managed to cap Russian oil revenues much at all. More on those bigger fights would have made a remarkable book a downright stunner.

The Western sanctions on Russia, as sweeping and unprecedented as they are, have not ended Putin’s ability to prosecute the war. They have made life more difficult for ordinary Russians and brought down Russia’s energy export revenues, but they have not yet severed the sinews of war. “But, in fact, the West didn’t hit Russia with the kitchen sink,” Baker writes. Greater enforcement of sanctions, especially on energy, will be crucial to ratchet up the pressure and start to actually punish Putin, she argues. The one thing that is unlikely is that the sanctions battle will end anytime soon—not with Putin’s Russia, and not with other revisionist great powers such as China, whose one potential weakness is the asymmetric might of U.S. money.

“As long as Putin is sitting in the Kremlin,” Baker concludes, “the economic war will continue.”

[socialistworld]

Ukraine war grinds on as US elections loom

Ukraine war grinds on as US elections loom

The war in Ukraine catapulted to the top of the news on 6 August when Ukrainian forces launched an unexpected assault over the border into the Kursk region of Russia. They rapidly took over 400 […] Special financial appeal to all readers of socialistworld.net Support building alternative socialist media Socialistworld.net provides a unique analysis and perspective of world events. Socialistworld.net also plays a crucial role in building the struggle for socialism across all continents. Capitalism has failed! Assist us to build the fight-back and prepare for the stormy period of class struggles ahead. Please make a donation to help us reach more readers and to widen our socialist campaigning work across the world. Donate via Paypal

[blogcowboyron]

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 14, 2024

Latest fromISW Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 14, 2024 Sep 14, 2024 – ISW Press Ukrainian officials and sources indicated that Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk Oblast has prompted the Russian authorities to increase the size of the Russian force grouping in Kursk Oblast by upwards of a factor of three. Ukrainian Pivnich (Northern) Operational Command Spokesperson Vadym Mysnyk…

[darkmaga-returns]

One of Trump’s most outspoken campaign promises is that he will end the war in Ukraine. When it comes to the question of how he plans to do that, anonymous insiders from the Trump team are claiming the goal is to “freeze” the conflict, with guarantees for Russia that Kiev won’t join NATO for 20 years, while the West uses the break in fighting to freely arm Ukraine.

International Relations and Security Analyst Mark Sleboda noted that if the Trump Admin goes with a plan like the ones being suggested in the media right now, it would be a non-starter for Moscow AND for Kiev. Not only are the demands not beneficial for Russia, but they ignore the fact that Russia is currently winning this war of attrition and making significant advances in the Donbass.

Follow Mark Sleboda on X, and check out his page on Substack

SOURCE LINKS:

6 Nov. 2024 - Trump Promised to End the War in Ukraine. Now He Must Decide How.

6 April 2018 - Trump imposes major sanctions on Russian oligarchs, officials, companies

3 Jan. 2024 - Trump Praised for First US Weapons Sale to Ukraine

6 Nov. 2024 - ‘I’ll have a deal made’: how Donald Trump will handle US foreign policy

7 Nov. 2024 - Ukraine aid caused government collapse – Germany’s Scholz

7 Nov. 2024 - Trump has three choices for secretary of state – Politico

6 Nov. 2024 - N.Korean troops engaged in combat in Kursk for first time, US officials say

15 Oct. 2024 - Russia and China pledge to strengthen military ties

5 Nov. 2024 - Ukrainian defenses in Donbas risk getting steamrolled by Russian advance

6 Nov. 2024 - Suriyak Maps: Ukrainian-Russian war. Day 986: Situation on Pokrovsk

6 Nov. 2024 - Biden team prepares to rush last-minute aid to Ukraine

4 Nov. 2024 - Germany's Baerbock offers no Ukraine guarantees as Kyiv sounds alarm

7 Nov. 2024 - Germany’s coalition collapses dramatically. Scholz plans to lead with a minority government