With the untimely hiatus that is America’s regime change, Donald’s office is now the sole one-stop shop for all matters of dubious celebrity, failed ambition, creepy sexuality, faded glory, mixed martial arts and other really rather funny crap.
He says below that after things settle down he’ll meet with Xi and Vova to at least halve the amount of money the three countries spend on defense. All that extra wealth can be put to much better use, he argues, like colonizing Mars or playing golf.
Not so fast, says Timothy Garton Ash, whose earnest essay appearing in The Guardian, titled “Trump’s senseless capitulation to Putin is a betrayal of Ukraine – and terrible dealmaking,” explores the same The Strongman as a Weak Leader narrative that his namesakes, in a train compartment somewhere in Zaporizhia, has for months been beating like a dead horse, but not yet in relation to Z.
Z, by the way, spent most of yesterday frowning in Khmelnytsky region at the site where $600 million worth of Soviet-designed nuclear reactors purchased from Bulgaria will be used to generate energy to fuel strip mining operations. He says we need the extra energy for extracting rare earth minerals to pay for ammo and guns supplied by Donald. The facility should be up and running in, er, 8 to ten years. It could be the costliest and stupidest investment in modern Ukraine’s mismanaged history.
Our president doesn’t look good. He and his potent team have become wildly unpopular as we near the 3-year anniversary of the invasion they failed to prepare for. In order to distract us from this fact, authorities in recent weeks have decided coram non judice to discredit top military brass and harrass critics, including former President Petro Poroshenko. We are all very tired of this arbitrary, extra judicial self-defeating bullshit. Ukraine experts in the West don’t want to write about Z’s Lukashenko streak because poking fun at the Pete, Marco, JD clownshow is an easier beat.
This is a picture of Full Snow Moon 2025 from my balcony overlooking a Kyiv neighborhood.
The bleak future of US-Ukraine security cooperation will be one of the topics talked about this afternoon at the Munich Security Conference. Z will lead Ukraine’s delegation at the days-long beano, which will provide a venue for members of Donald’s new cabinet, including JD, Marco, Pete and Keith, as well as US Senators and European leaders to sound off about everything.
Donald announced yesterday that US, Russian and Ukrainian officials will meet there on Friday for talks on how to end the war in Ukraine. Har, har.
"Russia is going to be there with our people," the US president said. "Ukraine is also invited, by the way, not sure exactly who's going to be there from any country - but high-level people from Russia, from Ukraine and from the United States."
Song of the Day c/o Mitski
Have a lovely weekend!
Militarily supporting a country that collapses is not just embarrassing. It got America off to a bad start in Vietnam and let's not even talk about Afghanistan. If Russia wins you guys get subsumed and when we fight Russia we'll be fighting you as well. Who's going to be crying then?
hi, vaughn! we're not collapsing, but the country's political establishment is. that's not uncommon for ukraine, which remains, er, an experiment in progress. back in 2004 political leaders/oligarchs were completely insane, but ordinary citizens carried on. same ten years later. same in 2022. the good news is the critical mass of ordinary ukrainians might save the world. unfortunately, z and his potent mangers are not worthy, but we're working on that problem