https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-8-2025-friday
"During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump vowed he could stop
Russia’s war on Ukraine with a single phone call. Instead, Matt Murphy and Ned
Davies of the
BBC report that Russian attacks on Ukraine have doubled since
Trump took office. Today was the deadline the president had announced for
Russian president Vladimir Putin to agree to a ceasefire in his illegal
invasion of Ukraine or face further sanctions. Instead, Trump announced this
afternoon that he intends to meet with Putin on August 15 in Alaska.
Putin generally cannot travel outside Russia because he has been indicted by
the International Criminal Court for war crimes, including the theft of
Ukrainian children. And yet Trump is welcoming him to the United States of
America.
This welcome gives Putin the huge gift of letting him touch down on U.S. soil
after he invaded Ukraine in defiance of the policy established after World War
II to prevent another such devastating war. In 1945 the United Nations charter
declared that “[a]ll Members shall refrain in their international relations
from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political
independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the
Purposes of the United Nations.” The United States was the key guarantor of
this principle until Trump took office.
The U.S. has stood against Russian invasions into Ukraine not only on this
general principle, but because of security guarantees the U.S., along with the
United Kingdom and Russia, gave to Ukraine in 1994. After the Soviet Union
crumbled in 1991, Ukraine had the third-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in
the world. In exchange for Ukraine’s giving up those weapons, the United
States, the United Kingdom, and Russia agreed to secure Ukraine’s borders. In
the 1994
Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, they agreed they would
not use military force or economic coercion against Ukraine. Russia violated
that agreement with its 2014 and 2022 invasions.
Now Trump will welcome Putin to the United States, to territory that once
belonged to Russia, reinforcing for Russian nationalists the dream of
recreating Russia’s old empire. That dream has been part of the ideology of
Russia’s drive to seize Ukrainian land.
Donato Paolo Mancini, Alberto Nardelli, and Daryna Krasnolutska of
Bloomberg
reported this morning that U.S. and Russian officials are planning this summit
to hammer out an agreement that will force Ukraine to cede to Russia its land
currently occupied by Russian troops, as well as Crimea. This deal would hand
Ukraine’s eastern industrial territory to Russia and bless the principle that
one country can seize territory from another through force. Observers note that
once this principle is established, as Putin wishes, there will be nothing
stopping him from invading Ukraine again as soon as his war-weary country
recovers its strength.
The plan revealed by the
Bloomberg journalists is still vague, but it
excludes Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky and European allies and is
similar to the one Russia demanded in April 2025. That plan, in turn, rehashed
almost entirely the plan Russian operatives presented to Trump’s 2016 campaign
manager, Paul Manafort, in exchange for helping Trump win the White House."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
