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Trump’s Tariffs: A Global Mess?

By dianeravitch
April 3, 2025 //
8

Yesterday after the stock market closed, Trump held a press conference to announce his much-ballyhooed tariff plan. He used the opportunity to insult other nations, as is his custom. Commentators noted that he slapped tariffs on uninhabited islands. Trump believes that the greatest period in the American economy ended in 1913, when the federal government adopted the income tax. When I was a junior in high school in high school, I learned that the enactment of a federal income tax was progressive because it reduced the vast gap between the very rich and everyone else. I also learned about the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, which set off a global trade war and contributed to the Great Depression. Apparently, these topics were not taught in Trump’s elite military academy. His history classes must have been taught from the perspective of the robber barons.

The Washington Post wrote:

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he will impose a new 10 percent tariff on all imported goods along with higher import taxes tailored for each of about 60 countries that his advisers say maintain the largest barriers against U.S. products, in a sharp turn toward the kind of protectionism that the United States abandoned nearly a century ago.

To impose the new tariffs, the president declared a national emergency, citing the annual merchandise trade deficit that the United States has run each year since 1975.

“For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike,” Trump said. “But it is not going to happen anymore.”

The tariff increases that the president announced had little modern precedent and would erect towering impediments to products from dozens of foreign countries, many of them poor nations that embraced exporting as a tool to escape grinding poverty….

Speaking in blunt, sometimes intemperate language, the president assailed the nation’s trading partners, including some of its closest allies, as “foreign cheaters” and “foreign scavengers” who had “ripped off Americans” for 50 years. Trump’s tone echoed the dark portrait of “American carnage” that he had sketched in his first inaugural address in 2017….

“In the short run, the effect is probably a recession. It’s going to raise the price of so many goods that can’t be made in the United States,” said economist Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations. “In the long run, it’s a vision of the U.S. that is very isolated from the world.”

Jay Timmons, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, warned that his members operate on thin profit margins and cannot absorb the tariffs. Small businesses and restaurant owners issued statements decrying their added costs.

“This is catastrophic for American families,” said Matt Priest, president of the Footwear Retailers and Distributers of America.

********************************

Daniel Dale of CNN fact-checked only a few of Trump’s outlandish statements during his press conference about his tariffs. He imposed tariffs on uninhabited islands, populated only by penguins.

Dale wrote:

President Donald Trump made a series of false claims about tariffs and trade – most of which he has made before – in the Wednesday speech in which he announced a sweeping set of global tariffs.

Here is a fact check of some of Trump’s remarks.

Canada’s dairy tariffs

Trump correctly noted that Canada has tariffs exceeding 250% on some US dairy products. However, he falsely claimed that merely “the first little carton of milk” exported to Canada faces a “very low price,” but “then it gets up to 275, 300%.”null

In reality, Canada has guaranteed that tens of thousands of metric tons of imported US milk per year, not merely a single carton, will face zero tariffs at all; Canada conceded a certain guaranteed level of tariff-free US access to its dairy market as part of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) that Trump’s own first administration negotiated.

Trump also didn’t mention something the US dairy industry acknowledges: The US is not hitting its zero-tariff maximum level of exports to Canada in any category of dairy product, so the Canadian tariffs aren’t being applied; with regard to milk in particular, the US isn’t even at half of the tariff-free quota. (There is a vigorous US-Canada debate about why the US is so far from the maximum, with each country blaming the other. Regardless of who’s right, the tariffs aren’t hitting US milk.)

Trump has persistently omitted key facts about Canada’s dairy tariffs. You can read more here from a previous CNN fact check.

US trade deficit with Canada

Trump, claiming “we subsidize a lot of countries,” falsely said “it’s close to $200 billion a year” with Canada. Trump has repeatedly used this $200 billion figure to describe the US trade deficit with Canada in particular, which is actually far lower than $200 billion; official US statistics show the 2024 deficit with Canada in goods and services trade was $35.7 billion and $70.6 billion in goods trade alone.

Trump didn’t mention the trade deficit in particular this time, but even if he was intending to use the word “subsidize” more broadly, there is no basis for the claim.

Who pays tariffs

Trump repeated his frequent false claim that, because of the tariffs he imposed on China during his first term, the US “took in hundreds of billions of dollars” that “they paid.” In fact, US importers, not foreign exporters like China,make the tariff payments, andstudy after studyhas found that Americans bore the overwhelming majority of the cost of Trump’s first-term tariffs on China; it’s easy to findspecific examplesof companies that passed along the cost of the tariffs to US consumers.

Previous presidents’ tariffs on China

Trump also repeated his frequent false claim that, before his first presidency, China “never paid 10 cents to any other president” from tariffs. Aside from the fact that US importers make the tariff payments, the US was actuallygenerating billions per year in revenuefrom tariffs on Chinese imports before Trump took office; in fact, the US has had tariffs on Chinese imports since1789. Trump’s predecessor, President Barack Obama,imposed additional tariffson Chinese goods.

US wealth

Touting the supposed benefits of tariffs, Trump claimed that “the United States was proportionately the wealthiest it has ever been” from 1789 to 1913, when tariffs made up a higher percentage of federal revenue before the passage of a 1913 law reestablishing the federal income tax.

Trump didn’t explain what he meant by “proportionately the wealthiest,” but by standard measures, the US is far wealthier today than it was in the early 20th century and prior. Per capita gross domestic product isnow many times higherthan it was then.

Douglas Irwin, a Dartmouth College economics professor who studies the history of US trade policy, said in February after Trump had made similar claims, that if Trump’s unclear comments are interpreted to be about per capita income, as “economists usually take this,” it is “obviously not true,” since “real per capita income and standards of living are so much higher today than the past. … It is nice to have indoor plumbing, running water, not outhouses, etc.”

This is only part of the article. Open the link to finish reading. Dale reviews inflation, the cost of gasoline, and other issues.

Categories Accountability, Economy, Extremism, International, Lies, Stupid, Trump

Trump Administration Cuts Funding for Vaccines for World’s Poorest Nations

By dianeravitch
March 27, 2025 //
3

The cruelty and sheer meanness of the Trump administration can never be overestimated. As the administration closes down USAID, without Congressional authorization, it announced a series of cuts that will kill millions of people. Having an ardent opponent of vaccines in charge of Heakth and Human Services removes any advocacy to distribute proven methods to save lives and prevent epidemics.

Stephanie Nolen of The New York Times reported:

The Trump administration intends to terminate the United States’ financial support for Gavi, the organization that has helped purchase critical vaccines for children in developing countries, saving millions of lives over the past quarter century, and to significantly scale back support for efforts to combat malaria, one of the biggest killers globally.

The administration has decided to continue some key grants for medications to treat H.I.V. and tuberculosis, and food aid to countries facing civil wars and natural disasters.

Those decisions are included in a 281-page spreadsheet that the United States Agency for International Development sent to Congress Monday night, listing the foreign aid projects it plans to continue and to terminate. The New York Times obtained a copy of the spreadsheet and other documents describing the plans.

The documents provide a sweeping overview of the extraordinary scale of the administration’s retreat from a half-century-long effort to present the United States to the developing world as a compassionate ally and to lead the fight against infectious diseases that kill millions of people annually.

The cover letter details the skeletal remains of U.S.A.I.D. after the cuts, with most of its funding eliminated, and only 869 of more than 6,000 employees still on active duty.

In all, the administration has decided to continue 898 U.S.A.I.D. awards and to end 5,341, the letter says. It says the remaining programs are worth up to $78 billion. But only $8.3 billion of that is unobligated funds — money still available to disburse. Because that amount covers awards that run several years into the future, the figure suggests a massive reduction in the $40 billion that U.S.A.I.D. used to spend annually.

A spokesperson for the State Department, which now runs what is left of U.S.A.I.D., confirmed the terminations on the list were accurate and said that “each award terminated was reviewed individually for alignment with agency and administration priorities, and terminations were executed where Secretary Rubio determined the award was inconsistent with the national interest or agency policy priorities.”

The memo to Congress presents the plan for foreign assistance as a unilateral decision. However because spending on individual health programs such as H.I.V. or vaccination is congressionally allocated, it is not clear that the administration has legal power to end those programs. This issue is currently being litigated in multiple court challenges.

Among the programs terminated is funding for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, which conducts surveillance for diseases that can be transmitted from animals to humans, including bird flu, in 49 countries. Some major programs to track and fight malaria, one of the world’s top killers of children, have also been ended.

Dr. Austin Demby, the health minister of Sierra Leone, which relies on Gavi’s support to help purchase vaccines, said he was “shocked and perturbed” by the decision to terminate U.S. funding and warned that the ramifications would be felt worldwide.

“This is not just a bureaucratic decision, there are children’s lives at stake, global health security will be at stake,” he said. “Supporting Gavi in Sierra Leone is not just a Sierra Leone issue, it’s something the region, the world, benefits from.”

“The guiding principle of my work is ‘go there.’ I want to hear directly from the people who are affected by disease, or lack of access to a new drug. I’ve been writing about global health for 30 years and have reported from more than 80 countries.”

In addition to trying to reach all children with routine immunizations, Sierra Leone is currently battling an mpox outbreak, for which Gavi has provided both vaccines and critical support to deliver them, he said.

“We hope the U.S. government will continue to be the global leader it always been — putting money in Gavi is not an expenditure, it’s an investment,” Dr. Demby said

Gavi is estimated to have saved the lives of 19 million children since it was set up 25 years ago. The United States contributes 13 percent of its budget.

The terminated grant to Gavi was worth $2.6 billion through 2030. Gavi was counting on a pledge made last year by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for its next funding cycle.

New vaccines with the promise to save millions of lives in low-income countries, such as one to protect children from severe malaria and another to protect teenage girls against the virus that causes cervical cancer, have recently become available, and Gavi was expanding the portfolio of support it could give those countries.

The loss of U.S. funds will set back the organization’s ability to continue to provide its basic range of services — such as immunization for measles and polio — to a growing population of children in the poorest countries, let alone expand to include new vaccines.

By Gavi’s own estimate, the loss of U.S. support may mean 75 million children do not receive routine vaccinations in the next five years, with more than 1.2 million children dying as a result.

Categories Cruelty, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Funding, Health, International, Science, Trump

Refugees in Bangladesh Will Die of Starvation Due to U.S. Budget Cuts in Foreign Aid

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2025 //
7

Mujib Mashal wrote in The New York Times about the desperate starvation facing the Rohingya refugees as a result of the shutdown of U.S. foreign aid. They escaped Myanmar’s “ethnic cleansing” and now live in a United Nations camp, where their survival depends on donations of food from benevolent nations. The U.S., thanks to billionaires Trump and Musk. They should take a tour of the camps and see for themselves why foreign aid is impirtant.

Mashal writes:

More than a million people in the world’s largest refugee camp could soon be left with too little food for survival. 

In the camp in Bangladesh, United Nations officials said, food rations are set to fall in April to about 18 pounds of rice, two pounds of lentils, a liter of cooking oil and a fistful of salt, per person — for the entire month.

The Trump administration’s freeze on aid has overwhelmed humanitarian response at a time when multiple conflicts rage, with aid agencies working feverishly to fill the void left by the U.S. government, their most generous and reliable donor. Many European nations are also cutting humanitarian aid, as they focus on increasing military spending in the face of an emboldened Russia.

The world is left teetering on “the verge of a deep humanitarian crisis,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres warned on a visit to the Rohingya refugee camp in southeastern Bangladesh on Friday.

“With the announced cuts in financial assistance, we are facing the dramatic risk of having only 40 percent in 2025 of the resources available for humanitarian aid in 2024,” he said, addressing a crowd of tens of thousands of Rohingya refugees. “That would be an unmitigated disaster. People will suffer, and people will die.”

At the refugee camp at Cox’s Bazar, overcrowded warrens of bamboo and tarp huts on mounds of dirt house more than a million Rohingya people driven from their homeland, Myanmar, by a campaign of ethnic cleansing that intensified in 2017.

Fenced off from the rest of Bangladesh, and almost entirely cut off from opportunities to find work or integrate into the country, the Rohingya refugees remain entirely at the mercy of humanitarian aid. The United Nations, with the help of the Bangladeshi government and dozens of aid organizations, looks after the needs of the traumatized people — education, water, sanitation, nutrition, medical care and much more.

The sudden drop in humanitarian aid threatens a wide range of programs and communities around the world, but the plight of the Rohingya is unusual in its scale and severity.

“Cox’s Bazar is ground zero for the impact of budget cuts on people in desperate need,” Mr. Guterres said. “Here it is clear budget reductions are not about numbers on a balance sheet. Funding cuts have dramatic human costs.”

Even at the current food allowance of $12.50 per person, per month, more than 15 percent of the children at the camp are acutely malnourished, according to the United Nations — the highest level recorded since 2017, when hundreds of thousands of refugees arrived after a sharp escalation of violence in Myanmar.

When a funding shortfall slashed the monthly food allowance to $8 in 2023, malnutrition and crime soared. People tried to flee the camp by embarking on dangerous and often fatal boat journeys.

During Mr. Guterres’s visit to the camp, U.N. officials had set up on a table sample food baskets showing what refugees currently get at $12.50 per person, and what that will be slashed to next month if, as they now project, the allotment falls to $6, barring a last-minute rescue.

Pointing to the sparse basket marked “$6,” Dom Scallpelli, the Bangladesh country director for the World Food Program, said, “If you give only this, that is not a survival ration.”

Even the $6 diet expected for the month of April would be made possible only because the United States unfroze its in-kind contribution, agreeing to send shipments of rice, beans, and oil, Mr. Scallpelli said. The cash contributions — the United States provided about $300 million to the Rohingya response last year, a little over half the entire response fund — remain halted.

“If we didn’t even have that, it would have been a total nightmare situation,” Mr. Scallpelli said about the in-kind donations. “At least we are thankful to the U.S. for this.”

Abul Osman, a 23-year-old refugee who arrived at Cox’s Bazar in 2017, said the refugees were already struggling with the bare minimum and the slashing of rations would be devastating for a population with no livelihood options. The Rohingya in Bangladesh are only allowed schooling inside the camp, and are not allowed access to higher education or jobs outside.

Pregnant women and children will suffer the most from dire food shortages, but the resulting mental health crisis will affect everyone, he said.

“It’s a threat to our survival,” he said.

People will die. Many thousands will die. Should we care? Our government claims to be Christian. What is the Christian response to a humanitarian catastrophe?

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Corruption, Cruelty, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Funding, Health, International, Musk, Elon, Trump

How Many Will Die Because Trump and Musk Ended Foreign Aid?

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2025 //
3

Nicholas Kristoff tried to estimate how many people will die because of Elon Musk’s frivolous cutting of foreign aid to desperate people? Of course, Musk relied on the authority given to his phony DOGE by Trump. So together, they bear responsibility for the deadly consequences. If either has a conscience, which is questionable, they will go to their graves someday knowing that they caused mass murders.

Kristof wrote in The New York Times:

As the world’s richest men slash American aid for the world’s poorest children, they insist that all is well. “No one has died as a result of a brief pause to do a sanity check on foreign aid funding,” Elon Musk said. “No one.”

That is not true. In South Sudan, one of the world’s poorest countries, the efforts by Musk and President Trump are already leading children to die.

Peter Donde was a 10-year-old infected with H.I.V. from his mother during childbirth. But American aid kept Peter strong even as his parents died from AIDS. A program started by President George W. Bush called PEPFAR saved 26 million lives from AIDS, and one was Peter’s.

Under PEPFAR, an outreach health worker ensured that Peter and other AIDS orphans got their medicines. Then in January, Trump and Musk effectively shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development, perhaps illegally, and that PEPFAR outreach program ended. Orphans were on their own.

Without the help of the community health worker, Peter was unable to get his medicines, so he became sick and died in late February, according to Moses Okeny Labani, a health outreach worker who helped manage care for Peter and 144 other vulnerable children.

The immediate cause of death was an opportunistic pneumonia infection as Peter’s viral load increased and his immunity diminished, said Labani.

“If U.S.A.I.D. would be here, Peter Donde would not have died,” Labani said.

We worked with experts at the Center for Global Development who tried to calculate how many lives are at risk if American humanitarian assistance is frozen or slashed. While these estimates are inexact and depend on how much aid continues, they suggest that a cataclysm may be beginning around the developing world…

An estimated 1,650,000 people could die within a year without American foreign aid for H.I.V. prevention and treatment.

Achol Deng, an 8-year-old girl, was also infected with H.I.V. at birth and likewise remained alive because of American assistance. Then in January, Achol lost her ID card, and there was no longer a case worker to help get her a new card and medicines; she too became sick and died, said Labani.

Yes, this may eventually save money for United States taxpayers. How much? The cost of first-line H.I.V. medications to keep a person alive is less than 12 cents a day.

I asked Labani if he had ever heard of Musk. He had not, so I explained that Musk is the world’s wealthiest man and has said that no one is dying because of U.S.A.I.D. cuts.

“That is wrong,” Labani said, sounding surprised that anyone could be so oblivious. “He should come to grass roots.”

Another household kept alive by American aid was that of Jennifer Inyaa, a 35-year-old single mom, and her 5-year-old son, Evan Anzoo, both of them H.I.V.-positive. Last month, after the aid shutdown, Inyaa became sick and died, and a week later Evan died as well, according to David Iraa Simon, a community health worker who assisted them. Decisions by billionaires in Washington quickly cost the lives of a mother and her son.

“Many more children will die in the coming weeks,” said Margret Amjuma, a health worker who confirmed the deaths of Peter and Achol.

On a nine-day trip through East African villages and slums I heard that refrain repeatedly: While some are already dying because of the decisions in Washington, the toll is likely to soar in the coming months as stockpiles of medicines and food are drawn down and as people become weaker and sicker.

Two women, Martha Juan, 25, and Viola Kiden, 28, a mother of three, have already died because they lived in a remote area of South Sudan and could not get antiretroviral drugs when U.S.A.I.D. shut down supply lines, according to Angelina Doki, a health volunteer who supported them.

Doki told me that her own supply of antiretrovirals is about to run out as well.

“I am going to develop the virus,” Doki said. “My viral load will go high. I will develop TB. I will have pneumonia.” She sighed deeply and added, “We are going to die.”

In South Africa, where more than seven million people are H.I.V.-positive, the Desmond Tutu Health Foundation estimates that ending PEPFAR would lead to more than 600,000 deaths over a decade in that country alone.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Corruption, Cruelty, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Funding, Health, International, Musk, Elon, Shame, Trump

Thomas Friedman Does Not Believe a Single Word from Trump or Putin about Ukraine. Why?

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2025 //
13

New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman smells a rat in the bilateral talks between Trump and Putin about the war in Ukraine. He’s been watching both of them for years, and he knows they are both lying. Putin is using Trump for his own ends. Trump wants to please Putin.

He writes:

Ever since President Trump returned to office and began trying to make good on his boast about ending the Ukraine war in days, thanks to his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, I’ve had this gnawing concern that something was lost in translation in the bromance between Vlad and Don.

When the interpreter tells Trump that Putin says he’s ready to do anything for “peace” in Ukraine, I’m pretty sure what Putin really said was he’s ready to do anything for a “piece” of Ukraine.

You know those homophones — they can really get you in a lot of trouble if you’re not listening carefully. Or if you’re only hearing what you want to hear.

The Times reported that in his two-and-a-half-hour phone call with Trump on Tuesday, Putin agreed to halt strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure, according to the Kremlin, but Putin made clear that he would not agree to the general 30-day cease-fire that the United States and Ukraine had agreed upon and proposed to Russia.

The Kremlin also said that Putin’s “key condition” for ending the conflict was a “complete cessation” of foreign military and intelligence assistance to Kyiv — in other words, stripping Ukraine naked of any ability to resist a full Russian takeover of Ukraine. More proof, if anyone needed it, that Putin is not, as Trump foolishly believed, looking for peace with Ukraine; he’s looking to own Ukraine.

All that said, you will pardon me, but I do not trust a single word that Trump and Putin say about their private conversations on Ukraine — including the words “and” and “the,” as the writer Mary McCarthy famously said about the veracity of her rival Lillian Hellman. Because something has not smelled right from the start with this whole Trump-Putin deal-making on Ukraine.

I just have too many unanswered questions. Let me count the ways.

For starters, it took Secretary of State Henry Kissinger over a month of intense shuttle diplomacy to produce the disengagement agreements between Israel and Egypt and Israel and Syria that ended the 1973 war — and all of those parties wanted a deal. Are you telling me that two meetings between Trump’s pal Steve Witkoff and Putin in Moscow and a couple of phone calls between Putin and Trump are enough to end the Russian invasion of Ukraine on reasonable terms for Kyiv?

Trump couldn’t sell a hotel that quickly — unless he was giving it away.

Wait, wait — unless he was giving it away. …

Lord, I hope that is not what we’re watching here. Message to President Trump and Vice President JD Vance: If you sell out Ukraine to Putin, you will forever carry a mark of Cain on your foreheads as traitors to a core value that has animated U.S. foreign policy for 250 years — the defense of liberty against tyranny.

Our nation has never so brazenly sold out a country struggling to be free, which we and our allies had been supporting for three years. If Trump and Vance do that, the mark of Cain will never wash off. They will go down in history as “Neville Trump” and “Benedict Vance.” Likewise Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and national security adviser Michael Waltz.

Why else am I suspicious? Because Trump keeps saying that all he wants to do is end “the killing” in Ukraine. I am with that. But the easiest and quickest way to end the killing would be for the side that started the killing, the side whose army invaded Ukraine for utterly fabricated reasons, to get out of Ukraine. Presto — killing over.

Putin needs to enlist Trump’s help only if he wants something more than an end to the killing. I get that Ukraine will have to cede something to Putin. The question is how much. I also get that the only way for Putin to get the extra-large slice that he wants and the postwar restrictions that he wants imposed on Ukraine — without more warfighting — is by enlisting Trump to get them for him.

Why else am I suspicious? Because Trump has left all our European allies on the sidelines when he negotiates with Putin. Excuse me, but our European allies have contributed billions of dollars in military equipment, economic aid and refugee assistance to Ukraine — more combined than the United States, which Trump lies about — and they have made clear that they are now ready to do even more to prevent Putin from overrunning Ukraine and coming for them next.

So why would Trump enter negotiations with Putin and not bring our best leverage — our allies — with him? And why would he visibly turn U.S. military and intelligence aid to Ukraine off and then on — after shamefully calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “a dictator”?

Sorry, that doesn’t smell right to me, either. What made Kissinger and Secretary of State James Baker particularly effective negotiators is that they knew how to leverage our allies to amplify U.S. power. Trump foolishly gives the back of his hand to our allies, while extending an open hand to Putin. That’s how you give up leverage.

Leveraging allies — the biggest asset that we have that Putin does not — “is what smart statecraft is all about,” Dennis Ross, the longtime Middle East adviser to U.S. presidents, told me.

“The key to good statecraft is knowing how to use the leverage that you have — how to marry your means to your objectives. The irony is that Trump believes in leverage — but has not used all the means that he has” in Ukraine, said Ross, the author of the timely, and just published, “Statecraft 2.0: What America Needs to Lead in a Multipolar World.”

What also smells wrong to me is that Trump appears to have no clue why Putin is so nice to him. As a Russian foreign policy analyst in Moscow put it to me recently: “Trump does not get that Putin is merely manipulating him to score Putin’s principal goal: diminish the U.S. international position, destroy its network of security alliances — most importantly in Europe — and destabilize the U.S. internally, thus making the world safe for Putin and Xi.”

Trump refuses to understand, this analyst added, that Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping both want to see America boxed in to the Western Hemisphere rather than messing around with either of them in Europe or Asia/Pacific — and they see Trump as their pawn to deliver that.

Finally, and pretty much summing up all of the above, it smells to me that Trump has never made clear what concessions, sacrifices and guarantees he is demanding from Russia to get a peace deal on Ukraine. And who goes into a negotiation without a very clear, unwavering bottom line in terms of core American interests?

There are sustainable ways to end a war and keep it ended and there are unsustainable ways. It all depends on the bottom line — and if our bottom line departs fundamentally from that of Ukraine’s and our allies’, I don’t think they are going to just roll over for the Trump-Putin bromance.

Putin wants a Ukraine with a government that is basically the same as his neighboring vassal Belarus, not a Ukraine that is independent like neighboring Poland — a free-market democracy anchored in the European Union.

What kind of Ukraine does Trump want? The Belorussian version or the Polish version?

I have absolutely no doubt which one is in Ukraine’s interest, America’s interest and our European allies’ interest. The thing that gnaws at me is that I don’t know what Donald Trump thinks is in his personal interest — and that is all that matters now in Trump’s Washington.

Until it’s clear that Trump’s bottom line is what should be America’s bottom line — no formal surrendering of Ukrainian territory to Putin, but simply a cease-fire; no membership for Ukraine in NATO, but membership in the European Union; and an international peacekeeping force on the ground, backed up with intelligence and material support from the U.S. — color me very, very skeptical of every word Trump and Putin say on Ukraine — including “and” and “the.”

It is clear to Friedman that Trump sides with Putin. But why? Why is he eager to satisfy Putin? Why does he behave like the wimpy little brother when he talks to Putin?

Categories Cruelty, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, International, Lies, Trump

The Collapse of Democracy in the USA: A Chilling View from France

By dianeravitch
March 14, 2025 //
12

This speech by French Senator Claude Malhuret went viral. It has been translated and reproduced at least 1 million times. I personally have received several copies of his speech from friends and family. Recently, it has been translated and published in The Atlantic. Senator Malhuret expresses the shock and dismay that many of us feel about Trump’s decision to abandon Ukraine and Europe and to align the United States with Russia. Please read what he said. This is not normal.

Senator Malhuret said:

Europe is at a crucial juncture of its history. The American shield is slipping away, Ukraine risks being abandoned, and Russia is being strengthened. Washington has become the court of Nero: an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a buffoon on ketamine tasked with purging the civil service.

This is a tragedy for the free world, but it’s first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. [President Donald] Trump’s message is that being his ally serves no purpose, because he will not defend you, he will impose more tariffs on you than on his enemies, and he will threaten to seize your territories, while supporting the dictators who invade you.

The king of the deal is showing that the art of the deal is lying prostrate. He thinks he will intimidate China by capitulating to Russian President Vladimir Putin, but China’s President Xi Jinping, faced with such wreckage, is undoubtedly accelerating his plans to invade Taiwan.

Never in history has a president of the United States surrendered to the enemy. Never has one supported an aggressor against an ally, issued so many illegal decrees, and sacked so many military leaders in one go. Never has one trampled on the American Constitution, while threatening to disregard judges who stand in his way, weaken countervailing powers, and take control of social media.

This is not a drift to illiberalism; this is the beginning of the seizure of democracy. Let us remember that it only took one month, three weeks, and two days to bring down the Weimar Republic and its constitution.

I have confidence in the solidity of American democracy, and the country is already protesting. But in one month, Trump has done more harm to America than in the four years of his last presidency. We were at war with a dictator; now we are fighting against a dictator supported by a traitor.

Eight days ago, at the very moment when Trump was patting French President Emmanuel Macron on the back at the White House, the United States voted at the United Nations with Russia and North Korea against the Europeans demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops.

Two days later, in the Oval Office, the draft-dodger was giving moral and strategic lessons to the Ukrainian president and war hero, Volodymyr Zelensky, before dismissing him like a stable boy, ordering him to submit or resign.

That night, he took another step into disgrace by halting the delivery of promised weapons. What should we do in the face of such betrayal? The answer is simple: Stand firm.

And above all: make no mistake. The defeat of Ukraine would be the defeat of Europe. The Baltic states, Georgia, and Moldova are already on the list. Putin’s goal is to return to the Yalta Agreement, where half the continent was ceded to Stalin.

The countries of the global South are waiting for the outcome of the conflict to decide whether they should continue to respect Europe, or whether they are now free to trample it.

What Putin wants is the end of the world order the United States and its allies established 80 years ago, in which the first principle was the prohibition of acquiring territory by force.

This idea is at the very foundation of the UN, where today Americans vote in favor of the aggressor and against the aggressed, because the Trumpian vision coincides with Putin’s: a return to spheres of influence, where great powers dictate the fate of small nations.

Greenland, Panama, and Canada are mine. Ukraine, the Baltics, and Eastern Europe are yours. Taiwan and the South China Sea are his.

At the Mar-a-Lago dinner parties of golf-playing oligarchs, this is called “diplomatic realism.”

We are therefore alone. But the narrative that Putin cannot be resisted is false. Contrary to Kremlin propaganda, Russia is doing poorly. In three years, the so-called second army in the world has managed to grab only crumbs from a country with about a quarter its population.

With interest rates at 21 percent, the collapse of foreign currency and gold reserves, and a demographic crisis, Russia is on the brink. The American lifeline to Putin is the biggest strategic mistake ever made during a war.

The shock is violent, but it has one virtue. The Europeans are coming out of denial. They understood in a single day in Munich that the survival of Ukraine and the future of Europe are in their hands, and that they have three imperatives.

Accelerate military aid to Ukraine to compensate for the American abandonment, so that Ukraine can hang on, and of course to secure its and Europe’s place at the negotiating table.

This will be costly. It will require ending the taboo on using Russia’s frozen assets. It will require bypassing Moscow’s accomplices within Europe itself through a coalition that includes only willing countries, and the United Kingdom of course.

Second, demand that any agreement include the return of kidnapped children and prisoners, as well as absolute security guarantees. After Budapest, Georgia, and Minsk, we know what Putin’s agreements are worth. These guarantees require sufficient military force to prevent a new invasion.

Finally, and most urgently because it will take the longest, we must build that neglected European defense, which has relied on the American security umbrella since 1945 and which was shut down after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The task is Herculean, but history books will judge the leaders of today’s democratic Europe by its success or failure.

Friedrich Merz has just declared that Europe needs its own military alliance. This is a recognition that France has been right for decades in advocating for strategic autonomy.

Now it must be built. This will require massive investment to replenish the European Defense Fund beyond the Maastricht debt criteria, harmonize weapons and munitions systems, accelerate European Union membership for Ukraine, which now has the leading army in Europe, rethink the role and conditions of nuclear deterrence based on French and British capabilities, and relaunch missile-shield and satellite programs.

Europe can become a military power again only by becoming an industrial power again. But the real rearmament of Europe is its moral rearmament.

We must convince public opinion in the face of war weariness and fear, and above all in the face of Putin’s collaborators on the far right and far left.

They say they want peace. What neither they nor Trump says is that their peace is capitulation, the peace of defeat, the replacement of a de Gaullian Zelensky by a Ukrainian Pétain under Putin’s thumb. The peace of collaborators who, for three years, have refused to support the Ukrainians in any way.

Is this the end of the Atlantic alliance? The risk is great. But in recent days, Zelensky’s public humiliation and all the crazy decisions taken over the past month have finally stirred Americans into action. Poll numbers are plummeting. Republican elected officials are greeted by hostile crowds in their constituencies. Even Fox News is becoming critical.

The Trumpists are no longer at the height of glory. They control the executive branch, Congress, the Supreme Court, and social media. But in American history, the supporters of freedom have always won. They are starting to raise their heads.

The fate of Ukraine will be decided in the trenches, but it also depends on those who defend democracy in the United States, and here, on our ability to unite Europeans and find the means for our common defense, to make Europe the power it once was and hesitates to become again.

Our parents defeated fascism and communism at the cost of great sacrifice. The task of our generation is to defeat the totalitarianisms of the 21st century. Long live free Ukraine, long live democratic Europe.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Fascism, Freedom, History, International

Bill Kristol: Trump Betrays Ukraine and Our Ideals

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2025 //
2

Bill Kristol was a prominent conservative until Trump. He edited The Weekly Standard. Now he is an outspoken critic of Trump because Trump is betraying America and is destroying the Republican Party. In this post, he speaks out against Trump’s craven abandonment of Ukraine and his craven embrace of Putin.

He writes:

The betrayal of Ukraine continues apace.

On Friday, President Donald Trump stopped sharing American intelligence with Ukraine, and Russia responded by immediately stepping up its strikes on civilian Ukrainian targets.

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk explained the situation succinctly: “This is what happens when someone appeases barbarians. More bombs, more aggression, more victims.”

But Tusk was being diplomatic. He was maintaining the pretense that Trump was merely foolishly or wishfully appeasing Putin. Trump isn’t acting foolishly or wishfully. He wants to help Putin.

Indeed, the distinguished military historian Phillips P. O’Brien wrote on Saturday:

What we have seen over the last few days is so extreme that it deserves to be said out loud and acknowledged as soon as possible. The United States has not just abandoned Ukraine, the United States is now actively helping Vladimir Putin and the Russian state kill Ukrainians to try and force Ukraine to accept a bad peace deal that very well might spell the end of their country. At the same time, the USA is now bending over backwards to help protect the Russian military.

O’Brien provides evidence for these charges, which you can and should read if you have the stomach for it. And since O’Brien’s newsletter, we’ve had reports that Trump won’t restore military aid with Ukraine even if there’s a deal on mineral resources, and that the Trump administration wants to depose Volodymyr Zelensky as president.

As the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser remarks: “Trump’s demands right now are Putin’s demands.”

By Sunday night, Trump was telling reporters that the administration had “just about” lifted the pause on Ukraine intel sharing. But the details of the lift were left unclear. Indeed, the alleged willingness to lift the pause seems to be laying the groundwork for failing to do so, or for putting the pause on again, when Zelensky fails to make sufficient concessions for “peace.”

Those looking for optimism continue to try to advance the proposition that Trump is merely stepping back a bit in Europe to focus on the China threat. But there are reports that China, Russia, and Iran are now engaged in new naval exercises near Iran’s Chabahar port. This is only one of many instances of the autocracies of Europe and Asia working together.

And the fact is that Trump wants to cut deals with all the autocrats—with Russia, China, Iran, and for that matter North Korea. Those are the leaders with whom he wants to work to make the world safe for autocracy.

Not all Republicans are on board this agenda. The Reaganite pulse in the GOP still beats, if faintly. And so one reads about Hill Republicans having concerns about Trump’s policy. But as Adam Kinzinger mordantly remarked about his former colleagues: “If only they had votes in say, a legislative body, to do something about it. But no, they can only be ‘concerned.’”

Three House Republicans. Four GOP senators. That’s what it might take to stop or impede Trump’s sellout of Ukraine. They could vow not to support Trump’s agenda, and to vote with the Democrats if necessary, as long as the betrayal of Ukraine continues. They could start with the government funding bill that must pass by the end of this week.

But no, Hill Republicans are still bending the knee to Trump.

And so a Republican who’s been staunchly pro-Ukraine like GOP Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick feels he has to pretend that cutting off intelligence sharing with Ukraine is :an escalate to de-escalate tactic by the administration to bring these parties to the table.”

An escalate to de-escalate tactic.

The mental gymnastics of Republicans who know better, but who do not want to confront Trump, never cease to amaze.

It’s all sickening. It’s sickening to see the betrayal of Ukraine, because one thinks of what will happen to the Ukrainian people.

But it’s also sickening to see the betrayal of Ukraine because of what it will say about what’s happening to us.

As a French friend of America, Bernard-Henri Levy, wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week:

I don’t know if the Americans will grasp that in Mr. Zelensky’s dignity lies their “city upon a hill” creed and that American leaders, from the Founding Fathers all the way to Kennedy and Reagan, would have been proud of a deep bond with this leader.

I don’t know, really, if any of this will be properly understood after that incident, display, fiasco, debacle, monstrosity—call it what you will—in the Oval Office.

It’s proper to blame President Trump for the “incident, display, fiasco, debacle, monstrosity” in the Oval Office. But Trump’s our president. It’s our Oval Office. If Americans in both parties don’t do their utmost to check and overturn the president’s actions, we will all have been part of the betrayal of Ukraine. We will all have been part of a betrayal of America.

Categories Cruelty, Democracy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, International, Trump

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: How Trump Is Helping Putin

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2025 //
10

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history at New York University and a specialist in autocracy.

She wrote recently on her blog Lucid about some of the ways that Trump is helping Putin achieved his goal of reassembling the whole USSR. Many years ago, Putin said that the collapse of the USSR was “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century.” some might have said it was World War I or Wotkd War II. Not Putin, veteran KGB agent.

Ben-Ghiat wrote:

To understand the nature and scope of this momentous shift, it helps to think like an autocrat. For this kind of leader, democratic America, with its robust economy, far-reaching infrastructure of foreign aid, immensely powerful military, and checks on foreign malign influence and corruption initiatives, is a huge problem.

Trump’s path back to power so he could take care of this distressing situation was eased by Chinese, Iranian, and Russian disinformation campaigns, which, together with U.S. Republican propaganda, helped to discredit and weaken American democracy in the eyes of the American public. Trump’s ceaseless efforts to praise foreign strongmen and his delegitimization of democratic institutions, from elections to the free press to the judiciary, also had this aim.

Trump had long ago internalized a view of geopolitics that sees democracies, and American democracy in particular, as hostile actors who deny the rights of autocracies to expand their influence in the world. When Trump suggests that President Joe Biden’s support of Ukraine’s bid to join NATO provoked Russia’s invasion, he justifies the Kremlin’s aggressions as a legitimate response to democratic meddling. 

Now that Trump is back in the White House, focused on the destruction of American democracy, we can expect public collaboration with Russia to take several forms. Trump and his enablers in and outside of the GOP will produce a steady stream of performances and propaganda meant for two audiences: autocrats, especially Putin, and the millions of Americans who still need to be indoctrinated to see the world in ways that benefit Trump and his Kremlin ally.

The novel co-presidency of Trump and Elon Musk has provided a one-two punch approach to quickly launch the other two ways the U.S. will collaborate with Russia. First, by erasing or dialing back America’s global soft and hard power footprint in the world. This could mean reducing military spaces abroad that are now deterrents to autocratic aggression, or using such spaces as launching pads for pro-autocratic military engagements that the US may one day participate in.

It also means ending or scaling back humanitarian assistance programs that have created goodwill for America among global populations. Musk has jump-started this latter action by destroying USAID. The goal is to create a vacuum of American power and influence in the world that China, Russia, Turkey and other autocracies can fill.

The second form of collaboration entails the removal of barriers to the free flow of Russian influence inside America. This was supposed to be a priority of Trump’s first administration. Just months after his inauguration, Trump hosted Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergei Kislyak in the Oval Office, with only a Russian state photographer from TASS present. This told the world that the White House would be a Russian-friendly space with Trump in power, with Kremlin views of politics and the world amplified by Washington. 

President Trump with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak in the Oval Office, May 10, 2017. Alexander Shcherbak/TASS/via Getty Images. 

Then came the Russia investigation —a supreme annoyance made possible by the existence of democracy in America. During the recent meeting with Zelensky, Trump evoked the difficulties this investigation created for Russian capture of the United States, tellingly mentioning the toll it took on Putin–and just as tellingly, alluding to the pressures this obstruction of Putin’s plans placed on him as an ally with responsibilities to fulfill. His statement resembles the “self-criticism” Communist operatives were required to engage in when they displeased the regime. 

“Let me tell you. Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump said. “He had to suffer through the Russia hoax…He went through a hell of a lot with me. He went through a phony witch hunt…It was a phony Democrat scam. He had to go through it. And he did go through it.”

This false start, and the heightened expectations for Trump to perform this time, are likely why Trump & Co. have acted so aggressively. In his first weeks in power, Trump signed orders to disband TaskForce KleptoCapture, which targeted Russian oligarchs, disband the FBI’s Foreign Influence Taskforce, and relax enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stand down from all planning against Russia, including digital actions.

The appointment of Tulsi Gabbard, who has a history of taking positions that defend Russian interests, as Director of National Intelligence, is another indication of the will to dismantle obstructions to Russian influence inside America. The walls of the national security fortress are coming down.

In 2018, before the Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki, Trump said that he saw Russia as more of a “competitor” than an “enemy.” Seven years later, that competitor has become an ally. Whatever forms Russia-U.S. collaboration will take, more Americans will come to understand that the man they elected to “save the country” is far more interested in solving Putin’s problems than in governing America. That means wrecking American democracy at home and dismantling American power abroad.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Funding, International, Lies, Trump

ProPublica: How Many Children Will Die Because Elon Musk “Deleted” USAID?

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2025 //
3

ProPublica estimated the number of children who will die–of starvation or lack of medical care–because DOGE closed down USAID. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of children, in addition to their families, are the direct result of the shuttering foreign aid. These lives don’t matter to Trump and Musk; they are not white. Musk is a well-known pro-catalyst; he thinks women must have more babies. He himself now has 14 children, by different mothers. But he seems to care only about white babies.

Here is a portion of their report:

For weeks, some of the federal government’s foremost authorities on global health have repeatedly warned Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other leaders about the coming death toll if they carried out the Trump administration’s plan to end nearly all U.S. foreign aid around the world.

In their clearest accounting yet, top officials have estimated the casualties: One million children will not be treated for severe acute malnutrition. Up to 166,000 people will die from malaria. New cases of tuberculosis will go up by 30%. Two hundred thousand more children will be paralyzed by polio over the next decade.

Instead of acting on the repeated warnings, top administration officials, including the State Department’s director of foreign assistance, Peter Marocco, thwarted their own experts’ efforts to keep the U.S. Agency for International Development’s most vital programs up and running, according to internal memos and estimates compiled by global health leaders at the agency and obtained by ProPublica.

President Donald Trump’s political appointees, along with billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, pressed ahead with their plan to dismantle USAID by ignoring and impeding staff who tried to protect lifesaving operations — even as the administration publicly insisted that those programs remained online — according to the memos and interviews with government officials.

During exchanges outlined in one of the memos, a DOGE engineer emailed staff and said they were not allowed to review the programs they were canceling. At another point, USAID’s then-deputy chief of staff, Joel Borkert, told agency personnel to take a “draconian” approach to approving waivers.

The explosive memos — which include summaries of email exchanges and top-level meetings inside USAID, as well as internal agency research — were sent by Nicholas Enrich, acting assistant administrator for global health. ProPublica also obtained detailed breakdowns of lifesaving programs managed by the bureau and the projected impact of cutting them. Enrich was placed on leave Sunday.

Enrich told The New York Times he released the memos, which multiple other officials contributed to, after learning he was being placed on leave, as thousands of others at the agency have been. The memos were circulated to the staff and obtained by ProPublica.

The documents identify several key senior policymakers behind the scenes while also puncturing the administration’s claims of a careful, deliberative review of USAID programming. The records also represent the government’s most explicit concerns to date memorialized by a senior official from inside Trump’s administration.

The State Department, USAID and Elon Musk did not respond to questions about this story. Rubio and Marocco did not respond to a request for an interview.

Since the inauguration, Rubio, Musk and Marocco have taken dramatic steps to incapacitate USAID, the largest foreign aid donor in the world, by firing its employees and halting operations. The global health bureau was one of the first parts of the agency targeted for mass layoffs.

Then, last week, they abruptly cancelled 10,000 foreign aid projects, which account for 90% of USAID’s humanitarian operations and about half of the State Department’s. Lifesaving programs that were still operating around the world were forced to close down immediately.

How do you sleep at night, when you know that your actions were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children? And their parents?

The New York Times story that was linked in the story gave more details:

The Trump administration’s decision to withdraw foreign aid and dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development is likely to cause enormous human suffering, according to estimates by the agency itself. Among them:

  • up to 18 million additional cases of malaria per year, and as many as 166,000 additional deaths;
  • 200,000 children paralyzed with polio annually, and hundreds of millions of infections;
  • one million children not treated for severe acute malnutrition, which is often fatal, each year;
  • more than 28,000 new cases of such infectious diseases as Ebola and Marburg every year.

Those stark projections were laid out in a series of memos by Nicholas Enrich, acting assistant administrator for global health at U.S.A.I.D., which were obtained by The New York Times. Mr. Enrich was placed on administrative leave on Sunday.

This was the opening of Enrich’s bold memo, as reprinted in the New York Times:

Takeaway: The temporary pause on foreign aid and delays in approving lifesaving humanitarian assistance (LHA) for global health will lead to increased death and disability, accelerate global disease spread, contribute to destabilizing fragile regions, and heightened security risks-directly endangering American national security, economic stability, and public health. If the pause leads to permanent contract terminations, the $7.7B in resources appropriated by Congress are no longer be used to support these lifesaving global health programs, which could potentially result in wasted resources. The impacts on mortality and morbidity are summarized in the tables below. While the Foreign Assistance Review is set to take place in the coming weeks, it is important to recognize that a mechanism-by-mechanism approach may overlook the broader impact of these programs across global health program areas. This includes missed opportunities to enhance efficiency and cost-effectiveness within LHA program areas.

Marco Rubio, how do you feel about the deaths of so many people? Does it trouble you? Can you look in the mirror in the morning without seeing a murderer reflected back to you?

We know that Trump and Musk don’t care. What about you, Mr. Rubio?

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Corruption, Cruelty, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Health, International

Zelensky Offers Ceasefire Plan, Praises Trump Effusively

By dianeravitch
March 4, 2025 //
9

Ukrainian President Zelensky offered a path to peace, trying to mend the rupture with the U.S. He rejected the previous deal presented by Trump because it was negotiated by the U.S. and Russia, without the participation of Ukraine, and it contained no security guarantees, no protection for Ukraine if Putin decided to renew the war.

The New York Times:

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Tuesday offered a course of action that he said could end the war, while trying to assure the Trump administration that his government was dedicated to peace.

“Our meeting in Washington, at the White House on Friday, did not go the way it was supposed to be,” Mr. Zelensky wrote on X. “It is regrettable that it happened this way. It is time to make things right.”

He was referring to an explosive meeting at the White House last week in which President Trump berated Mr. Zelensky and called him ungrateful. Mr. Trump followed up on Monday by announcing that he was pausing all U.S. military aid to Ukraine.

The Ukrainian leader said he was ready to release Russian prisoners of war, stop long-range drone and missile strikes aimed at Russian targets, and declare a truce at sea immediately — moves that he said would help establish a pathway to peace.

Only, however, “if Russia will do the same,” he added.

Mr. Zelensky’s proposal seemed clearly designed to shift the burden for ending the war onto Russia, which launched its invasion three years ago. The White House has claimed that the Ukrainian leader is the main obstacle to peace.

In his post, Mr. Zelensky offered effusive praise for American support, noting specifically “the moment when things changed when President Trump provided Ukraine with Javelins.”

“We are grateful for this,” he wrote. “Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace closer,” he added. “My team and I stand ready to work under President Trump’s strong leadership to get a peace that lasts.”

There was no immediate reaction from the Kremlin to Mr. Zelensky’s proposal. Despite the ferocity of the fighting, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has shown a willingness to do side deals with Ukraine. The two countries have conducted numerous prisoner-of-war exchanges, and Russia and Ukraine had been set to participate in talks in Qatar last August about halting strikes on each other’s energy infrastructure. Moscow pulled out of the meeting after Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region.

In recent weeks, however, Mr. Putin has offered no hint of being willing to de-escalate the war before winning major concessions from the West and Ukraine — like ruling out Ukrainian NATO membership, reducing the alliance’s footprint in Europe, limiting the size of Ukraine’s military, and giving Russia influence over Ukraine’s domestic politics.

“There is no evidence that Russia would be prepared to accept a deal, and what that would be,” said Malcolm Chalmers, deputy director general of the Royal United Services Institute, a research group in London. He said the decision by the United States to pause military aid would only encourage Putin to ask for more — including Ukrainian demilitarization and neutrality.”

Mr. Zelensky sought to strike a careful balance in his statement. Aware of Mr. Trump’s stated desire to get a quick deal, he said Ukraine was “ready to work fast to end the war.”

At the same time, he suggested a staged process, similar to an idea raised by the French government, that could start immediately.

“We are ready to work fast to end the war, and the first stages could be the release of prisoners and truce in the sky — ban on missiles, long-ranged drones, bombs on energy and other civilian infrastructure — and truce in the sea immediately, if Russia will do the same,” he wrote. “Then we want to move very fast through all next stages and to work with the US to agree a strong final deal.”

The article goes on to expressions of dismay by Ukrainians who are disappointed that it was their strongest ally, the U.S., that betrayed them.

Categories Accountability, International
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