Nixon dealt with the worst murderer of the 20th century when he sat down with Mao. Reality is what it is. – Hugh Hewitt

Extraordinary. In decades of watching not just American politicians, especially the President, but politicians around the world, I can recall nothing like this happening in a joint public session between leaders.

It’s what we all suspect happens sometimes behind the scenes; cut and thrust arguments that are as much emotional as they are rational, and sometimes more so.

But never in public, for good reasons.

I expect this from Trump, I’m sure he’s exactly the same in private when he’s being attacked, the man is transparent. But I was surprised that Zelensky went there.

Perhaps I should not have been, given reports from last year about President Biden losing his temper with Zelensky in a phone call when the latter demanded more aid after Biden had just committed another billion dollars in military assistance. Or when Zelensky foolishly let himself be pulled into the Harris campaign late last year by appearing with Democrats (and only Democrats) at a munitions plant in the crucual swing state of Pennsylvania.

Vice President Vance certainly hadn’t forgotten that last one.

No cherry-picking: watch all eleven minutes of this. It’s both painful to watch and yet mesmerising.

However, understand that this is when the fireworks started. Below is the full 46 minutes of the meeting and it doesn’t go off the rails until the 38 minute mark:

Part of Hugh Hewitt’s commentary below if the link doesn’t work for you:

Everyone who wants to comment on today has to watch this entire tape and hopefully realize that at approximately the 38 minute mark President Zelensky asks a question of Vice President Vance which isn’t really a question. (My guess is that someone gave President Zelensky really terrible advice to not fight with President Trump in public but that he could score on the VP because the VP couldn’t respond. Wrong.)

President Trump had been almost indulgent of President Zelensky for 38 minutes, trying to get to the post-presser meeting with a path forward to a ceasefire intact, aware that he has to deal with Putin afterwards as well. A couple of times President Zelensky dances on the cliff (especially with the pictures which someone who doesn’t know this business told him would be an excellent stunt and wasn’t) and President Trump steers it back to a path to the post-presser meeting.

But then President Zelensky puts the VP on the spot and it escalated. Then President Zelensky tells President Trump how the United States would feel, and you can see our president give into a (justified) rising anger at President Zelensky’s approach and rhetoric, as did the VP.

I have long supported Ukraine and still do. President Zelensky’s conduct has been heroic. But he is used to President Biden, Secretary Blinken and NSA Sullivan who did not have a plan or a purpose other than “de-escalation” which they assumed would stop escalation from Russia —which did not happen— and for whom every decision was agony. President Zelensky also did not remember that Ukraine didn’t lose the war (that President Biden told Putin would be fine if it was a “minor incursion”) because of weapons President Trump had sent in his first term.

The scene had been set a little earlier: Trump knows about projecting an image for TV and I get the impression that he, and a number of others in his administration, are no longer impressed by the khaki act.

Will Putin be rubbing his hands gleefully? I should think so, along with his supporters on both the Left and the Right.

But I’m not going to get too upset by such reactions for the following reasons.

First, on the military side, Putin has lost anywhere from 150,000 to 200,000 dead, plus casualties that will typically be twice that or more. Over half a million casualties. Tens of thousands of tanks and armoured vehicles destroyed plus vast amounts of other equipment, so much so that they were hauling 60 and 70-year old tanks and artillery out of storage for the fight.

Moreover the Russian Army has been revealed as a paper tiger, utterly incapable of maneuver warfare and stymied in a fight against a military weaker even than the NATO ones that have let themselves decline, like Germany. Those who talk of appeasement and Putin’s next moves West seem to completely ignore these facts. This is not 1934-1938 circa Nazi Germany.

Second is the economic damage Russia has sustained: young, talented men leaving the country, crippling interest rates, the loss of valuable export markets in Western Europe, especially for natural gas., and of course the sheer waste of money on the “Special Military Operation”. A wartime economy can keep a lid on all these things, but when the war ends the chickens aways come home to roost, the only exceptions being the USA after WWI and WWII. Britain, despite being a victor, was never the same power again.

No, Putin might have aggressive designs to rebuild Mother Russia to her pre-communist glory days, but it’s going to take years to recover from all this before he can even think about any further adventures anywhere. In fact he likely won’t live long enough to see such. Some other autocrat will have to deal with these problems.

And for what? To gain control of totally smashed up territory that will require vast amounts of wealth to restore, if they ever are. Putin can forget about foreign aid in this, even from China. The whole rationale for his attack on Ukraine, to prevent another NATO nation appearing on Russia’s borders, resulted in two: Sweden and Finland, overthrowing decades of neutrality, yet another sign of both the fear of Putin’s recklessness and the lack of fear of his military capabilities. He almost literally shot himself in the foot.

It may be that Western Europe resumes buying natural gas from him (it’s notable that Ukraine never destroyed the pipelines carrying Russian gas to the West), especially as their stupid Net Zero policies bite ever harder. But if they do I doubt we’ll hear much about “appeasement”.

As to Ukraine, they’ll likely fall back into the corrupt, squabbling government they were before the war. I hope that Zelenskyy gets re-elected when the war is over and election re-commence (apparently they’re banned by the Ukraine Constitution in times of war), since I believe he was the nation’s best chance at ending such before Russia attacked. But the nation will take decades to recover, the only difference with Russia being that they’ll get international aid to re-build, especially from the EU.

But I don’t think they’ll collapse so far that Putin can take advantage of it and gain the prize he set out for in 2022, total control of Ukraine and absorbing them back into Russia, as in Tsarist times. Even if Trump cuts them loose the EU, feckless as it is, would likely step up to the plate finally in terms of military support in the form of boots on the ground. It’s quite clear that Trump wants them to do so and they seem to have got the message, if recent “emergency” meetings called by Macron and the British Labour PM’s call for increased military spending in Britain are anything to go by.

Did it have to be this way? Not at all and I wish that such had not become public, but again, transparency is what was needed to break open this deadlock. And what has led to this point can be laid at the feet of the last twenty years of US Presidents from GW Bush (The Russo-Georgia War) to Obama (Annexation of Crimea) to Biden allowing Russia to get away with “incursions” for various reasons; Bush because he regarded Putin as an ally in the “War On Terror”; Obama because he thought Putin was only behaving badly due to that scary warmonger Bush; Biden – or more to the point, Biden advisors, because they thought Putin could help with Iran, and a whole succession of EU leaders who felt none of it was serious enough to really confront Putin when it might have made a difference. Funnily enough it was only during Trump’s presidency that Putin stood pat on all such things.

A list of Western appeasement of Russia in the last twenty years. Basically a succession of 1936 Rhinelands.

Critics of Trump who use the word appeasement perhaps don’t know their history as well as they should.