In the wake of last weeks amazing outbreak of WWE at the Whitehouse, featuring President Zelensky of Ukraine versus the tag team of US President Trump and VP Vance, live in front of TV cameras, the meltdowns have continued in their predictable fashion.
It turns out that before Zelensky met with Trump he met with a bunch of Democrat Senators, who advised him to not sign the minerals deal, as proudly advertised by one of them:
No wonder he screwed up when all he had to do – as usual the negotiations are done and dusted by this stage via lower-level staff – was sign the damned thing, do a grip-and-grin, and go backstage to continue to hammer away about “security guarantees” and such. One step at a time is one of the arts of diplomacy.
So is reading the room! Note to Zelensky: the Democrats are out of power in the USA and unlike GW Bush, Trump is not a Republican who gives a damn about the MSM, or about caving to Democrat demands in the name of “bipartisanship”.
Zelensky probably doesn’t read the American pollster Frank Luntz either but he should after the latter produced a couple of polls that showed Americans angrier at Zelensky than Trump and, for the first time, more sympathetic to Putin than Zelensky. Now those are just two polls, I’ve had issues with Luntz’s hot takes before and they weren’t as scientific as they should be. However, as Luntz concludes:
The United States isn’t changing…
It has changed.
Three years ago, Americans were overwhelmingly supportive of Ukraine and they considered Zelensky to be a global hero. Today, a majority of Americans oppose the war and Zelensky is now a controversial character.
Given how poorly the Democrats read the mood of the American voter in 2024, given how they’ve been flailing ever since, you’d think Zelensky wouldn’t want to take advice from them, but it’s worse than that. The Democrats just want to defeat Trump, and the only option now open to them electorally are the 2026 Mid-Terms when they’re likely to take the House and thus stymie any further Trump actions. They also want to win in 2028, and the message is, Any Weapon To Hand.
Ukraine may die, but that is a sacrifice the Democrats are willing to make.
Then there’s the Europeans, who promptly commenced their performative dance moves of shock, horror, outrage at Trump and praise of Zelensky (including strangely identical social media posts), plus pledges of further support, both military, diplomatic and economic.
Yeah, just one problem with that!
Simply put the EU is sending more money to Russia in buying fossil fuels than they’re sending Ukraine:
EU member states bought €21.9bn (£18.1bn) of Russian oil and gas in the third year of the war, according to estimates from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (Crea), despite the efforts under way to kick the continent’s addiction to the fuels that fund Vladimir Putin’s war chest. The amount is one-sixth greater than the €18.7bn the EU allocated to Ukraine in financial aid in 2024, according to a tracker from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel).
As far as that military support goes, the EU is not in great shape.
- Germany in 2018 had large proportions of their tanks, planes and ships out of service (I have to laugh at the headline of the post I made from 2019, Infinity War, Part 10: US – Euro Relations in Crisis)
- Denmark has a military “that consists of ships that cannot sail. Planes that cannot fly. And cannons that cannot fire. Everything is missing”
Britain has now joined that club:
- The Royal Armoured Corps has not been able to deploy a realistic Challenger 2 regiment of 59 tanks for many years. Lack of available Challenger 2s has meant that the army’s ambition for MBTs has been at the 20 to 25 level, at the very best.
- The Royal Artillery used to have a force of over 100 self-propelled AS90 artillery pieces. But much like the Challenger 2 fleet, this had been left to rot, with only a handful available even for training.
- Other armoured vehicle fleets are equally in dire straits. Think about it: 35 years ago, Warrior infantry combat vehicles charged into Kuwait; 30 years ago, a Warrior battlegroup was deployed to Bosnia amid much acclaim. The vehicles that are still in service are substantially the same as they were.
Anybody in Britain in 1965 who’d suggested they could go to war inside NATO using weapons from 1930 would have been put into an insane asylum. Run the clock forward a decade and the same applies even with the superior weapons the British were fighting with in 1945. Yet this is where they now are.
As with Denmark and Germany there’s also total inadequacy across supply chains for everything from boots to bandages and ammunition. Sure, there are upgrades to the Challenger tank and replacements for the Warrior, but those are years away from deployment, and while the Brit’s have bought 12 modern Archer 155mm cannons from Sweden, their ammo supplies wouldn’t last a week.
It’s therefore no surprise that after PM Kier Starmer made bold noises in the wake of the Trump-Zelensky fight about putting boots on the ground as a peacekeeping force that his military got in his ear about the real state of play: “Where’s this 20,000-figure come from? Who’s briefing this? We couldn’t do this in a month of Sundays!”. Thus this walk back:
British Ambassador to the U.S. Lord Peter Mandelson: President Zelenskyy needs to give “his unequivocal backing to the initiative that President Trump is taking to END the war and to bring a just and lasting PEACE.”
Also this walk back from none other than NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte:
In an interesting turn of events, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte just urged Zelensky to mend ties with Trump and the U.S., emphasizing the importance of strong relations. The news comes despite the fact many heads of state of European members of NATO defended Zelensky after Trump’s exchange with him yesterday. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte: “You have to find a way, dear Volodymyr, to restore your relationship with Donald Trump and the American administration.”
No Minister 
Zelenskyy is politically pretty naïve.
You are right, he needed to sign the deal, be Trumps friend, and try to get a ceasefire so that everyone could catch their breath (including letting other nations build back their depleted military strength)
I have made no secret of the fact that I have friends in Ukraine that have been on the receiving end of Putin’s little adventure, and as much as I know how much they now hate every single Russian on the face of the planet, I also know that it needs to stop.
The amount of damage that has been done is generational. You talk to someone in their early 20s who has had their life so radically changed – for reasons they don’t understand – and their chances of forgiving and forgetting and almost zero.
They hate Russia.
They watched their parents kicked off their land. They watched their friends die. One of them told me the other day that they don’t know if they’ll be alive by Christmas. They’re 25 and that’s their view of their future.
But saying all that, the killing still needs to stop. And Zelenskyy needs to go cap in hand to Trump, say “I’m sorry” and take the deal.
And everyone else telling him to keep on fighting with that pluck underdog spirit needs to STFU or get a gun and go to the front line.
And this a short time ago says that Trump isn’t mucking around. He wants peace.
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5174156-trump-pauses-aid-to-ukraine-amid-clash-with-zelensky/
Everybody hates Russia Nick
It is de rigueur and has been for hundreds of years
Its probably because of the way Russians make the sign of the cross
No Andrei I don’t hate Russia, or my Russian friends. I’m no fan of Putin, although to be fair to him early on he tried to reach out to the West and people like Hillary Clinton decided to publicly mock him.
But I don’t live in Kyiv with someone firing rockets at me, and nor do you.
As for the sign of the cross, that seems to be your own personal issue. I’m Presbyterian so we hate everyone.
Of course you dislike Vladimir Vladimirovich, probably the greatest statesman of the past 200 years.
He of course put an end to the looting of Russia by powerful westerners and is thus loathed by the Western elites
He also doesn’t allow Western religious rituals like gay pride parades in his lands which doesn’t help his popularity among the West’s chattering classes.
Just thank your lucky stars you live in a bland nation where the major political issue is the quality of FREE school lunches.
Watching TV ONE NEWS is beyond satire
🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Normally I’d list this as pure shit-post trolling but I’ve read and interacted with you online for almost twenty years now and I have this terrible feeling that you mean it, since it’s not the first time you’ve said it either explicitly or implicitly.
Just one counter-example will suffice.
Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine in 2022 will go down as the greatest geopolitical strategic mistake of his Presidency and in Russian history second only to the Czar’s decision to mobilise his troops in 1914, thereby triggering the German General Staff that they had to attack asap.
As I said the other day, his rationale of preventing the formation of another NATO country on his borders has now resulted in one anyway, Finland, plus yet another new NATO member, Sweden.
That’s before we look at the basics of:
On that last, sure, the reality of fossil fuel purchases is what this post is partially about, but given what they’ve seen he’s capable of, they’ll move to buying LNG from the US and the Middle East as soon as they can.
Peter the Great and Catherine the Great would be embarrassed by such “statesmanship”, not to mention the Joe don’t-stop-hand-clapping Stalinistic efforts of its most fervent citizens.
You really should feel embarrassment at this level of sycophancy. At a minimum it places his successors – who cannot be more than a decade away – at a severe disadvantage. Who could possibly match a 1-in-200-year miracle?.
I’m being bit provocative for sure Tom, but what good would a blog be without meeting with challenging ideas that may be confronting.
VVP did turn around Russia’s decline markedly raise the standardof living for ordinary folk.
NATO is just a huge beaucracy that can bomb the crap out of poor countries using America’s wealth to pay for it – The Russian Federation is a diffrent proposition from Libya et al.
The bear can bite back.
Interesting you used the phrase “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” that being a phrase coined by VVP himself in a 2007 speech at Munich and often willfully misinterpreted
But zed has this side deal going on with UK, signed 16th Jan 2025.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/uk-ukraine-100-year-partnership-agreement/
General Flynn has a few comments…
https://x.com/Patri0tContr0l/status/1895881449137480047
Replenishing stock…
https://x.com/gaye_gallops/status/1896560056910721489
However, nightlife in Odessa goes on…
https://x.com/RadioGenoa/status/1896430996427554862
It’s good that people are finally waking up to what a grifting piece of shit Zelensky is. Please let it be noted that I thought he was a grifting piece of shit before it was cool. Though I will say that even I thought he’d be smart enough to figure out the party’s over and there’s no more coke, cut his losses, and retire to his Miami palace. I underestimated just how deep the greed and evil goes. He really seems to think he can keep up the grift by keeping up the slaughter. He’s an absolute monster.
nekminit…
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/white-house-wants-recorded-apology-zelensky-mend-relations
What about this UK agreement? …
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/uk-ukraine-100-year-partnership-agreement/
U.S. Army Lt. Col (Ret.) Tony Shaffer talks how the UK played the United States when it comes to the minerals deal. Keir Starmer already locked in the “Minerals Deal” with Volodymyr Zelenskyy as part of their “100-year agreement.”
Frenemies?
I did a quick search on that document and only found the word “mineral” mentioned once. It doesn’t seem to say much apart from some vague waffle:
“supporting development of a Ukrainian critical minerals strategy and necessary regulatory structures required to support the maximisation of benefits from Ukraine’s natural resources, through the possible establishment of a Joint Working Group”
Let’s see who comes out on top…
The Uk doco seemed to be quite military orientated.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/white-house-wants-recorded-apology-zelensky-mend-relations
I am pleased to see Trump saying what most people prefer to ignore and deny.
This conflict in Ukraine and Russia is injuring, killing and displacing millions of ordinary people and destroying what they have created.
The cold war between Russia and the USA has carried on the refusal of USA political elites to stop establishing “nato” military installations offensive to Russia finally resulted in a “special military operation” that should have been avoided.
The Ukraine conflict is a proxy war between Russia and the USA. The citizens of the Ukraine are being sacrificed to prevent a “hot war” that would escalate to involve nuclear weapons.
Now we see the “leaders” of nations that help to fund the needless death and destruction wanting access and ownership of the minerals and other resources in the Ukraine.
Maybe that is what it was really about.