Trump changes his tune saying Ukraine can win the war against Russia if Europe pays for it.
whilst Western mainstream media celebrates his change of tone, nothing has changed on the ground.
Good day, spectators,
And before we dive in, I wanted to remind everyone that: whilst I do focus heavily on Gaza—because I believe it’s the most important story in the world right now—the spectacle isn’t a single-issue magazine and I do try to cover any important international stories that mainstream media misrepresents or ignores entirely. Today’s topic is a perfect example of that mission.
So, the man who very recently told Volodymyr Zelenskyy that he ‘doesn’t have the cards to win the war with Russia’ has now, apparently, seen a new hand? In a post on Truth Social that sent a wave of excitement through the neoliberal commentariat, Donald Trump declared that Ukraine could not only win but could reclaim all its territory, maybe even ‘go further’. Russia, he assures us, is a ‘paper tiger’ in ‘BIG Economic trouble’.
The usual suspects have, predictably, scrambled to the nearest hilltop to scream the good news. ‘Finally!’ they squawk, ‘the American president sees the light!’ The shift in rhetoric is being parsed like scripture, a sign that the tide is turning any minute now.
But unfortunately, I need to gently interrupt their celebratory parade with a little bit of reality.
Nothing on the ground in Ukraine has changed since I wrote the last time about Ukraine:
Nothing.
the fantasy versus the battlefield.
The trajectory of this war has been clear for years to anyone willing to look past the propaganda and behind the curtain. Ukraine is grappling with a catastrophic manpower crisis, with morale at an all-time low and frontline battalions operating at half-capacity. This is all well documented.
Men are being snatched off the streets to be fed into a meat grinder they cannot win and the people have had enough:
Watch: In Kremenchuk, two passers-by attack Ukrainian conscription officers and help the man they were trying to kidnap get up, after which the cyclist takes out a telescopic baton and smashes the windshield of the officers’ vehicle.
Videos emerge regularly of Ukrainian soldiers refusing suicidal orders, of desertions, of units abandoning positions.
Watch: First-person footage of a Ukrainian in military gear escaping the country by jumping over a barbed wire fence and entering Romania.
This is not a military on the cusp of a glorious victory but one that is fighting for its life, propped up by promises that increasingly ring hollow.
Even the West’s own intelligence assessments, when they occasionally do leak, paint a picture that contradicts the public cheerleading entirely. Russian forces have adapted, dug in, and shown no signs of the catastrophic collapse that has been predicted for three years running. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s infrastructure continues to be systematically destroyed, its economy is all but entirely dependent on foreign aid, and its population, that is those who haven’t escaped, face another winter of blackouts and uncertainty.
So where the hell does this sudden burst of optimism from Trump come from? In my opinion, it’s not complicated.
This isn’t a newfound belief in Ukrainian sovereignty. It’s a cynical manoeuvre to wash his hands of the situation whilst stoking the fire. By declaring that Ukraine can win with European support, he is effectively telling Europe, ‘You handle it’. The goal is to prolong a conflict that, from the vantage point of Washington, serves a neat purpose: it weakens Russia at a comfortable distance, paid for with European treasure and Ukrainian blood. We must also not forget, a lot of that European money goes to the United States for its weapons too, so it's an absolutely brilliant deal.
It’s a grift, and we’re all supposed to applaud.
Zelenskyy’s impossible position.
Zelenskyy, for his part, is trapped in a nightmare of his own making and others’ design.
He talks about a Plan A to end the war this year, but his Plan B is to collect another $60 billion from an already-broke Europe to fund another year of…whatever it is we have been seeing. For a while now, I’ve been wondering what his endgame truly is. I can not figure him out. Is he a nationalistic leader fighting for his country, or a useful pawn being prolonged by his patrons, dreading the day the cheque bounces and the music stops?
I almost feel sorry for him because it’s clear now that he has been used from all sides, consistently promised victory whilst being handed just enough rope to hang his nation’s future. Every public appearance is a spectacle now, a rehearsed plea for more weapons, more money and more time. The showman-turned-president finds himself in the most tragic role of all: the man who cannot admit the show must end.
The elephant in the room that a lot of cheerleaders are so desperate to avoid eye contact with is that: without a substantial deployment of Western troops, Ukraine has little to no chance of a decisive military victory. But no country wants to cross that line. Europe has a number of its own political and economic crises and is in no state to fight this war to its conclusion. The idea that it can is a fantasy sold to the public to mask a brutal calculation.
Europe’s slow-motion suicide.
Here’s what nobody wants to say out loud: supporting Ukraine is bankrupting Europe, both financially and politically. The energy crisis triggered by sanctions has deindustrialised Germany, the continent’s economic engine. Farmers are protesting across the bloc as cheap Ukrainian grain floods markets whilst they face crippling energy costs. The far-right is surging in every election, feeding off the economic pain and war fatigue that establishment parties refuse to acknowledge.
Watch: Polish farmers blockade the border with Ukraine and burn tyres in protest at the cheap imported products affecting their livelihoods.
Meanwhile, the US, which is comfortably sandwiched between two oceans, is watching Europe tear itself apart in service of American geopolitical objectives. It’s a masterpiece of imperial strategy: firstly, you get your allies to pay the cost of containing your utmost rival and then you deny involvement in the whole enterprise.
The architects of this policy view it all as acceptable collateral damage. Russia must be weakened, and if it costs the prosperity and stability of Europe and the lives of a generation of Ukrainians, then that is a price they are seemingly willing to pay. It is sickening but it is nothing new.
the human cost of ‘strategic necessity’.
War propaganda on all sides has made discerning the truth around it all a full-time job, and Western media has largely abandoned its duty to provide even the smallest morsel of clarity. I’ve scratched the surface though, and the story is clear. Actual human beings are being forced to die for a ‘geopolitical necessity’ they did not choose.
Whenever I talk about Ukraine, there is always a tiny number of people in the comments whose knee-jerk reaction is to call me a pro Putin shill but this isn’t about being sympathetic to Russian imperialism. That is a real thing. No, this is about calling out the bullshit of our own leaders who view this tragedy as a strategic board game. The deterioration of the EU’s economy and the rise of the far-right are seen as ‘containable’ costs. The countless Ukrainian lives being lost are a statistic in a quarterly briefing for the likes of Keir Starmer Ursula von der Leyen.
Every single day this war continues, more men die in trenches for territory that they probably don't care about that much anyway. Families are being destroyed, more infrastructure is being obliterated, more refugees are joining the millions already scattered across Europe. And for what? So American defence contractors can post record profits? So Washington can claim it ‘stood up to Putin’ whilst Europeans pay the bill?
This cannot continue in this way. The media frenzy over Trump’s empty words is a dangerous distraction from the urgent need to end this war. The conversation needs to move from how to achieve a total victory that is impossible to how to secure a peace that minimises further loss of life immediately.
If that means accepting Ukrainian men are no longer enthusiastic to die for some eastern regions that will remain under Russian control then that is the grim reality that must be confronted. It’s not justice, but it’s sanity.
The alternative is more death, more destruction, and the continued erosion of European stability in service of American strategic interests. How many more must die before we admit that this ‘until victory’ rhetoric is leading nowhere but the grave?
The West’s strategy is not to help Ukraine win; it is to let Russia lose, slowly, and at Ukraine’s expense. It’s time we stopped pretending otherwise.
Next they will be telling us that a negotiated peace is a betrayal, rather than the only sane path left.
And on that note, I’ll let you go for the day,
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This is what happens when one side is led by two second rate—I’m being generous—television actors, and the other side by serious, intelligent, leaders. What can it feel like for Putin, Lavrov, or Xi, to deal with Trump and Rubio? Much like a Master playing chess with a chimp. The chimp can’t win, but he’s treated as an equal just so he doesn’t throw the board on the floor.
In the immortal words of Smedley Butler, war is a racket.