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Trump wants Ukraine to surrender to Putin

J.D. Vance has let slip Donald Trump's secret plan for peace in Ukraine:

Mr. Vance said Mr. Trump would sit down with Russians, Ukrainians and Europeans and say, “You guys need to figure out what a peaceful settlement looks like.”

Um, OK. Gotta say, though, that I expected a little more from the master of dealmaking. Any thoughts on what this settlement might look like?

The Russians would retain the land they have taken and....Russia would get a “guarantee of neutrality” from Ukraine. “It doesn’t join NATO, it doesn’t join some of these sort of allied institutions,” Mr. Vance said. “I think that’s ultimately what this looks like.”

Stop me if I'm missing something, but the deal Vance has outlined is "Putin gets everything he wants." And in a laughable coda, Vance added that the Ukrainian side of the new border would be "heavily fortified" to make sure Putin can't reopen the war later. I'm sure this latter day Maginot Line would work great.¹

So much for the Churchill of the modern world. I assume Vance was chosen to deliver this message so that Trump can repudiate it if the snickering gets to be too much.

¹Actually, it would be more than twice as long as the Maginot Line.

57 thoughts on “Trump wants Ukraine to surrender to Putin

      1. MattBallAZ

        I would pay Kevin good money to use a comment system that allows us to block people like Justin.
        I generally get a lot of value from Kevin's readers, but gawd how I hate these morons.

    1. Justin

      This has led to a paradox in U.S. policy. We believe that the survival of Ukraine is key to the stability of Europe. But we also recognize that if Putin believes he is going to lose, he’ll become volatile. We fear what this means for the stability of Europe and even the world. When it comes to U.S. national interests, having either side win the war outright is too dangerous. So instead, we’ve crafted a policy that seems to allow neither side to lose. Our slow yes is bleeding Ukraine and Russia dry.

      https://time.com/6548816/ukraine-biden-administration-military-aid/

      Bleeding Ukraine to death. That's jackass Joe's policy.

      https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/08/europe/ukraine-military-morale-desertion-intl-cmd/index.html

      Two and half years of Russia’s grinding offensive have decimated many Ukrainian units. Reinforcements are few and far between, leaving some soldiers exhausted and demoralized. The situation is particularly dire among infantry units near Pokrovsk and elsewhere on the eastern front line, where Ukraine is struggling to stop Russia’s creeping advances.

      CNN spoke to six commanders and officers who are or were until recently fighting or supervising units in the area. All six said desertion and insubordination are becoming a widespread problem, especially among newly recruited soldiers.

      Biden wanted a war of attrition and this is the result.

      Meanwhile - he's helping Israelis bomb Gaza and Iraqis kill their own too.

      https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/13/us/politics/iraq-raid-isis-leaders-killed.html

      One of the largest counterterrorism operations against the Islamic State in Iraq in recent years killed four top insurgent leaders last month, the U.S. military said on Friday, dealing the group a major blow at a time when its attacks in Iraq and Syria are on the rise.

      1. Bardi

        While I agree with your comment about Israel/Gaza you have no idea what you are talking about wrt Ukraine. How do you know Putin will respond in an irrational manner should he be forced to establish prior borders, something we should do with Israel, forcing them back to some prior borders. I think your point is to keep it consistent.

  1. drickard1967

    "Trump wants Ukraine to surrender to Putin"'
    And in other breaking news... dog bites man, and Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.
    And bye the bye... the Maginot Line didn't work because the French left their border with Belgium--the same border the Germans used to invade in WW1--unfortified. No fort along the line actually fell to German attack.

      1. NotCynicalEnough

        Also Belgium had two massive fortifications at Eben-Ebael and around Namur. They fell in one day. The idea that a neutral Ukraine could hold off Russia under any conditions is laughable.

        1. TheMelancholyDonkey

          The Belgium forts were huge, but they were also antiques by 1940. No one expected them to hold out that long. The French just wanted them to last long enough that they could get to the positions in central Belgium where they wanted the Big Fight to take place before the Germans could get there. The Germans wanted to get through them quickly enough that they could threaten that French advance.

          As it worked out, the Germans sliced right through them, and the French still got to the Dyle in plenty of time.

      2. Josef

        It seems by the time of the German invasion in 1940, the Maginot line was already obsolete. The whole line was outgunned by a single German infantry division. Hitlers new Blitzkrieg warfare probably had more to do with his victory than just by passing the Maginot line. The Allies were unprepared for such warfare. It only took six weeks to get France to surrender and force the Brits out.

        1. TheMelancholyDonkey

          What happened to the Anglo-French forces had little to do with not being prepared for blitzkrieg warfare. It was an accumulation of a bunch of things: a military intelligence failure; the French generals not trusting their own second and third line forces; rigidity in the French command/control processes; being caught between generations of aircraft; Belgian perfidy; and some stupendously bad luck.

          We'll start with the bad luck. The Allies had completely figured out the German plans for their attack, and had built their own plan to counter it by advancing to the Dyle in Belgium and fighting it out there. In the actual event, the fighting that took place there significantly favored the French over the Germans. So, it may well have worked.

          Unfortunately, there was a black swan event that seemed like it benefitted the Anglo-French but actually worked out to be the exact opposite. In December, 1939, a German staff plane accidentally wandered into Belgian airspace and crashed. It carried a complete set of the German plans for attack. The Belgians forwarded them to London, where they confirmed that the Allies had doped out what was coming, and reinforced for them that they had the right plans.

          The German General Staff shrugged this off and intended to go ahead. Hitler forced them to change their minds and implement von Manstein's operational idea of going through the Ardennes to Sedan and then breaking out to the coast. This was a ridiculously risky gamble, as the Ardennes really wasn't suited for a large scale armored attack, and the Germans were relying upon a very small number of roads to carry bumper-to-bumper traffic, where any serious problem would have wrecked everything. And, if the French had figured out what was up, the panzers would have been trying to make an opposed crossing of the Meuse on a very narrow front. It would have been a disaster for the Germans.

          That's where the military intelligence failure, the obsolete planes, and the Belgian perfidy came in. The British and the French signals intelligence failed to register the German presence in the Ardennes. They were unable to penetrate the Luftwaffe's air cover for aerial reconnaissance. And the Belgians failed to warn them about what was happening.

          Belgian society, and especially the Belgian military, was split over whether they should be fighting with the French against the Germans, or the other way around. The possibility that the Germans might go through the Ardennes had occurred to the French. The arrangement was that the Belgians would warn them if that's what they did. But the headquarters that was responsible for doing so was staffed by officers that were in the camp that would have rather been allied to the Germans, and failed to issue that warning.

          All that combined to allow the Germans to arrive at the Meuse opposite Sedan undetected. Another bit of bad luck is that they did so about six hours after de Gaulle's tank corps drove past on their way to central Belgium. This is where the lack of trust the French officer corps had in their own troops came into play.

          Even by the standards of European militaries, the French officer corps was extremely conservative. Their second and third line troops were recruited primarily from urban workers, rather than the peasantry that populated their first line units. The generals were convinced that they were completely infiltrated by socialists who wanted a revolution, so they gave them little training and even less heavy armament. So, when the Germans crashed out o the Ardennes and needed to force their way across the Meuse, the two French divisions facing them were hopelessly outgunned and gave way quickly.

          Which is where the rigid command/control raises its head. Once the French high command realized what was happening, they were ineffective at getting units turned around quickly. Had they been able to do so, the German units racing towards the coast were extremely vulnerable to being taken in their flank, and could have been cut off. Instead, their attempts simply discombobulated the divisions that could have done so. French morale collapsed amid the disorganization. This is the only part of what happened that could be described as, "The Allies were unprepared for such warfare."

      3. TheMelancholyDonkey

        No. The Germans never really attacked the Maginot Line until they'd completely rolled up the French forces and could take it from behind. We really have no idea how well it would have fared had the Germans really targeted it.

    1. TheMelancholyDonkey

      Oi. The Maginot Line is, perhaps, even more poorly understood than Neville Chamberlain's actions in Munich. No, the French didn't build forts along their border with Belgium, and the Germans did plan to go around it. That's because the whole point of the Maginot Line was to make the Germans go around it.

      The strategic problem the French faced was that Germany was a more populous and more industrialized country than France was. So, the Germans had a substantially larger army. (The French also weren't sure that they could count on the British showing up to the next war.)

      The French solution was to build a massively fortified line along their frontier with Germany that they could hold with a comparatively small number of third line divisions. It allowed them to drastically shorten the length of the line they needed to cover with their best troops by ensuring that the Germans would have to attack through Belgium.

      In Allied plans were to advance to the River Dyle in Belgium and to fight the decisive battle there. This could have worked. In the actual event, the first line French troops that met the Germans on the Dyle outfought them. The best parts of the French army were at least as good as the Germans.

      The Allies lost in 1940 for other reasons entirely, that I'll go through in response to Josef. But the Maginot Line worked perfectly. It did exactly what it was supposed to do. Based upon how things went wrong for the Allies, they may well have been better off to extend the Line all the way to the coast and forget moving into Belgium at all. But, aside from the fact that this would have roughly tripled the resources being poured into the fortifications, the French very badly wanted to avoid having the next war against the Germans get fought entirely on French soil again.

  2. gs

    I actually remember the Cuban missile crisis. In a nutshell, an ostensibly hostile power (the USSR) moved ops too close to the U.S. border and then-president JFK lost his shit, which damn near started a thermonuclear war. I don't see a lot of difference between that and moving NATO - which lost its raison d'etre after the USSR collapsed 35 years ago - up to the Russian border. What did anyone think Putin was going to do?

    1. Josef

      Do you think Putins Russia is less of a threat than a communist USSR? Do you think NATO installations are a threat to Russian sovereignty? Using NATO as an excuse to wage a war of expansion is just that, an excuse. This isn't about NATO. Ironically his invasion spurred the nations of Finland and Sweden to join NATO. If he was really interested in curtailing the expansion of NATO nations, his war had the opposite effect.

      1. gs

        Pfft. Are you actually saying that NATO did not expand toward Russia under Clinton, then Bush, then Obama? All of which took place before the blowup in Ukraine in early 2022.

        Furthermore, it makes no difference what I think about threats to Russian sovereignty ; it's what Russia thinks about threats to Russian sovereignty. They were invaded by Germany twice in living memory (in 1990) and wouldn't have allowed German reunification if they knew NATA was going to expand toward their border.

        1. Justin

          It’s not like NATO invaded these countries and demanded they join. Those countries could have allied themselves with Russia. They assessed their national interests and concluded that Russia was a threat. Maybe if Russians weren’t evil assholes they would have made a different choice.

        2. Josef

          The Soviet Union collapsed a year after reunification. I'm not sure you can say they allowed it more than they realized the eventuality of reunification.

        3. smoofsmith

          Having spent quite some time in Ukraine, and knowing many people there, I can tell you that Putin is reacting to a sea change. This is about the Ukrainian people, who want to be free of the Russian sphere of influence, propped up dictators, Russian corruption, and anti-democratic strong men. They see what has occurred in Belarus and want nothing to do with any of it. They want to be free of it. Working with the west for 15 years, they think as we do, they no longer think like Soviets. They are Europeans now. Putin has recognized this and wants it to stop, as if time can be turned back. Ukraine will resist this every inch, as we are seeing, no different than how we would react if the US were invaded. Anyone who supports Putin is anti-Democracy, anti-West, and anti-Freedom. That's what Trump and Vance are, they are corporate state fascists.

        4. Bardi

          Russian "sovereignty".
          After the collapse of the USSR (run by Russia), many countries joined NATO to help protect themselves from Russia. NATO expanded only in the sense that people realized there would be a time when Russia would try to claim property formally of the USSR.
          Side point. Germany invaded Russia only because the Russians killed off some 20,000 or 40,000 Polish military just prior to 1940, basically paving an autobahn from Germany into Russia. Katyn Massacre.

    2. dilbert dogbert

      Fifteen US-built PGM-19 Jupiter missiles, with the capability to strike Moscow with nuclear warheads, were deployed in Turkey in 1961. Another major reason why Khrushchev planned to place missiles on Cuba undetected was to "level the playing field" with the evident American nuclear threat.
      The missiles were a good tit for tat but Khrushchev forgot about geography and logistics.
      We pulled our missiles out of turkey and K puled his out of Cuba.

    3. KenSchulz

      Well, he could have just ignored it, the way he has ignored the entries of Sweden and Finland into NATO, since he knows that neither of them will ever initiate an invasion of Russia. Just as Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia will not. Nor Romania, Czech Republic, Slovakia, etc. No one has any designs on the territory of Russia proper, and Putin knows that. He could have focused on any of Russia’s domestic problems, and made it a better country, so that citizens wouldn’t be drinking themselves to death. He could have fought corruption, invested in modernization of Russian industry, stabilized the financial sector to attract investment. But he didn’t.

  3. kenalovell

    Actually, it would be more than twice as long as the Maginot Line.

    Is that with or without the Belarus border? Because any future attack is just as likely to come from there.

    I thought Trump's surrender to the Taliban was the 21st century equivalent of Daladier and Chamberlain at Munich, but this grovelling appeasement would be even worse.

    1. TheMelancholyDonkey

      Looks like I'm working my way through popular misconceptions about WWII in this thread, because this isn't at all fair to Neville Chamberlain. He was never under the illusion that Hitler would stop with the Sudetenland. His comments on "peace in our time" were for public consumption. He would have liked for them to be true, because he was horrified at the thought of another major European war, but he didn't believe them. He knew perfectly well that the major European war was coming.

      What he, and Daladier, were doing at Munich was playing for time. The Allies were ramping up a massive rearmament program in 1938. The Germans, meanwhile, had badly overheated their economy pursuing rearmament and massive public works programs at the same time that they were trying to impose autarky because of a foreign exchange crisis. The Allies were getting stronger relative to the Germans at a healthy clip. The longer the war could be put off, the better their position would be.

      This was compounded by a pair of military intelligence failures that pushed things in the same direction. Anglo-French intelligence badly overestimated the strength of the Wehrmacht in the summer of 1938, and the Abwehr underestimated Allied strength. Consequently, Chamberlain and Daladier were more cautious than they needed to be, and Hitler was more reckless than he should have been.

      With hindsight, allowing the Germans to take the Sudetenland was a mistake. the additional advantage the Allies gained was more than offset by the loss of the Czechoslovak military and the mountain forts that made the Sudetenland strategically valuable (and the reason that the Treaty of Versailles overrode self-determination to give it to Czechoslovakia), and the German capture of the extensive Czech armaments industry the next spring.

      But it was a mistake born out of a rational, if incorrect, calculation, and not from cowardice or delusion.

      1. kenalovell

        I was referring to the way Daladier and Chamberlain did a deal with Hitler which they then coerced the Czech government into accepting, exactly like Trump did to the Ghani government. Then he blamed Ghani for jeopardising his deal by resisting obnoxious elements like releasing 5,000 Taliban prisoners.

        It seems Trump intends to repeat the performance by handing chunks of Ukraine over to Russia no matter what the Ukraine government thinks of the idea.

  4. Josef

    The great negotiator at work folks. If Trump were to win and force this capitulation on Ukraine what makes him think Putin wouldn't move against another nation in the same way. Perhaps a NATO aligned one. Would Trump even try to stop him? Or would he appease Putin in a similar way? He's not Churchill. At best he's Neville Chamberlain.

  5. D_Ohrk_E1

    Russia's enduring its own Vietnam, except, they've already tripled the number of total US casualties in Vietnam and the rate of casualties has remained over 1200 a day for the entire 2024.

    I just don't see Russia winning. Ukraine is close to having domestic manufacturing capability of ammo and missiles to add to their domestic drone industry. When they've stockpiled a ton of stuff, will we see something akin to the Tet Offensive?

    1. lawnorder

      Oddly enough, despite all the high tech weaponry this war has come to depend on old-fashioned weapons to a considerable extent. The Russians have apparently succeeded in putting in place very successful defenses based on minefields. It takes a lot of mines to fortify any great length of border in sufficient depth, but mines are cheap.

      The Russians have also been using a lot of artillery which the Ukrainians have not been able to answer because they don't have enough ammunition. It's said, and I don't vouch for the accuracy of this but it's plausible, that the Russians are firing up to 20,000 rounds of artillery a day at the Ukrainians. That's 7.3 million rounds a year, and the western powers are struggling to collectively supply Ukraine with one million rounds a year. New factories are being built, and when Ukrainian forces can match the Russians round for round, or preferably overmatch them, that will change the whole complexion of the war. The target should be to supply Ukraine with a million rounds month.

      1. KenSchulz

        I think rather that the answer is better counter-battery technology. Loitering drones able to locate artillery pieces by acoustic signatures and/or optical sensors, operating coöperatively with ‘kamikaze’ drones, could take out the enemy before they could move (countering ‘shoot and scoot’).

  6. KJK

    Our Ukraine and our NATO allies should know that if Il Duce wins, they are going to be on their own. I don't even think he would honor the US Article 5 obligations, unless there was a Trump golf course or other property in jeopardy.

    Maybe some journalist should ask him about his commitment to Article 5. Guarantee he will not answer the question, but just bitch that too many countries aren't paying enough.

    1. kenalovell

      "He [Trump], in my view, would on day one throw Zelenskyy under a bus," said Mr Brandis, who served as Australia's high commissioner to the United Kingdom from 2018 to 2022.

      "He would send a signal to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin that Putin can get away with what he likes. Does anybody believe that Trump would defend the Baltic states? Of course he wouldn't.

      https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-08-26/george-brandis-says-donald-trump-dangerous-backs-kamala-harris/104272206

    1. lawnorder

      One big difference is that the Ukrainians fight. As in Afghanistan, the US spent many years and much money trying to turn ARVN into an effective fighting force, without success. South Vietnam simply could not or would not make any significant contribution to its own defence. Eventually, if an "ally" won't defend themselves, the outside protector has no choice but to give up.

      1. James B. Shearer

        "One big difference is that the Ukrainians fight. As in Afghanistan, the US spent many years and much money trying to turn ARVN into an effective fighting force, without success. South Vietnam simply could not or would not make any significant contribution to its own defence. ..."

        I don't think this is particularly accurate.

    2. TheMelancholyDonkey

      Other than that Russia invaded Ukraine, while the Vietnam War started when South Vietnam refused to allow a free election, nothing at all.

  7. Dana Decker

    Will the "peace" deal include Hungary snatching a piece of Ukraine as a reward to Viktor Orbán for being, well, the bestest authoritarian in all of Europe?

  8. cedichou

    the Ligne Maginot worked totally fine. The German troops never went through it. They went around in Belgium, but that's because they knew they could not go through

  9. kennethalmquist

    I started to listen to the Vance interview (Shawn Ryan posts all of his interviews on Youtube), but I didn’t make it as far as the part Kevin quotes. The interview starts with Ryan and Vance reminiscing about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. After Vance mentions talking to 9/11 survivors, Ryan takes a sharp turn into crayztown:

    Ryan: What is it like to you to talk to these people in such an intimate setting knowing that the Biden/Harris Administration is actively funding terrorism.

    Vance: Yeah.

    Ryan: And not just them, every taxpaying American--you're funding them, I'm funding them, everyone who is paying U.S. taxes is now funding terrorism.

    Vance: Yeah.

    Ryan: We're sending 87, 40 to 87 million dollar a week to the Taliban. The IG report came out and said that they had accidentally sent 239 million dollars to the Taliban.

    Vance: Hmm, Hmm

    Ryan doesn’t explain how sending money to the Taliban, if the United States were doing that, would constitute funding terrorism. The United States provides humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, but the money is paid to private contractors or nongovernmental organizations, not the Taliban or the Afghan government. The IG has identified instances where contractors were not properly vetted, but none where money ended up in the hands of the Taliban or the Afghan government. The budget for Afghan aid in fiscal year 2024 (which ends on Sept. 30) is $258 million, much less than $40 million per week.

    Ryan continues in that vein and eventually asks, “Would it be a good idea to shut the U.S. government down if we continue to fund terrorism?”

    Vance’s rambling answer amounts to “yes.” Here’s an excerpt:

    After by the way they killed thirteen of our Marines--I guess, you know, eleven Marines and a couple of other service members just a year ago, actually, sorry, three years ago, almost exactly three years ago today. Like, if that can't motivate our leadership to get off their asses and actually say we're done funding the Taliban, then what would actually motivate it?

    The suicide attack at the Kabul airport wasn’t carried out by the Taliban, and we are not funding the Taliban. Interesting how Vance corrects himself when he gets the details wrong, but doesn’t try to get the central facts right.

    Another excerpt:

    We now know that there are thousands of military aged men who have come through that southern border from places like Afghanistan, Iran, and so forth, and so, yeah man, why shouldn't we be trying to force this government shutdown fight to get something out of it that's good for the American people? Like why have a government if it's not a functioning government? And if you have a government that's spending hundreds of millions of dollars funding terrorism, and then facilitating those people to come across the American southern border, it's totally insane.

    Vance doesn’t explain what he means by facilitating people to cross the border, but it’s pretty clearly nonsense because the mission of CBP is to stop illegal immigration, not to facilitate it. The United States government is in fact functional despite the best efforts of Republicans. But Vance is trying to convince people that it won’t matter if large portions of the Federal government are shut down based on two bogus examples.

    Vance is treating the threat of terrorism as a political tool, not as a real world problem. Nothing in this interview suggests that Vance, should he end up as President, would lift a finger to protect Americans against terrorism.

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