Category Archives: Foreign Policy

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World War III Watch: Yet another leftist wants to send Other People off to war!

Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator. He is a former Guardian foreign editor, US editor, White House correspondent, foreign leader writer and Observer foreign affairs commentator. As you’d expect from someone who writes for The Guardian, he is far to the left of the political spectrum, absolutely hates President Trump, but, for a columnist who complained bitterly that Mr “Trump talks peace but he is a man of war“, yet it seems that more war is what he wants:

Ukraine is the biggest and most consequential of all the American betrayals

As the war enters its fifth year, it’s time for Europe to take the fight to Putin on its own terms and tell Trump to get lost

by Simon Tisdall | Saturday, February 21, 2026 | 1:00 AM EST

Viewed from Europe, the US’s failure to defend the people of Ukraine against Russian aggression is the greatest and most consequential of a host of recent American betrayals. It’s not just the sickening subservience shown to Vladimir Putin, an indicted war criminal and mass killer. It’s not only the victim-blaming and bullying of Kyiv into making concessions. It’s not even Donald Trump’s crass attempts to monetise the war and milk the misery of millions for Nobel glory, while undercutting Nato allies and trampling sovereign rights.

What really shocks, and hurts, is the sheer bad faith shown by a country that Europeans always counted a friend. As the 18th-century English gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe noted, “few circumstances are more afflicting than a discovery of perfidy in those whom we have trusted”. To echo Trump’s dark warning after he was rebuffed over Greenland: Europe will remember.

“Europe will remember,” huh? Does Europe remember the history of its wars?

Mr Tisdall then proceeds through several wordy paragraphs to place the blame for the war not having been won squarely at the feet of President Trump, even though he at least mentions Presidents Barack Obama, who did nothing during Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and Joe Biden, who supplied limited aid to Ukraine following the 2022 invasion, before he gets to this:

Here’s what must be done: deploy troops from a European “coalition of the willing” to secure and defend Kyiv and other unoccupied cities; Russia cannot be allowed a veto. Enforce a no-fly exclusion zone, as I have repeatedly urged. Surge defensive missiles and drones. Beach Russia’s shadow fleet. Step up covert “active measures”, including cyber and sabotage, to counter Kremlin hybrid warfare. Seize assets, expel spies, expose lies, change the narrative. Europe must demand an immediate ceasefire, followed by phased Russian withdrawals, and assume a lead role in any final settlement talks.

Who, I have to ask, might make up that “coalition of the willing” and send troops, combat troops, into positions in which they might come in direct military combat with Russia? How will European voters react in any of this fanciful coalition nations when their sons are sent to possibly fight and die in a war for Ukraine? I’m old enough to remember how Americans reacted to our long years fighting in Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan.

Russia’s military has been seriously degraded after four long years of inconclusive war, but Vladimir Putin still controls a strategic nuclear arsenal. Given that Russia has been sending attack drones to damage Ukrainian infrastructure, there are no guarantees that the troops from the “coalition of the willing” won’t be struck by Russian weapons while the European troops “secure and defend Kyiv and other unoccupied cities.”

Winter is coming to an end now, but November is only nine months away, and much of Europe is dependent upon natural gas shipments from Russia to keep its people from freezing to death in the winter.

If not, why not? For consider the alternatives: endless war, endless killing, or an unsustainable, unjust peace on Trump-Putin terms. Europe is on notice: the US cannot be trusted. The challenge is indeed existential. All that it stands for and holds dear is potentially at stake. No matter how it’s done, for the sake of Ukraine’s exhausted, undefeated people and their own future peace and security, Europeans (including Britain) must finally find the unity, courage and wherewithal to take the military, economic, diplomatic and moral offensive.

Europe must take the fight directly to Putin’s door. And tell Trump to get lost.

Throughout their history, Europe has been very good at getting into wars. The first World War is a lesson in point, in which none of the nations truly wanted to get into war, but coalitions and posturing and odd visions of what each country had to do let the entire continent stumble into a war they everyone, on every side, expected to end in quick victory, yet which deposed government after government, and left half a generation of young men laying dead in the mud.

I’m old enough to remember when the left were the ones who were most adamantly anti-war; now it seems that has been reversed, and the left are the first ones to issue a call to arms. But wait, it’s different, because, just like the pro-Palestinian protesters, today’s left might agitate for a side during a war, the left aren’t the ones actually picking up rifles and heading for the fight, but expecting Other People to be the ones on the firing line.

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Are you tired of winning yet?

Our good friends on the left have been telling us how much foreigners hate President Donald Trump, how the United States is the laughing stock of the world, yada, yada, yada . . . until we come to a story like this. From the Associated Press:

Mexico’s president says it was ‘sovereign decision’ to send cartel members to US

By Megan Janetsky | Wednesday, January 21, 2026 | 4:47 PM EST

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico sent 37 cartel members to the United States at the request of the U.S. Justice Department, with President Claudia Sheinbaum saying Wednesday that it was a “sovereign decision” by her government.

Sheinbaum responded to criticism from analysts and opponents who said that the transfers on Tuesday were the result of mounting pressure from Washington. U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened to take military action on cartels.

Sheinbaum said that although the transfers were made at the request of the U.S. government, the decision was taken by the National Security Council after analyzing what was “convenient for Mexico” and in terms of its “national security.”

“Mexico is put first above all else, even if they ask for whatever they have to ask for. It is a sovereign decision,” she said at her regular morning news briefing.

We do not begrudge President Sheinbaum trying to save face, and it certainly is a benefit to our south of the border neighbor to be rid of the 92 criminals sent to American custody during President Trump’s second term. But who would think that Mexico would have taken this action at all had President Trump not asked for it? And who would have believed we’d have even asked if Kamala Harris Emhoff had won the 2024 election?

Sheinbaum, who has been praised for her level-headed management of relations with Trump, has been forced to walk a fine line between making concessions to the Trump administration and projecting strength both domestically and internationally.

Observers say that the Mexican government has used the transfers as a sort of pressure valve to offset demands by Trump and show authorities are cracking down on criminal groups. Tension has only mounted since the U.S. carried out a military operation in Venezuela to capture then President Nicolás Maduro to face charges in the United States in an extraordinary use of force that set leaders across Latin America on edge.

There was also the blowing out of the water speedboats trying to ship narcotics from Venezuela to the United States. It seems that President Trump is serious about trying to defend us from drug traffickers.

The American left, of course, seem to think that this is a bad thing!

Those sent to the U.S. on Tuesday were alleged members of the powerful Jalisco New Generation Cartel, known by its Spanish acronym CJNG, and the Sinaloa Cartel, which Washington has designated as terrorist organizations, and a number of other groups. It’s the third such transfer of capos over the past year. Mexico’s government said it has sent 92 people in total to the U.S. in total.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi on Wednesday said that the transfer was a “landmark achievement in the Trump administration’s mission to destroy the cartels.”

This is winning, this is the President of the United States doing everything he possibly can to use American strength to defend the United States against foreign threats. The left don’t like it, the left see us using strength as bullying, because the weak wimps of the left have only known bullying from the perspective of being bullied by stronger people.

So, if our own leftists are foaming at the mouth in hatred of Mr Trump, if the rest of the world hates our President, a whole lot of Americans don’t care as long as he’s getting good things done for our country.

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Elon Musk helps get information out of Iran and to the rest of the world

The New York Times is finally paying real attention to the situation in Iran. THis is a screen capture from their website front page on January 13, 2026. Click to enlarge>.

As we have previously noted, the credentialed media has been publishing rather little on the popular uprisings in Iran. Slightly more has been coming out, but information has still been sparse. More information has been coming out over social media, though, interestingly enough, far less on Bluesky than on Twitter, at least as far as I’ve personally seen. Iran has been fighting that, with a curious number of accounts, including some which were pro-‘Palestinian,’ supporting the theocratic regime over the human rights of the Persian people rising against that tyranny.

Now, Elon Musk is helping the protesters. From The Wall Street Journal:

Iran Is Hunting Down Starlink Users to Stop Protest Videos From Going Global

Video from the streets is one of the few ways of getting information out about the scale of the protests and authorities’ actions

By Benoit Faucon | Monday, January 12, 2026 | 11:00 AM EST

With the government shutting down the internet and throttling phone services, Iranians are leaning heavily on Elon Musk’s Starlink service to share videos of growing protests and the regime’s escalating crackdown with the world.

But Iran has intensified efforts to jam the service, which is banned in the country, and users are being hunted.

If the Journal‘s paywall is stopping you from reading the original, it can be read here for free.

Over the weekend, authorities began searching for and confiscating Starlink dishes in western Tehran, said Amir Rashidi, director of digital rights and security at Miaan Group, a U.S. nonprofit opposed to internet censorship.

“It’s electronic warfare,” Rashidi said. He said disruptions are worst in parts of Tehran where protests are taking place and in the evening, when the demonstrators gather.

The battle over information—while secondary to the confrontations taking place nightly in dozens of cities across Iran—has potentially serious consequences. President Trump has threatened to intervene in response to a crackdown by the regime.

Let me stress at this point that I do not support any American military action to support the protesters. Yes, I want them to succeed, I want the whole Iranian government to fall, but this needs to be done by the Iranian people themselves, and not something which the Islamists can say was pushed by the United States. Iranians themselves need to Make Iran Great Again!

Video from the streets is one of the few ways of getting information out about the scale of the protests and the actions of Iranian authorities.

That has always been a problem: with the cutoff of communications by the Iranian government, the credentialed media have far fewer ways to verify stories which come from a single source.

More than 500 people have been killed in the unrest, according to the group Human Rights Activists in Iran. Another rights group, Hengaw Organization for Human Rights, circulated video footage Sunday showing a large number of bodies at a morgue in south Tehran.

Trump is scheduled to be briefed Tuesday on his options. One under discussion is to send in more Starlink terminals. Trump said he would ask Musk about the possibility.

“We may get the internet going if that’s possible,” Trump told the reporters.

Iran shut down most internet connections for the country’s 90 million inhabitants late last week, after protests over a crippling economic crisis exploded into large-scale unrest with demonstrators chanting for an end to the regime. The government has also made it difficult to connect calls or send text messages.

The only exceptions are the government itself, its media services and regime loyalists who are registered on a “whitelist” of internet addresses, said diplomats and others communicating with some of those with uninterrupted access.

Well, of course, and I’m seeing that junk on Twitter, gobs of it. The Iranian government and their propagandists have been blaming the uprisings not on the collapsing economy or severe water shortages, but on the United States and Israel; the Great Satan and the Jooooos are always the ones responsible! To the leaders of the Islamic Republic, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia have diverted rain clouds, and the US and Israel have manipulated the weather.

We don’t know yet how this will turn out. It’s clear that huge numbers of Iranians are displeased with their government, but the government has guns, and has not been afraid to use them. We can all hope that the theocratic regime will be overthrown, though there’s no way of telling how that will work out for a new government.

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Why are we getting so little news on the Iranian uprisings?

Social media has been full of information about the anti-government demonstrations in Iran, and one of the biggest complaints is that the credentialed media are not seriously covering it, something I have pointed out as well.

And on Thursday, January 8, 2026, at 12:30 PM EST, our nation’s greatest and most respected newspaper, The New York Times, had exactly zero stories on the subject visible on their website main page. Fortunately, I had looked earlier this morning, and there was one, and only one article:

Protests Spread in Iran, and Crackdowns Escalate

Bazaars were shuttered and demonstrators met with violence from security forces amid rising anger about the country’s dire economic situation.

By Farnaz Fassihi | Wednesday, January 7, 2026

As strikes and protests spread to several major cities across Iran on Wednesday, the head of the judiciary threatened to intensify crackdowns and prosecute protesters.

Merchants and business owners in the traditional bazaars in the cities of Tabriz, Isfahan, Mashhad and Kerman closed to protest the dire state of the economy and the plunging currency, according to videos on social media, interviews with witnesses and Iranian media reports. The bazaars of Iran have both practical and symbolic significance — not just where people buy things, but also an emblem of the economy, like stock markets in the West.

In Tehran, shops in the traditional bazaar, where the recent wave of protests began, remained shuttered for an 11th day. Inside its labyrinth of passages, security forces deployed tear gas and beat some in the crowd of shopkeepers and workers gathered there, according to interviews with two shop owners who asked that their names not be published because they feared retribution.

The two shopkeepers, who are members of trade unions, said in telephone interviews that the government’s efforts to mediate with trade representatives so far had failed. One of the shopkeepers said that despite fears of financial losses, solidarity had prevailed to keep shops closed and pressure on. It was unclear how long this could last.

There’s more at the original.

Reporter Farnaz Fassihi, about whom the Times> told us, “has covered Iran for three decades and has lived and traveled extensively in the country,” was pretty circumspect in her journalism. From what she wrote, a reasonable reader could not conclude which ‘side’ was winning, and perhaps that was exactly the message she was attempting to convey. We are not told whether Miss Fassihi was reporting from inside Iran, so we do not know if her safety is compromised.

The impression one gets from seeing the social media reports is that the government of the mad mullahs is about to fall, and maybe it is, but it is at least as likely that the government, engaged in serious measures to stifle dissent, will survive.

Anti-riot police officers have taken to the streets of Tehran and other cities on motorcycles, chasing crowds and beating demonstrators, according to videos on BBC Persian and social media. Some videos show security forces firing shots at the crowd; in other videos, gunshots can be heard. In Shiraz, military roadblocks were set up on a tree-lined boulevard with military vehicles patrolling.

Yet the government of President Masoud Pezeshkian struck a conciliatory tone, with Fatemeh Mohajeran, a spokeswoman, saying on social media on Wednesday that “all protesters are our children and every blood spilled pains us.”

By contrast, the head of the judiciary, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i, and the country’s chief of security forces, Gen. Ahmad Reza Radan, told Iranian media that stern measures would be taken against protesters.

“We promise the Iranian nation that these people will be identified at any time and in any place, and will be prosecuted and punished until the last person is arrested,” said General Radan, according to Iranian state media.

There have been uprisings against the theocratic government before, uprisings which faltered and failed, and as much as I would like to be optimistic that the Iranian government will fall, the realist in me says to hold back, to wait, to see what actually happens.

But part of waiting to see what actually happens is restricted by the serious lack of journalistic coverage on the uprising. In 1979, as the Iranian Revolution which deposed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was unfolding, it seemed though we got far more news about it the in the United States, with just three television networks playing 30-minute-long evening news shows — even CNN was not formed until a year later — and newspapers to cover the story, newspapers which did not have instant, 24-hour availability over that internet thingy Al Gore invented. In 1979, I could read about the Iranian Revolution in the Lexington Herald-Leader, a decent-sized newspaper for a city of 220,000 people[1]That was then. In 2026, it’s just junk, a failing McClatchy newspaper that only publishes thrice a week, and delivered by mail now, is always a day late., but The New York Times? That was something that people could get at the Joseph A Best Bookstore across Reynolds Road from Fayette Mall . . . a day later. Students could go to the Margaret King Library on the University of Kentucky campus, and read the Times, or The Washington Post, again a day late.

Yet we still seemed to get more news about the Iranian Revolution from those limited and delayed sources than we are now seeing in a world with near instantaneous internet connections, the major television networks, CNN, Fox, MS Now, News Nation, and the websites of multiple television stations as well as newspapers.

Why is that?

Chris Freiman tweeted:

An uncharitable view that I can’t shake: the left is silent on Iran simply because it can’t bring itself to criticize any regime that’s opposed to the US

A lot of our friends across the pond have been extremely critical of the BBC’s lack of reporting. Saul Sadka wrote:

NEW LOW FOR THE BBC: This is the current state of its homepage. There is happy news about the birth of twin mountain gorillas, and about Prince Harry meeting his father, the King, but nothing—not a single word—about the protests in Iran that threaten to bring down the IRGC.

Me? I have snarked that the credentialed media are worried that if the uprising does oust the Islamist government, President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might get some of the credit, and they can’t have that! on the other hand, if the uprising fails, and the government kills a bunch of the protesters, the media will give Messrs Trump and Netanyahu the blame!

References

References
↑1 That was then. In 2026, it’s just junk, a failing McClatchy newspaper that only publishes thrice a week, and delivered by mail now, is always a day late.
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#TrumpDerangementSyndrome: the left are wholly upset, but the Venezuelan people are overjoyed. Who can actually be angry that Nicolas Maduro is out of power, except the leftist sympathizers?

I will admit to not having liked the fact that the United States armed forces were used to capture Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro, because the last thing I want is the US involved in yet another war, but it’s very easy to appreciate that the tinhorn dictator has been removed. I do worry that there is enough #TrumpDerangementSyndrome in the United States that it may be impossible to find a jury which will convict the now former dictator, because the American left hate President Donald Trump so much that they’d be mad if he cured cancer or walked across the reflecting pool. New York City’s new socialist Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, was particularly upset, though, as one commenter to his tweet said, “‘Unilaterally attacking a sovereign nation is an act of war and a violation of federal and international law’ – sorry I thought this was a statement from October 8th 2023, but I think you had phrased that one differently…”

The Louisville Courier-Journal had this interesting report:

Report: Delta Force practiced Maduro extraction in Kentucky

by Leo Bertucci | Sunday, January 4, 2026 | 11:47 AM EST

Commandos in the elite U.S. Army unit tasked with extracting Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro and his wife early Jan. 3 trained for their mission using a full-scale model of the Maduro compound built in Kentucky, The New York Times reported.

Leading up to “Operation Absolute Resolve” in Venezuela, Delta Force commandos “practiced blowing through steel doors at ever-faster paces” inside the model compound constructed by the Joint Special Operations Command, The Times reported.

Alas! What my best friend used to refer to as the Curious Journal is hidden behind a paywall, and I do not subscribe to it; I’m paying out enough for the newspapers to which I do subscribe, one of which is The New York Times, so, even though I’m always willing to give a Kentucky source its props, I have to go to the Times for more.

In August, a clandestine team of C.I.A. officers slipped into Venezuela with a plan to collect information on Nicolás Maduro, the country’s president, whom the Trump administration had labeled a narco-terrorist.

The C.I.A. team moved about Caracas, remaining undetected for months while it was in the country. The intelligence gathered about the Venezuelan leader’s daily movements — combined with a human source close to Mr. Maduro and a fleet of stealth drones flying secretly above — enabled the agency to map out minute details about his routines.

That’s the kind of mission which put agents at serious risk, because the United States does not have an open embassy in Caracas, meaning that none of the agents had diplomatic immunity.

It was a highly dangerous mission. With the U.S. embassy closed, the C.I.A. officers could not operate under the cloak of diplomatic cover. But it was highly successful. Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a news conference that because of the intelligence gathered by the team, the United States knew where Mr. Maduro moved, what he ate and even what pets he kept.

El Presidenté moved around a lot, and the mission required certain knowledge of where he would be.

In contrast to messy U.S. interventions of the past — by the military in Panama or the C.I.A. in Cuba — the operation to grab Mr. Maduro was virtually flawless, according to multiple officials familiar with the details, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the plans.

In the run-up, Delta Force commandos rehearsed the extraction inside a full-scale model of Mr. Maduro’s compound that the Joint Special Operations Command had built in Kentucky. They practiced blowing through steel doors at ever-faster paces.

The military had been readying for days to execute the mission, waiting for good weather conditions and a time when the risk of civilian casualties would be minimized.

Translation: this mission had been laid on for months. The model of Mr Maduro’s compound had to be constructed, the plan and the team put together, and practice time organized. Yet, with all of that, the secrecy of the mission was kept.

Let me be clear about this: while the Democrats in Congress have been whining that President Trump didn’t notify them in advance, if they weren’t notified it’s because some of them would have immediately gotten the message to Venezuela to sabotage the mission! Can you picture what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of her squadristi, or Bernie Sanders, or Eric Swalwell would have done if they had learned of the mission in advance?

That the United States was forced to take this move is unfortunate, and we should absolutely not try to occupy Venezuela, but only the truly deranged haters of President Trump, such as Will Bunch, linked below, can actually be sorry that Mr Maduro is now in prison. There’s no guarantee that this will Make Venezuela Great Again, but it’s certainly a step in that direction.
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And now the news you missed

The New York Times reported, in December of 2024, when Joe Biden was still President, that the expected good will and economic resurgence of Cuba due to President Obama normalizing relations with the Communist country didn’t really materialize, noting that most Cubans are:

coping with prolonged power outages, standing in line at poorly stocked supermarkets and watching their friends, family and neighbors — sick of all the hardships — pack up and leave.

During his first term, President Trump walked back some of his predecessor’s policies, and President Biden only weakened Mr Trump’s restrictions slightly.

There were difficulties from the Cuban side as well, as the government was concerned that too much openness, especially to more information about the West, would weaken support for the Communist regime.

Now comes more news, this time from The Wall Street Journal:

U.S. Oil Blockade of Venezuela Pushes Cuba Toward Collapse

Communist-ruled island was already suffering from food shortages, blackouts and exodus of people, and now faces loss of cheap oil from Nicolás Maduro

By Juan Forero and Ryan Dubé | Sunday, December 21, 2025 | 5:30 AM EST

Cubans are going hungry, suffering from spreading disease and sleeping outdoors with no electricity to power fans through the sweltering nights. A quarter of the population has fled during the island’s most prolonged economic crisis.

And it’s about to get worse.

The U.S. is ratcheting up pressure on Havana’s key benefactor, Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro’s regime, which has kept the Communist-ruled nation afloat with cheap oil. Now Venezuelan oil exports are at risk thanks to a partial blockade targeting sanctioned tankers — the kind that carry about 70% of the country’s crude.

One tanker that the U.S. has already seized was en route with almost two million barrels of Venezuelan oil.

The blockade adds to a U.S. pressure campaign on Maduro that also includes a major military buildup in the Caribbean, airstrikes on boats allegedly connected to Venezuelan drug trafficking and threats of bombing the country itself.

Were Venezuela’s oil shipments to stop, or sharply decline, the Cubans know it would be devastating.

“It would be the collapse of the Cuban economy, no question about it,” said Jorge Piñón, a Cuban exile who tracks the island’s energy ties to Venezuela at the University of Texas at Austin.

Cuba could, of course, buy oil at market rates, which are rather low anyway right now, but nevertheless higher than what Venezuela was charging.

Cuba is really one of the last old-line Communist states out there, and it would be undoubtedly good if that government fell, though even if a strongly capitalist government took over, it would take many years before that nation could recover. I can’t say whether this was something that the Trump Administration considered when we put the pressure on Venezuelan drug runners, but it’s certainly a happy side effect. Of course, you had to read The Wall Street Journal to even know about it, ot, to say the least, I had not heard about it anywhere else.

If the Communist government falls, I wonder how many Cuban-Americans would head back to the island, and help bring it back from the brink.

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Even The New York Times has admitted that Ukraine is slowly losing

On December 2nd, Bret Stephens, an opinion columnist for The New York Times, told us what a terrible thing it would be if President Trump’s peace proposal for Ukraine gave up too much to Vladimir Putin and Russia.

On Saturday morning, the Opinion section of The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website highlighted four pro-Ukrainian articles by columnist Trudy Rubin, who has been beating the drums hard for support of Ukraine. We have previously noted Mrs Rubin’s continuing attempts to support Ukraine, as well as David J Kramer, Executive Director of the George w Bush Institute and Vice President of the George W Bush Presidential Center, arguing that the only legitimate peace plan for Ukraine is a demand, “Russia, Get out of Ukraine!”

We can all wish that President Putin hadn’t ordered invasions of Ukraine, in 2014 and again in 2022. We can all wish that Ukraine’s territory was strong and inviolable. But sometimes what we wish were the case, and reality on the ground, are two very different things. From The New York Times:

Battlefield Picture Worsening for Ukraine as Trump Pushes Peace Plan

Russian forces have advanced on several fronts recently. President Vladimir V. Putin signaled after talks with U.S. officials that he was not budging from demands.

By Cassandra Vinograd, Oleksandr Chubko, and Maria Varenikova, Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine | Saturday, December 6, 2025 | Updated: 2:54 PM EST

It was a clear attempt to project Russian power.

Hours before meeting U.S. officials in Moscow this past week about their plan to end the war, President Vladimir V. Putin claimed that Russia’s forces had seized the strategic Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk after a monthslong fight.

The reality was murkier. Slivers of the city were still contested, according to battlefield maps and the Ukrainian military. But Mr. Putin’s claim, even if premature, reflected a trend shaping his unbending approach to negotiations: Russian forces are on the march.

“The Russians do have the upper hand,” said Emil Kastehelmi, a military analyst with the Finland-based Black Bird Group. Ukraine is not yet at the point where it must capitulate, he said, but it “is looking weak enough that the Russians think that they can impose demands.”

Mr. Putin has ordered the Russian military to prepare for winter combat, signaling after the talks with U.S. officials that he is not budging from his hard-line demands. President Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, has since held a series of discussions in Miami with Ukraine’s delegation that both sides called “constructive.”

The pace of Russian advances remains slow, but they have increased recently. Russia gained roughly 267 square kilometers of territory in October, and 505 km² in November. No one believes that Russia can suddenly ‘win’ the war in the next few months, but there is also little hope that Ukraine can reverse the recent losses on the ground.

At the same time, Russia is using drones to attack Ukraine’s infrastructure, including power plants, as winter begins to set in in a naturally cold land. Russian soldiers will be as affected as those of Ukraine by the cold blasts of Морозко — Father Frost — but many of Ukraine’s civilians will start to feel the same thing. Europe’s civilians will not have that problem, thanks in significant part to their purchases of natural gas from Russia! While we have previously reported on The Wall Street Journal’s article “European Leaders Warn Zelensky to Be Wary in U.S. High-Speed Push for Peace,” more and more people will die the longer this continues.

The issue is manpower, something The Washington Post was reporting on a year ago, and, absent American and/or NATO ground troops going into Ukraine and directly fighting the Russians, is not going to change. We have previously noted how so many, many people want to fight for Ukraine, but they’re doing so in protest marches in Philadelphia rather than picking up a rifle and heading to Ukraine to fight.

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World War III Watch Wouldn't it be great if the Europeans could offer a real peace deal that didn't threaten to start World War III?

Our good European friends in NATO are very, very concerned that President Trump is going to negotiate a peace deal, or at least a ceasefire, between Russian President Vladimir Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy that won’t be as favorable to Ukraine as they’d like, or, more accurately, too favorable to Russia. However, the European NATO nations have had 3¾ years to work out a peace deal more to their liking, and have been unable to do so. More, President Trump has only been in office for 10½ months; no one could seem to negotiate a peace while Joe Biden was President either.

President Trump wants peace, and always has. Some of those who dislike Mr Trump claim that he’s only doing this to try to win the Nobel Peace prize, something we all know he will never do, but really, what difference does that make if he can somehow achieve peace?

From The Wall Street Journal:

European Leaders Warn Zelensky to Be Wary in U.S. High-Speed Push for Peace

Ukrainian leader must secure a solid pledge from Washington before conceding to Russian demands, his counterparts caution

By Laurence Norman and Noemie Bisserbe | Thursday, December 4, 2025 | 3:19 PM EST

BERLIN—In recent days, European leaders have delivered a stark warning to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky: Don’t give in to Russian demands without ironclad security commitments from the U.S.

The message reflects European leaders’ growing wariness of Washington’s high-speed effort to reach a peace deal that has left them on the sidelines.

In particular, European leaders have advised their Ukrainian counterpart to nail down America’s role in security guarantees for Kyiv before accepting Russian demands, according to two European diplomats familiar with the discussions.

This message was delivered on a call Monday between Zelensky and European leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, the diplomats said. The European leaders insisted on the primacy of the U.S. role in security guarantees offered to Ukraine in any deal.

Really? So, for all of their big, brave words since February of 2022, they still expect the United States to do the heavy lifting. As we noted previously, the United Kingdom and France have held at least some discussions about sending their own troops to Ukraine, though such talks a year ago, while Mr Biden was still in office, but after Mr Trump had won the 2024 election, haven’t resulted in any troop deployments to Ukraine.

Concern is growing in Kyiv and other European capitals that Washington hasn’t detailed what it would do if Russia broke a potential peace deal and attacked Ukraine again.

If a peace deal was brokered, and Russia again attacked Ukraine, presumably after Russia rebuilt the losses from their army, the Unites States would still be 5,000 miles away from the battlefields. The NATO European forces are much closer, but will they risk war with Russia, with nuclear-armed Russia, over Ukraine? They certainly haven’t so far!

Were Ukraine to join NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty would obligate the United States and the European allies to come to Ukraine’s defense, but keeping Ukraine out of NATO is a primary goal for Russia; it’s very difficult to believe that Mr Putin would accept any peace deal which allowed Ukraine to join NATO.

The warnings, made in recent days, are a further example of European leaders’ attempts to insert themselves into peace talks that the U.S. has conducted by going directly to the Kremlin and Kyiv largely without European participation.

President Trump recognizes that European participation would only complicate and draw out matters.

The problem is actually a simple one: after 3½ years of war, Russia is slowly improving its battlefield positions. It certainly hasn’t been the quick war President Putin envisioned, or much of the West feared, but, slowly, Russia’s advantages in population and resources are beginning to tell, and the Ukrainian’s “dire shortage of manpower,” something which is not a recent development, and eventually Ukraine will lose unless the United States and/or NATO send actual ground troops to directly fight the Russians . . . and that’s World War III.

The European Union just scaled back a plan which would have used frozen Russian assets held primarily in Belgium to give loans — not grants, but loans — to Ukraine to fight Russia, but money does not equal soldiers, does not equal the actual combat troops Ukraine needs. The money could have purchased more weapons, primarily from the United States, but advanced weapons still require the personnel to operate them, and manpower is in short supply in that beleaguered country.

I am reminded of our own War Between the States, in which the smaller and lesser resourced Confederacy managed to win a several battles against the larger, more industrialized Union, but it was a war fought almost entirely in the South, in the Confederacy itself, which meant that the civilian casualties and economic damage of the war occurred primarily in the South, continually weakening the military position of the Confederacy.

That is the situation in the Russo-Ukrainian War: the civilians being killed are mostly Ukrainian, and the industrial and economic power of the combatants being degraded is mostly Ukrainian. President Zelenskyy wants American weapons which can strike deeper into Russia, to attack their infrastructure, something they’ve already been doing with drones, but that would not be enough to win the war for them, and the longer the war continues, the more people will be senselessly killed.

We could all wish that Ukraine could have not only fully resisted the Russian invasion and beaten them back, but that didn’t happen. As for me, I am not willing to see World War III over efforts to beat back Russia in Ukraine.

 

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World War III Watch: So many people want to fight, fight, fight for Ukraine who never actually go to Ukraine and fight

We noted, on Saturday, that the proposed peace plan is “a horrible deal for Ukraine, no doubt about that. But it does one thing: it stops the killing! It would be very dispassionate to suggest that Ukraine should keep on fighting, and its people keep on dying, if there were any reasonable prospect that they could eventually win the war.” Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Trudy Rubin opined against it, and wants President Donald Trump, who she clearly hates, to send Patriot missiles and other weaponry to Ukraine, but she, like so many other people who want to help Ukraine, never told us what it would take for Ukraine to actually win its war against Russia.

And late Sunday, the Inky published a straight news story on a demonstration by Ukrainian Americans:

Philadelphia’s Ukrainian American community rebukes proposed Russia-Ukraine peace plan

Rallygoers outside a North Philadelphia Ukrainian American club condemned Sunday a peace plan to end the war in Ukraine. The plan has been criticized for capitulating to Russia’s demands.

by Maggie Prosser | Sunday, November 23, 2025 | 4:38 PM EST

About 60 people gathered at a North Philadelphia Ukrainian American club on Sunday afternoon to condemn a U.S.-brokered proposal to end Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Waving Ukrainian flags and hoisting signs that read, “Appeasement Isn’t Peace,” demonstrators outside the Ukrainian American Citizens’ Association described the plan as a laughable, “copy-and-paste” of Russia’s demands, signaling America’s willingness to capitulate to the Kremlin.

The peace deal put together by Washington and Moscow calls for Ukraine to cede territory, reduce its military, and give up on NATO membership — stipulations that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has categorically rejected in the past.

And here comes the money line:

“Nobody in their right mind would ask a country to give up its territory,
its military, its freedoms,” said Ulana Mazurkevich, president of the Philadelphia-based Ukrainian Human Rights Committee. “They do not know Ukrainians. … We will not give up — we fight, we fight, we fight.”

Really? Who’s this “we” about whom President Mazurkevich speaks? In the photograph accompanying the article, which you can see as part of the Inquirer’s tweet reproduced above — I prefer to use tweets as article illustrations, because those tweets are not under copyright, and can specifically be embedded — there are several men and women as part of that about 60 people demonstrating, but as part of “we fight, we fight, we fight,” they are doing so in North Philly, not on the battlefields of Ukraine.

Even Mrs Rubin admitted Ukraine’s “dire shortage of man power,” a shortage exacerbated by all of the Ukrainians not living in Ukraine, not fighting in Ukraine. We have at least twice mentioned that the vocal and vociferous supporters of the Palestinians certainly didn’t actually go to Gaza to fight the Israelis, and I have to ask here: why aren’t these Ukrainians in Philly picking up a rifle and heading to Kiev? Don’t tell me that you fight, you fight, you fight if you aren’t there, actually fighting.

We noted, eleven months ago, a Washington Post article telling readers about “exhausted soldiers” on the front lines and men in their late thirties, and their forties, and their fifties, on the front lines, of a few women on the front lines, not the soldiers the Kiev government would prefer to have, but the ones they do have.

It’s easy to say “we fight, we fight, we fight,” when you are not the ones out there actually fighting. It’s easy for the brave people in the United States and the capitals of democratic Europe, people who are not facing the bullets and bombs of the Russian army to advocate for continuing the war.

David J Kramer, Executive Director of the George w Bush Institute and Vice President of the George W Bush Presidential Center, argued:

The United States and the democratic community of nations must stand with Ukraine against Russia’s brutal, forcible seizure of Ukrainian territory. Ukraine represents the frontline of freedom, and its heroic citizens, who endure deadly and daily Russian bombardments and who have pushed back against a much larger military, deserve Western support. If not stopped in Ukraine, Putin will target other nations, which he already has been doing, but more aggressively. If we want to prevent the possibility of a Chinese attack against Taiwan, an important way to do so is by showing unstinting backing for Ukraine and imposing greater costs on Russia and its accomplices.

The United States should not be discussing the future of U.S.-Russian relations while Russian missiles and drones continue to wreak havoc on Ukraine, killing innocent civilians and trying to freeze and force the population into submission with winter coming.

The 28-point plan should be dropped and replaced with a simple one-point plan: Russia, get out of Ukraine!

It’s easy to make those arguments from the safety of Southern Methodist University in Dallas. It’s easy to say that Russia must “get out of Ukraine” when he’s not there to force such. It’s beyond naïve to think that Russia would somehow accept a military defeat — “get out of Ukraine” — that no one has inflicted on them.

Mr Kramer’s site biography tells us that he is ” a leading expert on Russia and Ukraine,” and lists all sorts of impressive credentials, but his policy proposals amount to giving Ukraine more weapons and more money, but conspicuously avoids the only thing that could actually help Ukraine win, sending actual United States or NATO ground troops to directly fight the Russians. There is virtually no support for doing that, as Mr Kramer certainly knows, irrespective of what he might believe in his heart. He wants to:

Seek accountability for Russian war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Putin, after all, has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for his kidnapping of Ukrainian children

when a man who earned “his M.A. in Soviet studies from Harvard University and his B.A. in Soviet Studies and Political Science from Tufts University” has to know that war crimes can only be prosecuted on men who led nations and lost, and were then captured. Does Mr Kramer seriously believe that we can capture and drag Vladimir Putin before the bar? You’d have to spent a lot of time in a bar to think that!

Russia invasion of Ukraine is a terrible thing, something we all hate, but I have yet to see anyone present an actual plan to enable Ukraine to win the war. Simply sending money and weapons to a nation whose army has a “dire shortage of man power” is no plan at all.