Tag Archives: #Russia

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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.

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World War III Watch: the neocons want to see the fruitless fighting in Ukraine go on and on and on

If there is one thing that The Philadelphia Inquirer’s ‘Worldview’ columnist has been adamant on is arming Ukraine to fight the evil Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Russia. But even she couldn’t hide the fact that after 3½ years of war, Ukraine is starting to lose.

As Ukraine falters, Trump tries to hand the country to Putin with a shamefully pro-Russia peace plan

As Russia cracks Kyiv’s defenses and attacks Europe, the president refuses to send aid and kowtows to the Kremlin.

By Trudy Rubin | Thursday, November 20, 2025 | 5:01 AM EST

While America has been obsessing over Jeffrey Epstein, Vladimir Putin has been making dangerous headway in Ukraine — and expanding his war into Europe.

Under such circumstances, genuine peace negotiations are impossible because Putin thinks he is winning. America’s top foreign policy priority should be to reverse the Russian leader’s mindset by increasing military sales to Ukraine — which the Europeans will pay for.

Instead, the Trump team and Russian officials together have drawn up a new 28-point “peace” plan, without first consulting Ukraine or European allies. This pro-Russian plan calls for major Ukrainian concessions and would leave the country naked to further Russian aggression.

The White House has already denied Ukraine the weapons that could still stop the Russians, thereby effectively helping Putin slaughter Ukrainian civilians nightly with missiles and drones that target apartment buildings and heating systems.

Mrs Rubin knows, though she never says it, that many of President Trump’s voters, 77,302,580 Americans, were in part motivated by the fact that he did not want us to get more involved in the Russo-Ukrainian War. The United States has been involved in too many wars, costing us blood and treasure, and we haven’t actually won any of them. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were both expensive failures, with thousands of Americans killed and more wounded. It’s hard to forget that as the Wounded Warrior Project keeps running advertisements seeking donations on television. Saddam Hussein might be gone, but the government of Iraq is little better than it was, and the Taliban we deposed upon entering Afghanistan are back in power today.

And some of us still remember the debacle in Vietnam. I’ve said it dozens, if not hundreds of times: Ukraine cannot defeat Russia without American/NATO troops on the ground, directly fighting Russians. Does Mrs Rubin believe that the American people would stand for that?

Mrs Rubin wants us to send Patriot missiles to Ukraine, but even she admitted to the country’s “dire shortage of man power,” which begs the question: who’s going to operate the Patriot systems? Ukrainians are not trained to operate the complex systems, and cannot spare anyone from the front lines. The Patriots would have to be operated, at least at first, by American or NATO technicians, which puts the US and NATO directly at war with Russia, and that’s World War III. At least some of us don’t think that’s a particularly good idea.

Although things look bleak for Ukraine, I believe its fighters will manage to hold back the Russians this winter, but at a brutal cost to civilians’ and soldiers’ lives. Trump will bear much blame for the suffering to come.

Will they? Who knows, but Russia has made at least some small progress even during the распутица, the autumn mud time, but the fields of Ukraine are about to freeze over, once again providing solid surfaces for military vehicles. Nevertheless, the eastern European fields are no great place for soldiers, and much of the country is north of the 49th parallel, which is the same latitude as our longest border with Canada. The winter will be just as cold on the Russians, so it is at least reasonable to think that there won’t be much movement in the lines over the winter, but then there’s that “brutal cost to civilians’ and soldiers’ lives,” something Ukraine simply cannot afford.

And so the Russian leader is doing with a disastrous plan pushed by Trump’s supremely naive negotiator, real estate mogul Steve Witkoff, who has has no grasp of Putin’s history or goals and seems to swallow his lies whole.

That “supremely naïve negotiator” was, along with the President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, the one who got Hamas to accept the ceasefire deal which has (mostly) stopped the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

Witkoff’s draft plan would reportedly require Ukraine to give up the 14 per cent of the Donbas region it still controls, and cut the size of its armed forces by half. It would require Ukraine to abandon key categories of weapons, endorse a permanent rollback of vital U.S. assistance including long-range weapons, and ban foreign troops from basing on Ukrainian soil.

Yup, it’s 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.

But if there is no reasonable prospect that Ukraine could win the war, could reverse the military situation and force the Russian army out of Ukraine, it has to be asked: to what purpose does the continual bloodshed serve? Hamas waited over a year beyond their military loss to Israel, before they finally agreed to release the hostages and agree to a ceasefire; how many ‘Palestinians’ died in those months, died for nothing? As the people of Gaza are now whining about worn-out tents not offering any real protection from the oncoming winter, how many of them are living in those tents because Hamas refused to surrender for well over a year following the Israel Defense Forces complete occupation of Gaza?

Like the Hamas leadership living in luxury in Qatar, Mrs Rubin lives very well, thank you very much, in Philadelphia, 4800 miles removed from the war in Ukraine. She can advocate that the Ukrainians fight on, she can argue that President Trump should send Patriots, tanks, and the kitchen sink to Ukraine, but she is calling for more death and destruction in a war Ukraine cannot win.

We don’t have to like the end result of that war, we don’t like to have to see President Putin ‘win’ a war he started, but that doesn’t mean we ought to advocate that it continue.
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Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well-reasoned conservative commentary.

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World War III Watch: Do the left really hate Mr Trump so much that they’d rather see more and more blood flowing than the President get some credit for stopping a war? The left would rather see the killing continue than President Trump achieve a diplomatic victory and peace

Our good friends on the left — and I include the recent neoconservatives, who are not really conservative in very much among the left — are up in arms that the wicked, evil, hated President Donald Trump is trying to get at least a ceasefire, and possibly a lasting peace agreement, between Russia and Ukraine, claiming that such would lock-in Russia’s conquests of roughly 20% of Ukraine. The Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer, about which I would have written yesterday but was afraid of sounding like a broken record, was simply the latest.

The left are just deathly afraid that Mr Trump might win the Nobel Peace Prize, said to be one of his heartfelt desires, as though promoting peace is somehow a bad thing. But the President said that he just loved stopping wars! Continue reading →

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World War III Watch: “Well boys, I reckon this is it. Nuclear combat toe-to-toe with the Russkies!”

The Snowball Summit was over quickly, and now President Trump is scheduled to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Washington on Monday. Then additional European leaders will join in the fun. From The New York Times:

European leaders are set to join Zelensky for Ukraine meeting with Trump.

by Constant Méheut and Enjoli Liston | Sunday, August 17, 2025

European leaders said on Sunday that they would join President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine when he meets with President Trump on Monday at the White House, as they strive to show solidarity against Russia and avoid being sidelined in peace talks.

“Our goal tomorrow is to present a united front between Europeans and Ukrainians,” President Emmanuel Macron of France told reporters. “I don’t believe Putin wants peace. I believe he wants Ukraine’s capitulation.” Continue reading →

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World War III Watch: The left and the Neocons want the killing to continue in Ukraine

Our good friends on the left are just up in arms over President Trump’s meeting with Soviet Russian President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin in Alaska, ostensibly to discuss some way to end the Russo-Ukrainian War, which has been raging — well, maybe raging isn’t the right word; how about plodding along? — for 3½ years now. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Trudy Rubin, as much of a neocon as anyone working for the Inky can be, frets: Continue reading →

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Mustn’t ‘peace’ mean more than just the absence of war?

People have been crying for peace, peace, more loudly in the civilized West since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the October 7th attack on Israel by Hamas. We good Westerners have tended to ignore conflicts in other parts of the world.

In our religion studies after Mass on Sunday, we were going over the meaning of the word “peace.” The Gospel reading for next Sunday is Luke 10:1-12, which includes:

3 Go; behold, I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves. 4 Carry no money belt, no bag, no shoes; and greet no one on the way. 5 Whatever house you enter, first say, ‘Peace be to this house.’ 6 If a man of peace is there, your peace will rest on him; but if not, it will return to you. 7 Stay in that house, eating and drinking what they give you; for the laborer is worthy of his wages. Do not keep moving from house to house. 8 Whatever city you enter and they receive you, eat what is set before you; 9 and heal those in it who are sick, and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’

The commentary in the study guides brought up the definition of shalom as it is used in Hebrew.

The ancient Hebrew meaning of shalam was “to make something whole”. Not just regarding practical restoration of things that were lost or stolen. But with an overall sense of fulness and completeness in mind, body and estate.

Too often in English, we see the word ‘peace’ as meaning the absence of direct violence or war. Thus, when people call for peace between Russia and Ukraine, or between Israel and the Arabs, they too often mean just a ceasefire. A ceasefire in itself is a very basic good, but mustn’t peace actually mean more than that? Mustn’t peace mean more than “I am not trying to kill anyone, and no one is trying to kill me”, but also mean “I don’t want to kill anyone, and no one wants to kill me”? Continue reading →

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World War III Watch: Britain goes all out neocon

Prussian Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke the Elder wrote, “No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength,” which is frequently bastardized as “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” I’m old enough to remember when debates in the United States were all about matching the Soviets in warheads, weapons, and delivery systems. The impetus was less deterrence than it was being able to fight the USSR on the European battlefield. It all made sense, if you thought a nuclear war was a winnable thing. It was as though we could actually plan out a war that included using nuclear weapons, and somehow emerge victorious.

We have used nuclear weapons in war, and emerged victorious, but that is because the enemy didn’t have them, and because his plan to knock out the American fleet at Pearl Harbor did not survive first contact with the enemy. Yes, the Japanese attack sank four battleships and seriously damaged four more, also sinking or damaging three cruisers, three destroyers, an anti-aircraft training ship, and a minelayer. There were no aircraft carriers in port, and the wrath of our country was raised, and our industrial might undamaged.

Now, with Donald Trump having won the 2024 election, and his great reticence to get involved in the Russo-Ukrainian War, our European allies in NATO are revisiting notions of, as Major Kong put it, “Nuclear combat, toe-to-toe with the Russkies.”

Dropping tactical nuclear weapons was a major strategic error. We must correct it

Continue reading →