Trump’s Dwindling Patience With Putin

And it is equally interesting that Russia's people aren't tired of Putie's propaganda. Afterall, it is their nearly one million young men who have died for absolutely nothing other than to satisfy Putie's useless ego. Not to mention precious lives lost by Z's Ukrainian army. Yeah, those poor people on both sides of this conflict.

Sorry but I think this whole scenario is Trump and Putin using the media to give the appearance that we are on the verge of WW3. Run to your fall-out shelters! The end is nigh! Not. This is mostly theatrics. Haven't you noticed this whole topic flares up at really convenient times?

Putin drew a Red Line in the sand. Or did someone miss that? No weapons from NATO to Ukraine, remember? Now comes Trump and the Art of the Deal.

Putin is a totally committed megalomaniac. He has zero interest in peace.

Though I fault President Trump for believing in Putin he did something that Old Joe didn't, he tried.

I speak as an old school cold warrior who fervently supported President Reagan's anti-Communist policies and both sought celebrated the Soviet Union's dissolution. I did so because ending the evil Soviet empire was central to preserving our country and our freedom. Yet after World War II, we forfeited the independence of most of Eastern Europe after World War II because we didn't want to go war with the Soviet Union. And that was when we had a nuclear monopoly. We chose not to risk it, and I believe that was wise. So it's not clear to me why the independence of the Ukraine, which was part of the Soviet empire then, has now become a central U.S. foreign policy objective. Russia is not the threat to us now that the Soviet Union was then unless we make it so. Providing American weapons to fight Russia through intermediaries places my country at risk. Russian territorial expansionism does not. I would prefer that we not escalate our involvement in this conflict.

Putin's real fear is Xi Jinping and his ambitions to bring the Eastern Provinces of Russia under Chinese control. Xi understands that if Putin is defeated in Ukraine, he will be overthrown by his political enemies in Russia. The West will use this to impose a valid democratic government in Russia and remove the Communist Party. Xi would then move into the Eastern Provinces, which hold significant oil and energy reserves, and unite his CCP with the remnants of Russia's party. When Putin learned of this plan (which essentially amounted to China preparing to stab Russia in the back), he returned the defectors to Beijing along with a diplomatic note containing a nuclear threat. He used this as leverage to demand more support from China. To appease Putin and prevent him from potentially aligning with the US, Xi Jinping reportedly agreed for Foreign Minister Wang Yi to publicly state that "China cannot afford for Russia to lose," thereby abandoning China's previous neutral facade. China then negotiated a strategic pact (to be signed during Putin's September visit) that would include: 1. Full support for Russia's territorial ambitions (reclaiming Ukraine and the Baltic states), 2. Chinese assistance in restoring the Soviet territorial footprint 3. Russian help with the Taiwan conflict preparation. 4. Russian assistance with underwater nuclear submarine sites in the Arctic 5. Russian military pressure on Japan to weaken potential Taiwan intervention. The joint goal is to prolong the war in Ukraine to divert US resources from Asia, maintain the China-Russia alliance despite mutual distrust, and position China for long-term territorial gains from a weakened post-war Russia. All of this is in support of Xi Jinping's broader goal of reviving global communist influence. The relationship is described as purely transactional - both leaders need each other but don't trust each other, with Putin using the leaked betrayal plan as leverage to extract maximum support from a politically weakened Xi Jinping.

#6: I voted for the Gipper with my first vote in 1984, so I'm of a similar vintage to you. History seems to have sublimated one of the big reasons we didn't immediately go to war with the Russians after WWII ended, and that was because the Russians were heavily flush with *American* made armaments (supplied via the Persian Corridor) and would have posed a formidable foe at the time. The same is not true today, and one of the realities the Ukrainians have laid bare is that the so-called "#2 army in the world" was not deserving of such status. During the Cold War, our foreign policy was grudging acceptance of the existence of the "Iron Curtain" and the subjugation of the people in countries behind it. But we never agreed to a notion that those people were, in perpetuity, to be stuck under Soviet (Russian) jack boots. All Ukraine is doing today is refusing to lay down and let the Russians stick the boot back on their necks. There are some who think PDJT simply wants to get along with Russia, so he'll sacrifice Ukraine. I think he's finding out that there's no getting along with Russia under the present circumstances despite valorous attempts, so now it's time to tighten the screws. And personally, I don't have a big problem with helping Ukraine, because Zelensky is one of theirs (and they can remove him later if they choose to do so), while there will be no getting rid of Putin or future Russian Tsars should Ukraine fall. Ronald Reagan was a believer in self-determination. He spoke out about it on behalf of the South Vietnamese, he applied lots of pressure on the Sandinistas until they had free and fair elections in Nicaragua (which the Sandinistas lost), and he gave the Russians their own Vietnam in Afghanistan after they invaded and installed a puppet government, and he took Gorbachev to the mat with the commencement of new intermediate range missile installations in Europe, which led Gorbachev to sue for peace -- and the INF Treaty. Reagan was not a disinterested bystander on the world stage. His actions bespeak that of a man who was committed to self-determination, and I believe he would support assisting Ukraine today.

Putin is in a delicate position right now. The only result that the Communist party will accept at this point is total acquisition of Ukraine after they have lost over a million good men and a considerable portion of their weaponry. Concessions to any overture by Trump will make Putin look weak in their eyes and his life will not be worth one ruble. The Biden administration should have kept its nose out of the conflict from the beginning but they dared not because it would have exposed Joe and Hunter as international criminals. As Obama once predicted, Joe effed things up. Only a long-term squeeze on Russia's financial assets will be effective now.

Thank you for the replies, #7 and #8. I find much to agree with in your posts. I would add two things to clarify my own thinking. The first relates to the threat posed to us by Russia today. One of the key distinctions drawn in the 1980s came from Jeanne Kirkpatrick's Dictatorships and Double Standards. The idea was the authoritarian regimes we tolerated and sometimes supported were less dangerous and evil than totalitarian regimes we opposed. My perception of Putin's Russia today is that it's an evil authoritarian regime, not a totalitarian global threat to our existence. Dangerous to its own people and its neighbors certainly, but when combined with Russia's demonstrably diminished capacities, far less of a threat to us. President Reagan said correctly that the Soviet Union was the focus of evil in the modern world. The clear implication was it needed to be resisted wherever we could. I don't feel the same way about Russia. The second goes back to an old Cold War debate. One of the things I liked about William F Buckley was his intellectual integrity. He supported the US embargo against Cuba because Castro was a Soviet puppet and the Soviets were dangerous. When the Soviet Union dissolved, Buckley suggested lifting the embargo because Castro was no longer part of an existential threat to our lives and liberty. I thought that was a courageous position for a Cold War conservative to take. My hope is President Trump's actions will lead to some form of stabilized and negotiated settlement that ends the conflict and leaves both parties unsatisfied but no longer at war with one another. My fear is that it will escalate the conflict, raise unrealistic expectations, and potentially involve my country in a deepening in dangerous crisis. In other words, I sincerely hope I'm wrong and this all works the way President Trump expects it to.

#10: I share your sentiment in hoping for President Trump to succeed. One other distinction between Cold War authoritarian states that we supported vs. those we didn't: I'm pretty sure that none of the states we supported involved themselves in expansionist land-grabs. They were just anti-commie. Today's Russia isn't the same, and those who look at what Putin says through unfiltered sources come to the conclusion that he wants to put the Russian Empire together at the zenith of its size. That includes the territories of now-independent countries in the Caucuses, the central Asian republics that were also part of the Soviet Union, Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltic States, about half of Poland, and all of Finland. And I'm afraid that if Putin is allowed to succeed in Ukraine, he won't stop and will go after the NATO countries immediately to the west. And that puts us directly into war with Russia on an Article V basis. In my mind, it's better to arm the Ukrainians to the teeth, let them degrade and destroy Russia's military capacity (as they have been doing), and deprive the Russian economy (and its war machine) of oil revenue -- whether by driving the barrel price below Russia's break-even (as appears to be in the works) or simply making it economically untenable for anyone to buy Russian oil (as appears to be on tap when the 50-day mark is hit). Once Russia is no longer able to sell oil to anyone, we simply wait for Putin to burn through his cash reserves... and that's when the war ends and chaotic change comes to Russia. Better to see that confined to Russia than have it spill over into NATO countries.