From the Slate / Yahoo!News:
"Trump Has a New Plan for Ukraine. Hoo Boy
It’s no coincidence that President Donald Trump caved to the Kremlin’s demands for peace-through-surrender, and insisted that Kyiv do the same, on the same day that Russia launched its deadliest attack on Ukrainian civilians in nearly a year.
Then, one day later, deepening the delusions that he has long displayed about the war and his own power to affect its course, Trump called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to come to his senses and stop the killing.
“Vladimir, STOP!” Trump posted on Truth Social. “I am not happy with the Russian strikes on KYIV. Not necessary, and very bad timing.”
Quite aside from the bone-chilling familiarity (has Trump ever addressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky by his first name?), there’s the presumption that the Kremlin leader... cared what Trump or anyone else might think about his murderousness. Trump had complained once before about Russian bombing—and then, just minutes later, he resumed blaming Ukrainians for starting the war (and, of course, Joe Biden for failing to stop it). Certainly the “peace plan” that Trump had just laid on the table should have signaled that the Russians can get away with whatever levels of violence they’d like to commit.
Trump’s plan, according to European sources who have seen the one-page outline, calls for the following:
• Russian and Ukrainian troops cease fire at their current positions on the battlefield. That means Moscow would control about 20 percent of Ukrainian territory, including the bulk of its four easternmost (and, before the war, industrial-rich) provinces in Donbas.
• The U.S. also lifts all economic sanctions that it imposed on Russia as a result of the February 2022 invasion.
• Russia is recognized as controlling Crimea...
• The U.S. is barred from stationing peacekeeping troops in Ukraine after the ceasefire, and Ukraine is forbidden from ever joining the West’s NATO military alliance.
• In exchange for all this, Russia is obliged to concede … well, it seems, nothing. In fact, Russian spokesmen continue to demand that even a temporary ceasefire be preceded by a settlement of all the war’s “root causes,” which it blames entirely on Ukraine.
As one NATO official told a reporter from Politico when asked what he thought of Trump’s proposal: “Did Putin write this for him?” Another diplomat responded with an “exploding head” emoji...
Anyone who believes Putin would hold the line at Donbas, leave Kyiv’s government in place, or refrain from threatening other former Soviet republics hasn’t been paying attention to what Putin himself has been saying about his goals the past year—e.g., that Ukraine is a fiction, its people don’t exist as a separate culture, and that Russia has a legitimate interest in not only carving out a sphere of influence but re-creating the old Russian empire in the space of what was once the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact.
As for NATO, shortly after the 2022 invasion, Zelensky said he had “cooled off” on membership in the West’s military alliance as a trade-off for peace. He repeated the point this week. However, on both occasions, and several times in the interim, he has demanded some form of security guarantees from Western countries, asked what they might entail in the absence of a NATO slot, and heard nothing in return...
It is worth noting that, back in 2018, during his first term as president, Trump said the U.S. would not recognize Crimea as Russian territory. As a Republican active on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Marco Rubio also called for a similar policy. Now he has joined Trump on the switch to Moscow. So have most of the Republicans who were on Zelensky’s side not so long ago...
Trump’s favoritism toward Russia has been clear for a long time. His hostility toward Ukraine has taken on a darker intensity. The events of the past 48 hours may have hardened these trends irreversibly, making the days of even-handedness—much less a return toward alliance with Ukraine—impossible."
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