Trump had thoughts about his meeting with Putin during his press conference earlier today.
“I’ll tell Putin to end the war — he won’t mess with me” sounds a lot like “Peace for our time.” We know how that turned out.
— Iryna Voichuk (@irynavoichuk.bsky.social) August 11, 2025 at 2:15 PM
Trump openly admits relying on Viktor Orbán for information on the Russian war in Ukraine, despite Orbán’s ties to Russia and ongoing corruption scandals shaking his top party members and himself personally.
— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) August 11, 2025 at 12:48 PM
Trump: “There will be some changes in land … Russia has taken some very prime territory. They’ve taken largely ocean — in real estate we call it oceanfront property. That’s always the most valuable property.”
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) August 11, 2025 at 11:43 AM
I didn’t say they were good thoughts.
for the second time this briefing, Trump claims he’s “going to Russia” on Friday (he’s actually going to Alaska, which is in the United States)
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) August 11, 2025 at 11:56 AM
I’m sure 49 states are just as good as 50.
Trump’s been hallucinating that Ukraine started Russia’s war of conquest – and itching to do Putin’s bidding – for months, as I wrote in January.
Now, as the Russian house of cards economy is cracking, as long anticipated, Putin needs his pal’s help even more.— davidrlurie (@davidrlurie.bsky.social) August 11, 2025 at 4:31 PM
The worst part of this piece of the interview is his promise to resume normal trade with Russia if a deal is struck.
Since his deal involves handing Russia a chunk of Ukraine, lifting sanctions would let Russia recover, regroup, and devour Ukraine entirely within a few years.
— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) August 11, 2025 at 12:18 PM
Trump’s delusional belief that Ukraine started the war is straight up Russian agitprop. It’s what Putin, his aides, surrogates, catspaws, other Russian officials, and Russian state media, as well as their fellow travelers and useful idiots in Europe, the US, and other parts of the world have been pushing for over three years. Specifically, that Ukraine started the war because President Zelenskyy and his government are all NAZIs, were abusing Russian speaking Ukrainians in Donetsk, Luhansk, Crimea, Kherson, Kharkiv, Sumy, Zaprizhzhia, etc, and Putin just had to invade to clean out the NAZI regime in Kyiv, protect the Russian speaking Ukrainians, and liberate the rest of Ukraine. Once again: NAZI is how Russians refer to anyone who opposes Russia and its interests and that Russia was the real victim of the NAZIs not the Jews, that Zelenskyy is both Jewish and a native Russian speaking Ukrainian, and that no one was abusing Russian speaking Ukrainians. Unfortunately we know that Trump speaks to Putin on his personal cell phone regularly. He did during his first term, he did during the Biden interregnum, and he’s done it during his second term. The result is that he’s been inundated by Putin with Putin’s narrative of the war. Instead of recognizing that Ukraine is trying to fend off a genocidal Russian re-invasion, that Zelenskyy is a an unexpected (and unexpectedly effective) war time president, and that Ukraine is fighting for its national, political, social, economic, and religious survival, Trump believes it is the aggressor and Russia the victim. It also does not help that he’s both historically illiterate and an incurious ignoramus. He has no idea of the history here, has neither the interest nor the ability to overcome that knowledge gap, and, as saw the other day when he declared that the Armenians and Azerbaijanis had been fighting for thirty-five years, just has no idea what he’s talking about.
Which is why we are where we are: Trump telegraphing that he’s going to give significant portions of Ukraine away to Putin at the end of the week. He has no right to do so, but he’s deluded himself into believing he’s the great peacemaker. That he can easily resolve all these conflicts. Which, I’m sure, Putin has encouraged as part of flattering Trump’s enormous ego. Again: Putin needs to create strategic time and space. He needs it to consolidate what Russia’s military actually has captured, he needs it to get out from under the sanctions regime, he needs it to reconstitute his forces once he can get out from under the sanctions, and he needs it so he can then send his troops to try to take the rest of Ukraine and then keep going into the Baltics or Poland or Romania.
The question is not so much what Ukraine will do; they won’t accept or recognize any of this and keeping fighting to the best of their abilities. The question is what Ukraine’s non-US allies and partners – Canada, Britain, the EU member states, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, etc – are both willing and able to do. They no longer have the luxury of time or of believing Trump can be managed or cajoled into doing the right thing. Events have overtaken them and they have to make some hard decisions. Those decisions will determine not just how Ukraine defends itself from Russia’s genocidal re-invasion, but what Europe and the global system look like going forward.
Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.
War for Ukraine Day 1,264: Strategically Incoherent DelusionPost + Comments (17)
