Trump's Ukraine payback
It was probably not the smartest thing for Ukraine’s civil society to run a meddling op against Trump back in the day.
Trump’s Templar head of the Pentagon did a press conference about the administration’s plans for negotiations with Russia over Ukraine — and it’s been causing some waves. I’ve even seen people who’ve been critical of America’s role in this war and who have been arguing for a settled peace criticizing it…calling this a horrible negotiation strategy, basically “surrender to Russia.”1 The reason is that Pete Hegseth right off the bat said that Ukraine will not enter NATO, nor will NATO peacekeepers be stationed in Ukraine as part of any security guarantee, and that Ukraine will definitely not go back to pre-2014 borders. Some see this as giving too much to Russia before negotiations even begin.
I don’t really see these points as controversial anymore. No one in the West wants to fight a direct war with Russia — that’s why the Biden administration has been dangling NATO membership but never giving it. And the “capitulation” on the border issue? That’s also an obvious thing. It’s not whether or not Ukraine will go back to 2014 borders — it’s about how much and what chunks of territory it will lose. It’s been obvious a while now that Ukraine is going to lose this war in a very bad way and territory to Russia as a result. The only question has been: How many more Ukrainian (and Russian) men are going to be fed into the grinder before it happens? And what will Russia demand when it does?
But there is a bigger issue here — and that’s Trump’s payback.
It’s clear Trump is snubbing Ukraine in a massive way. He is essentially sidelining it, going over Zelensky’s head straight to Putin.2 He’s excluding the Ukrainian side from negotiations, while also talking about extracting payment from Ukraine in rare metals for all the war aid that the United States provided. Naturally, the Ukrainians are freaking out.
What’s Trump’s payback about? People have short memories these days. But I’ve been watching this thing long enough to remember that key players and institutions in Ukraine’s civil society — as well as Democratic-party-connected Ukrainian-Americans and soft power CIA cutouts like USAID — were at the forefront of a smear campaign painting Donald Trump a Putin puppet, going back to 2016.
This was quite an open thing back then. Ukrainian civil society (which was funded by American money) and America’s security establishment were against Trump. Ukrainians became willing pawns in a very sleazy campaign to bring Trump down by smearing him as a Russian agent…a Putin puppet…a peepee tape hostage to the Kremlin. All this was done quite in the open. Because back then, in 2016, no one seriously thought Trump would win.
But he did…
The anti-corruption journalist and politician above and NABU, a USAID funded anti-corruption organization in Ukraine (lol), were central to an early Trump smear campaign. The anti-corruption guy above got tied up in various corruption scandals in Ukraine, too (lol).
I wrote quite a bit about this during the impeachment hearings against Donald Trump, including how Ukrainian-American diaspora was involved in the anti-Trump campaign.
Here’s one from 2019 — “Trump, Ukraine and Weaponized Diasporas.”
…But the Trump-Ukrainian meddling story is bigger than just the Bidens.
It all goes back to the 2016 election and “RussiaGate” — the belief that Donald Trump and his people colluded with Vladimir Putin to steal the election. For nearly three years, this was taken as God’s truth by just about every mainstream news media outlet. Then, last April, the news cycle got doused with a bit of cold reality. Robert Mueller wrapped up his much-awaited investigation and delivered, well, nothing. As a stunned New York Times headline put it: “MUELLER FINDS NO TRUMP-RUSSIA CONSPIRACY.”
There were a lot of shady sources that helped fuel the RussiaGate narrative. But what people forget today is that a big chunk of that “intel” was procured and spread around by Ukrainian-American political operatives.