We shouldn't be surprised that the so-called "peace negotiations" in Saudi Arabia are about "the special relationship" between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin rather than the illegal war Putin has engaged in Ukraine. Nor should we be surprised about where it is being held: with a crown prince implicated in the murder of dissident journalists, Putin has no fear of his ICC arrest warrant being respected.
Furthermore, in this story here 1 we learn what we should already know: that Trump is going to be Putin's willing fool while "The Kremlin has ordered its intelligence services to use the US-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia on 18 February for information attacks. They will try to manipulate these events to influence public opinion," which will include
Statements such as "The West betrayed Ukraine", "Neither Moscow nor Washington care about the opinions of Europeans and Ukrainians", "The US and Russia made a deal behind Ukraine’s back", "The Ukrainian government is illegitimate", "The Ukrainian army is losing on the battlefield" and "Corrupt Ukrainian officials are stealing billions of dollars of US aid" will be the most widespread narratives in the near future.
We don't have to look far to find such propaganda, even when we don't actually want to look for it. A few Russian language stories appeared on my Android phone in the last week, despite my efforts to stop them. When I hit the links to these stories they automatically translate to English, and reading them it is clear that they are typical Kremlin propaganda, particularly in poking fun at Western politicians. From something called EADaily, which is an “intermediary” news site that “collects” and posts stories from other “news” sites and offers “commentary,” we read things like this:
Every day the statements of Western
so-called politicians become more and more stupid. I think this is due to the
fact that they don't have the Washington methodology they used to live by now. The
American spoke in Munich without a piece of paper, and I didn't notice any
teleprompters, and the head of this show, who started crying, didn't take his
eyes off the piece of paper. They have forgotten how to speak. That is, first
they forgot how to think, and then they forgot how to speak.
It isn’t mentioned who was “speaking” on the American side, but likely either Vance or Hegseth, and it should be noted that what they said was unthinkingly off-the-cuff and soon afterward “revised.” The commentator states “I see that Trump's whole team is tongue-tied. They know how to speak out. Not like the European clueless.” Obviously the “translator” here doesn’t quite understand American idioms, and that in this country, it is believed by many that the tongues of most people in the Trump administration should be “tied.”
Then there is this:
White House press Secretary Caroline Leavitt commented on the speech of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who used the word "dictate" in relation to Washington after a conversation between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. "Choose your words carefully," Leavitt urged. She further added that "the only place" that Germany deserves in these negotiations is "the dock."
It’s funny how Leavitt talks about the Germans when she is Trump’s Goebbels, a
fanatic who like all of Trump’s stooges is speaking for an audience of “one”—i.e.
Trump—thus his lies and misinformation continuously ejaculate from her mouth as
if from a broken sewer pipe.
You know what is really pathetic about all of this? Trump’s grandfather on his paternal side was German, was an illegal immigrant to this country in order to escape military service, and then returned to Germany to live permanently until his enlistment evasion was discovered and he was expelled from the country. He then returned to live permanently in U.S. It was his son, Fred, who was a racist and Nazi sympathizer, who taught his son Donald to be a “king” and a “killer.” And so here we are.
EADaily goes on:
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz during the next election debate said that Europe will not allow the demilitarization of Ukraine. Scholz also insists that Europe should be at the negotiating table to resolve the Ukrainian crisis. US President Donald Trump may withdraw the US military from the Baltic States and Western European countries amid negotiations with Russia on the Ukrainian conflict, writes Financial Times columnist Gideon Rahman, citing unnamed officials. If this happens, then everyone will hear such a howl in the marshes that the howl of a formidable bogeyman from the Dartmoor marshes will seem like just the first yapping of a Pekingese puppy. Negotiations on the settlement of the conflict on Ukraine without the participation of Europe "does not make sense." This statement was made by the representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Germany Sebastian Fischer.
Of course this is not to be tolerated by Russia: “This is not the place to start. Does the existence of the European Union make any sense? I understand that the former allies of the Third Reich have united on the basis of Russophobia. And some other meaning?”
That “meaning” is carried through to this bit of misinformation:
The Pentagon invested money in creating fake accounts on social networks as part of a social engineering program, according to journalists of the Federalist publication, citing government documents. The US Department of Defense funded a program of "large-scale social deception." At the same time, under the pretext of fighting Russian fakes, they simply shut up all Russian media outlets. And they lied as much as they could. And they can lie a lot. A lot.
This is Musk and company “finding” something that they don’t understand and just put their own “spin” on it to suggest something “nefarious” is being done with taxpayer money. In fact, as CNN reports
Trump then delivered a version of the claim on social media on Thursday morning, adding a demand for repayment: “DOGE: Looks like Radical Left Reuters was paid $9,000,000 by the Department of Defense to study ‘large scale social deception.’ GIVE BACK THE MONEY, NOW!”
Actually, why Reuters is mentioned in having anything to do with this program other than reporting it is just a function of the DOGE gang responding like children to things they don’t understand, and Trump just being Trump about anything that might indict his own large scale social deceptions. CNN notes that as reported by the Washington Post
The nature of the contract was described, in the brief and vague manner typical of federal contract descriptions, as “ACTIVE SOCIAL ENGINEERING DEFENSE (ASED) LARGE SCALE SOCIAL DECEPTION (LSD).” Those words might sound nefarious to someone who did no further research – but even before the Defense Department provided its Friday comment, there was ample public information on what the contract was about.
DARPA explained on its website that it was seeking to develop technology to “automatically identify, disrupt, and investigate social engineering attacks” – attacks known as “social engineering” because they try to deceive or “engineer” humans into performing certain actions, like clicking on links to malicious software, divulging sensitive information or giving up money.
For example, a foreign adversary might have operatives posing online as attractive potential dating matches to lure members of the US military into revealing information to them or granting them access to sensitive systems. While seeking competitive bids in 2017, the Pentagon publicly outlined its desire to create its own highly sophisticated bots to figure out who is behind these kinds of attacks.
Of course the principle “foreign adversary” is Russia. Trump and his “national security” apparatchiks know this, and what Musk his junior-league cohorts without any ethical or moral training in DOGE are merely doing what Russian hackers have been doing for years, except that Musk and company are actually doing real damage to the American people. Naturally Trump doesn’t want you to know any of this, so he has as his head of national “intelligence” Kremlin mouthpiece Tulsi Gabbard, who Republican senators again made hypocrites of themselves by confirming in that position.
The New York Times is reporting today that
The Trump administration is targeting government officials who had been flagging foreign interference in U.S. elections, despite continuing concerns that adversaries are stoking political and social divisions by spreading propaganda and disinformation online, current and former government officials said.
The administration has already reassigned several dozen officials working on the issue at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and forced out others at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of the Department of Homeland Security, they said.
The cuts have focused on people who were not only combating false content online but also working on broader safeguards to protect elections from cyberattacks or other attempts to disrupt voting systems. In last year’s election, the teams tracked and publicized numerous influence operations from Russia, China and Iran to blunt their impact on unsuspecting voters.
Experts are alarmed that the cuts could leave the United States defenseless against covert foreign influence operations and embolden foreign adversaries seeking to disrupt democratic governments.
We know what Russia is about, as do holdout Republican Senators John Kennedy and Roger Wicker, the latter who said in an impromptu news conference that he thought Putin should not only be arrested for war crimes but even “executed.” But not Trump, who is the first president in history to actively cavort with a man indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity; Russia still mainly targets civilian neighborhoods with its missile attacks in Ukrainian cities, and is accused of mass killings of civilians during its “occupation” of Ukrainian territory near Kyiv early in the war.
Trump is seen as a “friend” to Russia by Russian media. And why not? Former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, posted this comment this comment about what Trump is “offering” Putin in return for –nothing?
McFaul also notes that while Putin is demanding new elections in the hopes that Ukrainians will betray the man who stood-up to Putin’s Nazi-style aggression, and only when it became clear early in the war that Ukrainians were going to fight for their freedom, did the U.S. and the West give-up the empty words and decided to send them military and financial assistance. Naturally there was no call for free and fair elections in Russia, where opposition candidates are either barred from running or are arrested:
McFaul also implies that he is under no illusions that the “peace plan” being proposed by Putin with the apparent support of Trump is a fraud, and even Russian media admits it is a delaying tactic that again requires that Ukraine make all the concessions while Russia is allowed to re-build its forces in order to “finish” what they still intended this war to accomplish.
The invasion of Ukraine, beginning with the Crimea, as pointed out here 1 , was entirely without justification. Ukraine was solely interested in its own sovereignty, which Putin only “recognized” so long as Ukraine “behaved” as nothing more than a satellite state with a Russian puppet as president, bending to its will. If any country was acting “Nazi,” it is Russia under Putin. The fact that Trump is threatening Canada, Panama and Greenland indicates that Trump also has dreams of “empire.”
We know that Putin only wants to end the war only on his terms, and that his friend Trump is all in to aid him in this. The Kremlin media, as is made perfectly clear in EADaily commentary, has no concern about the state of the economy or the lives lost in Russia; the West can go on crying, but Russia will not be deterred, and even suggests here that non-Russian controlled territory in eastern Europe is only so because of NATO “peacekeepers”:
Let us remind you that in accordance with our interests and signifying the achievement of the goals set before SMO, for Russia is the establishment of control over the entire territory of Ukraine. If some land where it is necessary to restore order (demilitarize and denazify the population) turns out to be outside our borders, and even under the "supervision" of the so-called peacekeepers from the EU and NATO (which is ultimately the same thing), then it is impossible to achieve the desired result for us.
The article goes to suggest that any “agreement” between Putin and Trump is simply a “peaceful pause” to “defeat the enemy later,” since the eventual absorption of all Ukraine is in the “national interest”:
This means that Russia should, or rather, must use the peaceful respite that has arisen to put the economy on a war footing as quickly and completely as possible. It may even be necessary to nationalize some of the strategic enterprises (large metallurgical enterprises in the first place) if their owners do not understand the importance of the moment and do not abandon the slogan "profit first" and replace it with "The Fatherland is in danger! All for the defense of the Motherland!".
Yeah, that’s right: Russia started this war because they wanted to take all of Ukraine after starting off with the Crimea in 2014. Trump calling Zelensky a “dictator,” claiming he “started” the war, that he has done a “terrible job” protecting his country from Russian conquest, that he could have “ended” it any time he wanted to, that Ukraine had a “chair at the table” for three years—this has rightly angered even many Republicans. Of course none dare call treason against this country treason, and what Trump is doing is treason, because he is handing our security into the hands of Putin, turning this country into a Russian poodle…
…trying to take the easy route to end a conflict that he is also responsible for by giving Putin the false sense that this country would sit idly by while he invaded one country after another. Trump sold out the Afghan government to the Taliban, and we saw what happened when he tried to reach a “peace deal” with North Korea. He is a traitor to every ideal this country stands for, and he is selling out this country’s moral authority to a dictator, who he has done everything he can to be like him in this country, even to the point of suggesting he is a “king.”
We are seeing in real time the destruction of what this country once was by a certified megalomaniac. Russian media sees it just as clearly as many do here—although from the vantage point that Russia has a real "friend" in Trump who "understands" them.
Politico points out that the “talks” in Saudi Arabia deliberately excluded Europe and Ukraine because “a member of the Russian delegation, Yuri Ushakov, a key Kremlin foreign policy adviser since 2012 and former Russian ambassador to the U.S., also highlighted how the talks are being focused on Russian-U.S. relations.” That means it is Russia which is directing the “negotiations,” not Trump, for whom flattering his ego is all he craves.
Politico notes that “Preparing for possible Ukrainian peace negotiations is being portrayed in the Russian media almost as secondary in the bigger picture of Putin and Trump coming together to decide the shape of a new multipolar world order…In the Russian narrative it is the Americans who are at last catching up with a prescient Putin and coming round to his way of thinking.” That is to say, far-right beliefs in regard to “culture,” society and climate change.
Politico also observes that the Kremlin is “keen to ensure that Putin is seen in the driver’s seat and not Trump”—in other words, to make Trump look “passive” and “weak.” Thus far we see Trump repeating Putin’s talking points about Zelensky, when it is the latter who has shown more strength than anyone thought possible when the war started. Russia’s failure is being minimized with the “Russian media being instructed to portray Kyiv and the Europeans as unimportant and weak and increasingly losing any purchase on the course of events.
Also, judging from the Russian media coverage, a second aim is to establish that any possible end to the war will not only be decided bilaterally between Moscow and Washington and everyone else should be seen as bit players — and that any settlement will largely be on Russian terms.”
Indeed, it is Trump who is weak and willing to give-up this country’s and its allies credibility on the world stage for virtually nothing, something only a traitor to this country would do.
