How large a reward
Wait what?
In an echo of the Yalta Conference in 1945, the American and Russian leaders will talk on Tuesday about who gets what in the process of ending the war in Ukraine.
How is that an echo of the Yalta Conference???
At the Yalta Conference, the three heads of state were allies, however uncomfortably. At Yalta, the other team was the aggressor.
Here’s a shocker: Russia is not a US ally. I know Trump doesn’t get that, but the Times certainly should. Here’s another shocker: Russia is the aggressor in this war.
Trump handing Ukraine bound and gagged over to Putin does not resemble the Yalta Conference.
But talking to reporters on Air Force One while returning from Florida on Sunday night, Mr. Trump made clear that his scheduled phone conversation with Mr. Putin on Tuesday would be focused on what lands and assets Russia would retain in any cease-fire with Ukraine.
He will, in essence, be negotiating over how large a reward Russia will receive for its 11 years of open aggression against Ukraine, starting with its seizure of Crimea in 2014 and extending through the full-scale war Mr. Putin started three years ago. White House aides have made clear that Russia will certainly retain Crimea — in one of those odd twists of history, the location of the weeklong Yalta Conference in February 1945 — and strongly suggested it would get almost all of the territory it holds.
…
Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, said on “Meet the Press” on NBC over the weekend that he expected the talks with Russia to be pragmatic, and he deflected any discussion of whether Russia was being rewarded for its aggression. (As a member of Congress, Mr. Waltz was a vocal defender of Ukraine and its sovereignty. As the head of Mr. Trump’s National Security Council, he has avoided stating the obvious, that Russia began the war.)
I hope he has trouble sleeping.
The ominous conclusion:
In an interview, Professor Toft said that land expansion “is what Putin wants, and it’s obviously what Trump wants — just look at Greenland and Panama and Canada.”
She continued: “This is what these leaders think they need to do to make their countries great again.”
“The big question mark is China,” she added. The outcome of the negotiations — and particularly the question of whether Mr. Putin is rewarded for what has been a brutally expensive war, “may indicate what will happen if Xi Jinping decides he wants to take Taiwan.”
That Trump will say “Go right ahead.”
The similarity with Yalta is the ‘who gets what’. At Yalta, the Americans and Russians drew a line, nobody asked the Poles and the Czechs, etc. This time around, no one is asking the Ukrainians
1945’s “spheres of influence” have now devolved to 2025’s “gang territory”. Trump isn’t even pretending to “protect” anyone, but is horse trading for Russian non-interference in his construction of Fortress North America. Of course, Putin will continue to disrupt American politics just as much as he can. The best time to kick an opponent is when he’s down; Trump doesn’t even realize that this is the position he’s in.
Naif, correct.
Forget the myth of alliances, because the minute Hitler was defeated any pretense of an alliance between UK/USA on one hand and USSR on the other was dissolved. What Hitler failed to achieve was in large part achieved by the USSR with not a moment’s thought for the occupants of the lands so freely given away by Churchill and Roosevelt.
This is Yalta, all over again, the playground bullies deciding who can have what few crumbs they let fall from their table. We’ve seen this movie before.
Koreans were not asked if they wanted their country, newly liberated from Japan, to be split asunder. That was done without their consultation or agreement. Millions died.
The same goes for Vietnamese, finally liberated from the French yoke only to be subjugated by the USA before they’d fully celebrated independence. millions died.
India was partitioned without reference to the inhabitants of that ancient land. Millions died.
And who the fuck consulted Palestinians about handing their land, farms, and businesses over to refugees from Europe’s wars? Millions died.
A long and proud tradition of the strong fucking over the weak.
This is so utterly disgusting:-
‘Donald Trump began his conversation with Vladimir Putin with a simple demand: a 30-day ceasefire on land, sea and air which Ukraine has already signed up to, as an initial measure on which to build towards a peace.
Instead, what the US president got from Putin were questions, half-offers and limited concessions – and, above all, an extraordinary demand from the Russian leader to weaken Ukraine that would make a mockery of any peace agreement.
The “key condition” for resolving the conflict, the Kremlin said in a statement after the call, should be “the complete cessation of foreign military aid and the provision of intelligence information to Kyiv”.’
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/19/so-bold-are-putins-ceasefire-demands-its-hard-to-believe-he-is-entirely-serious
Bad news for Ukraine, good news for hockey players:-
“the Kremlin emphasised that Ukraine would remain shut out from the talks. “The leaders confirmed their intention to continue efforts to achieve a Ukrainian settlement in a bilateral mode,” negotiations that also restore legitimacy to a country whose aggression and war crimes had left it isolated and sanctioned by the west.
The positive is that talks continue, though the concern must be that Russia will use them to try to detach the US from Europe. In the meantime, Trump and Putin did also agree to organise ice hockey matches between players in the American and Russian leagues. The puck, at least, does not stop here.”
And now we cheer Germany re-arming:-
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/18/german-mps-approve-500bn-spending-boost-to-counter-putin-war-of-aggression
These are strange times.
How is it a “positive” that those talks continue???
Strange foul disgusting horrifying times.
Is the echo Yalta or Molotov-Ribbentrop?
Once it was Poland on the table being cut in two, between the Nazis and the Communists. Today Trump seems to feel bigger if he can wear Ribbentrop’s shoes and cut Ukraine in half.
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as though someone, somewhere mentioned German rearmament and could use a couple of thousand words in exegesis from someone in Germany. I will try to economise, and take the comments in reverse order (at least of those extant at time of writing).
Papito: I understand the impulse to grab onto Molotov-Ribbentrop, but this analogy is…inapt, for several reasons. Namely, for the analogy to at all hold, it would have to be be the modern-day USA playing the role of the USSR and modern-day Russia playing the role of the National Socialists. It just doesn’t work, however.
Sure, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union both “carved up” Poland (with the USSR even claiming to be “saving Slavs from National Socialist aggression”, which is literally Putin’s fig-leaf for greenlighting the insurrection in 2014), but that’s about where the similarities end…and basing the analogy on these similarities would make *any* real international diplomacy to end a war that isn’t explicitly in the underdog’s favour analogous to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. That clearly will not do. It, in fact, clearly will don’t.
Molotov-Rippentrop was negotiated in secret (or at least the part of it that everyone means when they say “Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact”, the secret bits which divvied up Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe amongst the two players — there were also a bunch of pedestrian clauses about non-aggression amongst the signatories, and also probably resources and trade and junk, which were publicly announced through diplomatic channels). To wit, the pact was signed *before* the Nazis invaded, and entailed a belated invasion by the Soviet Union (which saw the Nazis having to give up hard-won ground and also saw the Katyn Massacre, among other horrors).
The contemporary United States attempted to shake Zelensky down for some minerals in the leadup to that spectacular spat at the White House a few weeks back, and I’m sure there’ve been plenty of questionable dealings across the Biden and first Trump administrations, but nothing the United States has done rises to the level of actually invading the country, massacring its generals and intellectuals, and annexing its territory after the other party’s signatory has already defeated it militarily and placed the better part of it under martial law.
There was also an unspoken third party to Molotov-Ribbentrop, or at least which weighed in that pact’s hammerings-out, namely the Franco-British alliance who cynically guaranteed Poland’s independance in order to legitimise their declaration of war on Nazi Germany. Not only did the Brits and the Frenchies barely lift a finger to stave off Germany’s invasion once it launched, they turned a completely blind eye to the Soviet Union’s adventurism in Poland so as to avoid driving the two into an unholy formal alliance that may well have been unbeatable. Once Poland actually fell (so stopped being independent), the Allies were all to happy to integrate the remains of the Polish military into France and then Britain’s defence — rather an inversion of a guarantee of independence.
Nothing so chicanerous has happened with the Ukraine. There was a mass movement against corruption, capped off by a US-sponsored coup, followed by a few exhuberant Ukrainian Nazis overplaying their hand and giving Putin whatever thin pretense he felt he needed to violate his own government’s “permanent” guarantee of Ukrainian sovereignty by astroturfing an insurrection, and eventually a war to reassert Russian suzeiranty over Ukraine. This war surprised the whole world (especially Putin, but not a little bit the United States also) by how resilient and tenacious the Ukrainians defended themselves from the invaders (very much including a great deal of help from the United States, even from Trump’s first administration, over more than a decade of war and counting).
Putin doubtless thought it would follow in the same vein as his adventure in Georgia in 2008, or perhaps his intervention into Khazakhstan literally a couple of weeks before the Ukrainian “hot war” in 2022 — that he would either bring the extant government into line or he would be able to overthrow it and replace it with a government more amenable to Russian domination…perhaps even legitimise the transfer of Crimea and Donetsk/Lughansk (as he’d achieved with Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, way back when). But Putin didn’t give up once those goals proved untenable. He showed himself willing to throw away as many Russian lives as it took to achieve something he could tout as a victory.
That pseudo-victory may be at hand. Ukraine may have to resign itself to a bitter peace in which it loses a significant chunk of its eastern territory. But even if this occurs, and even if the United States plays a role in securing it, it will not have been a reprise of Molotov-RIbbentrop. I am not prone to histrionics, but I would imagine it may be offensive to some of the better-informed Poles to suggest it is.
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Ophelia, it is “positive” because hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have been killed or maimed and many millions have had their lives disturbed, and there is precious little chance of that stopping until the man in Moscow says “uncle”, and there is precious little chance of *that* happening until he can say he won. Even then, it is almost certainly only a matter of time before he or whoever succeeds him launch another adventure in Eastern Europe.
I am not a pacifist, and I do believe it is up to the Ukrainians to decide when they’ve had enough, but even I can see there is some silver lining to be gained from any kind of ceasefire. Even if that ceasefire is only provisory, doomed to futility in the fullness of time, a day of peace is worth quite a bit to quite a number of people.
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KBPlayer: It is a thing greatly to be wished that the United States detaches itself from Europe. It would be concomitantly great if they took a couple of million of the refugees their Middle Eastern wars caused with them as they left, though that is almost certainly not going to happen. But rest assured that the German “rearmament” will almost certainly be a boondoggle — and not just because it is not coming with any desperately-needed bureaucratic reforms, without which 500 billion Euros will be ground up and turned to dust with maybe a few dozen fighting vehicles to show for it, but no capable armed forces to speak of.
The incoming Chancellor has negotiated an unprecedented parliamentary manoeuvre in which he has relied on the extant government, which fell and was voted out but still has plenary powers for a few weeks until the new government forms, to effectively reform the constitution.
In order to get the Greens and the Social Democrats (who were the second and first biggest losers of the election, mind, and whose government Germans overwhelmingly rejected at the ballot box just a couple of weeks ago) on board, Chancellor-apparent Merz has given each of them everything they could have ever dreamed of — namely, a pledge for “climate neutrality” (whatever the hell that means) by 2045, *and* undefined “infrastructure”, *and* being able to label basically anything “national defence” in order to borrow money for it unaccounted for by the constitutional “debt brake”.
Note that Merz campaigned heavily, explicitly against reforming the “debt brake”; it was his main cudgel *against* the Greens and the SPD, that they were a bunch of drunken spendthrifts preparing to snatch the national purse and tip it over, and he was the sober keeper of the purse strings, prepared to fend them off at any political cost. I cannot overstate how short-sighted, cynical, and unutterably *stupid* this course of events is.
Or perhaps it’s genious. An incoming chancellor breaking his main campaign promise and giving the outgoing government everything they ever wanted before his own government can properly form is surely not going to backfire or have any negative consequences whatsoever. It certainly isn’t going to lead to great swathes of Germans feeling betrayed by the “democratic parties”, and it can surely only weaken the dastardly AfD, who undemocratically keep insisting that the government of Germany should actually occasionally give German voters what they want.
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The very Reverend Brindley: Please do feel free to stop shoe-horning Palestine into every goddamned post you make. If “millions died” from Israeli aggression in Palestine, there wouldn’t *be any* Palestinians. There are only about 5.5 million of them in Palestine, after all. According to Palestine’s own government (however reliable they are), there have been fewer than 150,000 Arab casualties in all of the conflicts in the region since the formation of Israel. Many fewer Israelis died in same, so you can’t sneakily assert that your “millions” also accounts for the “other side”.
Millions of Jews were, of course, slaughtered in the Second World War — in the Holocaust by Bullets, and in work camps, and in factories whose main product was human ashes. But I somehow doubt you were thinking of them when you wrote “millions died”, whichever time you did. I am no friend of Israel (not that anyone asked me, but I think the Jewish State should have been put on Long Island, with Manhattan being something of a condominium), but even I raise an eyebrow at you having such a hatred of Israel that you so easily transpose your catchy tagline from the other conflicts you listed in order to ascribe to them at least an order of magnitude more deaths than those for which they are at all conceivably responsible. And nevermind that pretty much every war Israel’s had has been either defensive or retaliatory in nature, which necessarily dilutes Israeli responsibility somewhat.
By the by, a couple of months ago, for New Year’s Eve, a Palestinian “influencer” travelled from West Jordan to Berlin and filmed himself shooting a rocket directly into an apartment window. He was quite surprised that the police detained him at the Berlin Airport, claimed not to understand how rockets worked, and also claimed that he’d worked out a private arrangement with the apartment’s (Lebanese) owner and there was no need for the police to be further involved (and in fact that their involvement was proof of their racism). Now, West Jordan isn’t the Gaza Strip, but it *is* under Israeli occupation and de-facto control; if Israel were as genocidal as you say, how in the hell could this young Palestinian man have risen to become an “influencer” in the first place, much less freely travelled to Germany (and attempted to travel back from there) in order to make such a nuisance of himself?
Or probably don’t bother answering that; this thread had nothing to do with Israel or Palestine before you arrived, and my own observations are not helping matters in that regard.
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YnnB: The United States of America remains the most dominant military and economic force on the planet, rest assured. Putin has proven nothing except that his very best soldiers cannot best an outnumbered, shoddily-equipped, barely-trained enemy as long as that enemy is convicted of spirit and in possession of NATO weapons at least fifteen years out of date. Unless Putin is completely delusional, he will understand that he can offer no conventional military threat to European NATO countries, much less to the United States. He’s even had to rely upon that military juggernaut, North Korea, both for weapons and for cannon fodder; now, you might consider this some kind of geopolitical eight-dimensional chess, but it hardly bespeaks a leader at the height of his power and influence.
Russian influence is of course nothing to ignore. I find a distressing number of my aquaintances and even a few of my friends bathed in Russian disinformation (such as how the United States supposedly promised Russia that NATO would not expand eastward, when the actual promise was to the Soviet Union that non-German NATO troops and nuclear weapons would not be stationed in the former East Germany upon German reunification), or otherwise deluded to think that Russian domination of Europe would be better than American domination, or the contradiction that a thousand Ukrainian Nazis toppled the government with the help of a few American agents against the popular will but two thousand Russian goons couldn’t possibly impose martial law in Lughansk and Donestk and astroturf an insurrection, or the even deeper contradiction that the NATO expansion weakened Russia but, if it hadn’t happened, Russia would have been too weak to have reasserted its influence in Eastern Europe in a way it has in fact done in the face of that NATO expansion. Having to deal with such tedious nonsense is exhausting, and demoralising, and above all boring.
But Europe, and America, have longstanding structural and ideological problems which cannot be laid at Putin’s feet. Of course he has meddled, and may have even tipped the balance a decade ago with Brexit and with Trump’s ascendancy, but he didn’t architect these things; they were the result of longstanding decay, itself largely brought about by the ennui of having actually won the Cold War and finding ourselves at what we mistook for the End of History. If Russia hadn’t lifted a finger to play the game of geopolitics, things wouldn’t look much different — perhaps the UK would still be in the EU, but it (and the EU as a whole) would still be awash in millions of refugees from America’s Forever Wars; maybe Trump wouldn’t have won in 2016, but he almost certainly would have in 2020; and Western support for Ukraine would have been even greater.
But Russia played geopolitics, as America did, as the EU and China and India and the various African and Arabian states have, both in recent and in distant memory. Wishing they had not done so is a child’s wish, and that is fine, as far as it goes; the heart of a child is a precious thing, something we should all strive to hold within our breasts. But we are men, and women, and we are tasked with taking the world as it comes and not as we would wish it to be.
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Naif: Quite.
I know that hasn’t changed, but what has is the guy at the top, who seems to use his ego-gratification and petty grievances as his guides to foreign relations. With huge swathes of the US government reduced or dismantled, with career officers and workers let go, who’s minding the shop? What happens when those departments tasked with watching American opponents try to report to higher-ups who won’t listen because Trump isn’t interested? Can strategic vision and vigilance be maintained from the bottom up in the face of hostility from the top down? Are institutions now guided by the naked, personal self-interest of one man going to be able to serve the national interest of the United States in those many instances where those interests are going to diverge? The United States is certainly not “weak,” but I would say that it is now unreliable, erratic, and rudderless. That can result in vulnerability that adversaries will seek to exploit.