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Full Episode
So yesterday, President Trump decided that he was going to go whole hog on Vladimir Zelensky. The Trump team is in Saudi Arabia negotiating with the Russian team over the end of the Ukraine war. Ukraine is not present in these negotiations, a matter of some consternation in Ukraine. And let's be very clear about that. Where I stand when it comes to the Ukraine war, Russia attacked Ukraine.
There is no good reason for Russia to attack Ukraine. Russia's goal in attacking Ukraine was to take over all of Ukraine up to and including Kiev and originally to kill Vladimir Zelensky and anyone else who is ruling in power and who is not going to act as a puppet of the Putin regime. None of this is speculative. That is all just the reality in February of 2022.
Now, Ukraine did a masterful job of fending off that attack. And by summer of that year, it was very clear that basically a stalemate had set in. And despite all of the best attempts by the Europeans and the half-hearted attempts by the Biden administration to provide Ukraine with additional arms, the lines just weren't moving that much.
And so since summer of 2022, the lines have been pretty much set. The Donbass area has been occupied by Russia. Crimea has been occupied by Russia. And love nor money is not going to move Russia forward. off of that particular land, not unless the Biden administration was willing to do much more, which they simply were not. What does that mean?
It means that any sort of settlement between Russia and Ukraine was always going to have the following basic outline. One, Russia was going to retain control over Donbass and Crimea. Because otherwise, there was no off-ramp for Russia.
Vladimir Putin was not going to lose face as the dictator of Russia and simply hand back territory that had originally been invaded in 2014 and has been held by Russia ever since. That was number one. Ukraine was not going to win back that territory. It was a victory for Ukraine simply to continue existing in the face of the Russian bear.
Number two, Ukraine was going to have to have some pretty significant security guarantees to make sure that Putin didn't just do this again. One of Putin's demands was that Ukraine essentially disarm. That was never going to be a going concern. It was never going to happen. So that was always going to be the outline of the deal. Security guarantees for Ukraine. Russia keeps Donbass and Crimea.
That was always how this was going to look. It's been this way for almost three years at this point. Now, there's some other additional elements that President Trump, as the president, is throwing into the mix. One of those is that he believes the United States has spent an exorbitant amount of money in Ukraine, and somehow Ukraine should repay all of that money forthwith.
And so he's got a couple of proposals on the table for that. One of those proposals was a sort of economic proposal that was pretty punitive with regard to Ukraine's future industry. Now, the case in favor of that particular economic proposal, which effectively speaking, forced...
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