The whole world is dancing to the tune of one madman. Yesterday, we had the sheer insanity of seeing no less than seven European leaders rushing to Washington to bend the knee to deranged Donald Trump, the convicted felon, fraudster, adjudicated rapist, and complete ignoramus. It is all incredibly depressing. He only ran in 2024 to avoid being impeached for treason and, to ensure a win, he had to make fantasy promises, one being to achieve peace in Ukraine in 24 hours. That was eight months ago. Now he’s way out of his depth and desperately trying to get any kind of settlement, regardless of what the long-term implications are for Europe.
The New York Times says the ‘stampede’ of leaders to the US appears to have paid off. At least it didn’t end up in a brawl, and the peace process is still on track. This is how we measure success nowadays. You can read the BBC's four takeaways HERE.
The main purpose of the meeting was to prevent President Zelensky from being humiliated and forced to accept a humiliating surrender to Putin, the worst mass murderer of the 21st century so far. They succeeded, but it shouldn't have been necessary.
Trump told the world’s press that Putin 'wanted peace.' This is like asking us to believe that a bully beating a frail old lady to a pulp is sympathetic and really wants to stop, but can’t bring himself to do it until the old lady hands over her handbag and everything she owns.
Meanwhile, Trump, effectively the world’s policeman, looks on, suggests it's the old lady's fault for starting it all, and she really must stop fighting back because the bully is stronger! There is not the slightest moral equivalence between the bully and the bullied, except in Trump's twisted version of reality.
Russia has demanded that Ukraine hand over the rest of the Donbas, huge areas that it doesn’t even control now, and at the current rate of progress, will take another 4.4 years and cost Russia another 1.9 million casualties. This is according to an intelligence update from the UK Ministry of Defence.
Posted by the UK Ministry of Defence on X. “…it would take Russian forces approximately 4.4 more years to gain 100 per cent of the four Ukrainian oblasts territory.” and ”…4.4 more years of war would lead to approximately 1,930,000 further Russian casualties (killed and wounded).”— jobytheway.bsky.social (@jobytheway.bsky.social) 17 August 2025 at 10:42
The parts of Ukraine it does occupy have been almost completely levelled with indiscriminate shelling, bombing and murder for three and a half years. Now, Putin, having failed militarily, wants Zelensky to simply surrender a bit more. We don’t yet know what Ukraine will find politically acceptable, but I doubt it includes that.
And as I posted on Sunday, I have also seen suggestions that Russia will, in return, offer a firm commitment to refrain from attacking Ukraine or any other European country in the future. This is the bully telling the watching cop that if he gets the handbag and a bit more, he won’t assault any other women - and the cop is considering this a reasonable solution. Think how this would go down in any civilised country.
Russia is doing what all bullies do. It’s congenital.
To sugarcoat the bitter pill, Trump hinted vaguely at the weekend that the US might provide some sort of security guarantees, and every European leader talked that up yesterday, presumably in a coordinated fashion, to make it harder for Trump to backpedal. I would be surprised if it made any difference to him. He would do a U-turn without thinking about it.
This is how Trump is being manipulated. Last week, he was clearly going to get Russia to agree to a ceasefire, or there would be “consequences.” This week, the Washington Post said the president “continued to maintain” that no ceasefire was needed. This U-turn came immediately after he met with Putin. Now the Europeans have got him to agree to provide security guarantees, something he has refused up to now. Trump has no firm ideas of his own and is always at the mercy of others.
Putin also convinced him last Friday that mail-in ballots are a big problem, and he has now vowed to campaign for all-paper ballots and the scrapping of voting machines. I am not sure this will benefit him at all, and it may prove costly - if anything ever comes of it, which is not guaranteed.
It was notable that all the European leaders spoke like serious politicians and international diplomats while Trump rambled like a crime boss, a mobster. He stood out like a sore thumb for the inanity and emptiness of his utterings, yet everybody normalises it.
At one point, Trump left the meeting of European leaders to call Putin, giving the blood-stained Russian dictator the appearance of having control of the agenda. This was to get him to accept a trilateral meeting with Zelensky before the end of August. The call apparently lasted 90 minutes so he may have been hard to persuade, but it seems that he has accepted.
Call me a cynic, but I don't believe the trilateral meeting will take place or that Russia will accept security guarantees being given to Ukraine by the USA. Putin will find an excuse and make demands that Zelensky cannot accept.
Putin has always maintained the Ukrainian war can't be stopped until its "root causes" are addressed, but what are they? He, Foreign Minister Lavrov and his official spokesman have struggled to articulate a reason for attacking a peaceful neighbour. Russia has suggested various causes in the past:
- Ukraine is not really a sovereign country anyway
- It's full of Nazis
- The eastward expansion of NATO is the big issue
- Russian speakers in the Donbas need to be protected
If the expansion of NATO was the problem, the war has forced Sweden and Finland (which has an 800 Km border with Russia) to join NATO with barely a peep from Putin. And if protecting Russian speakers in Donbas was the problem, why launch an attack on Kyiv hundreds of miles to the west in 2022?
Russia has been at war with America for a century, not a hot war but one fought diplomatically, economically and socially. It can’t confront America openly because it would lose, but successive Soviet and Russian leaders have sanctioned and funded every kind of destabilising action, short of actual fighting, in order to weaken US global leadership, which it resents and always has.
Every president up until Trump has operated on that basis. What has Russia got on him?
