Trump insists Ukraine join the US in committing 'suicide'

All it took was one phone call from you guessed who.

It was just a month ago when Donald Trump posted, “I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form.”

Now, Trump is demanding that Ukraine make concessions to Vladimir Putin that match or nearly match those dictated by Vladimir Putin.

Reuters has a summary of last Friday’s conversation at the White House between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy almost immediately following Putin and Trump's phone call:

“It was pretty bad,” one of the sources said of the meeting. “The message was, ‘Your country will freeze, and your country will be destroyed’” if Ukraine doesn’t make a deal with Russia.

A separate source denied that Trump said Ukraine would be “destroyed.”

Both sources said, however, that Trump resorted to profanity several times.

Two sources had the impression that Trump was influenced by a Thursday call with Russian President Vladimir Putin. During that call, according to The Washington Post, Putin proposed a territorial swap in which Ukraine would cede the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in return for small parts of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.

One of the sources said that U.S. officials proposed precisely that swap to Zelenskiy (Reuters’ spelling) on Friday.

Ukrainians see major strategic value in the portion of Donetsk and Luhansk that they still hold — they believe giving up that territory would make the rest of Ukraine much more vulnerable to Russian offensives, said one of the people briefed about the meeting. That source argued that giving up western Donetsk and Luhansk would amount to an act of “suicide.”

Trump’s early fall fling with supporting Ukraine’s freedom and refusing to reward Putin’s invasion had been one of the few surprising aspects of this regime. In nearly every other way, it has been as bad or worse than I expected last January when I committed my life to trying to keep it from power. Now the romance makes far more sense.

Melania Trump’s pose as an advocate of the Ukrainian people has evolved into legitimizing Putin’s mass kidnappings of Ukrainian children in exchange for 8 of the nearly 17,500 children still in Russian captivity. And Trump is back raving, though this time less publicly, at Zelenskyy, making demands for a ceasefire that is unlikely to end the overall war or present any security for the civilians who have faced invasion and bombardment, much as he did in Gaza, where Israel continues to strike almost daily.

You could argue this is all part of Trump’s continuing lust for “credit”—his desire to present himself as a peacemaker while murdering civilians in the Caribbean and preparing to launch an illegal war in Venezuela fits no form of logic other than that of an authoritarian strongman obsessed with distraction and domination.

But I’d urge you to look deeper.

Marcy Wheeler has documented for years how Putin’s 2016 attack on the American elections was designed brilliantly. It turned the hug Russia’s dictator offered our willing, wannabe dictator into a vise. The result, she says, is America’s “hegemonic suicide,” with the crucial twists applied by Donald J. Trump.

And we may be now witnessing the vise tightening across Europe.

Even European leaders seem to be signaling that they understand that Trump’s sudden and eager insistence on delivering Putin part of Ukraine—a condition of the quid-pro-quo Paul Manafort was offered by Russian-linked operatives in 2016—may be the long-telegraphed moment they’ve feared: Where Trump either abandons NATO or seeks to make it functionally irrelevant. While they are offering Zelenskyy their support, they have refused to back Ukraine’s core demand that Putin’s invasion not be rewarded with Ukrainian territory.

In nearly every way, this seems to be unfolding in ideal ways for Putin, who had recently seen his fortunes and overwhelming manpower advantage in Ukraine flipped against him. Perhaps, it’s even a plan he laid out in detail during a car ride in Alaska, as Marcy noted when she recorded the video above in mid-September.

The worst dictator of our time has cornered Trump, who is helping him corner Europe, which will now corner Zelensky to accept a ceasefire that’s less a relief than more a foothold for Putin to continue his pillaging at his convenience.

And if it doesn’t work out, Trump has an excuse to destroy NATO, offering Putin the prize of a lifetime, dearer to the former KGB agent than any Nobel.

The destruction of the Western Alliance, Trump’s targeted attack on democracy at home and abroad, and the end of any pretensions to a rules-based order are Putin’s spoils of the most successful intelligence operation of at least this century.

And, remarkably, Trump’s malevolence, arrogance, and hatred of the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence have resulted in even more gains for Xi than Putin, as the president of the United States does everything he can to make China the superpower of the 21st century and beyond.

Trump truly believes he can convince a country of some 38 million to commit national suicide. And why not? He’s done the same to a country of 340 million.

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