Op-Ed: When unreality rules – Trump’s impossible position on Ukraine is destroying America’s credibility
By Paul Wallis
The Donetsk region has become one of the main flashpoints of the fighting. — © AFP Genya SAVILOV
The many falling idols of America now seem to include, above all, routine total ignorance or understanding of the interests of American allies and total lack of interest in America’s enemies. Never mind the Tomahawks. Trump’s insistence on a Russian “win” in Ukraine is antagonizing allies and making America look weak.
The bizarre global headlines regarding the recent Zelensky meeting with Trump make it clear how much of an incoherent mess American foreign policy has become. This meeting was even worse than the one in February, and at least equally counterproductive.
The Ukrainians have said from day one they won’t cede territory, and that they want the 2014 borders restored. They have absolutely no reason to even consider any compromise.
The military and geopolitical facts tell a very unambiguous story:
Military
The military situation has been tracked since day one. The current situation is obvious. Russian offensives have monotonously failed for years and continue to do so, even with North Korean “help”. Casualties on the Russian side are appalling.
The Russian army has taken extraordinary casualties and defeats far beyond any level of acceptance for modern military forces.
The vaunted bombardment of Ukraine is largely because they can’t do much else.
The Ukrainians are responding effectively to every Russian move, and in fact retaking territory.
The Russian position in Crimea is untenable, a total tactical and strategic liability.
Even the upkeep of Russian forces seems unsustainable. Logistics have been terrible since 2023.
Troop effectiveness is highly questionable. The forces being deployed haven’t even been effective enough to move 20km in any direction and hold ground.
Tactical agility and mobility are bordering on absurd. Russian troops are using mules, quad bikes, and pickup trucks due to a lack of dedicated military transport.
On what basis is Russia “winning” anything at all? This war is turning into one of the worst, most prolonged defeats of a major army in history.
Geopolitical
This geopolitical position must and will change.
On whatever absurd basis, Trump has taken a unilaterally pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian stance. This is in diametric opposition to the new European stance, which is anti-Russian and pro-Ukrainian.
Last time this sort of catastrophic failure happened, the Soviet Union collapsed. The Afghanistan war was lost, and the USSR was broke, as Russia now seems to be becoming. The entire Soviet economy broke down suddenly and permanently.
Russian separatists are gnawing at the fringes of the Russian Federation. A long history of various groups indicates some level of resistance inside Russia. The Moscow Times also ran a story on Russia banning a “non-existent anti-Russian separatist movement”. Anyone’s guess what that means in practice.
Nor is the administration’s constantly dismissive view of Ukraine in line with any known reality. Ukraine isn’t some bit player. The Ukrainians are now front and center in global realpolitik. Ukraine has many friends and allies around the world.
The really strange thing is this.
There is absolutely no direct or indirect current or future benefit to the US in promoting Russian demands.
The world has had enough of drama queens.
_____________________________________________________________________
Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
Here’s Why Russia’s Vladimir Putin Is Fixated On Ukraine’s Donbas – Analysis
RFE RL
By Mike Eckel
At a tense White House meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, US President Donald Trump pushed the Ukrainian leader, telling him he would probably have to give up swaths of Ukrainian land to end the war with Russia.
“We think that what they should do is just stop at the lines where they are, the battle lines,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One two days later. “The rest is very tough to negotiate if you’re going to say, ‘You take this, we take that.'”
“Let it be cut the way it is. It’s cut up right now. I think 78 percent of the land is already taken by Russia,” he said on October 19. “You leave it the way it is right now. They can…negotiate something later on down the line.”
Trump was referring in large part to land in a section of eastern and southeastern Ukraine known as the Donbas.
Last spring, Zelenskyy backed Trump’s call for a cease-fire that would leave Russia in control of parts of the Donbas and other regions for the time being.
But for the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians, giving up the Donbas or any other territory formally or permanently is out of the question: “We will not leave the Donbas. We cannot do that,” Zelenskyy said in August.
Trump’s suggestion that Ukraine would have to give up land appeared to diverge from his remarks last month, when he claimed Kyiv was “in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form.”
While the White House may be shifting in its thinking about Ukrainian territory, the Kremlin is not.
The Donbas remains central to Putin’s political and military priorities — the entire region is scarred by a long section of the zigzagging 1,100-kilometer front line. To Moscow, its importance — economic, cultural, and historic — stretches back decades, if not centuries.
So why exactly is the Kremlin fixated on the Donbas?
Industrial Heartland
A geographic term deriving from the Donets River and the word “basin” — as in coal basin — the Donbas encompasses the entirety of two Ukrainian regions — Luhansk and Donetsk. By some definitions, it also includes small parts of the neighboring regions of Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and Zaporizhzhya.
It’s Ukraine’s industrial heartland — home to coal mines, smelters, metallurgical plants, ports, railways, and other heavy industry.
At around 52,000 square kilometers, the region is roughly the size of Croatia.
The Donbas’s southern stretches include some of the rich agriculture lands that Ukraine is famous for. The Sea of Azov coastline in southern Donetsk is home to the port of Mariupol and to Azovstal –until 2022, one of the largest steel facilities in the world.
Soviet leaders saw the Donets River region — its coal and its smelters — as the engine for crash-course industrialization, to haul the Soviet Union toward economic parity with European industrial powers like Germany.
After the economic shock of the Soviet collapse in 1991, the region began a slow decline, taking on a Rust Belt quality, suffering from outdated infrastructure, a lack of investment, a shift in production capacity, and competition from global markets and world trade.
Some of Ukraine’s wealthiest businessmen hailed from the Donbas, bankrolling the Party of the Regions political bloc and its leader, Viktor Yanukovych, who served stints as president and prime minister.
Yanukovych fled to Russia in February 2014 after months of mass demonstrations in Kyiv culminated in violent street clashes.
In the months that followed, Russia launched an insurgency and campaign of sabotage and destabilization in the Donbas, seizing military installations and key buildings, including the region’s unofficial capital, Donetsk. Russia also sent regular troops into full battle against Ukraine’s under-equipped and undermanned forces in several battles.
Russia-backed forces declared “people’s republics” in Donetsk and Luhansk, which later became the basis for Putin’s 2022 declaration to have annexed the two regions, along with two other regions.
Prior to February 2022, Russia’s proxies controlled around 42,000 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory, entirely in the Donbas, plus the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which was seized eight years earlier.
The Donbas Fortress Belt
Russian forces captured several key Donbas cities in the first year of the all-out invasion.
Mariupol fell in May 2022 after a brutal three-month siege; Syevyerodonetsk, to the north, was captured the following month. A year later, Bakhmut — a Donetsk region city whose defense Zelenskyy and his commanders had prioritized — fell to Russian troops.
After Bakhmut’s fall, Ukrainian planners prioritized a “fortress belt” of fortifications along two stronghold cities — Slovyansk and Kramatorsk — along with the rail juncture city of Kostyantynivka, further to the south.
Stretching roughly 50 kilometers in total, the belt is a sinuous line of defenses — trenches, anti-tank obstacles, bunkers, minefields — woven into the urban sprawl around the cities.
For Russia, overcoming the fortress belt would allow forces to move quickly west to the border of the Donetsk region, putting the Kremlin priority — seizing the entirety of the Donbas — within reach.
Losing the fortress belt would pose a longer-term risk for Ukrainian forces, paving the way for new Russian operations in the future — something Zelenskyy alluded to in August: “The Donbas is a springboard for a future new offensive.”
“The demands on Ukraine to hand over the remaining part of the Donetsk region are unrealistic from the point of view of Ukraine’s future defense capabilities,” Kirill Martynov, the editor in chief of the exiled Russia newspaper Novaya Gazeta Europe, told Current Time.
“Putin has been trying to conquer the Donetsk region for 11 years. And handing over to him those fortified areas that remain under Ukrainian control is effectively a path to Kharkiv and Dnipro,” he said referring to two capitals of neighboring regions. “And, by and large, a path to a new war in which it will be even easier for Putin to win.”
Novorossia
The roots of the Kremlin’s claims on the Donbas — not to mention most of Ukraine — date in part to the 18th century when Catherine the Great expanded Russia’s imperial conquests south to the Black Sea coast and west toward the Balkans.
Termed Novorossia, or New Russia, the concept was embraced by modern-day Russian nationalists and philosophers — Aleksandr Dugin most prominently — who also promoted the wider idea of a Russky Mir, or Russian World. Putin took up the idea publicly shortly after the seizure of Crimea, a territory that holds deep emotional resonance for many Russians.
In the Donbas, ethnic Ukrainians were the dominant nationality until the years after World War II, when Soviet planners started importing ethnic Russians to repopulate the region and build an industrial labor force.
By the time of the Soviet collapse, the Donbas had a higher proportion of people reporting themselves as ethnic Russians than any other region, though still the minority.
Prior to the outbreak of war in 2014, the Russian language was widely used in the Donbas and other parts of Ukraine. Zelenskyy, who hails from the south-central city of Kryviy Rih, grew up speaking Russian as his first language, for example.
Over the years, Ukrainian nationalists periodically sought to downgrade Russian across the country, and there were sporadic unsuccessful referendum efforts to cement the Russian language as a state language alongside Ukrainian.
Russian nationalists have claimed that the Donbas’s ethnic Russians want to secede and unify with Russia itself, which is contradicted by several elections and referendums held over the years.
The region was home to around 6 million people prior to 2022. In the run-up to the invasion, the Kremlin sought to justify its war in part by portraying the ethnic Russian minority as being victims of a state campaign of discrimination.
In his televised address on February 24, 2022, announcing the invasion, Putin spoke falsely of a “genocide that almost 4 million people are being subjected to.” Two years later, Russia filed a claim with the United Nations’ highest court, alleging genocide in the Donbas.
October 21, 2025
By Liberty Nation
By Dave Patterson
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the White House to persuade US President Donald Trump to provide Tomahawk cruise missiles that would reach farther into Russia. But Zelensky’s timing could not have been worse. His request came on the heels of a phone conversation between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. That call presented the spark of hope for a ceasefire, again. The phone call also resulted in plans for a one-on-one meeting between Trump and Putin in the near future. Apparently, the call also persuaded Trump to hold off on providing Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine.
Following the Trump-Zelensky cabinet room meeting, President Trump did not have a separate press conference nor a public farewell for the Ukrainian president. Nonetheless, Trump characterized the meeting with Zelensky in the following Truth Social post:
“The meeting with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine was very interesting and cordial, but I told him, as I likewise strongly suggested to President Putin, that it is time to stop the killing and make a DEAL! Enough blood has been shed, with property lines being defined by War and Guts. They should stop where they are.”
In other words, President Trump believes Ukraine should give up all the territory that Russia occupies to stop the fighting. But for many, that would mean all the lives lost by Ukraine in attempting to thwart the Russian unprovoked invasion would have been for naught. That is not likely to be Kyiv’s preferred solution.
Long-Range Russian Weapons Still Strike Ukraine
Meanwhile, Russian ballistic and cruise missiles, as well as drones and glide bombs, are being used against Ukraine routinely. Still, Ukraine does not have the weapons capabilityto return the destruction to Russia in kind. Consequently, Zelensky came to meet with President Trump seeking Tomahawk cruise missiles. The potential for the US to provide such weapons has been the subject of debate among foreign policy wonks and the press lately. “The missiles were part of a lengthy news cycle regarding the prospects of their handover, which could have enabled Ukraine to escalate its strikes on infrastructure in the Russian interior,” Just the News observed. It was, however, the notion that Ukraine having and using the longer-range Tomahawk cruise missiles would escalate the conflict between Ukraine and Russia that persuaded President Trump not to provide the weapons.
It would seem that with the daily pounding Ukraine is taking, the result of Russian long-range weapons, the fighting has already escalated. It’s just one-sided favoring Russia. Worrying about escalating the conflict was precisely the argument the Biden administration used for piecemealing to Ukraine first MIG-29s, then Patriot air defense missiles, then M1-A1 Abrams tanks, and then the Army Tactical Missiles Systems. That didn’t work well for bringing about a ceasefire. Please note: The Russians are using long-range weapons against Ukraine without concern about “escalating” the conflict. Without a concomitant response by Ukraine holding military targets and infrastructure at risk deeper inside Russia, Kyiv’s forces are at a significant disadvantage. Nevertheless, as The New York Times observed, “But Mr. Trump expressed trepidation about providing Kyiv with the long-range Tomahawk missiles it is seeking, suggesting he first wanted to see Ukraine and Russia renew peace negotiations. ‘We’d much rather have them not need Tomahawks,’ Mr. Trump said of Ukraine ahead of the private meeting.”
Threatening to provide Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles should have prompted Putin to be serious about working toward a ceasefire and ultimate peace agreement. What history tells us is that threatening to provide Ukraine with more capable weapons results in Putin requesting an in-person meeting or phone call with President Trump. The discussions prompt short-term optimism that there could be follow-on substantive talks at high levels to achieve a halt to the fighting. But those high-level talks end up just allowing the Russian side to reiterate their demands that are unrealistic and that Ukraine has rejected.
Not Possessing Tomahawk Missiles Concedes Negotiating Advantage
Furthermore, making it known that the US will not provide Ukraine with the more capable Tomahawk missile system gives away any negotiating advantage Ukraine might have had before any negotiations could take place. The better position for the US and Ukraine would have been to have used the Tomahawk or similar longer-range weapons, demonstrating to Moscow what Ukraine has suffered under the continuous Russian bombardment. In other words, it provides Russia with a taste of its own medicine.
As it stands, Russia will continue to use its long-range weapons against Ukraine. However, the beginning of substantive talks about an end to the war will begin. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio will meet with his counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, to iron out preparations for a Trump-Putin in-person meeting reportedly to take place in Budapest, Hungary. No precise date has been set for the summit, but reports are that it will take place soon, perhaps within the next two weeks. One hopes more comes from the Budapest meeting than from the August meeting between Trump and Putin in Alaska.
The views expressed are those of the author and not of any other affiliate.
Liberty Nation
Liberty Nation is a project of One Generation Away, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization. Liberty Nation is true to the OneGen organizational mission: to apply America’s founding principles to the issues of today. Liberty Nation does not endorse political candidates, nor endorse specific legislation, but offers commentary, analysis and opinions – the good, the bad and the ugly — on all things related to the American political discourse.
Ukraine’s growing energy crisis promises a cold and dark winter
This is no longer a war of weapons – it is a war of engineers.
Since the summer, Kyiv has changed tactics. Given the almost complete failure of Western oil sanctions to curb Russian oil exports, the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) has increasingly been targeting one of the main sources of Russia’s export revenues: Russian refineries. Russia has retaliated with a devastating campaign to take out more of Ukraine’s heating and power facilities that threatens to plunge the country into darkness just as the heating season gets underway.
According to various estimates, Ukraine’s campaign targeting Russian oil refineries have reduced production by 10%-30% and is impacting the budget, where the estimates for the full year budget deficit has more than tripled since the start of the year.
However, Russia’s retaliatory campaign has seen gas production fall by some 60%, according to comments by Naftogaz last week, and ten regions out of a total of 24 are already suffering from blackouts or have been put on emergency power supply regimes, according to Ukrenergo.
Ukraine was already short of gas supplies to get through the winter, with some 11bcm of gas in storage against the 13bcm it needs to heat and light the country until March. Ukraine produces some 20bcm of gas domestically each year and will be forced to import the rest. However, with German gas tanks only 75% full – by far the largest in Europe after Ukraine’s – ahead of an EU November 1 deadline to have 90%, the rest of Europe is also short of gas as the mercury starts to fall.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's trip to Washington was important where he asked US President Donald Trump for the powerful long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles, but was refused. Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s spy master and chief of the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine said last week that 99% of the strikes on Russian refineries were carried out by Ukrainian drones, but as Russian refineries were hard-topped during the Cold War, the damage drones can do is limited. US-made Tomahawks, on the other hand, are powerful enough to flatten a refinery. Bankova also wants to hit other military strategic facilities inside Russia such as their drone factories.
Tensions rising in Bankova
Tensions are rising amongst Ukraine’s top officials as they struggle to cope with the Russian drone and missile barrage on their energy facilities.
Zelenskiy convened a tense meeting with the leadership of his Office, the Foreign Ministry, the Defence Ministry and other key departments on 10 October to dig into the details of the energy sector. That same day, the Russians struck two thermal power plants in Kyiv leaving half the city without electricity and water. The previous meeting on October 6 had ended in a tense discussion, with raised voices, Ukrainska Pravda reports.
“At some point, Zelenskiy, in a righteous fury, resorts to shouting to compel officials to speak plainly, stop repeating empty phrases and stop passing the buck,” Ukrainska Pravda reported. The president demanded to know which energy facilities are properly protected, which need to be shut down to prevent the country from plunging into darkness and which are at risk of failing entirely.
When he asked, "who's to blame for such a large part of the network being so poorly secured?", ministers and heads of relevant state agencies usually have no answer other than: "our predecessors,” Ukrainska Pravda reports, adding that it is taking longer to complete new protective measures than their "predecessors" took to build them. The central issue is the problem of protecting gas production, massive heat and power generation facilities or gas storage sites.
The situation is becoming dire. According to Naftogaz Group, Ukraine's largest national oil and gas company, Russia has launched three major strikes on Ukraine's gas facilities over the past week and the city of Kyiv and nine other oblasts are already experiencing rolling power outages.
“The next heating season could, under certain scenarios, prove more difficult and problematic than the winter of 2022-2023, when Ukraine endured dozens of heavy strikes, nationwide power outages and simultaneous power cuts that left over 10mn people without electricity,” Ukrainska Pravda reports. “Sources in the energy sector told Ukrainska Pravda that the nature of recent strikes and the scale of the damage show the Russians are this time prepared to act even more cynically.”
Russia has also changed its tactics. Whereas in 2023-24, it relied on carpet bombing multiple sites across the country – most notably Sumy and Chernihiv oblasts – this year Russia is more specifically methodically trying to destroy the energy system and gas targets and has expanded its target zone to include Odesa, Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts. Local generation, Ukrenergo transmission lines and substations, and even distribution within large cities via oblast operator substations.
Another change is that instead of sending one large wave of drones and missiles, now Russia is striking in series, sending a few drones every hour to prevent repairs. Drone strikes to deplete air defence measures are followed by heavy missile attacks on generation facilities.
“The Russians' overarching aim remains unchanged: to destabilise the system and trigger a cascading failure – a blackout,” Ukrainska Pravda reports. “The intention is to create a deficit in Ukraine's east – historically the region with higher consumption and where almost all local generation has been damaged – and to gradually paralyse the west‑to‑east flow of electricity… Experience from recent years shows that in one or two attacks the Russians can knock out more generation than Ukraine can restore over an entire summer.”
Bankova is now anticipating strikes on dispatchable generation in Ukraine's western thermal power plants, followed by attacks on the distribution equipment of nuclear power plants. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant (ZNPP), the largest in Europe, has already been taken offline due to missile strikes on its power feeds.
Building defences
Under former commander in chief General Valerii Zaluzhnyi, a three-tier defence was built up:
- Installing sand-filled gabions around facilities;
- Building concrete and metal structures to shield large transformers at key substations; and
- Entire substations were sealed within reinforced concrete and steel topped with a layer of earth.
In total, around 80 key transformer substations, that form the energy backbone for the country, need protection to ensure the stability of the entire power system. In the first pass some 20 of these substations were fully protected, but the work has not been finished. Russia has at the same time increased its production of drones and missiles as part of its missile war to the point where it can still overwhelm Ukraine’s defences.
The work got bogged down in accusation of corruption: then Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal asked why the second-level protective structures built by the Agency for Restoration cost two to three times more than similar facilities built by Ukrenergo. This dispute led to endless meetings, arguments, funding delays, missed deadlines and other internal system failures, Ukrainska Pravda reports.
"This winter will certainly be one of shortages. Emergency outages are already in effect across almost the whole country. Most likely, in winter we will face a '4×2' scenario: four hours without power, two hours with it," a representative of one state energy company told the newswire.
Zelenskiy has constantly been calling for more air defence ammo and systems to protect Ukraine’s power supplies. When 30 to 50 Russian drones and missiles target a single facility, even the best defence won’t intercept them all. “It only takes one precise strike to disable a power unit at a plant. In the case of substations, the damage can be repaired technically within two or three weeks, but that means little if there is no generation," the state energy company official said.
Another new tactic is Russia is now also targeting Ukraine's gas infrastructure – the extraction facilities, underground storage compressors and regional distribution networks. The idea is to also cut off the fuel supplies used by the power plants.
"This is no longer a war of weapons – it is a war of engineers. On both sides, energy experts are monitoring strikes, calculating megawatts and reserves. Some are building, others destroying. The front line now cuts not only through trenches but also through control rooms," another company representative told Ukrainska Pravda.
Bulgaria Willing To Offer Air Corridor For Putin To Meet Trump In Budapest
October 21, 2025
EurActiv
By Thomas Moller-Nielsen
(EurActiv) — Bulgaria will allow a plane carrying Vladimir Putin to fly through its airspace to facilitate a planned meeting between the Russian leader and Donald Trump in Budapest later this month, the country’s foreign minister said on Monday.
“When efforts are made to achieve peace, if the condition for this is to have such a meeting, it is most logical that such a meeting should be mediated in [all] possible ways,” Georg Georgiev toldreporters on the sidelines of a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg.
“How is it proposed to hold the meeting if one of the participants cannot get to it?” he added.
No request has yet been made by Moscow to allow Putin’s aircraft to pass over the Black Sea nation, a Bulgarian official confirmed.
Bulgaria does not share a border with Hungary. However, Hungary and Bulgaria both border Serbia, which has strong historic links with Moscow. Passing through Bulgaria on his way to Budapest would cut Putin’s flight time considerably.
The only other route that does not involve flying over EU or Ukrainian airspace involves flying over the Mediterranean, and then passing over Montenegro or Albania before reaching Budapest via Serbia.
The summit, which was announced by Trump following a phone call with Putin last week and for which the date has not yet been fixed, has drawn a mixed reaction from EU leaders.
The EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, and many Eastern EU countries have criticised the scheduled meeting for excluding Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
But ministers from many Western EU member states, including the Netherlands, Germany, and France, have expressed tentative support for the meeting, which would be the first in-person summit between Trump and Putin since they met in Alaska in August.
Hungary’s right-wing leader, Viktor Orbán, has repeatedly criticised the EU’s support for Ukraine and has fostered strong ties with both Putin and Trump since resuming his country’s premiership in 2010.
Bulgaria and Hungary are currently both members of the International Criminal Court, which has issued an arrest warrant for Putin for his involvement in the deportation of Ukrainian children during the war.
Hungary, however, announced its withdrawal from the ICC in April this year. Its withdrawal will become legally effective from June 2026.
No comments:
Post a Comment