With this Putin-inspired attack, Trump crossed a line no president ever dared touch
Thom Hartmann
August 20, 2025
COMMON DREAMS
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin hold a press conference in Anchorage, Alaska. REUTERS/Jeenah Moon
On Monday, Donald Trump crossed another line that no president in our history has ever dared to touch. With the echo of Vladimir Putin’s whisper in his ear, in front of President Volodymyr Zelensky and seven other European leaders, Trump announced he’s preparing an executive order to ban mail-in ballots and even outlaw voting machines across America ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
Sitting in front of the Chancellor of Germany and the Prime Minister of Great Britain — both nations that allow and even encourage mail-in voting — Trump said:
“Mail-in ballots are corrupt mail-in ballots. You can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots, and we as a Republican Party are gonna do everything possible that we get rid of mail-in ballots. We're gonna start with an executive order that’s being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots because they’re corrupt. And, you know that we’re the only country in the world, I believe, I may be wrong, but just about the only country in the world that uses it because of what’s happened.”
This is not just a partisan maneuver. It’s an open assault on the Constitution, a grotesque power grab, and a direct threat to the foundation of democracy itself. And it’s happening in real time, in broad daylight, with a criminally compliant Republican Party cheering him on.
Republicans hate mail-in voting for multiple reasons.First, for people who’re paid by the hour, mail-in voting increases participation because they can fill out their ballots at the kitchen table after work. Republicans don’t want people to vote, and have introduced more than 400 pieces of legislation in the past three years nationwide to make voting more difficult.
Second, mail-in voting makes voters better informed and less vulnerable to sound-byte TV ads because, while perusing that ballot at the kitchen table, they can look up candidates on their laptops and get more detail and information. Republicans hate informed voters and rely heavily on often-dishonest advertisements to swing voters.
Third, mail-in ballots — because they arrive in the mail weeks before the election — give voters an early chance to discover if they’ve been the victim of Republican voter-roll purges, one of their favorite tactics to pre-rig elections.
Fourth, mail-in ballots end the GOP trick of understaffing and under-resourcing polling places in minority neighborhoods, leading to hours-long lines. Hispanic voters generally wait 150 percent longer than white voters, and Black voters must endure a 200 percent longer wait; mail-in ballots put an end to this favorite of the GOP’s voter suppression efforts.
Trump, knowing all this, couldn’t help himself yesterday, finally blurting out his real reason for wanting to end mail-in voting in America:
“We got to stop mail-in voting, and the Republicans have to lead the charge. The Democrats want it because they have horrible policy. If you [don’t] have mail-in voting, you’re not gonna have many Democrats get elected. That’s bigger than anything having to do with redistricting, believe me.”
Once again, Trump is ignoring the law and the Constitution, which explicitly delegates the administration of elections to the states and Congress, not presidential executive orders.
That’s not some vague norm or debatable tradition: it’s written into the very DNA of our system of government. States set the rules, unless Congress — not the president — overrides them. States decide how their citizens vote, as the Constitution’s Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 dictates:
“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”
Yet here we have a president declaring that he alone will dictate the terms of elections nationwide, in direct violation of two centuries of law and precedent. This is not only unconstitutional, it’s tyrannical.
When a president asserts powers he does not have, with the full knowledge that they aren’t his to wield, he’s announcing to the country that the rule of law no longer constrains him. That’s the definition of dictatorship.
And what makes this even more obscene is the source of Trump’s inspiration. According to multiple reports, Trump’s sudden rant on mail-in ballots followed a private conversation with Putin, who reportedly told Trump that mail-in voting was the reason he lost in 2020.
The man occupying the Oval Office is now taking advice about how to rig American elections from the very dictator who has spent his career poisoning journalists, jailing opponents, and staging sham referendums to annex entire countries.
It’s bad enough that Trump has always been Putin’s toady, but now we see the Kremlin effectively writing U.S. election law. If Jefferson, Madison, or Lincoln were alive to hear this, they would spit.
Mail-in voting is not a scam. It’s not a trick. It’s how tens of millions of Americans — Republicans, Democrats, independents — exercise their right to vote.
Seniors rely on it. People with disabilities rely on it. Military service members overseas rely on it. Hourly workers who can’t take a day off rely on it. Parents with young children rely on it. Rural voters, who often live miles from polling places, rely on it.
And every study, every audit, every bipartisan commission has found mail-in voting to be secure, safe, and reliable. Five states do it exclusively; we’ve had it more than two decades here in Oregon with nary a single scandal or problem. To call it fraudulent is a lie. To ban it is voter suppression on a scale this country has never seen.
And voting machines? Trump is openly declaring that he’ll return us to mind-numbingly slow hand-counting of ballots, a tactic straight from the authoritarian playbook designed to create chaos, delays, and endless opportunities to dispute the results in 2026 and 2028.
I’ve had concerns about voting machines and Windows-based tabulators for decades, but my solution isn’t to end them. Instead, we should use machines owned by the government itself, generating paper ballots and operating transparently on open-source software with every election subject to sample audits.
Instead of trying to make elections more secure, Trump’s laying the groundwork for election theft in plain sight. This isn’t subtle: it’s the loud declaration of a man preparing to overturn the will of the voters, with the blessing of a foreign adversary, and with a Republican Party too craven to object.
If Trump succeeds in outlawing mail-in ballots and voting machines, millions of Americans will simply not be able to vote. Seniors in nursing homes, service members abroad, people with disabilities, single parents, rural citizens: they will all be disenfranchised overnight. And make no mistake: that’s the point.
This is not about integrity. This is not about security. This is about shrinking the electorate to a size that Republicans believe will guarantee them victory forever.
Republicans know they can’t win free and fair elections in much of America. They know their policies are unpopular. They know their agenda is toxic.
So they cheat. They gerrymander districts into grotesque shapes that make a mockery of representative government. They purge voters from the rolls. They criminalize voter registration drives. They intimidate voters at the polls.
And now, at Trump’s command and Putin’s urging, they want to ban the very methods by which millions of Americans vote. This is not politics as usual. This is the slow-motion strangulation of democracy.
Every American who believes in self-government must rise up against this. Governors must prepare to defy such an executive order in court and in practice. State legislatures must assert their constitutional authority.
Attorneys general must be ready to sue. And ordinary citizens must take to the streets, the phones, the ballot box, and every civic space available to declare that this will not stand. Because if it does, we’ll have surrendered the very essence of the American experiment.
We’ve been here before in spirit if not in form.
Ronald Reagan’s campaign cut a deal with the Iranian Ayatollahs to hang onto the hostages until after the election. Richard Nixon tried to sabotage our democracy by killing Lyndon Johnson's peace negotiations with Vietnam and followed-up with burglaries and cover-ups when he thought Democrats were onto him. He was forced to resign. George W. Bush and the GOP stopped the counting of votes in Florida and handed the presidency to themselves. That assault has scarred our politics for decades.
But never — not once in 250 years — has a president openly declared that he will strip states of their constitutional right to run elections, end mail-in voting, and ban voting machines altogether. This is unprecedented, authoritarian, and it must be stopped.
It’s also just one in a broad spectrum of attacks Republicans have launched against your right to vote, with the SAVE Act — which will prevent women from voting if their birth certificate and drivers’ license have different names on them and they’ve never had an official change-of-name in the courts — teed up in the US Senate. All while millions are being purged from the voting rolls as you read these words.
This is the moment when the American people must decide whether they still believe in democracy. If we shrug, if we accept this as just more noise from a corrupt and broken con man, we will lose it. If we wait for someone else to act, we will lose it. If we tell ourselves the courts will save us, we may be bitterly disappointed.
The survival of democracy has never been guaranteed. It has always required vigilance, courage, and action. Now it requires all three from each of us.
Trump’s promised executive order is not just a legal maneuver. It’s a declaration of war against the American people. It’s the dream of every tyrant: to control who votes and who does not, to dictate the rules of elections so that the outcome is predetermined.
What Putin and Trump are proposing is not democracy. It’s not freedom. It’s not America.
And the Republicans who are enabling this treachery are as guilty as Trump himself. They’re betraying their oaths, their constituents, and our country. History will remember them not as conservatives or patriots, but as the gravediggers of our Republic.
This is the line. This is the moment. We cannot let Trump and his cronies bulldoze democracy into the ground at Putin’s command. Every patriot, every progressive, every independent, every honest conservative who still believes in the Constitution must join together and say no.
No to dictatorship. No to disenfranchisement. No to treason.
If we fail now, there may not be another chance.
August 20, 2025
COMMON DREAMS
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin hold a press conference in Anchorage, Alaska. REUTERS/Jeenah Moon
On Monday, Donald Trump crossed another line that no president in our history has ever dared to touch. With the echo of Vladimir Putin’s whisper in his ear, in front of President Volodymyr Zelensky and seven other European leaders, Trump announced he’s preparing an executive order to ban mail-in ballots and even outlaw voting machines across America ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
Sitting in front of the Chancellor of Germany and the Prime Minister of Great Britain — both nations that allow and even encourage mail-in voting — Trump said:
“Mail-in ballots are corrupt mail-in ballots. You can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots, and we as a Republican Party are gonna do everything possible that we get rid of mail-in ballots. We're gonna start with an executive order that’s being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots because they’re corrupt. And, you know that we’re the only country in the world, I believe, I may be wrong, but just about the only country in the world that uses it because of what’s happened.”
This is not just a partisan maneuver. It’s an open assault on the Constitution, a grotesque power grab, and a direct threat to the foundation of democracy itself. And it’s happening in real time, in broad daylight, with a criminally compliant Republican Party cheering him on.
Republicans hate mail-in voting for multiple reasons.First, for people who’re paid by the hour, mail-in voting increases participation because they can fill out their ballots at the kitchen table after work. Republicans don’t want people to vote, and have introduced more than 400 pieces of legislation in the past three years nationwide to make voting more difficult.
Second, mail-in voting makes voters better informed and less vulnerable to sound-byte TV ads because, while perusing that ballot at the kitchen table, they can look up candidates on their laptops and get more detail and information. Republicans hate informed voters and rely heavily on often-dishonest advertisements to swing voters.
Third, mail-in ballots — because they arrive in the mail weeks before the election — give voters an early chance to discover if they’ve been the victim of Republican voter-roll purges, one of their favorite tactics to pre-rig elections.
Fourth, mail-in ballots end the GOP trick of understaffing and under-resourcing polling places in minority neighborhoods, leading to hours-long lines. Hispanic voters generally wait 150 percent longer than white voters, and Black voters must endure a 200 percent longer wait; mail-in ballots put an end to this favorite of the GOP’s voter suppression efforts.
Trump, knowing all this, couldn’t help himself yesterday, finally blurting out his real reason for wanting to end mail-in voting in America:
“We got to stop mail-in voting, and the Republicans have to lead the charge. The Democrats want it because they have horrible policy. If you [don’t] have mail-in voting, you’re not gonna have many Democrats get elected. That’s bigger than anything having to do with redistricting, believe me.”
Once again, Trump is ignoring the law and the Constitution, which explicitly delegates the administration of elections to the states and Congress, not presidential executive orders.
That’s not some vague norm or debatable tradition: it’s written into the very DNA of our system of government. States set the rules, unless Congress — not the president — overrides them. States decide how their citizens vote, as the Constitution’s Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 dictates:
“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.”
Yet here we have a president declaring that he alone will dictate the terms of elections nationwide, in direct violation of two centuries of law and precedent. This is not only unconstitutional, it’s tyrannical.
When a president asserts powers he does not have, with the full knowledge that they aren’t his to wield, he’s announcing to the country that the rule of law no longer constrains him. That’s the definition of dictatorship.
And what makes this even more obscene is the source of Trump’s inspiration. According to multiple reports, Trump’s sudden rant on mail-in ballots followed a private conversation with Putin, who reportedly told Trump that mail-in voting was the reason he lost in 2020.
The man occupying the Oval Office is now taking advice about how to rig American elections from the very dictator who has spent his career poisoning journalists, jailing opponents, and staging sham referendums to annex entire countries.
It’s bad enough that Trump has always been Putin’s toady, but now we see the Kremlin effectively writing U.S. election law. If Jefferson, Madison, or Lincoln were alive to hear this, they would spit.
Mail-in voting is not a scam. It’s not a trick. It’s how tens of millions of Americans — Republicans, Democrats, independents — exercise their right to vote.
Seniors rely on it. People with disabilities rely on it. Military service members overseas rely on it. Hourly workers who can’t take a day off rely on it. Parents with young children rely on it. Rural voters, who often live miles from polling places, rely on it.
And every study, every audit, every bipartisan commission has found mail-in voting to be secure, safe, and reliable. Five states do it exclusively; we’ve had it more than two decades here in Oregon with nary a single scandal or problem. To call it fraudulent is a lie. To ban it is voter suppression on a scale this country has never seen.
And voting machines? Trump is openly declaring that he’ll return us to mind-numbingly slow hand-counting of ballots, a tactic straight from the authoritarian playbook designed to create chaos, delays, and endless opportunities to dispute the results in 2026 and 2028.
I’ve had concerns about voting machines and Windows-based tabulators for decades, but my solution isn’t to end them. Instead, we should use machines owned by the government itself, generating paper ballots and operating transparently on open-source software with every election subject to sample audits.
Instead of trying to make elections more secure, Trump’s laying the groundwork for election theft in plain sight. This isn’t subtle: it’s the loud declaration of a man preparing to overturn the will of the voters, with the blessing of a foreign adversary, and with a Republican Party too craven to object.
If Trump succeeds in outlawing mail-in ballots and voting machines, millions of Americans will simply not be able to vote. Seniors in nursing homes, service members abroad, people with disabilities, single parents, rural citizens: they will all be disenfranchised overnight. And make no mistake: that’s the point.
This is not about integrity. This is not about security. This is about shrinking the electorate to a size that Republicans believe will guarantee them victory forever.
Republicans know they can’t win free and fair elections in much of America. They know their policies are unpopular. They know their agenda is toxic.
So they cheat. They gerrymander districts into grotesque shapes that make a mockery of representative government. They purge voters from the rolls. They criminalize voter registration drives. They intimidate voters at the polls.
And now, at Trump’s command and Putin’s urging, they want to ban the very methods by which millions of Americans vote. This is not politics as usual. This is the slow-motion strangulation of democracy.
Every American who believes in self-government must rise up against this. Governors must prepare to defy such an executive order in court and in practice. State legislatures must assert their constitutional authority.
Attorneys general must be ready to sue. And ordinary citizens must take to the streets, the phones, the ballot box, and every civic space available to declare that this will not stand. Because if it does, we’ll have surrendered the very essence of the American experiment.
We’ve been here before in spirit if not in form.
Ronald Reagan’s campaign cut a deal with the Iranian Ayatollahs to hang onto the hostages until after the election. Richard Nixon tried to sabotage our democracy by killing Lyndon Johnson's peace negotiations with Vietnam and followed-up with burglaries and cover-ups when he thought Democrats were onto him. He was forced to resign. George W. Bush and the GOP stopped the counting of votes in Florida and handed the presidency to themselves. That assault has scarred our politics for decades.
But never — not once in 250 years — has a president openly declared that he will strip states of their constitutional right to run elections, end mail-in voting, and ban voting machines altogether. This is unprecedented, authoritarian, and it must be stopped.
It’s also just one in a broad spectrum of attacks Republicans have launched against your right to vote, with the SAVE Act — which will prevent women from voting if their birth certificate and drivers’ license have different names on them and they’ve never had an official change-of-name in the courts — teed up in the US Senate. All while millions are being purged from the voting rolls as you read these words.
This is the moment when the American people must decide whether they still believe in democracy. If we shrug, if we accept this as just more noise from a corrupt and broken con man, we will lose it. If we wait for someone else to act, we will lose it. If we tell ourselves the courts will save us, we may be bitterly disappointed.
The survival of democracy has never been guaranteed. It has always required vigilance, courage, and action. Now it requires all three from each of us.
Trump’s promised executive order is not just a legal maneuver. It’s a declaration of war against the American people. It’s the dream of every tyrant: to control who votes and who does not, to dictate the rules of elections so that the outcome is predetermined.
What Putin and Trump are proposing is not democracy. It’s not freedom. It’s not America.
And the Republicans who are enabling this treachery are as guilty as Trump himself. They’re betraying their oaths, their constituents, and our country. History will remember them not as conservatives or patriots, but as the gravediggers of our Republic.
This is the line. This is the moment. We cannot let Trump and his cronies bulldoze democracy into the ground at Putin’s command. Every patriot, every progressive, every independent, every honest conservative who still believes in the Constitution must join together and say no.
No to dictatorship. No to disenfranchisement. No to treason.
If we fail now, there may not be another chance.
Bloody Amputation: Trump’s “Peace” for Ukraine
Wednesday 20 August 2025, by David Finkel
THE TRAJECTORY WAS always clear to anyone who was paying attention, and knew how to filter out the noise of Donald Trump’s empty threats of “severe sanctions to destroy Russia’s economy,” let alone 500% tariffs on Russia’s oil customers, if there weren’t an “immediate cease-fire” in the Ukraine war.
When Trump met Vladimir Putin at the Munich-in-Anchorage summit, the agenda was the betrayal of Ukraine. This was ordained from the moment of the Trump-Vance ambush of president Zelensky in their infamous February White House encounter, if not even earlier.
A nation targeted for carveup. (Source: Institute for the Study of War)
It was always Trump’s view, along with the Christian-nationalist far-right sector of the MAGA cult, that the war was Ukraine’s fault from the beginning and that its only option is to surrender on whatever terms Russia’s superior power imposes.
So Trump flew to Alaska blathering cease-fire, while Putin arrived with the proposition for working out a “permanent solution addressing the root causes of the conflict.” That sounds statesmanlike, except for the detail that for Putin’s Russia, the basic “root cause” is Ukraine’s existence as an independent country with the capacity to set its own course and defend itself.
That independent Ukraine is what needs to be eliminated, beginning with the amputation of a fifth of its territory and continuing on to impose a vassal regime. That’s Moscow’s “comprehensive peace” — and Trump of course folded like the cheap empty suit he really is when facing a situation he can’t dominate.
As a bonus, according to Trump, Putin advised him that getting rid of mail-in voting is necessary to guarantee “free elections,” an area in which the Russian president-for-life is a leading expert.
Meanwhile, every day in Gaza dozens of people die of starvation — soon to be hundreds at least — as unrestricted U.S. weapons, not available to Ukraine, flow to Israel’s genocidal slaughter.
European Rescue?
Following the Alaska debacle, European leaders scrambled to Washington to protect the Ukrainian president from a repeat of the February catastrophe. They came deploying the mixture of flattery that Trump requires, with proclamations of solidarity with president Zelensky and phrases of “security guarantees” for Ukraine.
It’s entirely unclear what these hypothetical commitments might mean. Putin immediately responded with 270 drones and missiles hitting Ukrainian civilian and energy infrastructure targets. As The Economist online (August 18) explains:
What Russia cannot get by fighting it is demanding to be given on a plate through the pressure that Donald Trump can put on Ukraine and on America’s European allies. At the top of Vladimir Putin’s shopping-list is the western part of Donetsk province, which is still firmly in Ukrainian hands. But it is not just the symbolism that is important to him. The real prize is to force Ukraine to abandon its strategically critical “fortress belt,” a 30-mile (50km) line that comprises four cities and several towns, which stands in the way not only of Russia’s goal of gaining the whole of Donbas, but also of its ability to threaten other regions.
Not a problem for Trump, evidently. But how then can he get away with perpetrating this treachery?
Truthfully, in the final analysis the fate of Ukraine — like that of Palestine —is not of first-rate importance for the strategic interests of U.S. imperialism. Trump’s buffoonery in the face of a sharp operator like Putin is an American embarrassment, but nothing fatal.
What about the Russian threat? Three years of war have actually demonstrated its relative weakness. If it could not overrun Ukraine, much less could it challenge a middle-rank military state like Poland. What happens to Donetsk, Luhansk and the rest of eastern Ukraine is hugely important for that country and the region, but not for Washington so long as there is no threat of a Europe-wide war.
Since Russia’s all-out invasion in 2022 the United States, first under Biden and now Trump, gave Ukraine’s heroic resistance the weapons and crucial intelligence to prevent Ukraine’s defeat but not to win the war (which would also have been a terminal crisis for the Putin regime).
Today, the greatest dangers for Ukraine and its people appear to be exhaustion and demographic crisis, as the current population of 39 million is sharply down from 52 million at the point of independence in 1991.
For Trump’s family and cronies, Putin’s Russia now appears to present opportunities for business deals and enrichment — on far grander scales than his previous absurdist Mar-a-Gaza resort fantasy.
Meanwhile the genocider Netanyahu has given Trump the gift of a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. Little chance of that (unless the peace prize committee can be bought), but perhaps a special “Neville Chamberlain Peace in Our Time” medal could be struck in the president’s honor.
The small consolation in this episode is that Donald Trump, with all his bullying of people without the power to fight back, is exposed as a blustering fool on the world stage when there’s even a second-tier adversary. To some limited extent, U.S. “world leadership” is also weakened. These are good things, but not worth the sacrifice of Ukraine on the altar of cynicism and expediency.
[The Ukraine Solidarity Network (U.S.) is raising funds for urgently needed medical diagnostic equipment needed by front-line nurses.]
19 August 2025
Source Against the Current.
Attached documentsbloody-amputation-trump-s-peace-for-ukraine_a9137.pdf (PDF - 998.3 KiB)
Extraction PDF [->article9137]
David Finkel is an editor of Against the Current, published by the US socialist organization Solidarity (www.solidarity-us.org)
Trump-Putin
No Deals with War Criminals on Alaska Soil
Tuesday 19 August 2025, by Alaska Native Movement
““Alaska’s history teaches us the devastating cost of imperialism and fascism. From the Russian occupation of our lands to Putin’s war in Ukraine and the ongoing oppression in Palestine, we see the same pattern of violence and erasure. We stand with all who resist, because true freedom is collective—none of us are free until all of us are free.” – Enei Begaye, Executive Director Native Movement ”
Anchorage, Alaska – As President Donald Trump prepares to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on August 15 to discuss the Ukrainian crisis, Native Movement stands with Alaskans and those across the country who condemn any attempt to legitimize Russia’s war crimes on Alaskan lands.
Alaska knows the cost of Russian imperialism. For over a century, Russian colonizers stole and exploited land, decimated Alaska Native populations through violence, disease, and enslavement, and erased cultures with religious supremacy. Today, we see the same imperial playbook in Ukraine: annexation of territory, targeting of civilians, and the forcible deportation of over 20,000 Ukrainian children—a war crime under international law.
Alaska’s history with Russian rule doesn’t make us neutral — it makes us witnesses.
The decision to host Putin, a war criminal, on Alaskan soil is a betrayal of our history and the moral clarity demanded by the suffering of Ukraine and other occupied peoples.
Native Movement voices opposition to any deals that force Ukraine to cede territory, reward aggression, or silence the voices of those whose lives are at stake. We stand against the rise of fascism and violent occupation everywhere—whether in Ukraine, Palestine, or here in Alaska. None of us are free until all of us are free.
Alaska’s own experience with resource-driven governance shows how oil wealth erodes democracy and empowers authoritarianism, just as we see in Russia’s war on Ukraine. Hosting war criminals in Alaska is a betrayal of our communities and our future.
Petro-states like Russia and the U.S. have built empires on extractive violence. Oil wealth correlates with increased crime and political corruption. Alaska’s large military presence is tied not to community safety but to protecting oil and gas infrastructure, resource extraction, and broader U.S. economic and military interests.
Meanwhile, Russia floods global markets with hatchery-raised salmon, undercutting Alaska fisheries, destabilizing prices, and threatening wild stocks. These hatcheries, concentrated in Sakhalin and Kamchatka, release hundreds of millions of juvenile salmon annually. Indigenous communities, who have long relied on salmon for food, culture, and spiritual practice, are disproportionately affected. Bycatch isn’t just waste, it’s a symptom of broken systems. Current regulations in the U.S. and Russia ignore the compounding ecological harm and force Indigenous communities to bear the full burden on conservation while outside investors reap the profits.
Therefore, we reject deals that reward extractive violence, whether through war, occupation, or climate destruction. Resource-driven regimes not only silence dissent; they deepen gender inequality and erode community well-being. Petro-states often build national pride around oil wealth, masking inequality and environmental harm. In contrast, Indigenous cultures emphasize stewardship, reciprocity, and sustainability.
We reject any deals that:
Reward extractive violence, whether through war, occupation, or climate destruction
Reward territorial conquest through violence
Legitimize ANY war criminal’s crimes
Ignore the voices of those whose land and lives are at stake
We demand:
No legitimization of war criminals on our soil
Justice for every child stolen from their families
Recognition that territorial sovereignty cannot be negotiated away by outside powers
Accountability for war crimes, not rewards for aggression
Alaska was never Russia’s to sell
The 1867 Treaty of Cession between Russia and the United States is often depicted as a sale of Alaska for $7.2 million. But this narrative erases the sovereignty of Alaska’s Indigenous nations and misrepresents the nature of Russian presence in the region.
Russia’s colonial footprint in Alaska was limited, they never controlled or occupied the whole of Alaska. Defeated in battles with the Tlingit and Ahtna nations, Russian settlers were confined to a few trading posts and some parcels of land. They never fully colonized or controlled the vast territory they claimed.
The Treaty of Cession did not transfer ownership of Alaska; it transferred Russia’s claim to the land, not legal title. Indigenous nations have long-standing governance systems and did not recognize Russian sovereignty. Captain Charles Bryant of the U.S. Treasury Department reported in 1870, the Tlingit "never recognized the Russians as owning their land" and believed Russia had no right to sell it.
Many Alaska Native leaders protested the sale, asserting that they were rightful stewards of the land. The treaty classified Native peoples as "uncivilized tribes," denying us citizenship and legal recognition unless we abandoned our cultures and assimilated to "white man ways." When it should have been settler colonialists assimilating to our way of life, as we thrived and cared for these lands for millennia. This racist framework laid the foundation for genocide, land theft, and cultural erasure.
The sale of Alaska was not a legal transfer of land, but a colonial transaction that ignored Indigenous sovereignty. The U.S. government assumed control without consultation, and Alaska Native peoples were left in legal limbo, denied rights to our own traditional lands and territories, resources, and self-determination.
Today, we reject the legacy of this illegal and unethical sale. We honor the original nations of Alaska, whose stewardship predates colonization and whose rights remain unceded.
Alaska’s Indigenous communities, survivors of Russian colonialism, speak from hard-earned moral authority. We know the pain of land treated as a commodity, people as expendable, and children as property to be seized. Our history makes us witnesses to the struggles of Ukraine, Palestine, and all peoples fighting for their sovereignty and justice for their future generations.
We call on Alaskans and the global community to join us in saying: Not again. Not in Ukraine. Not in Palestine. Not anywhere. Alaskans stands with Ukraine and all oppressed peoples because we know the true cost of imperialism and fascism. No deals with war criminals.
14 August 2025
Source: Native Movement.
Attached documentsno-deals-with-war-criminals-on-alaska-soil_a9134.pdf (PDF - 911.1 KiB)
Extraction PDF [->article9134]
Alaska Native Movement is dedicated to Movement building for social justice and healing. https://www.nativemovement.org/
International Viewpoint is published under the responsibility of the Bureau of the Fourth International. Signed articles do not necessarily reflect editorial policy. Articles can be reprinted with acknowledgement, and a live link if possible.
A nation targeted for carveup. (Source: Institute for the Study of War)
It was always Trump’s view, along with the Christian-nationalist far-right sector of the MAGA cult, that the war was Ukraine’s fault from the beginning and that its only option is to surrender on whatever terms Russia’s superior power imposes.
So Trump flew to Alaska blathering cease-fire, while Putin arrived with the proposition for working out a “permanent solution addressing the root causes of the conflict.” That sounds statesmanlike, except for the detail that for Putin’s Russia, the basic “root cause” is Ukraine’s existence as an independent country with the capacity to set its own course and defend itself.
That independent Ukraine is what needs to be eliminated, beginning with the amputation of a fifth of its territory and continuing on to impose a vassal regime. That’s Moscow’s “comprehensive peace” — and Trump of course folded like the cheap empty suit he really is when facing a situation he can’t dominate.
As a bonus, according to Trump, Putin advised him that getting rid of mail-in voting is necessary to guarantee “free elections,” an area in which the Russian president-for-life is a leading expert.
Meanwhile, every day in Gaza dozens of people die of starvation — soon to be hundreds at least — as unrestricted U.S. weapons, not available to Ukraine, flow to Israel’s genocidal slaughter.
European Rescue?
Following the Alaska debacle, European leaders scrambled to Washington to protect the Ukrainian president from a repeat of the February catastrophe. They came deploying the mixture of flattery that Trump requires, with proclamations of solidarity with president Zelensky and phrases of “security guarantees” for Ukraine.
It’s entirely unclear what these hypothetical commitments might mean. Putin immediately responded with 270 drones and missiles hitting Ukrainian civilian and energy infrastructure targets. As The Economist online (August 18) explains:
What Russia cannot get by fighting it is demanding to be given on a plate through the pressure that Donald Trump can put on Ukraine and on America’s European allies. At the top of Vladimir Putin’s shopping-list is the western part of Donetsk province, which is still firmly in Ukrainian hands. But it is not just the symbolism that is important to him. The real prize is to force Ukraine to abandon its strategically critical “fortress belt,” a 30-mile (50km) line that comprises four cities and several towns, which stands in the way not only of Russia’s goal of gaining the whole of Donbas, but also of its ability to threaten other regions.
Not a problem for Trump, evidently. But how then can he get away with perpetrating this treachery?
Truthfully, in the final analysis the fate of Ukraine — like that of Palestine —is not of first-rate importance for the strategic interests of U.S. imperialism. Trump’s buffoonery in the face of a sharp operator like Putin is an American embarrassment, but nothing fatal.
What about the Russian threat? Three years of war have actually demonstrated its relative weakness. If it could not overrun Ukraine, much less could it challenge a middle-rank military state like Poland. What happens to Donetsk, Luhansk and the rest of eastern Ukraine is hugely important for that country and the region, but not for Washington so long as there is no threat of a Europe-wide war.
Since Russia’s all-out invasion in 2022 the United States, first under Biden and now Trump, gave Ukraine’s heroic resistance the weapons and crucial intelligence to prevent Ukraine’s defeat but not to win the war (which would also have been a terminal crisis for the Putin regime).
Today, the greatest dangers for Ukraine and its people appear to be exhaustion and demographic crisis, as the current population of 39 million is sharply down from 52 million at the point of independence in 1991.
For Trump’s family and cronies, Putin’s Russia now appears to present opportunities for business deals and enrichment — on far grander scales than his previous absurdist Mar-a-Gaza resort fantasy.
Meanwhile the genocider Netanyahu has given Trump the gift of a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. Little chance of that (unless the peace prize committee can be bought), but perhaps a special “Neville Chamberlain Peace in Our Time” medal could be struck in the president’s honor.
The small consolation in this episode is that Donald Trump, with all his bullying of people without the power to fight back, is exposed as a blustering fool on the world stage when there’s even a second-tier adversary. To some limited extent, U.S. “world leadership” is also weakened. These are good things, but not worth the sacrifice of Ukraine on the altar of cynicism and expediency.
[The Ukraine Solidarity Network (U.S.) is raising funds for urgently needed medical diagnostic equipment needed by front-line nurses.]
19 August 2025
Source Against the Current.
Attached documentsbloody-amputation-trump-s-peace-for-ukraine_a9137.pdf (PDF - 998.3 KiB)
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David Finkel is an editor of Against the Current, published by the US socialist organization Solidarity (www.solidarity-us.org)
Trump-Putin
No Deals with War Criminals on Alaska Soil
Tuesday 19 August 2025, by Alaska Native Movement
““Alaska’s history teaches us the devastating cost of imperialism and fascism. From the Russian occupation of our lands to Putin’s war in Ukraine and the ongoing oppression in Palestine, we see the same pattern of violence and erasure. We stand with all who resist, because true freedom is collective—none of us are free until all of us are free.” – Enei Begaye, Executive Director Native Movement ”
Anchorage, Alaska – As President Donald Trump prepares to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska on August 15 to discuss the Ukrainian crisis, Native Movement stands with Alaskans and those across the country who condemn any attempt to legitimize Russia’s war crimes on Alaskan lands.
Alaska knows the cost of Russian imperialism. For over a century, Russian colonizers stole and exploited land, decimated Alaska Native populations through violence, disease, and enslavement, and erased cultures with religious supremacy. Today, we see the same imperial playbook in Ukraine: annexation of territory, targeting of civilians, and the forcible deportation of over 20,000 Ukrainian children—a war crime under international law.
Alaska’s history with Russian rule doesn’t make us neutral — it makes us witnesses.
The decision to host Putin, a war criminal, on Alaskan soil is a betrayal of our history and the moral clarity demanded by the suffering of Ukraine and other occupied peoples.
Native Movement voices opposition to any deals that force Ukraine to cede territory, reward aggression, or silence the voices of those whose lives are at stake. We stand against the rise of fascism and violent occupation everywhere—whether in Ukraine, Palestine, or here in Alaska. None of us are free until all of us are free.
Alaska’s own experience with resource-driven governance shows how oil wealth erodes democracy and empowers authoritarianism, just as we see in Russia’s war on Ukraine. Hosting war criminals in Alaska is a betrayal of our communities and our future.
Petro-states like Russia and the U.S. have built empires on extractive violence. Oil wealth correlates with increased crime and political corruption. Alaska’s large military presence is tied not to community safety but to protecting oil and gas infrastructure, resource extraction, and broader U.S. economic and military interests.
Meanwhile, Russia floods global markets with hatchery-raised salmon, undercutting Alaska fisheries, destabilizing prices, and threatening wild stocks. These hatcheries, concentrated in Sakhalin and Kamchatka, release hundreds of millions of juvenile salmon annually. Indigenous communities, who have long relied on salmon for food, culture, and spiritual practice, are disproportionately affected. Bycatch isn’t just waste, it’s a symptom of broken systems. Current regulations in the U.S. and Russia ignore the compounding ecological harm and force Indigenous communities to bear the full burden on conservation while outside investors reap the profits.
Therefore, we reject deals that reward extractive violence, whether through war, occupation, or climate destruction. Resource-driven regimes not only silence dissent; they deepen gender inequality and erode community well-being. Petro-states often build national pride around oil wealth, masking inequality and environmental harm. In contrast, Indigenous cultures emphasize stewardship, reciprocity, and sustainability.
We reject any deals that:
Reward extractive violence, whether through war, occupation, or climate destruction
Reward territorial conquest through violence
Legitimize ANY war criminal’s crimes
Ignore the voices of those whose land and lives are at stake
We demand:
No legitimization of war criminals on our soil
Justice for every child stolen from their families
Recognition that territorial sovereignty cannot be negotiated away by outside powers
Accountability for war crimes, not rewards for aggression
Alaska was never Russia’s to sell
The 1867 Treaty of Cession between Russia and the United States is often depicted as a sale of Alaska for $7.2 million. But this narrative erases the sovereignty of Alaska’s Indigenous nations and misrepresents the nature of Russian presence in the region.
Russia’s colonial footprint in Alaska was limited, they never controlled or occupied the whole of Alaska. Defeated in battles with the Tlingit and Ahtna nations, Russian settlers were confined to a few trading posts and some parcels of land. They never fully colonized or controlled the vast territory they claimed.
The Treaty of Cession did not transfer ownership of Alaska; it transferred Russia’s claim to the land, not legal title. Indigenous nations have long-standing governance systems and did not recognize Russian sovereignty. Captain Charles Bryant of the U.S. Treasury Department reported in 1870, the Tlingit "never recognized the Russians as owning their land" and believed Russia had no right to sell it.
Many Alaska Native leaders protested the sale, asserting that they were rightful stewards of the land. The treaty classified Native peoples as "uncivilized tribes," denying us citizenship and legal recognition unless we abandoned our cultures and assimilated to "white man ways." When it should have been settler colonialists assimilating to our way of life, as we thrived and cared for these lands for millennia. This racist framework laid the foundation for genocide, land theft, and cultural erasure.
The sale of Alaska was not a legal transfer of land, but a colonial transaction that ignored Indigenous sovereignty. The U.S. government assumed control without consultation, and Alaska Native peoples were left in legal limbo, denied rights to our own traditional lands and territories, resources, and self-determination.
Today, we reject the legacy of this illegal and unethical sale. We honor the original nations of Alaska, whose stewardship predates colonization and whose rights remain unceded.
Alaska’s Indigenous communities, survivors of Russian colonialism, speak from hard-earned moral authority. We know the pain of land treated as a commodity, people as expendable, and children as property to be seized. Our history makes us witnesses to the struggles of Ukraine, Palestine, and all peoples fighting for their sovereignty and justice for their future generations.
We call on Alaskans and the global community to join us in saying: Not again. Not in Ukraine. Not in Palestine. Not anywhere. Alaskans stands with Ukraine and all oppressed peoples because we know the true cost of imperialism and fascism. No deals with war criminals.
14 August 2025
Source: Native Movement.
Attached documentsno-deals-with-war-criminals-on-alaska-soil_a9134.pdf (PDF - 911.1 KiB)
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Alaska Native Movement is dedicated to Movement building for social justice and healing. https://www.nativemovement.org/
International Viewpoint is published under the responsibility of the Bureau of the Fourth International. Signed articles do not necessarily reflect editorial policy. Articles can be reprinted with acknowledgement, and a live link if possible.
Self-Determination for Eastern Ukraine?
Completely absent in any of the governmental efforts for the last three and a half years to end the war in Ukraine is the issue of self-determination as it relates concretely to where the on-the-ground war and the huge percentage of casualties are primarily happening.
The principle of nations having the right to make decisions about the form and nature of their governments goes back over 100 years and has long been upheld by the United Nations and most of the world’s governments.
When it comes to the Russia/Ukraine war, this principle clearly applies to Ukraine’s efforts to defend its territory, economy, and form of government from Russia’s 2022 military invasion, intended to extinguish Ukraine as a self-determining country.
But so far, neither the United Nations nor any other country has applied the concept of self-determination to the reality that it is in eastern Ukraine, the four provinces of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, where the path to a just and peaceful end to this terrible war lies. Following a ceasefire and other necessary steps to prepare for them, there should be binding referendums under United Nations supervision so that each of these four provinces can decide whether they want to be part of Russia or part of Ukraine.
It would be essential that these referendums be under the auspices of a neutral entity, which is why the United Nations is the logical choice.
Is this point of view pro-Ukrainian or pro-Russian? It seems to me it is neither. Neither side wants to risk losing territory it considers to be its own via a popular vote, which would put the stamp of political legitimacy on the results. Of course, the alternative seems to be a continuation for years, if not decades, of destructive and dangerous military conflict, tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars wasted, and tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of additional deaths.
Would the implementation of such a deal set a precedent for situations elsewhere in the world where there is conflict over territory between more-or-less distinct peoples? It probably would, but is such a precedent a bad thing? In a world where democracy is under threat by fascists and authoritarians, a successful application of the democratic principle of self-determination would be a ray of light, a hopeful development.
Is there an alternative that is more just, more likely to succeed, more likely to end this brutal, destructive, and dangerous war and allow for positive economic and social rebuilding? That must be the objective.
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