If you don’t like Trump’s policy, wait a week. 
Shipments Resume
Less than a week ago the Pentagon announced it was withholding a shipment of arms earmarked for Ukraine.
The Wall Street Journal reports Trump to Resume Sending Weapons to Ukraine
“We have to, they have to be able to defend themselves,” Trump said of aiding Kyiv during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “They are getting hit very hard. Now they are getting hit very hard. We’re gonna have to send more weapons.”
In a statement late Monday, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said: “At President Trump’s direction, the Department of Defense is sending additional defensive weapons to Ukraine to ensure the Ukrainians can defend themselves while we work to secure a lasting peace and ensure the killing stops.”
Who’s Running This Show?
Trump told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a telephone call Friday that he wasn’t responsible for the halt in weapons shipments to Kyiv.
Trump said that he had directed a review of Pentagon munitions stockpiles after the U.S. struck Iran’s nuclear sites last month but hadn’t ordered the department to freeze the arms deliveries, according to people briefed on the conversation.
The call with Zelensky came shortly after Trump publicly said he was “very disappointed” and “didn’t make any progress” on a Ukraine peace deal in a separate call Thursday with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump urged Putin to end the war during the call, but Putin refused, according to the Kremlin.
“I’m disappointed, frankly, that President Putin hasn’t stopped,” Trump said Monday night.
Trump assured Zelensky that the U.S. will send as much military aid as it can spare, the people said.
Zelensky Happy
Zelensky hinted after his phone call with Trump that Ukraine might have cause for optimism. “This was probably the best conversation in all this time, it was maximally productive,” Zelensky said during an evening address on July 5. “I am grateful for the readiness to help.”
The halted shipments included Patriot antimissile interceptors, AIM-120 antiaircraft missiles, howitzer rounds, AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, GMLRS missiles to arm Himars rocket launchers, Stinger antitank missiles, and grenade launchers.
The White House National Security Council will meet on Tuesday to discuss the new weapons deliveries to Ukraine, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting.
“They do want to have the antimissile missiles, as they call the Patriots, and we’re going to see if we can make some available,” Trump said last month. “They are very hard to get, we need them, too.”
I had it figured out about two weeks into his first term:
Trump is weak, stupid and easily manipulated.
Is a gun a defensive weapon? A knife?
This is all kabuki.
Trump rightly assesses that this war is a loser, and wants to get out of it somehow.
Nothing to do with Ukraine; it’s all domestic politics and posturing.
There are no weapons to give. NATO has been exhausted. End of story.
Nobody wants to admit it, but in fact they have already at many junctures.
NATO spends at least 75% of global weapons spending, but of course that is nowhere near high enough !?
Trump apparently not knowing what hardware is being sent over is on par I guess. Most of the aid we’ve given isn’t stuff we want: Cluster munitions from the 80s, howitzer rounds that have been sitting since Nixon was pres, 5.56 ball that we’re constantly throwing out anyways. As for high tech stuff, most of it is either last Gen or export made to begin with.
If we babied Ukraine like we do with the people committing a genocide, Russia would have lost by now with their 19th century Crimean War human wave tactics. I’m seriously tired of old men playing armchair understander about Ukraine and military matters in general when the actual troops and intelligence keeps spelling out how to win. Russia is grinding itself out of existence, it wouldn’t cost much to let them once and for all.
We have never seen anything like this administration before. The Pentagon, CIA, NSC all have extremely intelligent, experienced, and capable people who work tirelessly to provide the very best information and advice to the political leadership within every administration. For the most part, past political leadership within administrations has been self-aware enough and humble enough to understand that they are not the experts, which is why they are continually briefed by the best and brightest taxpayer-funded experts. This President and his appointees have so much contempt for career experts, and this, combined with their arrogance, causes decision-making on critical life-and-death matters to appear erratic and lacking strategic purpose.
You need to learn the truth about experts. They will parrot what they are paid to parrot. Also, experts disagree with each other. Being an expert doesn’t automatically make someone right. Experts testify for both the plaintiff and defendant in court cases. Battle of the experts.
Number one, why is the war in Ukraine any of our business? The United States was not attacked.
Russian forces have successfully seized control of the Shevchenko village in eastern Ukraine—home to one of the largest lithium deposits in Europe.
same swamp as always, but overseen by a guy with the vocabulary of a slow second grader.
The first special needs president.
Putin won’t concede on his demands, and quite frankly he doesn’t have to, and the narcissist Trump won’t back down. More innocent Ukraine ‘soldiers’ dragged off the streets will die for nothing.
So what Trump is saying is he wants more Ukrainian soldiers to die. That makes him a murderer
Ukraine can not win under any circumstances short of the US sending troops to die which will NOT happen unless he wants to be removed from office
Who is going to pay for these new weapons? Not one more %$#^&#^ US Taxpayer dollar for Ukraine
One would have thought that as the Big Stupid Bill has passed and he no longer needs to worry about the RINO neocon war pig murderers in Congress holding it up he would hasten the wars end and save Ukrianian lives and save Ukraine itself by cutting off ALL support immediately.
Guess not. Trump is apparently a complete moron. As a result it is now all but certain that Ukraine ceases to exist completely
All Usonian presidents, at least since Truman, have been war criminals.
This war in Ukraine is by far the most important war since WWII when it comes to the interests of the “free world.” You see, Putin is a very strategic “poker player” and his strategy has always been underpinned by his belief that Russia could not win a conventional war against NATO, but that he will never have to fight that war because “the West,” with its democracies, will not have the “stomach” or “courage of their convictions” to stop his micro-aggressions. Putin is not stupid enough to attack Poland, Estonia, or Romania and risk forcing NATO intervention. But he knows that he can begin to take back Eastern Europe one little bite at a time, starting with Georgia, Crimea, the Donbas region of Ukraine, and possibly Moldova next if he is not stopped in Ukraine.
You have internalized the CIA/Blob “news” feed. The cause of Russias aggression in Ukraine is the West trying to regime change Russia and control its resources. That is why the CIA has (or had) 19 bases in eastern Ukraine. That is why we instigated a coup and implaced Azov/Ukronazi/CIA/MI6 Assets into power in Ukraine in 2014.
You should learn the real story
Yanukovych was elected by the people of Ukraine, promising to fulfill the people’s will and move the nation in a direction that would further the effort to join NATO and the EU. Yanukovych, over time, slow-walked away from these efforts. It then became very clear that Yanukovych had closer ties and allegiances to Russia than the EU and the NATO member nations. Like Estonia, Poland, and Romania, the people remember being under Soviet occupation, and they have no desire to ally themselves with their neighbor to the East. Of course, the CIA, U.S. State Department, and the EU foreign ministry had many people in Ukraine. Ukraine is a democracy and borders Russia. Russia has many allies and significant strategic interests within the borders of Ukraine. As we have with every fragile democracy where an autocratic neighbor is attempting to meddle with the democracy in order to weaken it, we (the West) have not been shy in pushing back on such efforts. Ask yourself, if Yanukovych was not working to move Ukraine closer to Russia while President, why, after being pushed out, did he flee to Russia, where he remains today?
So elections, such as were held in Crimea, are bad and illegitimate, but government by CA sponsored coup and CIA Funded street mob is Muh Democracy In Action.
I am NOT PROUD of this: My Company, back in the 80’s, developed the Motherboards for the Patriot Systems. It really did not make much money and certainly not enough for me to WANT that business to Continue. I wiggled out in 1990. The Gulf war deeply disturbed my Partners and I and to this very day, I am not proud of it and I am DEEPLY anti-war now.
And now I read that Patriots will be used against Russia. I would not TRUST PRES Z with my air rifle.
Be proud of your contribution to the us military. The politicians decide how it is used.
Worry not. The Guardian reports that the US stockpile of Patriot interceptors is down to 25%. Their production being measly 350 per year would be enough for just an evening in Tel Aviv last month. The project to double their production in a couple of years wouldn’t be enough for an evening in Kiev.
Germany 2Y is 1.8%. The 10Y: 2.6%. Klingbeil, Germany SPD young finance minister, a supersalesman, military family, is for arm deliveries to Ukraine, spending cuts, a smaller gov, lower rates, infrastructure, econ modernization and rearmament. Klingbeil wants to have better trade relationship with the US, but he is blaming Trump for redefining the US relationship with NATO. The E3 sells Trump’s volatility and instability to rearm, doing exactly what Trump advocates for years.
– “We have to, they have to be able to defend themselves,” Trump said of aiding Kyiv during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “They are getting hit very hard. Now they are getting hit very hard. We’re gonna have to send more weapons.”
> Is Trump senile? It appears as though He forgot He was President of the U.S. and thinks “Z” is!! I get it, Trump told “Z” to stop the aggression, gave him weapons to defend himself against attack if any. So “Z” tells Trump to go pound sand, and let him know when he gets more weapons. Until then STFU!
>> So what does Trump do you ask? He Cowers to “Z” yet again, and is sending “Z” more weapons. So actually “Z” Is In Charge it appears! So when Trump says stop “Z” says No, and Trump sends more weapons. That’s a heck of a “Peace Plan” you got going there Puppet Boy!!
No wonder Puting isn’t playing along, and can you blame Him? I certainly don’t! Who trust someone offering a “Peace Plan” who then turns around and Arms Your Adversary to the teeth? I wouldn’t trust Trump either.
>>> Send NO Weapons, and NO $$ until “Z” Stops Fighting. How hard is this? If He continues to fight, you back off, and let them give there Country to Russia, because they can never, ever, Win this battle without NATO, and then we are in a all out War that can’t be put back in the bottle…
The E3 – the UK, France and Germany – are building a missile force. It cost billions
to build mixers for solid state or liquid fuel for a few thousands ballistic missiles and drones. It takes decade to excavate silos, bunkers and command control deep underground, in the Alps. It cost trillions. But first the are building defensive interceptors. The E3 has sophisticated chemical, aircraft and submarine industries.
Are they building them for the people who have taken over their Countries? Why don’t they just give them the money as an offer to stay home, and maybe you can keep your land, maybe not your Government, but your land perhaps…
Austria and Germany deport Syrians and Afghans. Merz is more popular
after implementing AfD policies. Merz and Klingbeil are moving to the right.
The elephant in the room is the fact that China has not resumed sales of the most sensitive rare-earths to the U.S.
Therefore we can not produce critical military guidance components!
This strategic blunder of the century is what caused Trump to review our dwindling inventory of sophisticated weapons.
Our “Fire, Ready, Aim” commander is playing checkers against the serious chess players of the world and costing us our credibility and allies. Turning our defensive and offensive weaponry programs from world leadership to empty warehouses.
Elections have consequences!
Everyone understands elections have consequences. That’s why the old non-leader in fake power who sent our Money, Weapons and Oil to our adversaries is gone, and Trump is in Power.
You can’t fix things overnight, and right now He is stuck dealing with the Ukraine Biden Blunder. Yet another issue Trump has to deal with (without knowing the full details, it appears Trump may be currently losing this battle unfortunately. Not sure what’s happening behind the scenes however, but something is amiss),..
Ready, Aim, Fire !
“Elections have consequences!”
Glad Harris is not President.
If FDR underestimated Stalin (and FDR’s own charm toward the man, the supposed importance of a personal relationship, and the effects of all that), and became something of a patsy, Trump is very similarly beyond his depth. I think some of it was FDR’s physical decline, whereas Trump is the same Trump as we’ve seen for 10 years (cue: Putin last time around, Kim Jon Un, etc.) But I don’t expect Trump to sensibly absorb any lessons of history. It is all an oversimplified 3×5 card dot-point script for Trump (cue his misunderstanding of complexities of Hitler and his generals). Trump calculates in seemingly weeks or minutes while Putin obviously has pursued concerted plans for decades. This thing will not turn on a dime, as Trump seeks to shoe-horn everything into that silly “I’m the snap deal god” format. Trump’s advantage is everything the USA has built up to (without him), which hopefully his ridiculous impulsiveness will not degrade too much.
FDR behaved towards Stalin (well before Pearl Harbor) like an infatuated girl. Either that or a whole-hearted lover of Communism. And indeed his administration was seeded with actual Communists. The story is little known. FDR sacrificed American taxpayers and American aims generally to aid Stalin (Hitler was a choirboy compared to Stalin) with unbelievable amounts of everything imaginable.
Trump’s (and by extension, our) Ukraine “policy” seems to be tatters of Biden’s, plus anything he hasn’t arbitrarily reversed and scrambled in the last five minutes. He has an Israel policy, an immigration policy, a tax and spend policy, an ESG/ DEI policy. But the word scarcely applies here. Maybe it amounts to “keep everyone scrambling in all directions, however the chips may fall.”
I have come to understand the he has a “Destroy American innovation and credibility” policy!
He has to destroy the country to be able to save it, apparently.
Needs an excuse to put native dissenters in the ICE camps. We will see the first by next summer.
Trump is banking on the Israel-Iran ceasefire holding.
If that goes pear-shaped, all bets are off and Ukraine will get shafted because Israel comes first in the pecking order.
On again off again, nobody seems to have any idea what the hell to do … the US and NATO simply don’t have any enough arms to give to Ukraine now to make any real difference … and that is the problem .., any new US sanctions against Russia will just blow up world trade further … this is a catch 22 …
One thing you can say about trump is that he is consistently inconsistent with no apparent policies beyond the next day.
TACO TACOes TACO
Is Trump really deciding current War Policy or is he given Strategies which are probably designed by the Deep State who have been around long before Trump even entered politics?
Maybe? Something has changed, and it’s possible that the rug has been pulled and Trump is not in charge at the moment. Seems odd how some of Trumps actions have been muted, so to speak. I don’t think Trump changed His stance for Peace in Ukraine, but now he is potentially preparing to send them more. He has yet to fill the SPR best I know, and that should have been done immediately and way before money went to any other Country. Isn’t that part of the MAGA movement? Can’t be “Great Again” giving our Money to war mongers, Oil to our Adversaries, and fake peace plans on the table?
Something is Amiss…
Time to move beyond the “deep state” bogey man fantasies. Bessent is the deep state for economics, Miller is the deep state for immigration, “Raizin” Caine is deep state for military actions, but the fantasy of a cabal of shadowy cigar smoking billionaires running the show is unnecessary.
Rjm the deep state has been portrayed as long term liberal civil servants. If there is something of a deep state its the corporations billionaires and lobbyist. Ie follow the money. It will lead to greed/ beliefs and power.
Yes, thank God for career experts who keep the U.S. on track as our politics yo-yo back and forth every four or eight years. Elected politicians and appointed political leaders rarely have the background and experience to make informed and intelligent decisions without guidance from career civil servants. The real danger we face comes from an administration like the current one that operates out of contempt for the career experts and unwarranted arrogance.
NATO is foundering, Ukrainians continue dying and the Russians are advancing.
A few Patriot missiles ain’t going to make a damn bit of difference.
NATO wants war, but practically nobody else does…
The U.S. and Russia want Peace, but Ukraine and Z want War… Hmm…
All Russia has to do to have peace is stop killing Ukrainians.
All Ukraine has to do, is stop asking for more weapons, and stop firing the ones you have at Russia. Russia asked for Peace and Trump agreed. Then Ukraine started bombing Russia again and again. They have never stopped.
Russia is in a no win situation. They stand for Peace, and get bombed. They shoot back and they get accused of war mongering. Both are MSM Lies, and for NATO to get involved. Not happening under Trump I don’t believe, but for whatever reason, it’s leaning that way…
Trump has betrayed MAGA, but sadly, too many of his MAGA sheeple supporters are too ignorant and shallow to understand this. Yes he will lose a significant number of his best, most informed and principled supporters. The question is whether he will gain a sufficient number of former Neocon Republicans and others to make up the difference. I doubt it.
FoxNews has now declined to new lows. I’ve never seen such a disciplined level of propagandists spewing out the Party line. MAGA folks who rely almost exclusively on Fox News will continue to think that Trump hung the moon. They cheer Trump the Peace president, and they will cheer Trump the war President just as enthusiastically.
My optimism for Trump from a few months ago is completely gone. I have resigned myself to the fact that we may be screwed and War is on the horizon. I can’t get upset about it anymore. I’m emotionally spent. What will happen will happen. Unless God somehow intervenes, and I see that as a very low probability, there is very little effective opposition to stop what I see is a path to insanity and sorrow. May take a while, but it could be sooner than later-perhaps much sooner.
Right now it appears there are dozens of black swans flying in the skies above looking for a place to land.
European NATO countries have underfunded their military for decades and it’s we that have betrayed Nato? That’s a good one! The opposite is more true. The betrayal is on their side.
Europe, Japan, South Korea and the like were our poorer buffer states. That’s how it would be expected to work.
Take away America’s wars of aggression, and europe would have no enemies.
We don’t have enough to go around as our stocks haven’t been able to be reconstituted yet so Ukraine will just have to make do. Europe does have some systems they could transfer but they hesitate to do so because they don’t want to left vulnerable either.
Vulnerable to what? To whom? What would Russia want with countries like France and Germany that are fast becoming Muslim? All of NATO together can’t keep up with Russian defense production. Russia’s arms industry is state-owned. The Western for-profit defense companies are unwilling to invest the vast sums it would take to scale up production. It’s not just working 24/7. They would need to build many new factories. They’d be years in the planning – much less the building. The defense companies will never spend that kind of money when they risk a change in the political winds or – God forbid – peace breaking out. When it comes to weaponry, quantity has a quality all its own.
So your solution is to just give up? Don’t even try?
We’ve been trying for 3.5 years. What does Ukraine have to show for it other than 1.5 million dead men? It’s time to tell Ukraine we’re done. We’re out. They need to sue for peace with Russia. If that means more loss of territory, too bad, so sad. Sorry about how we used your country to “weaken Russia”:and led you to believe we would risk nuclear war to defend Ukraine. That was uh …bullshit. As Otter told Flounder, “you F’d up. You trusted us.”
I am favor of a peace treaty. Putin for the moment is not because China has his back. I am afraid lots more will die. Eventually there will have to be European boots on the ground.
Do they even have enough boots to place upon the ground, and still leave there Countries protected? They can’t currently stop people flooding into their own Countries, and taking over daily, so where do they get more troops to fight a war, for a Country currently being taken over already that they can’t stop.
We do have tens of thousands of troops over there, but I would think Trump would call them Home for our own protection, or I would hope so.
There have already been Americans and Europeons fighting in the Ukraine – driving tanks, aiming Patriots, firing HIMARS, directing false flag atrocities (MI6 in Bucha). If Macron and Starmer want to send their troops into Odessa (from Romania) and into western Ukraine, they can go ahead and do it. They’ll come home in body bags if they come home at all.
“What would Russia want with countries like France and Germany that are fast becoming Muslim?” Same as it wants with Ukraine (same as it seems to have always wanted). Buffer states, hinterland for empire.
It might try to “cleanse” the Muslim thing a la Chechnya, or, a la Stalin’s mass relocations and sequestrations.
Quite dissimilar, but not completely lacking a faint, tenuous, most vague resemblance, to the “kinder, gentler” domestic efforts of Trump now, of re-sorting populations.
Good news. As a two time Trump supporter (what was my alternative?) I’m heartened that he’s finally realizing that Putin doesn’t have the right to bomb civilians in Kyiv, the capital of a sovereign nation and that he has publicly telegraphed that he will never change course.
Most of the planet was conquered by countries or peoples that had no “right” to do so. Are we going to give California back to Mexico? Unfortunately not. Trump can “realize” whatever he wants, but he can’t change the course of this war. He can only prolong it so that more men on both sides (mostly Ukrainians) die and the Ukraine loses more territory. Russia now has 6 times the population of the Ukraine. They are winning and will win – unless the US gets directly into the war. For what? A border dispute in the heart of the former Russian empire? We would fight the most heavily nuclear-armed country on earth to help the Kiev regime maintain control of ethic Russians who they hate? GTFOH
Sentient, are you trolling? The “former Russian empire’ defines nothing and means less.What is being decided is nothing less than the future.
Wow, we as Americans have fallen a long way from standing against the Iron Curtain, holding aloft the light of democracy, and protecting weaker countries from the Soviet menace.
“Mr. Gorbachev, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL!” thundered Reagan.
“Mr. Zelensky, LAY DOWN AND DIE!” meekly simps Sentient.
Glad to see you are in favor of bombing civilians to annex a sovereign nation. At least you’re honest about it.
Very optimistic to imagine Trump’s attention span is what you portray. That goes against all evidence we have seen of the man, his tendencies and capacities. I don’t think Trump is “finally realizing” anything in this regard.