Opinions #5/25

Everyone is waiting for Trump and Putin to talk. If the meeting takes place, it may be in Europe or the Far East. Statements by the re-elected US president, while controversial, seem to confirm his intention to facilitate the start of talks between Moscow and Kiev, as promised during the election campaign. At the same time, reaching a ceasefire, which would be a success for Trump, requires a future to be invented. This time, the entire presidential team, from the head of diplomacy to the head of intelligence, is backing the tycoon who returned to the White House. Trump primarily seeks to go down in history as the president who ended the wars, a valid argument for continuing to blame the Biden administration and the democratic world that supported him. But if it is true that during his second term, Trump has decided to settle scores with the deep state, then clearly the world that has been pressuring Biden has already started pressuring him. “The military-industrial complex,” which in the last century President Eisenhower accused of being a problem for democracy, is now more active than ever. Obviously. The idea of ending a clearly inflamed conflict doesn’t please the Cold War 2.0 hounds. Ukraine’s weakness, its human and economic losses are a great business opportunity on the other side of the Atlantic. Jack Keane and Marc A. Thiessen write in the Washington Post (January 23, 2025): “Since Russia’s full-scale invasion began nearly three years ago, the American people have provided about $183 billion in aid to Ukraine. This assistance was not charity. Stopping Putin from subjugating Ukraine was, and remains, in the United States’ vital national security interest. And most of the military aid money has been spent right here at home — reinvigorating our dangerously atrophied defense industrial base, creating good manufacturing jobs and modernizing our military as we send Ukraine older weapons and replace our stockpiles with more advanced versions.” This time the money will not be given directly to Ukraine, where corruption remains unchecked. An international fund consisting mostly of Russian assets frozen in the West (about $300 billion) could lead to the creation of a “Ukraine defense cooperation account” managed by the Pentagon. In particular, the benefits to the US military industry would be obvious. “Let Russia pay to create jobs for American workers building Abrams tanks and Stryker combat vehicles in Ohio; Ground Launched Small Diameter Bombs, Bradley fire-support team vehicles and Hercules recovery vehicles in Pennsylvania; extended-range Joint Direct Attack Munition glide bombs in Arkansas, Missouri and Oklahoma; and 155mm artillery shells in Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Iowa, California and Texas, among countless other American communities producing weapons systems for Ukraine. Using frozen Russian assets to produce those armaments is a win-win solution: Ukraine gets the weapons and the United States gets the money, while Russia bears the cost of Putin’s aggression.” Keane and Thiessen are not free thinkers. Keane is a former deputy chief of staff of the US Army and current president of the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), which has been shaping the West’s narrative of the conflict since the beginning of the war in Ukraine; Thiessen is a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Both fit seamlessly into the world that makes the US defense industry a formidable power. Their strategic vision, published by a newspaper that symbolizes democratic values, the same one that forced Richard Nixon to resign with its Watergate investigation, doesn’t stop at the military industry. “Ukraine can pay us back. Though the war has devastated its economy, the country is sitting on an estimated $26 trillion in untapped natural resources — oil, gas, critical minerals and rare earth metals. Ukraine possesses some of the largest reserves of 22 of the 50 strategic minerals identified as critical to the U.S. economy and national security, including the largest reserves of uranium in Europe; the second-largest reserves of iron ore, titanium and manganese; and the third-largest reserves of shale gas, as well as massive deposits of lithium, graphite and rare earth metals.” Considering also the satisfaction, expressed earlier by BlackRock FMA head and global head of the Financial and Strategic Investors Group (FSIG) Charles Hatami in committing to a $500 billion reconstruction loan to Ukraine, the picture becomes complete: “BlackRock is proud to be able to assist the Ukrainian people by offering a recommendation to the government to establish the Ukraine Development Fund. The country’s recovery will create significant opportunities for investors to participate in the economic recovery.” And what do the Wall Street Goths (BR, J.P. Morgan, McKinsey, etc.) get in return? Quite a lot. Starting with 4 million hectares of farmland, equivalent to 40 thousand square kilometers, which have already come under the control of American agribusiness companies. Adding this part of the territory, over which Kiev lost sovereignty in exchange for money, to the 20 percent now under Moscow’s control, the geographic size of the country will shrink to about 440,000 square kilometers. Before the war with Moscow, there were 603 thousand, and they defended the territorial integrity of the country. A boomerang effect that history will easily attribute to the ultra-nationalist components that had such a strong influence on the fate of the Ukrainian population. A role that American President George Bush Sr. himself defined in 1991, on the eve of independence from the Soviet Union, as detrimental to the country. Speaking in the Verkhovna Rada in Kiev on August 1 of that crucial year, he did not hesitate to talk about the “suicidal nationalism of Ukrainians.” The speech went down in history as the Kiev Speech. I wonder if Trump shares that opinion. While we wait for an answer, Andrew Spannaus invites us into the labyrinth of the new “inner circle” of Washington, analyzing the critical elements that the relationship, now very close, between Trump and Elon Musk evokes in the early supporters of Trumpism, starting with Steve Bannon. While Massimo Nava focuses on the new orientation of the Eastern electorate, concentrating on the results that emerged from the ballot box in very different realities, such as Croatia or Georgia, united by the desire to improve relations with Russia.