Re: Friday - 02.28.2025 - Dinner Plans

dsi1 wrote:

On Sun, 2 Mar 2025 12:03:47 +0000, gm wrote:

It's best Mr. Zelenskyy stick with Europe in fighting this war...
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That Friday massacre was a set-up by Putin/Vance/Trump. That whole scene
was created to be shown on Russian TV in a remarkable America/Russia PR
campaign. Only the most feeble of mind would be fooled by what was going

David, I'd be VEWY careful calling out someone for "the most feeble of
mind":
POWERLINE:
"Zelenskyy is no longer the international heartthrob with the glamorous
entourage. He has postponed elections, outlawed opposition media and
parties, suspended habeas corpus and walked out of negotiations when he
had an even hand in Spring 2022 and apparently even now when he does not
in Spring 2025.
Quo vadis, Volodymyr..."
Historian Victor Davis Hanson has posted the following 1o observations
across several social media platforms:
Ten bad takeaways from the Zelenskyy blow-up
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/03/hanson-goldman-on-the-oval-office-showdown.php
Ten bad takeaways from the Zelenskyy blow-up:
1. Zelenskyy does not grasp—or deliberately ignores—the bitter truth:
those with whom he feels most affinity (Western globalists, the American
Left, the Europeans) have little power in 2025 to help him. And those
with whom he obviously does not like or seeks to embarrass (cf. his
Scranton, Penn. campaign-like visit in September 2024) alone have the
power to save him. For his own sake, I hope he is not being “briefed” by
the Obama-Clinton-Biden gang to confront Trump, given their interests
are not really Ukraine’s as they feign...
2. Zelenskyy acts as if his agendas and ours are identical. So, he keeps
insisting that he is fighting for us despite our two-ocean-distance that
he mocks. We do have many shared interests with Ukraine, but not all by
any means: Trump wants to “reset” with Russia and triangulate it against
China. He seeks to avoid a 1962 DEFCON 2-like crisis over a proxy
showdown in proximity to a nuclear rival. And he sincerely wants to end
the deadlocked Stalingrad slaughterhouse for everyone’s sake...
3. The Europeans (and Canada) are now talking loudly of a new muscular
antithesis, independent of the U.S. Promises, promises—given that would
require Europeans to prune back their social welfare state, frack, use
nuclear, stop the green obsessions, and spend 3-5 percent of their GDP
on defense. The U.S. does not just pay 16 percent of NATO’s budget but
also puts up with asymmetrical tariffs that result in a European Union
trade surplus of $160 billion, plays the world cop patrolling sea-lanes
and deterring terrorists and rogues states that otherwise might
interrupt Europe’s commercial networks abroad, as well as de facto
including Europe under a nuclear umbrella of 6,500 nukes...
4. Zelenskyy must know that all of the once deal-stopping issues to
peace have been de facto settled: Ukraine is now better armed than most
NATO nations, but will not be in NATO; and no president has or will ever
supply Ukraine with the armed wherewithal to take back the Donbass and
Crimea. So, the only two issues are a) how far will Putin be willing to
withdraw to his 2022 borders and b) how will he be deterred? The first
is answered by a commercial sector/tripwire, joint Ukrainian-US-Europe
resource development corridor in Eastern Ukraine, coupled with a
Korea-like DMZ; the second by the fact that Putin unlike his 2008 and
2014 invasions has now lost a million dead and wounded to a Ukraine that
will remain thusly armed...
5. What are Zelenskyy’s alternatives without much U.S. help—wait for a
return of the Democrats to the White House in four years? Hope for a
rearmed Europe? Pray for a Democratic House and a 3rd Vindman-like
engineered Trump impeachment? Or swallow his pride, return to the White
House, sign the rare-earth minerals deal, invite in the Euros (are they
seriously willing to patrol a DMZ?), and hope Trump can warn Putin, as
he did successfully between 2017-21, not to dare try it again?...
6. If there is a cease fire, a commercial deal, a Euro ground presence,
and influx of Western companies into Ukraine, would there be elections?
And if so, would Zelenskyy and his party win? And if not, would there be
a successor transparent government that would reveal exactly where all
the Western financial aid money went?...
7. Zelenskyy might see a model in Netanyahu. The Biden Administration
was far harder on him than Trump is on Ukraine: suspending arms
shipments, demanding cease-fires, prodding for a wartime, bipartisan
cabinet, hammering Israel on collateral damage—none of which Westerners
have demanded of Zelenskyy. Yet Netanyahu managed a hostile Biden, kept
Israel close to its patron, and when visiting was gracious to his host.
Netanyahu certainly would never before the global media have
interrupted, and berated a host and patron president in the White
House...
8. If Ukraine has alienated the U.S. what then is its strategic victory
plan? Wait around for more Euros? Hold off an increasingly invigorated
Russian military? Cede more territory? What, then, exactly are
Zelenskyy’s cards he seems to think are a winning hand?...
9. If one views carefully all the 50-minute tape, most of it was going
quite well—until Zelenskyy started correcting Vance firstly, and Trump
secondly. By Ukraine-splaining to his hosts, and by his gestures, tone,
and interruptions, he made it clear that he assumed that Trump was just
more of the same compliant, clueless moneybags Biden waxen effigy. And
that was naïve for such a supposedly worldly leader...
10. March 2025 is not March 2022, after the heroic saving of Kyiv—but
three years and 1.5 million dead and wounded later. Zelenskyy is no
longer the international heartthrob with the glamorous entourage. He has
postponed elections, outlawed opposition media and parties, suspended
habeas corpus and walked out of negotiations when he had an even hand in
Spring 2022 and apparently even now when he does not in Spring 2025.
Quo vadis, Volodymyr...???"
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GM
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