"Daddy" Just Accelerated The Killing Of Ukrainians

It never works out—never.

The latest iteration of “Trump will be good for Ukraine” lasted three days, but sadly this might have been the most tragic. We have had a number of such moments over the last months. My favorite (in a horrifying way) was the famous Trump-Zelensky sit down in St Peters during the funeral of Pope Francis. For some reason, this picture led people to believe that Trump was honestly going to help Ukraine.

Trump did what he always does after such meetings. Make a bland pro-Ukrainian/anti-Russian statement and then goes back to Washington and continues to help Putin as much as possible. In case you do not remember, the statement Trump made after the St Peter’s meeting was a question that ‘Maybe he (Putin) doesn’t want to stop the war’.

It was meaningless, self-evidently true, committed Trump to nothing—and quickly forgotten.

Btw, this happened on April 26.

We had another re-run this last weekend during the “Daddy” summit. After European leaders massaged Trump with vigor, the US president threw them a little crumb (which people weirdly thought was some great victory). In response to a question, Trump said he was thinking of sending Ukraine more air defense. The actual quote was: “We’re going to see if we can make some available”.

Well, it did not take two weeks for this nonsense to be exposed—just two days. It turns out that the US Department of Defense, at that very moment, was working to turn off as much of the remaining aid taps for Ukraine as they could—including the exact air-defense equipment that Trump mentioned. Last night the White House confirmed that the US was stopping some/all of the remaining (Biden-era) shipments of aid to Ukraine including crucial Patriot air defense systems (and other vital material).

This is a shopping list of much of the most important aid that Ukraine desperately needs to fight and without which many more Ukrainians will die. The nightly bombardment of Ukrainian cities will now be more effective for Russia, and the Ukrainian ability to strike back on the Russians will be lessened.

Just as a clarification—not only are the Patriots a crucial part of the Ukrainian air defense network, AIM-7 (Sparrow) missiles and Stingers are further key parts of the Ukrainian air defense network.

If Putin could write a wish list of the weapons he would want Trump to keep from Ukraine—this would be it.

The idea that the US needs these now is also a sham. Many of these weapons would be of dubious value in a war to protect Taiwan (and btw, the US is hardly planning for one I was recently told).

Now this decision may be revisited one the sham “assessments” are over. However even if that happens, Ukraine will have had weeks without vital supplies.

Its one more example of how the Trump administration is taking active steps to help Russia kill Ukrainians.

Maybe Europe will stop the stupid, self-destructive flattery of Trump and actually start acting in its own interest. European states, as I said in the weekend update, actually have some powerful tools to use to coerce Trump into helping Ukraine—if they had the self-respect and strategic understanding to use them.

First amongst these tools is the declaration that they will only buy US weapons going forward if the US also sells them weapons that they can then send on to Ukraine. The Trump administration is desperate that Europeans keep buying US weapons—and almost certainly would have to respond positively to such a position. This is from the update.

And the sad thing is that instead of playing the weak child—Europe has some very strong cards to play with Trump. In particular, the US is keen for Europeans to continue buying US weapons (they seem to have panicked a little when they realized that in pressing for more European defense spending they might encourage the Europeans to develop their own defense industries more). Europeans could easily make offers to buy US weapons on the pledge that the US will also sell Patriots to Ukraine. It could be a very effective strategy—but it means that they would have to use some pressure on the USA. Little children do not do that.

Btw, this is not the only thing that Europeans can do—but it would arguably be the most effective; However, it requires self-respect and self-confidence.

So there we have it—another sham moment has passed, though in this case the US was actively planning on sabotaging what little support was left for Ukraine while Trump was telling his little lies.

When a Russian missile slams into a Ukrainian apartment building tomorrow night or the next, and a young couple, maybe with a newborn child, is killed, just remember:

This is “Daddy” in action—this is the USA in action.