Letters from an American - February 19, 2025

Episode Date: February 20, 2025

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February 19th, 2025. The past week has solidified a sea change in American and global history. A week ago, on Wednesday, February 12th, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels, Belgium, that President Donald Trump intended to back away from support for Ukraine in its fight to push back Russia's invasions of 2014 and 2022. Hegseth said that Trump wanted to negotiate peace with Russia, and he promptly threw on the table three key Russian demands. He said that it was unrealistic to think

that Ukraine would get back all its land, essentially suggesting that Russia could keep Crimea at least, and that the US would not back Ukraine's membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, the mutual security agreement that has kept Russian incursions into Europe at bay since 1949. Hegseth's biggest concession to Russia though was his warning that stark strategic realities prevent the United

States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe. Also on Wednesday, President Donald Trump spoke to Russia's President Vladimir Putin for nearly an hour and a half and came out echoing Putin's rationale for his attack on Ukraine. Trump's social media account posted that the call had been highly productive and said the two leaders would visit each other's countries, offering a White House visit to Putin, who has been isolated from other nations since his attacks on Ukraine. In a press conference on Thursday,

the day after his speech in Brussels, Hegseth suggested again that the US military did not have the resources to operate in more than one arena, and was choosing to prioritize China rather than Europe, a suggestion that observers of the world's most powerful military found ludicrous. Then, on Friday, at the 61st Munich Security Conference, where the U.S. and allies and partners have come together to discuss security issues since 1963, Vice President J.D. Vance attacked the USA's European allies.

He warned that they were threatened not by Russia or China, but rather by the threat from within, by which he meant the democratic principles of equality before the law that right-wing ideologues believe weaken a nation by treating women and racial, religious, and gender minorities as equal to white Christian men. After Vance told Europe to change course and take our shared civilization in a new direction, he refused to meet with Germany's Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and instead met with the leader of the far-right German political party that has been associated with neo-Nazis.

While the Munich conference was still underway, the Trump administration on Saturday announced it was sending a delegation to Saudi Arabia to begin peace talks with Russia. Ukrainian officials said they had not been informed and had no plans to attend. European negotiators were not invited either. When U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov spoke on Saturday, the Russian readout of the call suggested that Russia urgently needs relief from the economic sanctions that are crushing the Russian economy. The day before, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, an ally of both Putin and Trump, assured Hungarian state radio that Russia will be reintegrated into the

world economy and the European energy system as soon as the US president comes and creates peace. Talks began yesterday in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. In a four and a half hour meeting, led by Rubio and Lavrov, and including National Security Advisor Mike Walz, the U.S. and Russia agreed to re-staff the embassies in each other's countries, a key Russian goal as part of its plan to end its isolation. Lavrov blamed the Biden administration for previous obstacles to diplomatic efforts and told reporters that now that Trump is in power he had reason to believe that the American side

has begun to better understand our position. Yesterday evening from his Florida residence Trump parroted Russian propaganda when he blamed Ukraine for the war that began when Russia invaded Ukraine's sovereign territory. When reporters asked about the exclusion of Ukraine from the talks, Trump answered, there for three years. You should have ended it three years ago. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal." He also said that Zelensky holds only a 4% approval rating when in fact it's about 57%. Today Trump posted that Zelensky is a dictator and should hold elections, a demand Russia has made in hopes of installing a more pro-Russia government. As Laura Rosen pointed out in Diplomatic, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev posted, if you told me just three months ago that these were the words of the US

president, I would have laughed out loud. Be clear about what's happening, Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark posted, Trump and his administration, and thus America, is siding with Putin and Russia against a United States ally. To be even clearer, under Trump, the United States is abandoning the post-World War II world it helped to build, and then guaranteed for the past 80 years. The struggle for Ukraine to maintain its sovereignty, independence, and territory has become a fight for the principles established by the United Nations, organized in the wake of World War II by the allied countries in that war, to establish international rules that would,

as the UN Charter said, prevent the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights. Central to those principles and rules was that members would not attack the territorial integrity or political independence of any other country. In 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO came together to hold back growing Soviet aggression under a pact that an attack on any of the member states would be considered an attack on all. The principle of national sovereignty is being tested in Ukraine. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine held about a third of the USSR's nuclear weapons,

but gave them up in exchange for payments and security assurances from Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom that they would respect Ukraine's sovereignty within its existing borders. But Ukraine sits between Russia and Europe, and as Ukraine increasingly showed an inclination to turn toward Europe rather than Russia, Russian leader Putin worked to put his own puppets at the head of the Ukrainian government with the expectation that they would keep Ukraine, with its vast resources, tethered to Russia. In 2004, it appeared that Russian-backed politician Viktor Yanukovych had won the presidency of Ukraine, but the election was so full of fraud, including the poisoning of a key rival who

wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe, that the U.S. government and other international observers did not recognize the election results. The Ukrainian government voided the election and called for a do-over. To rehabilitate his image, Yanukovych turned to American political consultant Paul Manafort, who was already working

for Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. With Manafort's help, Yanukovych won the presidency in 2010 and began to turn Ukraine toward Russia. When Yanukovych suddenly reversed Ukraine's course toward cooperation with the European Union and instead took a $3 billion loan from Russia, Ukrainian students protested. On February 18, 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power in the Medan Revolution, also known as the Revolution of Dignity, and he fled to Russia. Shortly after Yanukovych's ouster, Russia invaded Ukraine's Crimea and annexed it. The invasion prompted the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions

on Russia and on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in the U.S. territories. EU sanctions froze assets, banned goods from Crimea, and banned travel of certain Russians to Europe. Yanukovych's fall had left Manafort both without a patron and with about $17 million worth of debt to Deripaska. Back in the U.S. in 2016, television personality Donald Trump was running for the presidency, but his campaign was foundering. Manafort stepped in to help. He didn't take a salary, but reached out

to Deripaska through one of his Ukrainian business partners, Konstantin Kalimnik, immediately after landing the job, asking him, how do we use to get whole? Has Oleg Vladimirovich Deripaska operations seen? Journalist Jim Rutenberg established that in 2016 Russian operatives presented Manafort a plan for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine's east, giving Putin effective control of the country's industrial heartland. In exchange for weakening NATO and US support for Ukraine, looking the other way as Russia took eastern Ukraine, and removing US sanctions from

Russian entities, Russian operatives were willing to help Trump win the White House. The Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020 established that Manafort's Ukrainian business partner, Kalymnik, whom it described as a Russian intelligence officer, acted as a liaison between Manafort and Deripaska while Manafort ran Trump's campaign. Government officials knew that something was happening between the Trump campaign and Russia. By the end of July 2016, FBI Director James Comey opened a counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. After Trump won, the FBI caught Trump National Security Advisor, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, assuring Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that the new

administration would change US policy toward Russia. Shortly after Trump took office Flynn had to resign and Trump asked Comey to drop the investigation into Flynn. When Comey refused Trump fired him. The next day he told the Russian delegation he was hosting in the Oval Office, I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That's taken off. Trump swung US policy toward Russia, but that swing hit him. In 2019, with the help of ally Rudy Giuliani, Trump planned to invite Ukraine's pro-Russian

President Petro Poroshenko to the White House to boost his chances of reelection. In exchange, Poroshenko would announce that he was investigating Hunter Biden for his work with Ukrainian energy company Burisma, thus weakening Trump's chief rival, Democrat Joe Biden, in the 2020 presidential election. But then, that April, voters in Ukraine elected Volodymyr Zelenskyi rather than Poroshenko. Trump withheld money Congress had appropriated for Ukraine's defense against Russia and suggested he would release it only after Zelensky

announced an investigation into Hunter Biden. That July 2019 phone call launched Trump's first impeachment, which, after the Senate acquitted him in February 2020, launched in turn his revenge tour and then the big lie that he had won the 2020 election. The dramatic break from the democratic traditions of the United States, when Trump and his cronies tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election,

was in keeping with his increasing drift toward the political tactics of Russia. When Biden took office, he and Secretary of State Antony Blinken worked feverishly to strengthen NATO and other U.S. alliances and partnerships. In February 2022, Putin launched another invasion of Ukraine, attempting a lightning strike to take the rich regions of the country for which his people had negotiated with Manafort in 2016. But rather than a quick victory, Putin found himself bogged down. Zelensky refused to leave the country and instead backed resistance, telling the Americans who offered to evacuate him, the fight is

here. I need ammunition, not a ride. With the support of Biden and Blinken, NATO allies and other partners stood behind Ukraine to stop Putin from dismantling the post-war, rules-based international order and spreading war further into Europe. When he left office just a month ago, Biden said he was leaving the Trump administration with a strong hand to play in foreign policy, leaving it an America with more friends and stronger alliances whose adversaries are weaker and under pressure than when he took office. Now, on the anniversary of the day the Ukrainian people ousted Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, Putin is famous for launching attacks on anniversaries.

The United States has turned its back on Ukraine and 80 years of peacetime alliances in favor of support for Vladimir Putin's Russia. We now have an alliance between a Russian president who wants to destroy Europe and an American president who also wants to destroy Europe," a European diplomat said. The transatlantic alliance is over. This shift appears to reflect the interests of Trump rather than the American people. Trump's vice president during his first term, Mike Pence, posted, Mr. President, Ukraine did not start this war. Russia launched an unprovoked and brutal invasion claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. The road

to peace must be built on the truth. Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker, a Republican of Mississippi, said Putin is a war criminal and should be in jail for the rest of his life, if not executed. Courtney Kube and Carol E. Lee of NBC News reported that intelligence officials and congressional officials told them that Putin feels empowered by Trump's recent support and is not interested in negotiations. He is interested in controlling Ukraine. A Quinnipiac poll released today shows that only nine percent of Americans think we

should trust Putin. Eighty-one percent say we shouldn't. For his part, Putin complained today that Trump was not moving fast enough against Europe and Ukraine. In the bulwark, Mark Hurtling, who served as the commanding general of the United States Army Europe, commanded the 1st Armored Division in Germany and the

multinational division north in Iraq, underlined the dramatic shift in American alignment. In an article titled, We're Negotiating with War Criminals, he listed the crimes. Nearly 20,000 Ukrainian children kidnapped and taken to Russia, the deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, schools, and energy facilities, the execution of prisoners of war, torture of detainees, sexual violence against Ukrainian civilians and detainees, starvation, forcing Ukrainians to join pro-Russian militias. And we are negotiating with them, Hurtling wrote. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo points out that the talks appear to be focused on new concessions

for American companies in the Russian oil industry, including a deal for American companies to participate in Russian oil exploration in the Arctic. For years, Putin has apparently believed that driving a wedge between the US and Europe would make NATO collapse and permit Russian expansion. But it's not clear that's the only possible outcome. Ukraine's Zelensky and the Ukrainians are not participating in the destruction of either their country or European alliances, of course. And European leaders are coming together to strengthen European defenses. Emergency meetings with 18 European countries and Canada have netted a promise to stand by Ukraine and protect Europe. Russia poses an existential threat to Europeans, President Emmanuel Macron of France said today. Also today, rather than dropping sanctions against

Russia, European Union ambassadors approved new ones. For his part, Trump appears to be leaning into his alliance with dictators. This afternoon he posted on social media a statement about how he had killed New York City's congestion pricing and saved Manhattan, adding, long live the King. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Butowich reposted the statement with an image of Trump in the costume of an ancient king with a crown and an ermine robe. Later, the White House itself shared an image that imitated a Time magazine cover with the

word Trump in place of Time, a picture of Trump with a crown, and the words, Long live the King. The British tabloid, The Daily Star, interprets the changes in American politics differently. Its cover tomorrow features Vladimir Putin walking Putin's poodle, the President of the United States. Letters from an American was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dedham, Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.