The Duran Podcast - Trump Ukraine theatrics. Russia will not back down

Episode Date: July 8, 2025

Trump Ukraine theatrics. Russia will not back down

All right, Alexander, let's talk about the diplomacy in and around Project Ukraine. And Trump has had a call with Putin. He's had a call with Zelensky. He said he had a very good, friendly call with Zelensky. But he had a call that he's unhappy with Putin, not happy with the call for Putin. He's been saying it's quite a lot over the past couple of days. The Russian readout and Putin's statements seems like it was a pretty standard call with Trump. They're not unhappy with the call. But Putin did say that Russia is going to continue the course.

He told Trump, we're going to continue to do what we're doing. So what are your thoughts on the diplomacy that is happening with Project Ukraine? I don't think there is any diplomacy. I think what basically happened. The phone calls. The phone calls, exactly. but I think what basically happened was this. The United States, as we've discussed in previous programs, is now running into capacity constraints.

They've had this conflict in the Middle East. They've used up a lot of air defense interceptors there. Already before that conflict, they were starting to worry about their stockpiles of air defense interceptors, particularly the key PAC-3 Patriot missile interceptor, which is used to shoot down ballistic missiles, and that is in limited production, apparently only 30 a year. 30 a month, I'm sorry, not a year. But anyway, they are very restricted in the number of these that they can supply to Ukraine. Ukraine is now being hammered by the Russians every night and every day in terms of Russian missile and drone attacks.

the Americans have found that they just cannot maintain the pace of supply to Ukraine, that the Ukrainians and their allies in Europe have been insisting upon. So the Americans, as we discussed in a recent program, have been obliged to stop. So what then happened was Trump, in order to try to somehow smooth things over, he called Putin. He asked Putin, will you now agree to a ceasefire? you previously said to me that you would agree to a ceasefire on certain conditions. One was arms supplies to Ukraine and intelligence sharing with Ukraine.

Stopping. Well, I have now stopped supplying Ukraine with one type of critical weapon. Air defence interceptors. Can you please agree to a ceasefire? And that was basically what Trump was trying to do. So he was trying to smooth over this issue of the fact, the non-delivery of air defense missile interceptors to Ukraine by trying to get the Russians to agree to a ceasefire or perhaps more realistically going through the pretense of again asking the Russians for a ceasefire. because I cannot believe that he expected that Putin would agree to a ceasefire. Putin did not agree to a ceasefire.

He said, maybe this is a step in the right direction, but it doesn't go anywhere near far enough. We can't just have one category of weapons and similar weapons stop. We need all weapons supplies to Ukraine to stop and all intelligence sharing with Ukraine to stop. and in addition, they need to agree to withdraw their forces from the four regions. I mean, we know that. I mean, the readout, the Russian account of the court doesn't say all of that,

but we know from other Russian officials that these are the Russian positions now. And there's no reason to think that Putin shifted on this. So Trump, as he often does, I think piled on a bit more pressure. Putin apparently reacted somewhat. sharply, we've had this extraordinary parts of the Russian commentary that Putin told Trump that Russia won't back down on its objectives and achieving those objectives in the special military operation. And that was the end of the call. And I am going to suggest that from Trump's point of view, he got basically what he wanted, because he then

telephone Zelensky and mouths the following day. And he said, look, I'm out of missiles. I can't send you any more missiles at the moment. But I've tried. I've tried again with the Russians. I asked Putin to agree to a ceasefire. He won't agree to a ceasefire. You can't say that I'm backing. The Russians are working alongside them. I've done my best. I cannot produce weapons. I simply don't have. have. So Zelensky then pushed back. He wanted more help with air defense systems. Trump said, okay, we'll do that. But he doesn't explain how and it might be in the future. He said the same to Mertz. Mertz is trying to buy air defense missiles from the United States. But there's been no agreement by the United States to supply Germany with more air defense missiles because they simply don't have them. So that is what I think happened over the course of these three calls. Yeah, but Trump, just to go off of what you're saying, Trump calls Putin and asks him to agree to a ceasefire by saying we're not going to give patriots to Ukraine. But he's saying we're not going to give patriots to Ukraine because they don't have patriots to give to Ukraine.

If they had patriots to spare, they would give them to Ukraine, but they don't have any patriots. So, I mean, it was a bluff. It was a bluff. Putin called. It was a bluff. And Trump would have known that Putin knew it was a bluff. And he knew that Putin would call it. It was a pure bluff. But as I said, it got, I suspect its purpose was to get Trump through a difficult call with Mets and Zelensky. Because Mertz and Zelensky were badgering him after the American announcement. And he needed something to show them that he was trying to do something in the lead up to the disdainting. decision to the stopping of the delivery. So I imagine the call with Zeletsky, just real quick, I imagine the call with Zeletsky was, look, if I could help you, I would, but I just can't.

Exactly. So what's next? So what comes next? Well, you can also see what happened because Mertz and Zelensky then brought up once again the question of the sanctions. And they're saying, you know, if we can't have air defense missiles now, let's at least get these bone crushing sanctions that Lindsay Graham and Blumenthal are talking about in the Senate. Trump has shown no enthusiasm for these sanctions up to now. But we have to anticipate that over the next couple of weeks, the pressure for more sanctions against Russia is going to increase. Now, this then brings us to the next of the interesting calls because Wang Yi has had a meeting with Akayakales and said China is 100% behind Russia, which is a way of saying China will continue to back Russia in terms of it, the special relationship and will not agree to reduce oil purchases from Russia.

Trump has just signed a trade agreement with China. So I can't imagine that he's going to walk that one back. So again, pressure for more sanctions will increase. There's a possibility we will get this bill passed at some point over the next couple of weeks. Trump will probably sign it into law, but he won't enforce it. He will do probably exactly what he did with China's purchases of oil from Iran. will exempt Chinese oil purchases from Russia. Would it just be Chinese or would it be India as well?

India as well, I'm sure all. India, Turkey too. So these sanctions will end up being of no real importance. Okay, so then what happens? We go through all of this theater. Absolutely. Right? Lindsay Graham gets his 500% bone crushing.

Secondary sanctions, Trump signs it, but then exempts all these countries. Or maybe he just shovels it away in his desk and doesn't even enforce it. I don't know. But obviously, they're not going to put 500 percent. The U.S. are not going to put 500 percent tariffs on India and China. That's not going to happen. So we run through this entire process.

Patriots, the United States does not have. The sanctions, it's going to be all theater. What then? Well, then the war goes on. Eventually, the Russians win. Lots of pressure on the Europeans, on the Germans and all of those people to come up, you know, with more money and more weapons and all of that. But we've discussed in many programs the moment when the United States is going to walk away, I think we are really now heading to that exit point.

I mean, you know, there's been a long, complicated, over-complicated dance to get us to this point. But I think that's where we are. Of course, there's already been pushback. We've had that story from NBC. Actually, the United States has no shortage of interceptors and all of this, all based on those incredibly reliable sources, the three anonymous sources and all of that. So there's going to be that chatter in the background. But I think everybody in the United States who knows about these things and makes these decisions knows that this is indeed where we are. And I think that rather like what happened in the last stages of the Vietnam War, this is the moment when America is going to start actually disengage and retreat from the sea.

Intelligence sharing will continue. The Americans will do whatever else they can do within limited means to keep this thing going. They will egg on the Europeans to go on doing so as well. They will make threatening noises against the Russians from time to time. But I think that this is essentially the exit point. I don't think from this moment on the Americans are going to be anywhere near as involved in this conference. either in the military strategies, the diplomacy, or anything else as they have been up to now. Even if, let's take the opposite scenario, even if patriots are given to Ukraine, does it make a difference in the conflict? And let's say Trump does decide to implement the 500% bone crushing secondary sanctions on everybody. He goes scorched earth. What plays out then? Well, let's take the first thing. We've had a very interesting revelation from Yuri Ignat, who is the rather capable and rather honest,

when he's allowed to be spokesman of the Ukrainian Air Force. He's straightforwardly admitted that the Patriots, even these advanced PAC-3 patriots, cannot shoot down his gun-de-miss missiles. So, you know, they're not making a different. They're not successful in shooting down Russian missiles. I don't believe they're shooting down the Kinja hypersonic missiles either. So these are missiles that are more basically there as a sign of America's commitment to Ukraine.

There are just too many drones now hitting Ukraine every night, too many missiles from Russia, hitting Ukraine every night for this to make any significant difference. It's exactly what you said. If the United States had these missiles in the necessary quantities, they would supply them. They can't supply them. And there's no point in doing so because they can't work anyway. So even if Trump suddenly were to reverse course and start to supply these missiles, it would create a bit of a sensation in the media for a few days.

But the results would be the same, except that the United States would run through its Patriot missile inventory even more quickly. And it really would be at that point down to critical levels, probably within weeks, maybe even within days. So that's the first thing to say. The second about the bone crunching sanctions. Let's say Donald Trump loses all sense of political reality. Let's say his anger towards Putin becomes so extreme that he decides to, as you say, conduct scorched earth policies. One of two things will happen.

Firstly, I cannot imagine that China will stop importing Russian oil. So China will continue to import Russian oil. This is the key economic relationship. Now, China has overtaken India as Russia's biggest customer for oil. The alliance between Russia and China is consolidated and deepened. China becomes even more dominant in a sense in this relationship, because Russia then starts to become more dependent on China. That goes completely contrary to the whole direction of US foreign policy.

In the meantime, other countries like Turkey, India, they're very badly hit economically. They're friends of the United States. What do they do? They probably have to deepen their economic relations with the bricks and with China because that's where salvation economically presumably lies. We haven't discussed it, but Turkey's going through another period of economic stress at the moment. Just to say there was even an article in the Financial Times about this. So, you know, Erdogan would have to presumably deepen that relationship.

And in the meantime, the 500% sanctions, tariffs, I should say, on China would mean shortages of goods. In the US, we'd start to see the shelves emptying of Chinese-produced goods. we would see the relationship between China and the United States torched. We would also start to see inevitably rises in the price of oil and energy, which will feed into higher inflation in the United States. And this is the extraordinary thing. Russia itself would sail through because they would continue to supply oil to China and they would

continue to export oil through the various secondary markets that the United States ultimately cannot control. And in conditions of an oil shortage and rising oil prices, the most likely result is that Russia would be able to make up the difference through the higher oil prices of what it has lost in volumes, which is exactly what happened in 2022 when the Russian trade It's just great. All right. A final observation and we'll wrap up the video. I've been listening a lot to, unfortunately, a lot to Mark Routte.

He's been giving a lot of interviews, a podcast interview to New York Times the other day. And listening to Routte, I believe that he's given up on Project Ukraine. Yes. And I believe he is now moving on to the next grift, which is fighting Russia and China in five. to seven or 10 years, and the United States needs to pour money into NATO as well as the NATO member states, but he's really focused on the United States and getting the bag from the United States. You can tell that is what it's all about now for NATO, or at least for Mark Uruta, who's the CEO of NATO?

He understands Ukraine is finished. Trump is not interested in it. So his next goal, his policy moving forward as the CEO of NATO is to, position what's going on in the world right now as a fight between NATO and Russia and China. You can throw in Iran. You can throw in into the mix, North Korea as well. But we need to pour money into NATO in order to take on Russia and China over the next five to 10 years. That's a correct assessment, right? Yes, absolutely. It's interesting you said that because I'd come to exactly the same views. Ruta is a much more intelligent man than Jensstoltenberg. Stoltenberg had something of the quality of a fanatic about him. I mean, he really was fanatical, if I can say that, about Project Ukraine. I mean, you could see that. Ruta, for him, it's not anywhere near as centrally important or viscerally important. So he understands perfectly well that the realities are exactly what you say about Ukraine.

Ukraine is going down. His priority now is to preserve NATO in order to keep the money flowing. How do you preserve NATO? You actually, if anything, want the alliance between Russia and China to become stronger. You talk up the threat from the Russians and explain that this is all, that the Russians now are China's great cats. You come along to the Americans and say, you can't abandon us because if you abandon us, you abandoning Europe to the Chinese because the Russians are simply doing the Chinese's job in Europe. So you can't abandon us. You can't reduce your forces here.

You've got to keep the money flowing because this is essential in terms of your own grand geopolitical strategy. And he's arguing this case every single day. And by the way, you know, as a piece of salesmanship, he's not doing a bad job, actually. I mean, he's quite a lot of kissing up. Yeah, absolutely. He's doing a lot of kissing up to Trump. Exactly. He's, he's, you know, he's, he knows how to do it and he's doing it in a very smooth way. Whether Trump will be fooled by It is another matter, whether the Americans, where people like Elbridge Colby and Pete Heggseth are going to be taken in, I'm not saying. But as I said, you could see that he's doing it with quite a lot of skill.

He's the CEO of NATO and the United States is his biggest customer. Exactly. Exactly. That's what he's doing. All right. We will end the video there, the durand.locals.com. We are on Rumble, Odyssey, pitch, telegram, rapfin, and X. Go to the Durand shop.

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