I LEAF BAD SMELL BEHINDZ MEES AN’ I DOAN CARES.

  

OOPS! Looks like it’s time for Ukraine’s President Zelensky to break out the Bermuda shorts and suntan lotion and skedaddle out of Dodge! He may have to end the war sooner than he'd rather, and without a war to fight his political career would drop, lickety-split, to the bottom of the  dead letter box. (If the conflict ends, martial law in Ukraine would be revoked and elections called. It's hard to see how he could stay in power.)  

Anyway, Mister Zee flew into Washington yesterday fully expecting to be gifted with America’s long-range “Tomahawk missiles. These subsonic projectiles can fly up to 1600kms, which puts within range more Russian military and energy infrastructure, as well as Moscow and Saint Petersburg. BAM! Take that, Putin!

Please note: The warheads on these munitions can be configured to hold nuclear payloads and there is no way for Russia to know whether an incoming Tomahawk was a nuke or just your basic high explosives. Which makes adding these missiles to Ukraine’s arsenal a dangerous escalation and, given that American technicians would operate and guide the missiles,  a dangerous provocation as well (i.e., It would be clear and unambiguous that the United States was attacking Russia directly). 

WHICH PROMPTED, on Thursday, a phone call from Putin. It lasted two and a half hours and by the end of it, Trump apparently had a change of heart and would not allow Ukraine access to Tomahawks. Zelensky had been charged up, ready to receive the missile upgrade based on Trump’s musings about supplying them to Ukraine earlier in the week. But, the Friday meeting in the White House turned frosty right quick when Trump dropped a big turd on the table with his “Nope.” Needless to say, it was a short meeting with Zelensky and his rat pack. They didn’t even stay for lunch. No more 'free lunches' for them, me thinks! 😆

MORE IMPORTANT than Zelensky’s hissy-fit was the announcement that ministerial-level meetings are to be held shortly between Moscow and Washington to discuss a resolution to the Ukraine conflict and relations between the two nuclear superpowers going forward. This is something that everyone should welcome. On the agenda, for sure, would be the renewal of the New Start treaty governing how many nuclear warheads each nation may possess and deploy. Even more interesting is scheduling the summit meeting in Budapest, Hungary between Trump and Putin, following the technical negotiations just mentioned. Hungary is a NATO member and its Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, is an outlier in the alliance in that he disagrees with NATO’s involvement in the Ukraine-Russia conflict and the billions of euros going to Zelensky from European coffers. Having a summit hosted by Orban suggests Trump approves of his ‘end-the-conflict-now' position. It's also a pointed nudge to European/NATO countries to get with the program and enough already with the war talk.

IT'S a tiny, green shoot of hope in these rather bleak times. So, we’ll see. 

 

Cheers, Jake. ___________________________________