by Matt Agorist, The Free Thought Project:
Those of us anxious to see peace in Ukraine should applaud President Trump’s initiative but we should also highlight the glaring contradictions of a president who finds the killing in Ukraine unacceptable but fully supports the genocide in Palestine.
(Common Dreams) As we approach the third anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a monumental shift is taking place that might just lead to the end of this calamitous war. This is not a breakthrough on the battlefield, but a stark reversal of the U.S. position from being the major supplier of weapons and funding to prolong the war to one of peacemaker.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
Donald Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine if he was re-elected as president. On February 12th, he started to make good on that promise by holding a 90-minute call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Biden had refused to talk to since the war began. They agreed that they were ready to begin peace negotiations “immediately,” and Trump then called President Zelenskyy and spent an hour discussing the conditions for what Zelenskyy called a “lasting and reliable peace.”
At the same time, the new U.S. Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, unveiled Trump’s new policy in more detail at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, saying, “The bloodshed must stop. And this war must end.”
There are two parts to the new policy that Hegseth announced. First, he said that Trump “intends to end this war by diplomacy and bringing both Russia and Ukraine to the table.” Secondly, he said that the United States is handing off the prime responsibility for arming Ukraine and guaranteeing its future security to the European members of NATO.
Assigning Europe the role of security guarantor is a transparent move to shield the U.S. from ongoing responsibility for a war that it played a major role in provoking and prolonging by scuttling previous negotiations. If the Europeans will not accept their assigned role in Trump’s plan, or President Zelenskyy or Putin reject it, the United States may yet have to play a larger role in security guarantees for Ukraine than Trump or many Americans would like. Zelenskyy told the Guardian on February 11th that, for Ukraine, “Security guarantees without America are not real security guarantees.”
After blocking peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in April 2022, the Biden administration rejected peace negotiations over Ukraine for nearly three years. Biden insisted that Ukraine must recover all of its internationally recognized territory, including the Crimea and Donbas regions that separated from Ukraine after the U.S.-backed coup in Kyiv in 2014.
Hegseth opened the door to peace by clearly and honestly telling America’s European allies, “…we must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective. Chasing this illusionary goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering.”
Spelling out the U.S. plan in more detail, Hegseth went on by saying that a “durable peace for Ukraine must include robust security guarantees to ensure that the war will not begin again. This must not be Minsk 3.0. That said, the United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement. Instead any security guarantee must be backed by capable European and non-European troops.”
Read More @ TheFreeThoughtProject.com
