Russia

President Donald Trump called Russian president Vladimir Putin yesterday and discussed various topics, including the war in Ukraine, for an hour and a half. According to Trump, the two agreed to begin negotiations on ending the three year-long conflict immediately and even set up preliminary talks about traveling to one another’s capitals. Shortly after the call with Putin, Trump dialed Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky for yet another conversation that reportedly went ”very well.” Trump’s call with Zelensky, of course, wasn’t the controversial part. Nobody had a problem with it. The dialogue with Putin, however, was apparently blasphemy, akin to violating all of the Ten Commandments on the same day.

The United States only has one president at a time. Until January 20, that’s Joe Biden. But President-elect Donald Trump and his skeleton foreign policy team are waiting in the wings, plotting policy behind the scenes on issues — Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, Middle East peace — that have stymied the Biden administration for the last year. In fact, Trump is already influencing the respective calculations of allies, partners and adversaries before he even steps foot in the Oval Office. And Biden’s advisors seem perfectly fine with it. Trump fancies himself as a master negotiator, somebody who’s inherently skilled at poking, pressuring and sweet-talking the opposite side of the table until he gets what he wants.

The massive prisoner swap which led to Russia’s release of prisoners Evan Gershkovich, Paul Whelan and Vladimir Kara-Murza, among many others, is the greatest gift their families and loved ones could ever hope for — in several cases, it is a lifesaving development. But it also serves as an indication of just how much the practice has become a weapon of the world’s great powers. For my family, the news is deeply personal. Vladimir, a longtime dissident imprisoned for the crime of speaking out against the war in Ukraine in remarks to the state legislature of Arizona, was a pallbearer along with me for my father-in-law, John McCain. My wife joined with his, Evgenia, to speak to a bicameral congressional committee earlier this year to advocate for his release.

Two Russian ships docked Tuesday in Venezuela’s La Guaira port, twenty miles away from Caracas. The stop comes after military exercises were conducted in the Atlantic, with four vessels stopping in Havana late last month. This is all part of a decades-long “look-at-us” operation, also known as a “show the flag” move, as Russia’s defense ministry puts it. While Russia’s presence in Cuba and Venezuela is not a new phenomenon, conflict in the East has only accelerated their muscle-flexing in the West. These movements mark Russia’s first extensive military exercises in the hemisphere in five years, as well as their first deployment of a nuclear submarine in close proximity to the US since the Cold War.

A US government-affiliated Ukrainian NGO, texty.org.ua, published a list last week of all the Americans “impeding aid to Ukraine.” There are 388 individuals and seventy-six organizations on the list, including members of the conservative media Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, members of Congress and a few Spectator writers. The piece is titled “Rollercoaster: From Trumpists to Communists. The forces in the US impeding aid to Ukraine and how they do it.” “The title of this article oversells the product: it is a substantively thin piece, largely an excuse to smear a large group of Americans who have been skeptical of aid to Ukraine in one form or another,” Senator J.D. Vance and Representative Matt Gaetz wrote in a letter to secretary of state Antony Blinken on Tuesday.

Earlier this month, two American supersonic fighter jets flew over Georgetown, the capital city of Guyana. The US show of force is not only for the attention of Venezuela’s socialist regime who has been escalating toward a military conflict with its smaller neighbor since at least September 2023 when Nicolás Maduro returned from Beijing. The message of sending two F/A-18 Super Hornets flying from a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier sailing in the Caribbean Sea is also for the Islamic Republic of Iran. At first glance, the Venezuela-Guyana conflict is about a century-old border dispute of a dense territory called the Esequibo that makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s land mass but only 15 percent of its population.

The US crackdown on trade finance for Russia from international banks — designed to impede imports needed for the continuing assault on Ukraine — is biting hard, reports the FT, quoting an investor who thinks “the logical endpoint of this is turning Russia into Iran.” Quite right too: sanctions like these are a vital non-military way to hobble Vladimir Putin’s campaign. But war and finance intersect in many different ways. Consider also the fate of 400 western-owned commercial aircraft that were leased to Russian airlines before the invasion in February 2022. Now stuck in Russia or its satellites, unmaintained to western standards and unfit to fly back into our airspace, they’re a potential multibillion loss for their owners and insurers.

Money is often a substitute for strategy in US foreign policy. We spent $2 trillion in Afghanistan, only to lose the country the minute our troops began to pull out. How much will it realistically cost, then, to beat Russia in Ukraine? Will the next $100 or $200 billion do the trick? This is not a question that supporters of war-spending ask themselves. As in Afghanistan, spending is a way to defer thinking about actually winning — or facing the serious possibility of losing. Our aid buys delay, not results. Ironically, while the specter of World War Two is invoked every time there’s a conflict, our experience then teaches the same lesson as recent attempts to purchase victory.