Yiannis Damellos
Trump's effort to bring his buddy Vladimir Putin out of the cold and come to terms with Russia has found an opponent in Volodymyr Zelensky who told the Munich Security Conference today he doesn't see a "ready US plan" to end the war in Ukraine. At the same time, American Vice President JD Vance failed to make an impression on European leaders with his cowboy antics in his address, saying that "there is a new sheriff in town", referring to US President Donald Trump. Earlier, he had told the Wall Street Journal that Moscow could be hit with sanctions and potential military action if Vladimir Putin failed to agree on a peace deal guaranteeing Ukraine's long-term independence. The Ukrainian president is due to meet the US Vice-President on the sidelines of the summit later. Trump had also said US, Russian, and Ukrainian officials would meet in Munich - but Moscow denied it. What a clusterfuck!!!
It's almost three years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine - and all cooperation that was achieved between the US and Europe on the matter has been shuttered by the new White House resident and his minions. In the words of Ukrainian MP Oleksiy Honcharenko, who is currently at the Munich Security Conference, the only thing that can be said about US Vice-President JD Vance's speech is "the total humiliation of all European leaders". "People in the room are shocked," he says in a post on X.
According to Honcharenko, "For most of Vance's speech, the European leaders and bureaucrats looked at each other, and there was almost no applause."
J.D. Vance began his speech by saying the Trump administration was "thinking and praying" for those affected by yesterday's suspected car-ramming attack in Munich. Immediately afterward, he expressed his fears about "the threat from within" and emphasized that there is no issue more "urgent" than mass migration - which he described as being at an "all-time high" in various countries around the world. In front of a flabbergasted audience trying to measure the damage that the recent presidential election has done to American Democracy, he dared to say he feared there'd been a retreat of "fundamental values" - such as free speech - in Europe and the UK, calling on all countries to live by "democratic values".
Then he repeated Trump's crybaby rhetoric on defense spending (or how to increase the value of the military-industrial complex around the world). Vance said European countries must play a "bigger role" in the future of the continent - but also said it's becoming less clear what Europe is actually defending itself against... (maybe Trump and the rise of the Far Right?) And he ended by suggesting that if American democracy can survive 10 years of climate activist Greta Thunberg "scolding it", Europe can "survive a few months" of Elon Musk. Well, let's wait and see first if Musk manages to sell another Tesla in the Old Continent or Canada in the next few months before he turns to his Red-haired daddy asking for more subsidies from the State Department.
To close, it's worth mentioning that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky who arrived in Munich earlier in the day used his first news conference to say his talks so far with Trump are "definitely not enough to form a plan" for peace. So, no developments as of yet on Trump's efforts to end the War, plus there is a clear undercurrent to this high-level gathering of world leaders, diplomats, defense officials, and spies: When it comes to how to end the war in Ukraine, Europe is simply not on the same page as America. While Trump is impatient for a peace deal with Moscow to get his Nobel Prize, Ukraine and its European allies accuse Washington of giving away the best bargaining chips after the US appeared to rule out all the security guarantees Ukraine had been hoping for. Zelensky has also told this conference that Vladimir Putin cannot be trusted and he was opposed to giving up territory to Russia, something President Putin is likely to insist on.
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