Russia - Ukraine “peace negotiations” | Limited Infrastructure Ceasefire fails(?)

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BlueSmoke said:
Of course there was going to be a money transfer to Russia.

www.themoscowtimes.com

Putin Authorizes U.S. Hedge Fund to Buy Russian Securities - The Moscow Times

Russian President Vladimir Putin authorized a U.S. hedge fund to purchase securities in Russian companies from 11 other funds, mostly based in the U.S. and U.K., according to a presidential decree published Monday.
www.themoscowtimes.com www.themoscowtimes.com
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It's not, though. They are buying the Russian assets from other US and UK funds. I don't really understand this , but on my present understanding I can't trace any assets going to Russia unless those funds are fronts.
 


“… Speaking Wednesday morning, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Moscow had launched 145 drones, four cruise missiles and two ballistic missiles into Ukraine overnight, “targeting energy infrastructure among other things,” including two hospitals.

“Putin’s words are very much at odds with reality,” Zelensky said.

Meanwhile, the Russian Defense Ministry said Ukraine launched its own overnight attack on Russian oil infrastructure in the country’s southern Krasnodar region. In comments carried by state news agencies, the Kremlin said the strike undermined efforts by President Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin to achieve peace.

Neither the Kremlin nor Ukraine’s defense ministry responded to requests for comment.

The dueling accusations highlight the uncertaintyabout the implementation and enforcement of any cease-fire, including when it would take effect. Zelensky said the U.S. should monitor the cease-fire and that he would discuss next steps on a call with Trump on Wednesday. …”
 
superrific said:
It's not, though. They are buying the Russian assets from other US and UK funds. I don't really understand this , but on my present understanding I can't trace any assets going to Russia unless those funds are fronts.
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We will have to keep an eye on this. I would think any money or economic help going to the Russian economy whether its indirect or not would be a help to Putin.

The other thing I said in a prior post warning of this kind of stuff is that Putin and Trump would get really creative to disguise a money transfer or aid. Putin needs economic help to keep going.
 


Odd that this didn’t happen yesterday… I mean if this were a good faith effort to negotiate a ceasefire, seems like the next call after the Putin call would have been with Zelensky.
 
www.theguardian.com

Republican Russophilia: how Trump Putin-ised a party of cold war hawks

The idea of Moscow as a paragon of Christian nationalism has penetrated the party of Reagan – and the lurch in US policy has huge implications for the global order
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
- David Smith

In a speech that ran for 100 minutes there was one moment when Donald Trump drew more applause from Democrats than Republicans. As the president told Congress last week how the US had sent billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine, his political opponents clapped and unfurled a Ukrainian flag – while his own party sat in stony silence.

It was a telling insight into Republicans’ transformation, in the space of a generation, from a party of cold war hawks to one of “America first” isolationists. Where Trump has led, many Republicans have obediently followed, all the way into the embrace of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin – with huge implications for the global democratic order.

“The reversal is dramatic and the willingness of the Republican party to go along with it continues to be breathtaking,” said Charlie Sykes, a political commentator and author of How the Right Lost Its Mind. “At least for a while it appeared that Republicans were still going to be supportive of Ukraine. But now that Trump has completely reversed our foreign policy there seems to be very little pushback.”

Last month, Trump set up a peace process that began with the US and Russia’s top diplomats meeting in Saudi Arabia – with no seat at the table for Ukrainian officials. He branded Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a “dictator”, a term he has never applied to the authoritarian Putin.

Along with Vice-President JD Vance, he berated Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, a spectacle that prompted the Democratic senator Elissa Slotkin to observe that Ronald Reagan, a Republican president who was an inveterate foe of Soviet aggression, “must be rolling over in his grave”. Trump suspended offensive cyber operations against Russia and paused military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine until it agreed to a 30-day ceasefire.

The Oval Office shakedown shocked the world but there was strikingly little criticism from Republicans. The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, sank into a couch and said nothing as the shouting raged around him. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who had previously been supportive of Zelenskyy, even suggested that the Ukrainian president should resign.

Speaking at a Center for American Progress thinktank event in Washington this week, Patrick Gaspard, a former Obama administration official, said: “What you fundamentally believe matters little if you’re acting against those beliefs. It was astonishing to see Republican leaders who on a Monday were praising Zelenskyy and by the Tuesday were removing any reference to him from their websites. It’s an extraordinary thing to see people who used to be pretty serious on this issue, like Lindsey Graham, suddenly saying the things.”

Meanwhile, other Russia hawks such as the former vice-president Mike Pence, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger have been sidelined. Republicans who were not shy about countering Trump’s foreign policy ideas during his first term are now standing by him – in public at least.

Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations thinktank and author of Reagan: His Life and Legend, said: “Absent Trump, I don’t think you would see this reorientation of the Republican party. Even with Trump a lot of Republicans, especially on Capitol Hill, are very uneasy about it and don’t like what Trump is doing but they’re afraid to speak out.”

Others suggest that loyalty to or fear of Trump may not be the only explanation. Younger Republicans are questioning the legitimacy of institutions such as Nato and the United Nations and following far-right influencers such as Tucker Carlson, who interviewed Putin in Russia last year and claimed that Moscow was “so much nicer than any city in my country”.

Critics say Trump, Carlson and the “Make America great again” movement see in Russia an idealised version of white Christian nationalism, in contrast to the “woke” values of western Europe. Putin has mocked the US embassy for flying a rainbow flag and suggested that transgenderism is “on the verge of a crime against humanity”.

From this perspective, the struggle is no longer capitalism against communism but rather woke against unwoke. In various speeches Putin has railed against the west’s “obsessive emphasis on race”, “modern cancel culture” and “reverse racism”. He said of the west: “They invented five or six genders: transformers, trans – you see, I do not even understand what it is.”

All are familiar talking points from the Maga playbook. Indeed, last year, on the rightwing strategist Steven Bannon’s War Room podcast, the Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene said: “Let’s talk about what this really is, Steve: this is a war against Christianity. The Ukrainian government is attacking Christians; the Ukrainian government is executing priests. Russia is not doing that; they’re not attacking Christianity. As a matter of fact, they seem to be protecting it.”

Bannon has made no secret of his desire to bring down the European Union and “globalist” forces. Joel Rubin, a former deputy assistant secretary of state under Barack Obama, draws a comparison with conservative “red” states and liberal “blue” states within the US. “Let’s make it real American tangible,” he said. “Russia is a red state and France and England and Nato – they’re blue states"...

Russia launched an aggressive effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential election on Trump’s behalf, according to a later Senate intelligence committee report, which found extensive evidence of contacts between the Trump campaign advisers and Kremlin officials and other Russians.

Trump vehemently denied collusion even as his administration imposed sanctions on Russia. At a joint press conference in Helsinki in 2018, Trump sided with the Russian president over his own intelligence agencies. He has remained unwilling to criticise Putin, even after Russia invaded Ukraine and after the opposition activist Alexei Navalny died in prison...

The balance appears to be shifting as the cold war fades into memory. About 41% of Republicans view Russia as either “friendly” or an “ally”, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll released earlier this month. And just 27% of Republicans agree with the statement that Trump is too close to Moscow, according to a Reuters/Ipsos survey.

Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House of Representatives’ armed services committee, told the Guardian of the “Make American great again” movement: “They have definitely shown a sympathy for Vladimir Putin’s autocratic, ‘traditional’ values, which are very troubling if you care about the problems of bigotry and discrimination. There is growing sympathy and the wing of the Republican party that’s against that is getting weaker while the other wing is getting stronger.”

He added: “They believe that they’re going to promote ‘traditional values’ and they see Putin as an ideological ally in that. I still think it is a minority within the Republican party but Trump’s the president. He’s the leader of that party and they’re adhering to him. Trump has an enormous amount of sympathy for that worldview and more and more of them are drifting in that direction.”

Bill Galston, a former policy adviser to Bill Clinton, said: “The Republican party during the cold war was anti-communist and from their standpoint, once communism disappeared, their major motive for opposing Russia did as well.

“The fact that Russia is a rightwing autocracy doesn’t particularly trouble them. To the extent that Putin has refashioned himself as a traditionalist culture warrior, he’s actually making an affirmative appeal to what the Republican party has become.”
 
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BlueSmoke said:
We will have to keep an eye on this. I would think any money or economic help going to the Russian economy whether its indirect or not would be a help to Putin.

The other thing I said in a prior post warning of this kind of stuff is that Putin and Trump would get really creative to disguise a money transfer or aid. Putin needs economic help to keep going.
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Yes, I agree. On its face, though, the transaction doesn't benefit Russia one penny.

I think the reason that Putin put that law in place was to prevent the frozen assets being used to help Ukraine. So loosening the restriction is an indication that Putin expects Trump to unfreeze the Russian assets.
 
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