This is my Friday ramble. And here is a transcript, edited for clarity:
Good morning.
As you’re watching this, it’s Friday morning, December 5th—and it’s very cold outside if you live on the Eastern Seaboard:
As I’m recording, it’s December 4th, Thursday evening, a little after 6 p.m.
What happened this week is that Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff went to Moscow to meet with Vladimir Putin to talk about peace in the war in Ukraine. So this is weird on a number of different levels, starting with: neither of these guys, Kushner or Witkoff, have really that much to do with the actual government. I mean, Jared is basically the son-in-law of the president—you know, the guy who’s asleep all the time. And Witkoff is, I guess, a special envoy or something, but he’s just a real estate dude from New York whose son happens to be in the crypto business with Don Jr. and Eric. It’s just weird, entangling conflicts of interest with these people.
So that’s who we’ve chosen to send to Moscow. And of course, predictably, they get there, they get to Moscow. They’re supposed to meet Putin at, let’s say, 10 in the morning. He keeps them waiting for four hours, because that’s what he does. Because he has to show his power. Which he does by being a dick. Because he is a dick and he’s petty and awful.
But the whole process is ridiculous, because we have to keep in mind what’s going on here. First of all, the only reason there’s war in Ukraine is because Putin invaded Ukraine.
Why did he invade Ukraine? You have to ask him. There’s no historical reason for doing so. The only reason that we have war in Ukraine is because Putin decided to invade Ukraine. That’s it. Ukraine didn’t do anything. Putin just decided, “I want to invade there because I want more territory.” And so that’s what he did.
This is against international law. It’s something we fought for in the Gulf War. Remember when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait? George Herbert Walker Bush put together a coalition of the democratic states, and we said, “You are not allowed to do that, Saddam Hussein!” And we went in there and we kicked him out of Kuwait, and that was it. In a related story, he stopped trying to invade his neighboring countries.
That’s not how we’ve behaved with Putin, though. In 2014, Putin invaded Ukraine and took Crimea. He took it. You know, there was a lot of sneaky stuff going on. There’s little green men and kind of an attempt at a referendum and all this stuff. But basically, he invaded Ukraine and took Crimea. Just took it, just annexed it. Like people used to do in Europe in the Middle Ages.
And President Obama was like, “We can’t have that. Better slap on some sanctions,” which were completely a joke. The Russians laughed at it. So Putin’s not invading Ukraine for the first time. He’s invading Ukraine again.
And he’s invading Ukraine even though the Minsk Agreements, which were signed in 2014 and 2015, established that he’s not allowed to do that; he’s doing it anyway. And those weren’t the first agreements between Russia and Ukraine. Back in 1994, the Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine—this is after the fall of the Soviet Union—a lot of nuclear weapons were held by Ukraine. And we thought that was probably not a great idea. So we stepped in and we said, “Give up your weapons.” And so Ukraine signed an agreement with Russia basically saying, “We’re gonna turn in our nukes, please don’t invade us.” So they turned in their nukes—and Russia invaded them.
So the idea that Vladimir Putin is going to come to the negotiating table with these two morons, Kushner and Witkoff; agree to something, to some peace process; and then abide by it, is just preposterous. He’s not going to do that. And we know he’s not going to do that because he’s been demonstrating that he’s not gonna do that for years and years and years now. So it’s naïve at best to continue to do this.
Putin has zero incentive to come to any actual agreement where he has to give up anything. He has a lot of incentive to say, “We should have peace, we should talk, we should negotiate.” Because, you know, it may be that the West gets tired of the war and just hands him the Donbas, which is what he wants. So that’s a win for him.
Or he can just keep kicking the can down the road and, you know, delaying and delaying and delaying. Every time there’s a delay, Putin gets more time to build up his store of weapons and recruit more soldiers and all that kind of stuff.
And now, of course, it’s coming on the winter. Like I said, it’s very cold here. It’s probably cold there as well. In the wintertime, Russia has a lot of power because they have oil, which people need more of in the winter to heat their homes, as we all know. So we’re once again in a time of year that favors Putin, which is not great.
The worst part about all this is that the United States government right now is run by a man, in Donald Trump, who is—you know, we politely say he’s a Kremlin asset. He’s really—and I hate to use this word, but I’m going to use it anyway—he’s Putin’s bitch. That’s what he is. He’s going to do whatever Putin wants. Why? I don’t know, but that’s the reality. It’s been that way his entire first term and heretofore in the second term. He’s going to give Putin what he wants as soon as it’s politically viable to do so.
So that’s really what Kushner and Witkoff were tasked with, to try to figure out what Putin wants, and let’s figure out how we can give it to him. Because a lot of very wealthy people, oligarchs here in the U.S. also, are going to make an awful lot of money if and when the war concludes in some way, and we can open up business in Russia again. There’s a lot of money there, there’s a lot of natural resources. Exxon Mobil’s gonna make a lot of money as soon as that happens. There’s a lot of very rich and powerful forces that want the war to end and don’t give a crap about all the people dying in Ukraine.
We should talk about that too. The war is not a war like in World War I where there’s trenches and there’s people on each side and the civilians are far away from the front. What’s happening is—as my friend Zarina Zabrisky, who’s been reporting in Eastern Ukraine for years now, has told us—they have human safari there, which means that there’s these drones that come, you know, over the river into Kherson. And they just blow shit up. You know, they hunt down people. It’s like—no, it literally is—playing a video game, because there’s some Russian schmuck somewhere doing it, you know, with the controls and all that. And they go in and they find people and they press the little button and they blow them up. Kind of like what Hegseth is doing with the Venezuelan boats, except in Ukraine they’re blowing up old ladies and hospitals and babies in the baby carriage. Every day more war crimes, every day more war crimes. It’s horrifying. It’s horrifying. It cannot be justified.
And the fact that we meet with this man, Vladimir Putin, and treat him with any form of respect, like he’s some sort of distinguished diplomat, like he’s Otto von Bismarck or something, is preposterous. He is basically a mafia boss and a cartel leader and some sort of warlord, all mixed together. And he’s a criminal. He’s a wanted criminal by the International Criminal Court, for war crimes. That’s what he is.
When you have a guy like that, you don’t roll out the red carpet and invite him to Alaska. You don’t cower to him in Helsinki. These things happened a while ago now. They’re not in the immediate people’s brains anymore, because they’re not in the current news cycle, but they happened. And they were painfully humiliating for the United States—painfully humiliating. And they sent a message that Trump is Putin’s bitch. That was the message that got sent. Which is exactly what Putin wanted. And you know what? That’s what’s happening.
Now, Europe seems like they’re slowly recognizing that they’re going to have to get involved militarily, and they’re starting to do that and ramp up their own militaries—which is good insofar as it’s going to be necessary to combat the Russians, but bad because we don’t want every country in Europe to suddenly have all these standing armies, because last time that happened it didn’t end very well. It was not a great thing. So, you know, that’s what we’re dealing with.
And the real tragedy of all this is that it didn’t need to go this way. This is something that different presidents have messed up, but, you know, Biden messed this up, too. It was under his watch that the invasion happened, and he was very slow to combat it. All these presidents think that they can charm this guy, that they’re gonna talk to him and they’re the ones that are gonna get through to him. No! It’s not going to work. The guy is a psychopath. And he’s not going to do what you say. You might think that, but that’s not what he’s going to do.
And we know this because he never does. So Biden, you know, dicked around. He sent Blinken over there to dick around when he should have been arming the Ukrainians right from the start. Given them everything that they wanted, everything that they asked for.
If Putin is going to violate treaties, doesn’t that make the treaties null and void? If Putin’s gonna violate Minsk and Budapest, then I guess if the Budapest memorandum is no longer applicable, we should give Ukraine their nuclear weapons back. Why don’t we do that? Just roll them in there and see if Putin’s able to do the thing he does where he threatens nukes and holds the whole world hostage—even though he ain’t gonna use them.
So the whole thing is just a clusterfuck at this point. It’s really embarrassing to be an American, and watch this, and know that my president—not my president, but the President of the United States, and our government that represents us, including me—is out there licking Putin’s boots to try to give him Eastern Ukraine, that he’s trying to take illegally in violation of international law.
You know, this has been going on since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Sovereign nations, sovereignty is important.
Nobody wants to go to war, right? It’s not like I’m like, “Yeah, let’s go in and take him out.” I don’t want to go to war. Nobody wants to go to war. I think Putin knows that. That’s the problem. That’s why appeasement doesn’t work. That’s why appeasement doesn’t work. When Hitler met with Chamberlain, he knew that Chamberlain didn’t want to go to war. He knew it. And he knew he could get away with doing just about anything because he knew how badly the British and the French and the Allies wanted to avoid more war.
That’s just it. And Putin knows that we feel the same way. And we do! Nobody wants to go to war. But there are times, if you’re going to have peace—especially if you’ve cast yourself a role as the policeman for democracy, this global force of good, this hegemonic power—sometimes you have to show the ability to use force. You know, you have to demonstrate a willingness to fight. To bring peace, you have to have a willingness to fight. And Putin has to believe it. Or he’s going to keep coming. He’s going to keep coming. He’s going to keep coming in Ukraine. And if he wins in Ukraine, it’ll be Georgia and it’ll be Moldova. And he’s going to have his eye on Poland and the Baltics. Because that’s what he does and that’s who he is. And to think otherwise, even for a moment, is naïve at best and treasonous at worst.
I want the press to be better, reporting about this, to make it clear how ridiculous this is and what a sad joke it is that we’re negotiating with this man at all. But, you know, that’s not what I’m seeing. What I’m seeing is, we’re just gradually forgetting about all of the war crimes, and all of the stuff that Putin did, and all of these people that have died by human safari in Kherson and elsewhere, and all of the cities like Mariupol that were destroyed for no reason at all. There’s a willingness now in the United States government to just forget about all that, because there’s deals to be made. Our dealmaker president wants to make a deal with Putin—which he’s wanted to do, by the way, for years and years and hasn’t been able to do so.
That’s where we are. And I want to, as it gets into the wintertime, just shout out to Zelenskyy, President Zelenskyy, probably the most patient man on the face of the earth, who has to deal with, you know, the foot-dragging of the Western governments, and being humiliated by Trump in the Oval Office. And shout out to the Ukrainian people for fighting and not surrendering to this pathetic, puny little Russian psychopath.
That’s where we are. And I hope that, you know, the winter will come, and 2026 will bring better times for Ukraine in this war. Maybe Putin can will go the way of the dodo bird—because that’s really the only way that the war is going to end. When he leaves, when the Russian military leaves Ukraine, and when he leaves the Kremlin.
That’s what we want. And that should be the goal. Kissing his ass is not going to work. It never has. It never will. And that’s just how it is.
Until next time, have a great weekend, everybody. Thanks for listening. We shall prevail!
TONIGHT
Join me, Stephanie Koff, and our special guest, as we take stock of the horrible Trump Cabinet:
