Ramble On: "Peace For Our Time" in Ukraine (video)

Morning thoughts on Russian war crimes, Putin's lies and betrayals, the Trump Administration's incompetence, and the flawed thinking in the Ukraine "peace" talks

Here is today’s ramble:

And here is a transcript, edited for clarity:

Good morning, it’s Friday morning, April 25th, seven o’clock a.m. The cats are in my office looking out the window, so I have to have the window open. So the sounds of birdsong might filter in through the microphone and also the occasional car driving by.

It’s a beautiful spring day. The flowers are in bloom on the trees, but this morning we need to talk about something less flowery, which is: Ukraine. And this is something I think is not being discussed enough in any serious way that I’ve seen. Because there’s this peace process now—you know, the Trump people want this peace process, and Putin wants it so badly that in the middle of the peace process, he’s launching missiles at Kyiv, right? Much to Trump’s dismay. Trump actually sent out a Truth Social blast calling Vladimir out. “Vladimir, stop.” Yeah, he’s gonna stop because you tweeted at him. That’s how this works.

Let’s just take a pause and look at the situation there, okay? Every day for years now, Putin and the Russian forces commit atrocities, serious war crimes in Ukraine—all over, but especially in eastern Ukraine. War crimes are: blowing up places where people live, hospitals, schools, apartment buildings, willy-nilly.

As you know, my friend, Zarina Zabrisky, has been there for years now, mostly in Kherson, reporting on all the atrocities. And what’s happening is what she calls human safari. So there’s these drones that come equipped with weapons on them, and the drones go around looking for people and things to shoot at and blow up. Indiscriminately. It’s like a video game. That’s how they look at it. They’re just blowing up old ladies. They’re blowing up whatever they see. Cars, people walking on the street. And the purpose of this is to establish terror.

It’s a war crime. It’s been a war crime. It’s never been anything but a war crime.

And that’s what’s happening there every day. Okay, so imagine how that is. And it’s very similar to what Netanyahu and that regime is doing in Gaza. Indiscriminate killing with the aim of terrorizing and moving out ethnic groups so that another group, their group, can take control of the region.

This is not something that we sanction anymore, certainly post-1945, and have not for some time. But every day it’s happening in Ukraine. It’s happening in Gaza and it’s happening in Ukraine. And it was happening in Ukraine first. Not that that lessens what’s happening in Gaza, but today’s topic is Ukraine. And I want people to understand that it’s the same kind of war crimes going on.

During the peace talks now, nothing has stopped. Putin hasn’t stopped. And that’s the first problem with any peace talks with this guy is that he can’t be trusted. You can’t make an agreement with this guy. He’s a liar. He’s a serial liar. He doesn’t abide by any agreements that we already have. Ukraine has already made agreements with Russia. It’s already happened. He just ignores them. He cherry picks.

If you watch the interview he did with Tucker Carlson some time ago, Putin does this sort of sweeping overview of the historical deal there, and he just cherry picks historical events that fit his narrative and ignores anything that doesn’t. So he’ll just ignore whatever agreement that we come up with because that’s what he does. He’s a liar and he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care.

So whatever security guarantee we’re hoping to get with this guy is not worth the paper it’s printed on. It just isn’t. I mean, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s like, you know, demanding that Pete Hegseth stop drinking or cheating on his wife. It’s just never gonna happen. It’s not in his nature. He cannot stop.

So what will happen if we agree to anything is this: Ukraine will be humiliated. The fighting will nominally stop, I guess. I don’t even know if that will happen. And the sanctions will be lifted on Russia, which is what Putin has wanted for years and what the Trump people, I think, also want. And Putin will take the time and the money to regather his forces, replenish his supplies, and then he will attack Ukraine again a year or two down the road. That’s what he does. This is always what he does. So any kind of agreement that allows him to keep territory that he seized illegally is akin to the Hitler-Munich situation. And Putin has shown no, you can’t trust him anymore than the West could trust Hitler in the 1930s, right? It’s baffling that we’re even considering this as a thing.

Not only that, from what I’m reading about these peace talks, they want acknowledgement of Crimea as being now part of Russia, and they want to stay where they are in these parts of Eastern Ukraine: Donetsk and the other regions there. This would send the message to Putin, but also to Xi, that: Go ahead, invade whatever you want. Take whatever sovereign territory you want. The Westphalian order doesn’t matter anymore. Everything that we’ve been fighting for since World War II doesn’t matter anymore. We don’t care, you know, because peace. We have to engage with these people because peace.

So what that shows is us, the United States, as weak, as cowardly, and as prone to attack. I mean, say what you will about all the horrible things we’ve done, because there’s been a lot of bad things that we’ve done through the years, certainly, but U.S. military strength and hegemony since the fall of the Soviet Union has given a platform for there to be relative peace and stability—in the world, but certainly in Europe, since 1945. This is the Pax Americana, which Trump has been trying to destroy—or maybe he’s already destroyed it.

And we’re going to see in the years ahead, if this cannot be repaired, just what that means. Because I think people have no fucking idea what that actually means and what that actually is going to look like. Maybe in Europe they know, but in the United States? They don’t know. People have no idea.

And that brings us to Trump. Why are we gonna trust this clown? He changes his mind every 15 minutes. This tariff situation is a joke. It’s just willy-nilly. People on the MAGA side are desperately trying to find some brilliant 3D chess rationale for the tariff this and he’s trying to do that. No! He’s trying to destroy everything, and he’s dumb. So he just thinks this tariff stuff is a good idea. That’s it. And he sees everybody pushing back on him and calling him a moron, because he is a moron, and he doesn’t like it. That’s it. There’s nothing more complicated than that. So why do we trust this guy who has, by the way, been a Kremlin asset since the early 80s, to negotiate a peace deal involving Russia. Stupid, makes no sense.

You know, this is what Putin wants, sure. “Yeah, we’ll do deal with Trump, great. Give us Crimea, give us the East, we’re gonna take this, the sanctions are gonna be lifted. U.S., you can have these mineral resources in Ukraine.” Meanwhile, Ukraine’s not even—they’re not even at the table for this. This is a U.S.-Russia joint. Which is, I mean: who makes a peace plan without involving one of the countries? That’s ridiculous.

And then there’s the administration, this Witkoff guy who’s Russia’d up to the moon. He’s the one doing the negotiating. Great. I trust that to work out well. Our Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, is a clown. And the reason we know he’s a clown is because he’s building this powder room at DoD so he can put on his fucking clown makeup. Right? We’re gonna go to war or do anything militarily with this jackoff? I mean, everybody’s gonna know what the war plans are.

Seriously. I mean, nothing has happened because we’re not at war, but the severity of what he’s been doing in leaking troop movements is just mind blowing. Even given the ineptitude and the dumbness and stupidity of the Trump people in general, this is a whole other level of incompetence. I mean, a whole other level. It’s treason, but I think it’s maybe unwitting treason because he’s so dumb.

(I can’t believe this guy got into Princeton. I really can’t. I don’t know. It’s bizarre. Not that everybody that goes to Princeton is smart, but this guy’s egregiously dumb. And I don’t think he’s like, you know, a legacy guy. Maybe he is. I don’t know. Anyway, it doesn’t matter.)

Hegseth is a dope, and he’s drunk all the time. And I think the reason why he’s sharing all this stuff with his wife is because she’s the one that actually tells him what to do. I don’t think that Mr. Macho Man can make a decision involving when to go to the bathroom without checking in with her first, because he’s so incompetent. Right. So fine. Just make her the Defense Secretary. Just let’s eliminate this drunk, clownish middleman.

Meanwhile, on the domestic front, Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, can’t even secure her pocketbook at a restaurant. She’s supposed to secure the border? Mm-hmm, that’s gonna work out well.

Lifting sanctions now enriches the oligarchs. It helps these Musk people and Trump and all these other people that we don’t like. And it just is going to give Putin more time to regroup. That’s all it’s gonna do.

Nobody wants this war, but the reality is, the war will stop if Russia just fucking gets out of there and goes home. That’s the peace plan. Leave. It’s that simple. Just leave.

You know, I could see maybe some plan involving Crimea: Ukraine’s never going to acknowledge it, we’re never going to acknowledge it, but it’s going to be kind of okay that they stay only in Crimea. Maybe. But you can’t invade another country, grab up territory and then be like, “Okay, we’re done,” and have the global order say it’s okay. You can’t do that because, spoiler alert, he’s going to keep coming, right? He’s going to invade. He’s not gonna stop invading. This is a guy who thinks the Soviet Union is this big empire that got chopped up and he wants to re-expand.

So the way that there’s gonna be peace in Ukraine is if Russia leaves Eastern Ukraine. That’s it. Pretty simple to me. You started it. Get the fuck out, and the war will end.

And we’re also sort of pretending, I guess, that that’s not the case. Trump and Vance, remember when Zelensky was at the Oval Office, took Russia’s side about the whole war thing. And it’s like, Guys, that’s not what happened. This is what happened. It would be like, you know, Mexico invading Texas and Arizona and New Mexico and there being a war for a couple years and then us saying, you know what, keep it, we’re good. And that would be the peace plan.

That’s not the peace plan. That’s a surrender. And again, nobody wants war. Ukrainian people don’t want war, but what choice did they have? They’ve been invaded by a monster, by a war criminal, by a guy who commits atrocities.

And I don’t know, every day I pray that Putin meets his maker, because the sooner that that happens, the sooner there will actually be some chance of peace. So I just want to pull back and have everybody think about that while reading all this peace stuff that seems to just ignore reality.

And I get that there’s situations on the ground that are this is the way that it is, and we have to, you know, look at it from a realistic perspective, fine, but let’s not forget all the shit that Putin has done there. And let’s not forget that he lies, that any agreement he makes is bullshit, that he will break it, and that letting him out now will only give him time and money to regroup and make things even worse later.

The time to stop him was actually in 2014 when he invaded Crimea the first time, but certainly when he invaded Ukraine a couple years ago. Biden fucked that up. Absolutely. The Europeans did too. And now we’re paying the price.

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Anyway, I don’t have much now upfront in terms of announcements, but I hope that everybody watched on Wednesday night, the second episode of the The Five 8 1/2 with Nadine Smith and Lisa Graves was absolutely fantastic. Their guest Rich Logis runs an organization called Leaving MAGA, which is leavingmaga.org. He, used to be in MAGA, and he has created kind of basically a support group for people who are in that cult and want to leave it. He was great. I thought the, you know, the topics in general on the show were fantastic. And Nadine and Lisa are both, you know, they’re brilliant. They’re funny. And they’re just really hopeful, positive energy people.

And I actually was in a bad mood myself on Wednesday. I was in kind of a grumpy mood and it totally made me feel better watching the show. So I encourage you to go watch that:

Tonight we have The Five 8, because I can’t believe it’s Friday already, but it is. It’s what my computer says and the computer don’t lie. So tonight, eight o’clock PM, please join us. We have a great guest tonight doing some great work in activism. And you’ll want to check that out.

And in other news, there’s going to be an audiobook of The Age of Unreality. And it’s narrated by, not me, it’s narrated by Kevin O’Brien, who has done 200 audiobooks, and he did a fantastic job with it. So I don’t know exactly when it’s coming out, but soon, and it’s wonderful. And I’ve really enjoyed listening to it. So I’ll let you know when that comes out. And you can check that out as well.

That’s all I got. My coffee cup runneth empty. So everybody, please try to have a good weekend. Try to enjoy the spring weather. And we’ll see you next week.