And it's way past time for that to end.

Most of the money never leaves the U.S. It is a boon to the military industrial complex. Good ole American jobs.

"As CSIS has reported before, “aid to Ukraine” is a misnomer because 90 percent of military aid is spent in the United States. Of aid overall, 60 percent is spent in the United States, about 25 percent is spent in Ukraine, and the final 15 percent is spent globally."

X2

Same with the NATO excuse. What was his excuse for invading them in 2014?

Where are you getting that? I see very little, if any mention of Trump in this thread.

Half of the first page is basically just people saying it's all apart of Trump's master plan deal making or something

Also not talking about just this post referring to most posts that criticize trump and peoples defenses for anything any everything lately have been boiling down to " ha Trump's master plan! JUST AS PLANNED" or something analogy of 4 d chess

If only they’d let the actual Ukrainians decide what to do,,,,

And before everyone jumps in with “can’t have an election during wartime,,,,”

There’s been plenty of wartime elections in recent times

A democracy should always hold elections in times of war.

They'd probably be much better off if they got rid of the current grifter.

Well ya gotta admit, the issue this thread is about is pretty straight forward to people who ain't clouded with TDS.
He tried diplomacy first so now its on to another tactic. What's the definition of insanity?

"The 2014 Euromaidan protests
In November 2013, the Ukrainian Government of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych decided not to sign a planned Association Agreement with the European Union and demonstrations ensued in the capital Kyiv. These ‘Euromaidan’ demonstrations turned violent in early 2014 and, in February that year, some European foreign ministers mediated a compromise, involving a unity government and early elections.

After the collapse of a power-sharing agreement on 22 February 2014, President Yanukovych disappeared from Ukraine and a new government was installed by the Ukrainian parliament.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea, 2014
Toward the end of February 2014, unidentified military figures, later confirmed to be Russian personnel, surrounded the airports in Crimea, a majority-Russian peninsula in Ukraine. The Crimean autonomous assembly was then seized by pro-Russian forces.

In March 2014 the assembly issued a declaration of independence and a subsequent referendum on union with Russia was held. According to Russian election officials, 95.5% of voters supported union with Russia. The results of that referendum are not internationally recognised.

Since then, Russia has maintained its control over Crimea and supported pro-Russian separatist forces who also took control of parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine (the Donbas) in 2014.

Fighting between Russian-supported separatists and Ukrainian government forces has continued in the Donbas for the last eight years despite the negotiation of the Minsk Agreements in 2014/2015 which called for a ceasefire, the withdrawal of all foreign armed groups and constitutional reform recognising the special status of Donetsk and Luhansk."

"Diplomatic efforts to address the conflict between Russia and Ukraine have been ongoing since at least 2014, following Russia's annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of hostilities in the Donbas region, meaning attempts at diplomacy have spanned over eleven years."



"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result"

I'm still mystified as to why the Russian flag isn't flying over Kiev by now. Just doesn't make sense.

You're ignoring the background to the events. At the time, the plan of the US and EU leaders was to remove Ukraine from Russian influence and later to take over Russia itself.

Some of those involved are openly discussing this.

For example, Carl Bildt, the former Swedish Prime Minister. At the time, he was the EU's chief negotiator on the Ukraine issue, together with Frank-Walter Steinmeier (then German Foreign Minister and now German President).

Here is a lecture by Carl Bildt on the topic of Ukraine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_SQuLf74n4

He openly says that the aim of the EU Association Agreement with Ukraine is to remove Ukraine from Russian influence and thus defeat Putin.

At about 30:50 min his plans to force Russia under the normative control of the EU.

Your own Government, above all Victoria Nuland, has also invested a great deal of money and effort in this planned regime change.
Weeks before the Maidan, they were already talking about who should form the new government.

Quote:
"Victoria Nuland, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, spoke of $5 billion, or €4.5 billion, for Ukraine in a call to the American ambassador in Kiev on January 28, 2014. That was just a few weeks before Mr. Yanukovych was chased out of the country. Ms. Nuland also spoke of whom from the opposition could join the new government as if she could influence such things. That all came to light after the conversation was tapped and made public – apparently by a Ukrainian intelligence service officer still loyal to Mr. Yanukovych."
https://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2015-05/ukraine-usa-maidan-finance

During the Maidan, Steinmeier and his colleagues signed an agreement with Yanukovych and the Maidan leaders. Yanukovych was supposed to clear the way for new elections, and in return, the Maidan leaders promised an end to the protests and a peaceful withdrawal.

However, the Maidan movement and its Western backers did not comply, continuing the violent protests and then installing a new, illegal government without elections, in violation of Ukrainian constitutional law.
The population in eastern Ukraine did not want to accept this and so a separatist movement began.


Crimea had been Russian territory since 1783, when it was annexed by Tsarina Catherine II.
Then, in 1954, former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, himself an Ukrainian, donated Crimea to Ukraine (as was believed at the time to be a symbolic act). Since both countries were part of the Soviet Union, hardly anyone was bothered by this. Whether Khrushchev was already considering a possible breakup of the Soviet Union at that time is unknown.

Because the Russian Black Sea Fleet is stationed in Crimea, in Sevastopol, and the peninsula is otherwise of great strategic importance to Russia, too, and Russia has its only southern ocean access via the Black Sea, it was agreed at the end of the Soviet Union that Crimea would remain virtually under Russian rule.
Attempts were made to change this in 2014, but the Russian government, of course, could not allow that
Just as the US cannot allow China to take control of the Panama Canal or the Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America, whatever you prefer).

To avoid any misunderstandings: Crimea was never part of Ukraine before 1954. Until 1475, it was under the control of Mongolia's khans. In 1475, it fell to the Ottoman Empire, but remained under the administration of local khans. In 1502, the Crimean Tatars defeated the khans and later began their conquests toward Moscow. In 1687 and 1689, the Russians attempted to conquer the region with their Crimean campaigns as part of the Russo-Turkish War. However, Crimea remained a vassal state of the Turkish Empire. The Russians only succeeded in conquering it in 1783. The loss of territory was recognized by the Turks in the Treaty of Jassy in 1792.

Ukraine as a state did not exist before 1917/1918.

^^^^^^
Thanks for the history lesson; this is what it's all about.
Russian has good reason to be paranoid about the motives of the west.

a little time and he will be there

Been almost 4 years...How much time does the vaunted red army need to take over a weak neighbor? and how many casualties? Embarrassing really....

Es tut mir Leid, Manfred. The pack doesn't care anyways.

Weak neighbor? Ukraine is an industrialized country, the likes of which the US hasn't fought since World War II.
They are supported by most Western weapons industries, equipped with US Starlink communications, supplied with real-time reconnaissance data from NATO satellites, AWACS, drones, etc., troops trained by NATO and experienced in war since 2014, equipped with the most modern drone force the world has ever seen, that ist making classic maneuver warfare impossible.
And yet the Russians, a country with a $2 trillion gross domestic product, have taken an average of 20 km² from them every day this year.
And they've done so with warfare the likes of which the world has never seen. I don't think there has ever been a major modern war with so few civilian casualties relative to the number of soldiers killed. No area bombings of major cities, as is common in Western warfare to break the morale of the enemy's civilian population.

"Since the Russian Federation launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, HRMMU has documented the deaths of at least 13,883 civilians, including 726 children, and 35,548 injured, including 2,234 children."

https://ukraine.ohchr.org/en/Number...n-July-2025-UN-human-rights-monitors-say

We don't have reliable figures on military losses on either side, but it will be many hundreds of thousands.

By comparison, according to various sources, Western troops killed approximately 200,000 civilians in the 2003 Iraq War.