UKRAINIAN GLORY

George Will Tweaks Trump “the Wheedler” for His Naiveté about Putin

by | Mar 13, 2026 | Spiritual Justice Warriors, updates

President Putin Conning President Trump, public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia

At The Washington Post, George Will tweaks President Trump for naively buying President Putin’s propaganda about Russian military invincibility.  Excerpt:

Donald Trump continues trying to wheedle Vladimir Putin to end his war to extinguish Ukraine’s nationhood short of that outcome. Trump’s persistence calls to mind the man Gulliver encountered during his travels: He had spent “eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers.”

The president misunderstands two things. First, the more blood and treasure Putin expends in Ukraine, the more he wants to win in order to redeem his blunder. This war was supposed to prove Russia’s might, and that Ukraine is an ersatz nation. Instead, it has revealed the yawning gap between Russia’s pretensions and its capabilities, and has created an incandescent Ukrainian nationalism.

Second, the way for the West to economize violence and military expenditures in the long run is not to prepare for future conflicts with a Russia emboldened by success, but to deepen its diminishment by enabling Ukraine to continue bleeding Russia’s army and economy.

Trump, having cast his trained eyes on video of a Moscow military parade, reportedly (according to the Financial Times) told aides that the Russian army looked “invincible.” Well.

Ian Bremmer, president and founder of Eurasia Group, a political risk consulting firm, writes that in each of the past two months, Russia has suffered 30,000 to 35,000 casualties. In the past two years, Russia has taken 1 percent of Ukrainian territory at a cost of “157 dead per square kilometer.” The four-year Russian death toll is probably at least nine times higher than the 36,000 Americans killed in three years in the Korean War.

The Economist says that in less than four years (June 22, 1941, to May 8, 1945), Russia advanced 1,600 kilometers from Moscow to Berlin. In more than four years, Russian forces in Donetsk, the war’s principal cauldron, “have advanced just 60km — the distance from Washington to Baltimore.”

Slava Ukraine!

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