A leading Russian state television presenter has boasted that President Trump has not set the Kremlin any conditions for peace in Ukraine and that his only demands have been towards Kyiv.
Olga Skabeyeva, a television host who has been called “Putin’s Iron Doll”, made the comments after Andrii Yermak, President Zelensky’s chief of staff, said Russia could stop the war at any time by ceasing its attacks on Ukraine.
“[Yermak] forgot that Trump does not set any conditions for Russia and [President] Putin. Only for Zelensky and Ukraine,” Skabeyeva wrote on Telegram.
She's quite right. Trump is angry at Zelensky, but not a word against Putin as the bombing and killing in Ukraine continue.
Skabeyeva said in 2022 that Russia should have launched nuclear weapons at London to kill western officials, including Joe Biden, who were attending Queen Elizabeth’s funeral.
Her comments came after Vladimir Solovyov, another Russian state television presenter, said he would not be surprised if Trump eventually entered an alliance with Putin against “satanic Europe”.
The Kremlin said at the weekend that Trump’s foreign policy “largely aligns with our vision”. Since the Oval Office “meltdown” last week, Trump has accused Zelensky of “not being ready for peace” while criticising him for saying “negative things” about Putin.
What lovely friends Trump has.
Russia has demanded that Ukraine surrender four regions in its east and south, as well as Crimea, before there can be any peace. It also wants Ukraine to become a “neutral” country and prevent it from joining Nato. Putin and other officials in Moscow have questioned Ukraine’s right to exist as an independent state.
Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president, said yesterday that Russia’s main war aim remained the “maximum defeat” of Ukraine.
“Russia is advancing. The enemy is resisting and has not yet been defeated,” said Medvedev, who is the deputy head of Russia’s security council. “Inflicting maximum defeat on the enemy on the ground remains our main task.”
Putin said on Wednesday that Moscow had provided Russian passports to almost all the residents of the regions in Ukraine under the Kremlin’s control.
The Russian interior ministry said 3.5 million passports had been supplied to people in Ukraine’s Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia regions.
The Kremlin said in 2022 that it had annexed all four regions, despite not fully controlling any of them. Kyiv has called the process “illegal” and a “gross violation” of Ukraine’s sovereignty.
President Lukashenko, the Belarusian dictator, offered on Wednesday to host a three-way summit between Putin, Trump and Zelensky.
A key Russian ally, Belarus has previously hosted peace talks on Ukraine, including shortly after the start of Moscow’s all-out invasion in 2022.
Lukashenko also praised Trump as a “good guy” and said that his efforts to end the war were “brilliant”.
What a spectacle: Russian propagandists, those polished ventriloquist dummies of tyranny, gloating that Trump has not set a single condition for peace upon Moscow, only upon the nation that was invaded, bombed, and butchered. And why should they not gloat? They have seen before what happens when a man with no moral compass stumbles into their grasp, mistaking submission for strategy, imagining that the bear, if sufficiently flattered, might yet become a lapdog.
Meanwhile, Medvedev mutters about Ukraine’s “maximum defeat,” as though he were announcing the weather rather than the obliteration of a sovereign nation. Putin, that hollow-eyed relic of Soviet ambition, hands out Russian passports to Ukrainians under the threat of starvation and exile, the oldest trick of empire dressed up as benevolence. And now, as if to complete the grim farce, the Belarusian despot Lukashenko offers to host a “peace summit,” no doubt picturing himself as a modern-day Metternich while playing court jester to the Kremlin.
We have seen this theatre before, and we know how it ends: not with peace, but with the tightening grip of conquest. And yet, astonishingly, the so-called leader of the free world is playing along, demanding not that the aggressor withdraw, but that the victim surrender. This is not diplomacy; it is capitulation dressed as pragmatism, appeasement masquerading as statesmanship. Europe must take note: America is no longer a reliable ally.
Worse than "no longer a reliable ally": now actively supporting our enemies. They've switched sides.
Mick Hartley 
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