Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that Putin is assembling a heavyweight team with decades of experience in high-stakes negotiations to face off against Trump’s clown show “for a deal to end Russia’s war in Ukraine. Meeting laughing stock TV personality Pete Hegseth and a gaggle of unserious Republican politicians will be Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s “chief Kremlin foreign-policy adviser who has more than half a century of involvement in diplomacy, and his top spymaster, Sergei Naryshkin, who served with Putin in the Soviet KGB... That Putin is opting to rely mostly on highly skilled and experienced negotiators to represent Russia in any talks is hardly a surprise. The personnel choices underscore just how determined the Russian leader is to secure a favorable outcome in any negotiations and potentially how little his demands in relation to Ukraine have changed in the three years since he ordered the full-scale invasion… Trump’s team by contrast lacks the same depth of background on Ukraine and has little experience negotiating directly with Russia. With the path to a deal still highly uncertain and Putin showing no sign of offering significant concessions, those could be major liabilities at the negotiating table.”
Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker knew that Hegseth is unqualified for the job as Defense Secretary but voted for him anyway. On Friday he worried that Hegseth “made a ‘rookie mistake’ when he said a return to Ukraine’s pre-war borders was ‘unrealistic,’ giving away Trump’s ultimate position… which is to sell out Ukraine. Hegseth, probably drunk, also said that Ukraine can’t join NATO, as if he were actually on the Russian team, not the U.S. team. “I don’t know who wrote the speech,” said Wicker— “it is the kind of thing Tucker Carlson could have written, and Carlson is a fool.”
Politico reported that “Wicker said he favors a firm posture with Moscow. ‘Everybody knows… and people in the administration know you don't say before your first meeting what you will agree to and what you won't agree to,’ Wicker said, adding that he was ‘puzzled’ and ‘disturbed’ by Hegseth’s comments… [But] Hegseth wasn't freelancing. Trump on Thursday said there was a ‘good possibility of ending that horrible, very bloody war.’ He also said it was not ‘practical’ for Kyiv to join NATO and ‘unlikely’ that Ukraine could return to its 2014 pre-invasion borders. The direct talks between Trump and Putin have left European allies rattled that the EU and Ukraine could be sidelined in any peace deal. Amid Trump’s talks with Putin, Wicker took a more hawkish stance that is in line with traditional Republican views. He called Putin a ‘war criminal who needs to be in prison for the rest of his life.’ He also said Russia should ‘absolutely not’ be readmitted to the G7, an idea Trump floated on Thursday.”
Trump this week suggested NATO enlargement provoked Russia to invade Ukraine, but Wicker didn't agree.
“There are good guys and bad guys in this war, and the Russians are the bad guys,” Wicker said. “They invaded, contrary to almost every international law, and they should be defeated. And Ukraine is entitled to the promises that the world made to it.”
Wicker has been one of the Senate’s chief advocates for Ukraine aid and pressed the Biden administration in its final days for a surge in U.S. weapons for Kyiv’s forces. He wanted President Joe Biden to pull out the stops and lift restrictions preventing Ukraine from using donated weapons to strike inside Russian territory and accused the former president of “slow-walking” deliveries.
Wicker has long framed the Russia-Ukraine conflict as a test of U.S. resolve, arguing that failing to arm Ukraine could force American troops into future wars.
On Friday, Wicker also called for the U.S. to continue weapons shipments to Ukraine “until there is a ceasefire.”
JD Vance seemed to go even further than Wicker, threatening Russia with U.S. military involvement! Bojan Pancevski and Alexander Ward reported that “Vance said Thursday that the U.S. would hit Moscow with sanctions and potentially military action if Putin won’t agree to a peace deal with Ukraine that guarantees Kyiv’s long-term independence. Vance said the option of sending U.S. troops to Ukraine if Moscow failed to negotiate in good faith remained ‘on the table,’ striking a far tougher tone than did Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who on Wednesday suggested the U.S. wouldn’t commit forces. Vance said the U.S. could pursue a range of measures, giving President Trump ample negotiating flexibility with Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.”
“On Thursday,” wrote Pancevski and Ward, “Trump told reporters that Ukraine would be a party to talks with Russia, a key demand of Zelensky’s. But Trump also said that Russia should be allowed back into the Group of Seven club of wealthy countries and that membership for Ukraine in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was something Russia couldn’t allow.”
European leaders are eager to meet with Vance at the Munich Security Conference. For his part, “Vance said he would tell leaders that Europe must embrace the rise of antiestablishment politics, stop mass migration and curb progressive policies. He said he would call for a return of traditional values and ending migrant crime. ‘It’s really about censorship and about migration, about this fear that President Trump and I have, that European leaders are kind of terrified of their own people,’ Vance said. He said he would urge German politicians to work with all parties including the far-right and anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party… On Ukraine, Vance said it was too early to say how much of the country’s territory would remain in Russian hands or what security guarantees the U.S. and other Western allies could offer Kyiv. He said those details would need to be worked out in the peace talks. ‘There are any number of formulations, of configurations, but we do care about Ukraine having sovereign independence,’ he said. Trump has said Putin wants to end the conflict, which the Russian leader launched three years ago with an attempted full-scale invasion that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and destroyed swaths of Ukraine. Russian forces control nearly 20% of Ukraine’s territory. Vance said the Trump administration would aim to persuade Putin that Russia would achieve more at the negotiating table than on the battlefield.
In his address, Vance will also back Elon Musk, the billionaire businessman and Trump ally. Musk’s political campaigning in Europe, including for the Alternative for Germany party—a group under surveillance for extremism—has drawn near-universal criticism from European leaders such as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron. Both men were registered to attend but their representatives said they wouldn’t be present at Vance’s speech. Macron won’t come to Munich and Scholz will only arrive later, according to French and German officials.
Vance said Musk doesn’t speak for Trump. But he said he agreed with Musk that European countries needed to stop letting in large numbers of migrants from the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere. He also said that European leaders were wrong to criticize Musk for speaking out.
Isabel Van Brugen’s report was starker, titled Vance Slaps Down Hegseth by Threatening Putin With U.S. Troops and claiming that Vance was a “warning to Russia, threatening the potential deployment of U.S. troops to Ukraine— a move that directly undercut Hegseth who was forced into an embarrassing reversal on his earlier remarks.”
There is another interpretation from the one that warns that Trump has a circus negotiating for the U.S. Van Brugen wrote that “Economist Mark Toth, a national security and foreign policy analyst, told the Daily Beast that the contradictory messaging from Vance and Hegseth signals a deliberate White House strategy to keep adversaries— and allies— off balance. ‘The White House appears determined to be unpredictable, using the fog of war— or in this case, the fog of negotiations— to maintain leverage as they work toward their endgame in Europe,’ Toth said. ‘Ultimately, this approach sets the stage for a strategic pivot to pressing national security threats emerging from the Indo-Pacific and Iran.’ However, he warned that such tactics come with significant risks. ‘One final word of caution— fog, especially self-created fog on the battlefield, always risks its creator becoming lost in it as well. Trump and his national security team would be wise to remember that.’ The contradictory messaging from the White House may also be part of the strategy to pressure NATO member states into raising their defense spending from 2 percent to 5 percent of their GDP, Toth said.”
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