The leaders of Russia and the United States met July 16 in the capital of Finland. The fact that this meeting took place at all was shocking to many, considering the fact of Russian interference in the election that elevated Donald Trump to the presidency. The fact that the summit took place on the eve of the shooting down, by Russia, of MH17, killing all 298 people aboard the Malaysian passenger jet, was yet another element of why this meeting was a disgrace from start to finish.
News reports today state that Trump is now extending an invitation to Putin to visit the White House, so Trump is clearly unperturbed by the fallout from the Helsinki summit, but he should be, in the days following the tete-a-tete at least three separate matters have arisen that are each cause for serious concern.
The “Ukraine deal”
So far U.S. commentary on the meeting has been limited to White House press secretary, the serially mendacious Sarah Sanders, telling reporters that she’ll “get back to them” on a ran.ge of subjects, and so we learn more from Russia about what was discussed, a disturbingly clear trend of late.
On July 19, Vladimir Putin told a gathering of diplomats in Moscow that he had proposed a deal to Trump-related to Ukraine, details were made public in a subsequent article from a Bloomberg Moscow correspondent, citing sources who were present.
It appears that Putin wants to “solve” the conflict in the Donbas by referendum. Of course, this proposal papers over the fact that the entire conflict was created by Putin in the first place. For the avoidance of doubt, the only way to end the conflict in parts of the Donbas is for Russia to abide by Minsk and get their military and mercenaries out of Ukraine. Following that, as envisaged in Minsk, there will be elections in the region in accordance with Ukrainian law. It is noteworthy that Putin publicly stated that Ukraine was not fulfilling their end of the Minsk deal at the same time as he was quite deliberately and now publicly attempting to pursue policies that are completely at odds with what Minsk says.
(And important side note, it is surprising to see many journalists in Ukraine sharing the aforementioned Bloomberg article without any caveats addressing several serious factual errors in that reporting from Moscow. The most significant but not only flaw is where the journalist writes (not in quotes, his own text) that Crimea “voted to join Russia,” something that is simply untrue. Bloomberg’s editors should have picked this not insignificant error up and corrected their article.)
Though Ukraine’s illegally occupied Crimean peninsula wasn’t mentioned, you can be pretty sure that Putin’s offer for 1. “assistance” in ending the eastern Ukrainian conflict will have been put forth in that context, allow him to keep possession of the peninsula, and he would use his 2. “influence” over the 3. “separatists” in eastern Ukraine.
₁ – These forces are under direct orders from Moscow and do what they’re told.
₂ – See previous comment.
₃ – In the context of Donbas, the way to view the term “separatists” is “following Kremlin orders.”
The “McFaul/Browder” deal
Another shocking development, but something that Trump called a “very interesting idea,” was the notion that investigators in the US might be given access to the 12 GRU (Russian military intelligence) officers indicted by Mueller and U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rob Rosenstein in the days before the summit – while Trump was busy trashing NATO and insulting the European Union.
While it is obvious that the offer from the Russian was hollow, Trump not only fell for it, but he went as far as thinking the reciprocity Putin demanded at the same time was probably OK. The quid pro quo in this case (one of many involving these two men, as historians will teach us) was that at the same time Russian “law enforcement” bodies would also get to question a dozen Americans for a variety of perceived infractions of Russian law. One of the Americans specifically mentioned was former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Mike McFaul.
It should be obvious to any rational adult that offering a distinguished former U.S. diplomat to another country’s law enforcement bodies is an absolute non-starter of an idea. Yet it took the White House a couple of days to reach this conclusion. At the same time, Trump was also prepared to offer up American-born financier Bill Browder on a plate. Browder has been a thorn in the side of Putin since his friend and former lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was murdered in a Russian jail and, in the Magnitsky name, Browder campaigned to have laws passed to sanction Russian human rights abusers. This is one of the sanctions that irks Putin the most, how dare anyone challenge his human rights abuses?
McFaul was rightly given the backing of a unanimous motion passed in the U.S. Senate, while Browder explained that handing him to Putin was basically the same as handing him a death sentence.
The nuclear specter
On this, we really have to congratulate Putin on making the potential threat of a nuclear exchange seem real. Of course, it categorically is not. But bravo Vladimir Vladimirovych on the successful manipulation of reality in the mind of his opposite number.
Nuclear weapons are the greatest insanity man has ever invented, and in the event that one side in this crazy equation might ever think they should hit the big red button, it is an absolute guaranteed certainty that moments later the other side would retaliate in kind, leaving millions of people dead and apocolyptic devastation as the result.
No, as bloodthirsty as Putin clearly is to anyone who has studied his wars in Chechnya, against Georgia and Ukraine, and his barbarity in Syria, Putin’s not going to set off a chain of events that would certainly result in the destruction of himself and his own country. For one thing, he wants to live in a world where he can enjoy the billion-dollar spoils that he has amassed over the years by looting Russia.
Trump started out his meeting with Putin by talking about this topic, saying he was concerned that between them they controlled 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons (well, he actually said nuclear power, which was a simple mistake, not as big of a mistake as saying “would” instead of “wouldn’t” of course.)
The hyping of the possibility of nuclear armageddon continues today, with a remarkable consistency between messaging from Moscow and Washington.
While the BBC have Russian Senator Alexei Pushkov being quoted as saying “Do they want war with a nuclear power?” (and blaming, in part, the U.S. media) at the same time Trump himself was also tweeting, as usual in his factually incorrect way, that the media in the US “wants so badly to see a major confrontation with Russia, even a confrontation that could lead to war.” This is not a coincidence.
As we all feared prior to this meeting, Trump got played. He is chronically out of his depth, and now he has invited Putin to visit the White House.
By the way, we have no idea, yet, what was discussed or proposed with regard to ending the slaughter in Syria, but what we do know is that Putin is a master at manipulation, and Trump is very easy to manipulate. The omens are not good there either.
