As promised, Trump came out the gate swinging—or in his case, signing over 100 executive orders to immediately neuter many DEI initiatives, take away clearance from ex-Biden officials, and suspending foreign aid to all countries for 90 days, which includes Ukraine.

A Ukrainian journalist who allegedly met with Washington Post staff reported that a full reboot was in order on Ukraine:

“Alarming: The Pentagon has fired and suspended everyone who was responsible for Ukraine and aid to it. The US Department of Defense is in a complete reboot”

▪️ There will be a new format of relations with Ukraine, it’s all a bit alarming, – said propagandist close to the Armed Forces of Ukraine R. Bochkala following a meeting with journalists from The Washington Post.

The below is not yet corroborate, but it claims that all shipments to Ukraine have been suspended:

In the Pentagon, everyone who was responsible for Ukraine has been fired and suspended. They will all face an investigation into the use of US budget money.

The US this morning in Washington, withdrew all applications to contractors for logistics through Rzeszow, Constanta and Varna. At NATO bases in Europe, all shipments to Ukraine have been suspended and closed.

According to foreign military analysts, this is on the order of several thousand tons of weapons and equipment.

However, the most interesting development vis-a-vis Ukraine was hearing Trump’s first words as president regarding the situation. You’ll recall for months we were forced to listen to claims from various mouthpieces like Kellogg and Waltz who appeared to be speaking on Trump’s behalf, though we could never be sure. But now President Trump has issued his first nuggets to give us an idea of the direction things might go—and they are interesting.

Firstly, a far more staid and reeled-in Trump forewent the now expected blustering bravado about marching up to Putin and forcing him to end the war in a single day. Instead, in an uncharacteristically quiet and uncertain tone, Trump remarked that negotiations would depend entirely on whether Putin is interested or not:

Unfortunately, Trump exposes his complete ignorance and lack of credibility when it comes to the Ukrainian conflict by subsequently complaining that Russia has suffered an outrageous one million deadsoldiers in the war. How can anyone possibly count on the man so ill-informed to be the savior that miraculously ends the war? We can understand a little flourish for the media to dress it up a bit, make things seem more dire for effect—but peremptorily citing such numbers just makes Trump look sadly disconnected, which further colors any of his efforts toward the war as similarly half-assed; that’s not to even mention his claim that Spain is a member of BRICS.

He goes on to say that Putin is destroying Russia by not making a deal, and the way he says it almost feels as if Trump is now convinced that Putin has already made up his mind not to “make a deal”. He further claims that Russia’s economy is in ruins, and most notably, says that he would consider sanctioning or tariffing Russia:

This is the first time we’ve gotten confirmation straight from Trump himself, rather than Kellogg and the like, that he is in fact considering the ‘nuclear option’ of playing ‘hardball’ with Russia, should Putin refuse to bend the knee. And in fact, in a different interview he made it even more clear:

He’s asked plainly whether he’ll sanction Russia if Vladimir Putin doesn’t come to the negotiating table, and his response is: “That sounds likely.”

So there we have it. Trump the ‘peace maker’ has shown his cards and clarifies the possible directions he intends to take. Which means some of the earlier claims from Keith Kellogg appear to have been accurate in regard to Trump trying to put the vise on Putin should the peace deal turn sour. There is some small chance that Trump continues to merely grandstand with the usual bravado for reporters but in reality still seeks a way to dump Kiev completely.

You’ll note in the first video above, he makes a very interesting comment which slips under the surface of the rest of his statement. Listen again to when he’s describing Russia’s failed war effort, then says: “I mean…it’s a big machine so, eventually things will happen…”

What he appears to mean that, despite his little ‘dressing up’ of the putative ‘failed’ war effort, he’s acknowledging that it’s not so failed after all because Russia’s war machine is at this point so big and powerful that eventually Ukraine will not be able to resist at all; it appears Trump is aware of this fine point after all.

Interestingly, this jibes with a new German command report from Major General Christian Freuding, who makes drops a shocking bombshell that again flies totally in the face of the prevailing Western narrative on Russia:

Link to original Welt article.

“Russia is building up its forces beyond the requirements of the current conflict!”

— The head of Germany’s military task force on assistance for Ukraine, Major General Christian Freuding.

Freuding essentially says that Russia is now building reserve armies by generating more manpower and armor than it’s losing. Recall Shoigu’s reserve armies I covered a long time ago, where much of Russia’s generated manpower was going rather than merely sustaining losses on the front:

Freuding also states, by the way, that Russia now builds 3,000 UMPK glide bombs per month, and ‘procures’ 3.7M artillery shells per year:

Now, sensing the pitfall Trump may sleepwalk into, top Trumper Steve Bannon has warned that Trump is in danger of creating his own “Vietnam”:

Donald Trump is in danger of failing to make a clean break with Ukraine and could be sucked deeper into Vladimir Putin’s war — just as Richard Nixon was stung in his attempts to pull out of Vietnam — Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon warned in a wide-ranging interview with POLITICO.

He correctly notes:

“If we aren’t careful, it will turn into Trump’s Vietnam. That’s what happened to Richard Nixon. He ended up owning the war and it went down as his war not Lyndon Johnson’s,” Bannon said.

And it’s true: Trump knows China is eating the US’ lunch on the economic front and as others like Rubio have pointed out, the US has a very limited time window to somehow change the calculus in a way that keeps it in the race with China. If Trump’s vanity keeps him from detaching himself from Ukraine he risks doing the dance with Russia to the point of US exhaustion while an unhindered China laps them all.

Russia may not be China but on Russia’s home turf—which Ukraine essentially is—the ‘superpower’ US does not have the advantage and will find itself sucked into a war of attrition it cannot win. That’s not to mention that rumors swirl around Zelensky preparing a false flag of some kind to drag Trump into the war as much as possible, for instance from Legitimny channel:

#hearings
We confirm colleagues information that in February Zelensky and OP are preparing some provocative events that, according to their idea, will change Trump’s attitude and force him to participate in the Ukrainian crisis.
Zelensky will do everything to extend the game, as he has been given the task of prolonging the conflict to prevent Trump from ending the war. They will come up with any new space requirements that will be unrealistic to fulfill.

Compounding all this is Trump’s earlier boasts of the Russian economy set to implode being total bunk—here’s the latest contravening data. Note it’s not even oil and gas revenue that’s blazing skyward:

Russian budget revenues rose to a record level in December, despite new “strongest” sanctions , – Bloomberg

▪️Russia’s revenues rose to a record last month even after the United States imposed a powerful new package of sanctions on the banking sector aimed at disrupting foreign trade payments and curbing export earnings.

▪️ Total revenue in December was more than 4 trillion rubles ($40 billion), up 28% from the same month last year, according to the Finance Ministry.

▪️This is the highest level recorded in the ministry’s data since January 2011.

▪️The US and its allies are trying to stop the Kremlin’s war machine by restricting export revenues, and in late 2024 they imposed additional sanctions on Russia’s energy sector and the banks that service it. Still, oil and gas revenues rose by a third in December from a year earlier and are up 26% in 2024. Other revenue sources showed similar gains for the full year, driven by taxes and dividends amid robust economic growth.

▪️ “The volume of non-oil and gas revenues in 2024 significantly exceeded the estimates set out in the budget law for 2025-2027, including from the largest tax sources,” the Finance Ministry said in a statement.

▪️The increase in revenues allowed the government to spend more than ever before – total expenditure for the month amounted to 7.15 trillion rubles, breaking the previous record set in December 2022.

RVvoenkor

That’s not to mention Patrushev’s new interview wherein he expresses his learned view that Ukraine may “cease to exist” this year:

Lastly, Zelensky made another interesting statement. We had just spoken about his assertion that Russia has 600k+ troops in the SMO, while Ukraine allegedly has 800k+. In a new video from the Davos forum, Zelensky again reiterates that Russia has 600k+ but then says something which proves some of my earliest reports on this blog about Russia’s force dispositions at the onset of the SMO:

He states that the current 600k+ force is up to 4.5 times larger than Russia’s initial force. Doing the math, 600k is 4.5 times more than 133,000—or using his 4x number we can say 150,000.

My earliest readers will recall I was the lone voice proving with numbers that Russia’s opening foray into the SMO consisted of a tiny force of a mere ~70-130k rather than the massive 250-400k claimed everywhere else as part of the official Western historiography. This was the main reason for why Russia was forced to retreat from places like Kherson and Kharkov after early gains, when Ukraine had force-mobilized upwards of a million troops while Russia was operating with a tiny raid structure. Now we have confirmation from Zelensky himself. And he even indirectly confirms General Freuding’s earlier claims of Russia’s continued strengthening of forces when he says in the video above that if Russia is not stopped now, it will soon have an army ten times larger than the 2022 one, rather than a mere 4.5x larger.

For now it’s clear that Trump’s admin likely has no real plan to negotiate with Russia and is completely misinformed by its intelligence assets. As I wrote many months ago, the only real question will be not whether negotiations will work, but what Trump will do once Putin blanks all his negotiations offers.

One supposes that one possibility is that Trump may make a kind of ‘half effort’ in applying ‘punitive sanctions’ against Russia only to appease the deep state neocons and warmongering media, but with the full knowledge that it won’t do much and that Russia will overrun Ukraine either way. At least, if Trump were truly more devious and ingenius than we give him credit for, this is one avenue he could pursue. But more likely Trump will use the Ukraine situation to play various concessions off of Europe, just as he’s been leveraging threats against Panama, Greenland, and the like to get Europe to fall in line.

In the end it will have to come down to which imperative of Trump’s is the stronger—his will for personal glory and the fear of tarnishing his vanity by being portrayed as a ‘loser’ in Ukraine? Or his great desire to fashion a legacy as a historic ‘peace maker’ at all costs.