CatholicFella 🇺🇦

It cannot be stated often enough or vociferously enough: The Trump administration is helping Russia to conquer Ukraine. The United States of America has taken the side of an aggressor against its innocent victim. We are helping our actual enemies as they prey upon us and our friends. This policy reversal from both the Biden administration and the first Trump administration is a shameful abandonment of principle and of self-interest.

Damn! They was fast. Ukraine has launched its first satellite for its own communications network

Putin, Trump and MAGA love repeating the story that NATO betrayed Russia by expanding eastwards, supposedly breaking a promise never to admit countries once trapped under Soviet communist rule. There is one rather inconvenient detail they always leave out: those countries desperately wanted to join. And with good reason. They remember Soviet occupation, political executions, mass deportations to Siberia, forced collectivisation, prison camps, secret police, censorship and generations of lives destroyed by Moscow’s glorious socialist paradise. Families disappeared. Countries lost their independence. Ordinary people could be imprisoned for expressing the wrong opinion. When communism collapsed, these nations did not need NATO to persuade them to escape Russian influence. They practically ran towards the door. Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Czechia and the others understood something the MAGA intellectual establishment apparently struggles with: living next to Russia is considerably more pleasant when Russia cannot decide how you live. And that brings us to Serbia. Aleksandar Vučić, a leader who spent years cultivating Moscow while balancing Serbia’s European ambitions, has just been defeated by a student-led democratic movement. The celebrations in Belgrade tell their own story. Serbia has its own complicated history, and nobody should pretend this election settles every question about NATO or EU membership. But it exposes the central absurdity of Moscow’s worldview. When a European leader continually argues against Western integration while protecting Russia’s influence, the obvious question is whose interests he actually serves. There is no need to invent secret payments to recognise a politician doing Moscow’s work. NATO did not expand eastwards because Washington forced unwilling nations into an alliance. It expanded because countries with experience of Russian domination wanted protection from ever experiencing it again. Putin, Orban, JD Vance, Hegseth and Trump calls that Western aggression. Russia, meanwhile, has spent centuries discovering that keeping its neighbours within its sphere of influence generally requires threats, repression or an army. That tells you almost everything about which civilisation has something worth offering.

Mitch McConnell has just delivered a warning Trump cannot afford to ignore. In The Wall Street Journal, the veteran Republican senator warned that Trump’s continued submission to Putin could jeopardise his entire legislative agenda. McConnell calls Trump’s Russia policy strategically naive and morally bankrupt. More importantly, he signals that Republican senators may withhold their support unless Trump changes course. This is no longer merely about Ukraine. It is about whether Republicans will allow an American president to keep rewarding a Russian dictator while undermining America’s allies. For once, Trump may discover that Congress has a spine.