Donald Trump’s plan to tap the retired US lieutenant general Keith Kellogg as US envoy to Ukraine and Russia has triggered renewed interest in a policy document he co-authored that proposes ending the war by withdrawing weapons from Ukraine if it doesn’t enter peace talks – and giving even more weapons to Ukraine if Russia doesn’t do the same.
Trump is said to have responded favorably to the plan – America First, Russia & Ukraine – which was presented to him in April and was written by Kellogg and the former CIA analyst Fred Fleitz, who both served as chiefs of staff in Trump’s national security council from 2017 to 2021.
The document proposes halting further US weapons deliveries to Kyiv if it does not enter peace talks with Moscow, while simultaneously warning Moscow that, should it refuse to negotiate, US support for Ukraine would increase.
You can’t stop Ukraine from defending itself even if you pull the support. Europe should fill the void.
Tbh my money is on Ukraine following through on their threat to do a crash nuclear weapons program. If the rest of the world won’t actually help them meaningfully, they’ll defend their interests as they see fit - as they should.
I think we should but Europe doesn’t have close to the mean to produce enough weapon as it is. When we started to help Ukraine we realized we couldn’t even produce enough riffle bullets let alone missiles.
Europe is not a federal state. Military speaking there is no Europe. There’s a bunch of small countries with their own industry and military capabilities. If Ukraine has french launchers they’ll depend on the French industry to produce rockets, not on a 500M people country called “Europe” who has the capabilities to reorganize productions.
And currently no country in Europe is ready to relinquish militaries capabilities and prerogatives to the union.
I"ve read that the EU’s working on setting-up a standing army, small, but actual, & directly deployable…
According to this, nope:
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/05/29/fact-check-is-the-eu-setting-up-a-european-army
it does seem strange, though:
the extra-delay of extra-layers-of-bureaucracy is idiotic, in some situations, &
NATO’s gutted, once Trump steps-in, as he’s a Putin ally, openly…
it’d be SANE to be doing that, with Trump & Putin dominating the world, in mere-weeks…
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Sounds like the U.S. military weapons industry should learn from the U.S. commercial gun industry and encourage straw purchases.
Sadly, it would mean a catastrophe for Ukraine if US stops weapons delivery. We already saw this scenario which resulted in fall of Avdiivka and other huge problems for Ukraine. Heck, EU isn’t even capable of producing enough shells plus there is a lot of weapons that have US parts and would be denied to use, such as Storm Shadow and similar.