The US will be salvaged thanks to Pres Trump, EU on the other hand is a failed entity.

DISASTER for Ukraine – EU Emergency Meeting Fails, No Money, No Weapons! Here’s What’s Next for Zelensky

In a catastrophic blow to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the European Union’s emergency meeting has collapsed, leaving Ukraine with no new funding or weapons, as reported by the New York Post. Predictable? You bet—and conservatives are laughing out loud at the predictable implosion. Zelensky, fresh off being booted from the White House by President Donald Trump, fled to the UK hoping Europe would swoop in to save his regime. But it turns out the EU is flat broke, crippled by its own self-inflicted migrant crisis, failed energy policies, and mountains of debt. Zelensky’s desperate gamble has backfired spectacularly, and now he’s got no choice but to crawl back to Trump—the one leader who’s been right all along.

This fiasco was inevitable. For years, EU elites blindly followed the Biden-Harris warmongers, pouring billions they didn’t have into a war they couldn’t win, all to prop up Zelensky’s increasingly shaky grip on power. But with European economies tanking under the weight of open borders and suicidal climate agendas, there’s nothing left to give—no matter how loudly Brussels bureaucrats cry “European unity.” Hungary’s decision to block more aid, as AP News reports, was the first crack in the facade, signaling a return to sanity as European publics tire of endless war and economic pain.

Zelensky’s UK tour, where he signed a 100-year alliance hoping to bypass Trump, now looks like a humiliating misstep. After Trump made it clear the U.S. gravy train was over—calling out Zelensky’s disrespect and pushing for peace—Zelensky bet on Europe to bail him out. Big mistake. The New York Post’s coverage highlights the EU’s failure to agree, exposing the collapse of its leadership class. With Biden sidelined and Trump in charge, the war’s lifeline has been cut, and Zelensky’s only option is to dial Trump, the one leader who’s been offering peace since 2020.

This wasn’t about defending democracy—it was about enriching defense contractors, laundering money, and covering Biden’s foreign policy flops. Trump warned them, repeatedly, that peace was possible with serious leadership, but they ignored him, smeared him, and now they’re out of moves. For Trump supporters, this is vindication: his America First policies exposed the racket, and with the EU broke, the path to peace is wide open. Zelensky’s coming back to Dad—and Dad’s pissed.

https://www.rightjournalism.co...s-next-for-zelensky/

Now waiting for President Trump to “Zelensky” NATO. The winning is delicious!

Using the carrot... and the stick:

President Trump Warns Russia to Negotiate Quickly or Face Tariffs and Sanctions

Using his Truth Social account, President Donald Trump said he is “strongly considering” issuing large-scale sanctions and tariffs on Russia to get a ceasefire and settlement deal on the table to end the war in Ukraine.



With Ukraine in a vulnerable position due to the USA ‘pause’ in Ukraine missiles and drones targeting systems, President Trump appears to be telling Vladimir Putin directly not to exploit the vulnerability or Russia will face enhanced economic pressure points.

President Trump is putting pressure on both sides to reach an interim ceasefire agreement.

https://theconservativetreehou...nctions/#more-269887

Great read, chellim!

Ukrainian forces fighting inside Russia are almost surrounded, open source maps show

https://www.reuters.com/world/...ack&utm_medium=email


Thousands of Ukrainian troops who stormed into Russia's Kursk region last summer in a shock incursion are nearly surrounded by Russian forces there, in a major blow to Kyiv which hoped to use its presence there as leverage over Moscow in any peace talks.

Ukraine's situation in Kursk has deteriorated sharply in the last three days, open source maps show, after Russian forces retook territory as part of a gathering counteroffensive that has nearly cut the Ukrainian force in two and separated the main group from its principal supply lines.

The precarious situation for Ukraine comes after Washington suspended its intelligence sharing with Kyiv and raises the possibility that its forces may be forced into a politically awkward and psychologically difficult retreat back into Ukraine, or risk being captured or killed.

The battlefield reversal comes at a time when Kyiv is under mounting U.S. pressure to agree to a ceasefire with Moscow and as Russian forces continue to advance along parts of the front line inside Ukraine, even as Ukrainian forces stage a fightback in one area.

"The situation (for Ukraine in Kursk) is very bad," Pasi Paroinen, a military analyst with the Finland-based Black Bird Group, told Reuters.
"Now there is not much left until Ukrainian forces will either be encircled or forced to withdraw. And withdrawal would mean running a dangerous gauntlet, where the forces would be constantly threatened by Russian drones and artillery," he said.

"If Ukrainian forces are not able to restore the situation quickly, this could be the moment where the Kursk salient begins to finally close into an encircled pocket."

There was no official confirmation of the Russian thrust from the Russian Defence Ministry or the Ukrainian military, both of which tend to report battlefield changes with a delay.

Yan Matveev, another military analyst, said on Telegram that Ukraine had a difficult choice to make.
"The only argument in favour of holding the bridgehead is political. To use the remnants of the bridgehead for bargaining. And also a little morale - after all, a retreat is a retreat...," he said.

TAKING WAR TO RUSSIA

Ukraine's incursion into Kursk last August was the most serious attack on Russian territory since the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and was designed to bring the war to ordinary Russians, whom the Kremlin had tried to shield from the fallout from the fighting raging inside Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said it was also aimed at trying to ease pressure on Ukrainian troops defending their own country from Russian forces in the east by forcing Moscow to divert resources to defend its own territory, and at giving Kyiv a potential bargaining chip in future peace talks.

The incursion was embarrassing for Moscow and raised uncomfortable questions about its ability to protect its own borders. Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly said his forces would regain full control of Kursk by force and rejected any idea of making it part of wider future talks.

Open source mapping from Deep State, an authoritative Ukrainian military blogging resource, showed on Friday that around three-quarters of the Ukrainian force inside Russia had now been almost completely encircled.

It showed they were joined to the remaining Ukrainian force located closer to the Russian border by a land corridor around 1 km long and less than 500 metres wide at its narrowest point as Russian forces move to cut that off too.

Deep State said late on Thursday that Russian forces had advanced near the nearby settlement of Kuryilovka.

In an update released on Friday it also said that Russian forces were pressuring Ukraine's positions in the border area with Sumy region as part of the same operation and moving to try to block supplies to Ukrainian forces inside Kursk.

"It is worth noting that the enemy has an advantage in UAVs (drones), both reconnaissance and strike. The most commonly used is the FPV drone. They are mainly responsible for fire control of everything that moves ‘in’ or ‘out’ of Kursk region," Deep State said in its note.
Yuri Podolyaka, an influential Russian war blogger, said Russian forces had broken through south of Sudzha, a Russian town located inside the nearly surrounded pocket.

"The Russian Armed Forces have driven a deep wedge (up to 4 kilometres deep) and actually reached the alternative supply route to Sudzha (which the enemy was using because the main road could not be used)," Podolyaka wrote on his Telegram channel.

A Ukrainian military analyst and former commander, Evhen Dykyi, said Ukrainian forces had, however, improved their positions in the last day or two on the approaches to Sudhza.

"Just yesterday, we launched another round of counterattacks there," he told Ukrainian Radio NV. "Now it's our turn to strike at their rear and logistics. We will see how successful this counter action turns out to be."
Ukraine's General Staff, in a late evening report on Friday said that its armed forces had repelled 29 Russian attacks in the Kursk region over the past day. Russian forces, it said, had launched 22 air strikes.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/...-minerals-2671281548

Rare Earths Reality Check: Ukraine Doesn't Have Minable Deposits

Experts say proposed deal with U.S. makes no sense
Glenn Zorpette
07 Mar 2025

Ukraine Doesn’t Actually Have Minable Rare Earths

To begin with, the contentious 28 February Oval Office meeting can’t be understood without a crucial piece of context: there are no deposits of rare-earth ore in Ukraine known to be minable in an economically viable way. And that would be true even if full-scale warfare were not raging in the country’s east, where a great deal of its mineral resources are concentrated.

Ukraine is believed to have four areas with substantial deposits of rare earth ores, according to Erik Jonsson, senior geologist with the Geological Survey of Sweden. “There are four slightly bigger deposits: Yastrubetske, Novopoltavske, Azovske, and Mazurivske. All but one of them seem to be now within or near the zone that the Russians control, as far as I can tell,” says Jonsson. “And when it comes to resources in those deposits, I mean, we have numbers; yes, that’s nice. But we have no real, detailed, outline of how those numbers were arrived at.” The numbers are believed to come from Soviet surveys dating as far back as the 1960s.

“The rare-earth deposits don’t look that relevant,” Jonsson concludes. “I mean, I wouldn’t go for them.” Two of the deposits are dominated by a mineral called britholite, he notes, which is not desirable because it has not been processed for rare earths, which means that almost nothing exists in the way of process chemistry and equipment.

quote:

Rare Earths Reality Check: Ukraine Doesn't Have Minable Deposits
Experts say proposed deal with U.S. makes no sense

I think it would be a mistake for the US to get more involved in Ukraine.
It's similar to the Middle-East and oil. I'm fine with buying it, but we shouldn't have to protect the drilling/mining.

US is destroying world order, Ukraine's ex-commander-in-chief Zaluzhnyi says

https://kyivindependent.com/us...rder-zaluzhnyi-says/

The U.S. is destroying the world order as Washington is making overtures to the Kremlin, said on March 6 Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine's former commander-in-chief and current ambassador to the U.K.

Speaking at the Chatham House, Zaluzhnyi said that President Donald Trump's administration has questioned the unity of "the whole Western world."

"Now Washington is trying to delegate the security issues to Europe without participation of the U.S. so we can say that in the near future, NATO likewise can stop existing," the ambassador said.

According to Zaluzhnyi, Europe can be Russia's next target. He said that fears of Western partners made it possible for Moscow to start forming "an axis."

The two key Russian allies, Iran and North Korea, supply Russia with weapons that are used against Ukraine. Pyongyang has also sent over 10,000 troops to fight alongside Russian forces in the embattled Kursk Oblast.

"We see that it's not just the axis of evil and Russia trying to revise the world order, but the U.S. is finally destroying this order," Zaluzhnyi said.

"And when those countries of the axis conclude a strategic agreement between themselves, we should have thought maybe this is an attempt to revise the existing world order."

The remarks come amid rising tensions between Kyiv and Washington following a clash in the Oval Office exchange on Feb. 28 between President Volodymyr Zelensky and Trump.

The dispute led to the collapse of a bilateral deal on Ukraine's natural resources, after which the U.S. president paused all military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine.

The move to suspend aid to Ukraine came on top of other Kremlin-friendly steps recently taken by the U.S. The Trump administration has also been considering lifting sanctions imposed against Russia for its brutal all-out war against Ukraine that killed hundreds of thousands.

Long article, but the bottom line is we can't afford it anymore...

NATO: The Case To Get Out Now

Authored by David Stockman

The case for getting out of NATO encompasses four fundamental propositions:

First, the Federal budget has become a self-fueling fiscal doomsday machine, even as the Fed has run out of capacity to monetize the skyrocketing public debt.

Second, the only viable starting point for fiscal salvation is slashing the nation’s elephantine Warfare State by at least $500 billion per year.

Third, the route to that end is a return to the “no entangling alliance” wisdom of the Founders, which means bringing the Empire Home, closing the 750 US bases abroad, scuttling much of the US Navy and Army and withdrawing from NATO and similar lesser commitments elsewhere.

Fourthly, jettisoning NATO requires debunking its Origins Story and the false claim that it brought peace and security to post-war America when what it actually did was transform Washington into the War Capital of the World, dominated by a panoptic complex of arms merchants, neocon warmongers and a vast Warfare State nomenklatura.

(much more...)

https://www.zerohedge.com/geop...ato-case-get-out-now

We can clearly cut a great deal more than 500B.

I really think the goal should be 14T.

Returning that much capital to the effective users of it, would be a massive economic boon.

quote:

Originally posted by Aglifter:
We can clearly cut a great deal more than 500B.

I really think the goal should be 14T.

Returning that much capital to the effective users of it, would be a massive economic boon.

And where did you come up with that wildly unrealistic figure of $14 trillion in government spending cuts?

It's literally over twice the entire federal annual spending. If one were to completely disband the federal government and the entirety of the military, the savings would be "only" $6.8 trillion per year.

So I guess let's throw in all the local and state governments' spending too. Do away with all those as well. Disband all government overnight. Cool, that's another $4 trillion.

Still barely 3/4 of the way towards your goal. A mere $3.2 trillion short.

Where should we make up the rest, in our newly anarchical and defenseless non-country full of effective capital users?

quote:

Originally posted by Aglifter:
We can clearly cut a great deal more than 500B.

I really think the goal should be 14T.

Returning that much capital to the effective users of it, would be a massive economic boon.

Interesting math.

quote:

Originally posted by Aglifter:
We can clearly cut a great deal more than 500B.

I really think the goal should be ...

RogueJSK is right about the math. Really, the goal should be a balanced budget.
You don't even begin to address the debt until you stop adding to it. "Reducing expenditures" is always "estimated" over 10 years which ends up being meaningless. The only budget that Congress actually controls is the current years budget. They can't stop a future Congress from spending.

quote:

Originally posted by Aglifter:
I really think the goal should be 14T.

I like the way you think! That is a very big number, and an audacious goal.

My only question is $14T what?

Reduce the Federal debt by $14T? (I think that would gets down to “only” $20T in debt, which seems like a step in the right direction.)

Or, more optimistically, reduce the Federal debt to a “mere” $14T? (Bigger step in right direction.)

Grow the GDP to $14T per year? That would be nice, though it may take a minute unless we continue with Bidenflation, in which case at some point $14T won’t be enough to buy a pack of gum.

As pointed out, the annual Federal expenditures are less than half of $14T, so reducing Federal expenditures by that much is not in the realm of the possible.

Please explain what you meant by your $14T goal?

Or did a decimal place get dropped? A $1.4T reduction in annual expenditures could be a possible, if bold goal.


Curious…

Edited to add:

quote:

Originally posted by chellim1:
Really, the goal should be a balanced budget.

I don’t (quite) agree. That should have been the goal several years ago before we drove the fiscal car three quarters of the way off a cliff. I would argue that the goal should be a budget that provides a substantial surplus that is used to pay down the debt. Only when the debt is less than 10% of GDP should we even entertain a balanced budget. Until then there should be a significant surplus every year that is used to reduce the debt. And when considering what we are going to spend the limited funds that we allow to be spent, the first questions should be, “How does this benefit America?”, and “How does this move the American economy forward, increasing GDP?”

When I was reading the article that wcb posted above, I could hear the scratchy and annoying sounds being played in the background from the world's tiniest violin.

zelenskyy and the WAR PIGS and the war pig profiteers must be so verklempt.

OK, OK, so I got my number scrambled.

I still think the Federal expenditures, and the local and state ones, can easily be cut in half, with those savings put toward debt redemption, until it’s paid off.

That graphic doesn’t seem to include oil royalties, which are fairly significant, and could be much larger.