While Rubio, Witkoff and Kushner are trying to pressure Ukraine to capitulate and reassure them that they can trust Trump and Russia(!), Ukrainians are hiding from the Russian missiles and drones.
Michael Andersen and Brian Bonner have combined 50+ years of experience in Ukraine.
And a good Monday to you.
Not everybody is so lucky. Below is a screenshot from a conversation I had with a good friend in southern Ukraine early this morning. She was telling me about the drones attacking, as we spoke:
She and her young daughter live in Mykolaiv, close to Odesa, close to the Ukrainian Black Sea coast. Her husband is away, an officer in the Ukrainian army. She and her daughter are tough nuts – they have to be – it is far from the first time they have spent the night in a bomb shelter. (In fact, they are lucky even to have a bomb shelter in their building.) But last night, as she writes, the Russian Shahed drones were flying particularly close bombing residential apartment buildings.
Just 70 km down the road, the Russian army is using the city of Kherson – and the people there – as a sadism and training lab in what is locally known as a ‘human safari’.
The Russians were driven out of Kherson city itself three years ago, but have since been sitting ‘ugly’ just on the other side of the river Dnipro – from where they are hunting – and ‘hunting’ is the appropriate word – the citizens of Kherson with drones, hand grenades and missiles.
“They terrorize us more and more, day by day,” a friend told me recently.
“It is terrible when you talked to somebody yesterday and today they (the Russians) just killed them on the street.”
A recent U.N. report was very clear:
“Russian authorities have systematically coordinated actions to drive out Ukrainian civilians from their homes [in Kherson] through recurrent drone attacks.”
Putin wants to empty Kherson for Ukrainians, it seems.
And, not surprisingly, it has worked. At the start of the Russian invasion, in February 2022, 300,000 people lived in Kherson – today, at the most, one-fifth is left, 60,000. Just in 2025, Russian drones and bombs have killed more than 200 civilians and wounded 2,000. At least 3,000 houses have been damaged or destroyed.
This means that among the population still living in Kherson, one in 30 has been injured or killed by Russian bombs just this year. The U.N. describes this as “war crimes.” Not a word the U.N. is known to use lightly.
The Russian regime has ignored the U.N. accusations. The only official reaction has been from one Kirill Dmitriev– Putin’s so-called Special Envoy for Investment and Economic Cooperation, also known as his ‘bag man’ and main money launderer.
“Of course, our military is not targeting kindergartens….”Dmitriev stated. But both the facts on the ground (as identified by U.N. investigators) and Russian military bloggers constantly releasing videos showing Ukrainian civilians being killed by drones make it difficult to believe a word Dmitriev utters.
“The city will be dismantled — brick after brick,” one such blogger boasted recently, “stay tuned for updates.”
Hmmmm – maybe you also recognize the name Kirill Dmitiriev from the last week’s headlines?
Dmitriev has namely emerged as the point man in the Kremlin’s dealings with the Trump administration. He basically walks in and out of the White House – despite being sanctioned by the U.S. for money laundering (but that is another sad story).
It was on one of those many visits that Dmitriev apparently handed Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner the Kremlin’s 28-point ‘peace plan.’ Or rather ‘piece(of Ukraine) plan’. In any case, the Trump administration was happy to present the plan as their own.
I wrote a piece about Trump caring so little about Ukrainethat he a) sent his estate agent and his son-in-law to sort out the war, and b) made it public that Steve Witkoff knows absolutely nothing about Russia, Putin or Ukraine – but still made him his Special Envoy on the conflict. Go figure.
“Steve had no idea about Russia, had no idea about Putin too much, didn’t know too much about politics. But he was really good at real estate.” (Donald Trump)
So Witkoff and Jared Kushner, whose main qualifications seem to be that he is the president’s son-in-law, together with little Marco Rubio, are the ones now meeting in Miami to pressure Ukraine to surrender 20% of their territory to Russia. Territory that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or wounded defending.
After they will have tried to threaten the Ukrainian delegation into capitulation, their plan is to go to Moscow and make money out of the Russian/U.S. ‘plan’. In the Kremlin, they will met with one Kirill Dmitriev. When I say money, I mean hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more.
The Trump administration (how long before we start calling it a ‘regime’, when do you cross that line?) are rapidly normalizing what is absolutely-fcuking-NOT-normal.
None of this is normal. That a U.S. President decides to let a pal who is an estate agent and his son-in-law be his point men on the biggest issue in international security, a war that has cost more than one million casualties, is not normal. It is just not normal. Let’s imagine that George W Bush had bypassed Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld, and dozens of trained advisors and diplomats in the State Department and the Moscow embassy, and instead sent his estate agent to negotiate with Putin (who was, of course, already in power back then)? Or that Barack Obama had ignored Hillary Clinton and the U.S. ambassador to Moscow at the time, Michael McFaul, and instead had sent some dude he had bought a condo off to negotiate with the Kremlin?
A little bit later, I asked my friend in Mykolaiv how she and her daughter were doing.
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Related :
Stand With Ukraine has just reposted a piece from Occupy Democrats :
Dec 2, 2025 :-
BREAKING: A former top NATO military official slams Donald Trump and says that he “works for Putin” in a brutal takedown that’s enraging MAGA world.
The remarks were made in French, but now they’re going viral in English…
“Ridiculously inconsistent and incoherent, but hey,” Michel Yakovleff, a lieutenant general in the French Army who served as Vice Chief of Staff at NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, said of Trump’s behavior.
“If we said he’s crazy, it basically would amount to the same thing,” interjected another member of the panel on France’s La Chaîne Info news channel.
“No. He works for Putin, but not crazy” said Yakovleff. “But by that I mean Putin, for him, Trump is the dream. He’s got a guy who does everything he asks for. That’s beautiful. And he doesn’t even pay for it. So, no, it’s beautiful.”
“Yesterday, he was in ultimatum mode. And that’s a basis for discussion. Here we are. So, if anything today is good news. He cam back from golfing and was happy,” he added.
The fact that the rest of the world, most notably our NATO allies, recognizes Trump as a Putin puppet while his MAGA base refuses to admit it should be infuriating to every patriotic America. We are being betrayed by our own commander-in-chief on behalf of our adversaries.
Trump and his cronies have been aggressively lobbying for an end to the Ukraine war so that he can score a much-needed diplomatic win and in doing so they’re selling Ukraine down the river. They don’t care about a just or lasting peace, they care about snagging headlines.
As for Yakovleff’s remarks about Trump working for Putin, it’s simply undeniable at this point. He refuses to stand up to the Russian dictator at every turn and bends over backwards to service his interests. Terrifying as it is to consider, we cannot rule out the possibility that the Kremlin has blackmail material on Trump, perhaps provided by Jeffrey Epstein. The late billionaire pedophile’s emails have revealed that he attempted to reach out to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to provide “insight” on Trump. While we might never get the full truth, releasing the full files would be a good start.
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Ariana Gic :
To the leaders of NATO and EU nations:
By choosing to not step up and help Ukraine defeat Russia when the United States is forcefully coercing Kyiv to surrender, you are helping Moscow WIN!!
You are DESTROYING every bit of peace and security left in the world.
By choosing not to step up to help Ukraine now, you are:
Sacrificing Ukrainians to Russian extermination.
Sacrificing Ukraine to genocide.
Legalizing genocide.
Sacrificing international law.
Sacrificing the inviolability of borders.
Sacrificing the sanctity of sovereignty.
By choosing not to step up to help Ukraine now, in this critical and pivotal moment in history, by choosing to kowtow to Trump – an evil, corrupt, convicted criminal – and to war criminal Putin, you are:
NOT saving yourselves.
NOT protecting Europe.
NOT protecting humanity.
By choosing to allow evil to prevail in the most horrendous of fashion, by STANDING BY and SUPPORTING American coercion of the victim of more than a DECADE of genocide, you are helping destroy all that is good and just. You are destroying democracy. You are discarding freedom.
By choosing to stand by and allow Trump to coerce Ukraine to surrender to his partner Putin, you are parties to Ukraine’s demise. You cannot hold your heads up high and say you did all you could. You cannot be proud. You cannot say you rose to the occasion in our darkest hour.
By choosing to not stand with Ukraine, you abandon not only Ukrainians – a crime in and of itself – but you abandon yourselves. By choosing to not stand with Ukraine, you abandon your principles. By choosing to not stand with Ukraine, you abandon your citizens. By choosing to not stand with Ukraine today, you are choosing to stand with Russia.
Yes, it IS this stark. Yes, it IS this black and white. We have legal and moral duties which we are ignoring. We are not doing everything in our power to do what we are sworn to do. We are sacrificing Ukraine and ourselves to Putin, and we are doing it while claiming otherwise.
I am ASHAMED of our leaders. I am ASHAMED of our nations. I am DEVASTATED that we have chosen the path of allowing evil to prevail under the guise of “protecting” the very thing we are sacrificing. If we do not act on our principles, we have nothing. We are no better than them.