By Martin Armstrong

It was a lofty promise and a campaign tale that no one believed could happen. Donald Trump stayed true on his promise to carry out a number of executive orders on Day 1 of his presidency, but he cannot simply sign an EO to end the war in Ukraine. Yet he did promise to stop sending blank checks to Ukraine and has appointed a special envoy who is requesting 100 days to reevaluate America’s position in the war. More importantly, Trump would like to go directly to the source and speak with Putin.

The Kremlin broadcast Putin’s weekly security council message earlier than expected to address Trump directly. “We are open to dialogue with the new US administration on the Ukrainian conflict,” Putin said. “Its goal should not be a short truce, not some kind of respite for regrouping forces and rearmament with the aim of subsequently continuing the conflict, but a long-term peace based on respect for the legitimate interests of all people, all nations that live in this region.”

Russia will never waiver on a deal that does not include prohibiting Ukraine from joining NATO. Trump seems to be aligned with him on this issue as any reasonable mind can comprehend how this would lead to an immediate escalation into World War III. Territorial concessions? Neither Russia or Ukraine is willing to surrender territory.

New US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has reaffirmed the new administration’s message that the war in Ukraine must end. America can withhold funding or direct intervention. America cannot undo the damage that has been done. There are too many hands in the money pit that is Ukraine from world governments to investment banks. Everyone is heavily invested in Ukraine and will demand repayment for untold fortunes spent on prolonging the for-profit war. Even withdrawing from NATO would not be sufficient to end the war as the alliance has been preparing for a Trump victory before campaigning efforts began.

Europe is pushing full speed ahead to fabricate World War II, with both Germany and France offering to send “peacekeepers,” a digestible new term for “trained soldiers.” Zelensky simply wants the money to continue pouring in. “Will President Trump even notice Europe?” Zelensky asked in appearance at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “Does he see NATO as necessary, and will he respect EU institutions?” Ukraine’s president is attempting to shape this as a Europe v the USA matter as if America is abandoning Europe under Trump.

From LifeSiteNews

By Frank Wright

Giving an account which completely contradicts the narrative of Vladimir Putin as Adolf Hitler, with Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine a brave defender of democracy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. states bluntly, ‘The Ukraine war should never have happened.’

In a brief interview released on January 10, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says the reasons behind the Ukraine war are not those which have been supplied to the American people. 

Giving an account which completely contradicts the narrative of Vladimir Putin as Adolf Hitler, with Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine a brave defender of democracy, Kennedy states bluntly that “The Ukraine war should never have happened” – and it was effectively planned by the U.S. Deep State.  

“We wanted the war,” said Kennedy, explaining how the U.S. government has acted to provoke and prolong the Ukraine war for years.  

“Now six hundred thousand kids are dead. We have spent 200 billion dollars – which we need in this country. We can’t afford to be engaged in wars that are this close to nuclear engagement,” Kennedy concluded. 

Kennedy’s brief and stunning rundown of the truth behind the case for war in Ukraine exposes decades of deep state corruption. In this report, LifeSiteNews tests Kennedy’s claims against a historical record rich with evidence seldom seen in the news today.  

A diet of deception

Western news consumers have been fed a diet of war propaganda which has seen these facts framed as “Putin’s talking points” – and people who talk like Kennedy smeared as traitors. Yet Kennedy also points out,  

“My son Connor went over to Ukraine and fought in the Kharkiv Offensive because he looked at Putin as a bully who had invaded this country,” Kennedy stated.

Kennedy’s own son was radicalized to risk his own life, being prepared to die for this narrative. Yet his father says he was fighting an imaginary war. 

“What this war was about was really about security.” Against years of propaganda painting Putin as an expansionist dictator hell bent on conquering Ukraine – and then Europe – Kennedy says, “It was never about territory”.  

Why should we take Kennedy’s claims seriously? His remarks are in fact only news because the news itself has been so effective in keeping the truth from its Western audiences.  

Everything Kennedy says about this war has been predicted and noted for over three decades. The people who have said what he is saying include George Kennan – one of the most celebrated postwar U.S. diplomats, and President Putin himself. As Kennedy explains that the Ukraine war is the result of years of broken promises made to Russia by the West, his charge that the U.S. government “wanted the war” appears not only credible, but the only rational explanation for the “fatal error” of NATO expansion which predictably led to this conflict.  

To the brink of nuclear war

The result of this reckless grand strategy – to bring the borders of NATO to those of Russia – created a security crisis which has rekindled the terrible prospect of all-out nuclear war.   

Yet Kennedy says there is a realistic hope of peace promised by the coming Trump administration. 

“Whatever you say about President Trump he’s a real estate guy – and he’d rather do a deal than have a war.”

Kennedy, however, warns it is “harder to do a deal now.” Why? 

“Everything the Russians were saying about this [war] from the beginning has turned out to be true.” What does Kennedy mean? His explanation shows the evidence leading to the crime scene of the proxy war in Ukraine today.  

It began, for the Russians, with the creation of a security threat on its borders.   

“Putin was scared that Ukraine would attack Russia.” As Kennedy explains, “Zelensky has confirmed that by a NATO-supported invasion of Russia… in Kursk.”

The invasion of Kursk, undertaken over the summer of 2024, was only one of a long series of reckless actions backed by NATO against Russia. Terrorist and drone attacks have struck deep into Russian territory, and long-range U.S. and NATO supplied cruise missiles have been fired into Russia in a dangerous step up the escalation ladder. This ladder, of course, leads to nuclear war.  

Kennedy believes, however, that Trump means to stop it. The question is then, if Trump can get the U.S. out – how should it go? 

A warning from recent history is given by Kennedy. 

“The Afghan withdrawal was a horrible calamity,” said Kennedy. He argues that the deadline was set for withdrawal for political reasons – setting a goal which was militarily unrealistic.  

“It was politically driven by a date that was impossible for the army to comply with.”

The same argument could be made about all the regime change wars from Afghanistan to Ukraine: driven by a political ideology, they demanded the impossible and delivered chaos and destruction in place of the promise of democracy and freedom. All these wars since 2001 have been lost, of course, though some have harvested vast profits from them. 

War without reason

They have all been fought for non-military reasons, as Colonel Douglas Macgregor has frequently noted. In 2019 he said Trump’s move to “break with the past” and “climb out of the Afghan and Middle Eastern money pits” were “anathema to the Washington Beltway.” 

“The quality of a great leader is the courage to break with the past when the facts change,” said Macgregor, as he explained, “For President Trump, facing facts means change. But real change—ending the Korean War, disengaging forces from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan—is anathema to just about everyone inside the Washington Beltway.” 

What Macgregor was saying was that the political class benefits from these “money pits,” at the expense of the Americans whose money – and lives – are being poured into them. 

Striking a hopeful note, Macgregor said of Donald Trump five years ago:  

Washington hates him for doing these things, but most Americans and future generations of Americans will love him for it.

Can Americans expect this sort of strength – and leadership, from the new administration? A break with the past would hopefully mean a break with the sorry tradition of excluding wise men and their wisdom from American grand strategy. 

Macgregor spoke truth to power 

A strong critic of the “forever wars,” it has been said that it was his wise opposition to continuing any of them which finished his career.  

As Responsible Statecraft said of him in 2020, “Senior military officers quietly admit that in terms of sheer intellect, no one quite matches Macgregor.”

This peerless intelligence had no place in the neoconservative grand strategy of forever war. The same article records that Macgregor told U.S. war planners to “[t]urn the governing of Iraq over to the Iraqis, then… get out.”

The report quotes a former West Point colleague of Macgregor who said, “I think it was at that point that Doug’s career ended.”

“Macgregor’s outspoken and often too-public critique of his own service hurt his chances for promotion. Macgregor questioned everything: why are we staying in Afghanistan? Or Iraq? Or Syria? Why are we prosecuting these endless wars?”  

With little chance of Macgregor being present in person to shape policy, it is encouraging to see his vision of an alternative to forever war is shared by Kennedy. 

The price of principle

Set for a significant role in the coming Trump administration, Kennedy echoes a position made so courageously by Macgregor over twenty years ago: that the U.S. has been waging war endlessly for no good reason. At least, no good reason from the point of view of the American people and their national interest. 

A man as wise as Macgregor must have known that speaking truth to power could very well be fatal to any ambition.  

He put country before career, and in trying to stop the needless killing his chances of promotion were buried instead. Macgregor reminds us there is a difference between a job and a vocation. His calling was to the truth, and he told it regardless of the cost to himself. 

With Kennedy and Trump comes the hope of a deal in place of the business of death. The new administration seems to speak here for the cause of life, of the truth, and of a new vision for America.  

Another break with the past?

Kennedy’s consistent position on the war in Ukraine is a direct contradiction of the “boomer neocon” foreign policy of the last four decades. 

Heavily influenced by Zionism, it has resulted in the routine “genocide of Christians,” as JD Vance pointed out last May.   

“Why can’t we stop genociding Christians?” he asked, noting the Iraq war alone resulted in “the slaughter of over a million historic Christians.” 

He said it was “weird” that in a so-called Christian and “conservative” Republican Party that, “No one makes this argument that traditional neoconservative foreign policy keeps on leading to the genocide of Christians. But it does, which is one of many reasons why neoconservative foreign policy is strategically and morally stupid.” 

Vance, soon to be Vice President, said this in a speech, “Towards a Foreign Policy for the American Middle Class”. Like Kennedy, he chose his words to count the cost in human blood and American treasure of  “the last 40 years of American foreign policy.” 

He said the “fruits” of these four decades was disaster. 

“Disaster in Iraq…disaster in Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, it’s on issue after issue after issue.”  

Vance appears to be serious about change, and a break with the broken “slogans” of the past forty years of the “endless wars” which Trump has long vowed to end – a view apparently shared by those he has chosen to staff his new government.  

Yet a troubling precedent was set in the previous Trump administration – in which Macgregor said Trump was trying to break with this awful past. 

To help make this break, the man who was promoted instead of Macgregor to National Security Chief under Trump was General H.R. McMaster.   

McMaster was “ousted” after only one year in post, following a lobbying campaign to remove him by the Zionist Organization of America.  

Though no wars were started under Trump, the struggle for control over U.S. foreign policy appears to have been decided in favor of the Israel lobby if the picks for the incoming admin are any indication. 

This lobby has a powerful partner in keeping neoconservative war policies on track: the mainstream media.  

Kennedy himself is now under attack from the pro-war press. A report from January 7 in The Atlantic compares “populists” like Kennedy and Trump to Rasputin – the mystical priest of the household of the murdered Russian Tsar Nicholas II. Author Anne Applebaum sees in the promise of peace a sort of madness, which she says is a sign of “The End of Enlightenment Rationality.”

In the bizarro world of the permanent war faction celebrated by “defense industry propagandist” Anne Applebaum, people who “promote ‘peace’ – a vague goal” – as she styles it – are crooks and cranks peddling “conspiratorial and sometimes anti-American ideas.”

The enemies of peace  

It was arch neocon and co-founder of the Zionist Project for a New American Century who said people who want the forever wars to stop are unAmerican – and “intolerant.” Writing for Foreign Affairs in 2021, Robert Kagan instructed Americans that it was their duty to support, pay for and even die in the wars he and his wife Victoria Nuland have devoted their careers to starting.  

Nuland herself gave credence to Kennedy’s claim, again made in the video, that the U.S. had compelled Ukraine’s Zelensky to abandon a peace agreement with Putin.  

“Biden sent [UK Prime Minister] Boris Johnson to force Zelensky to tear up that deal,” said Kennedy. 

That deal would have seen the 2022 war come to an end only weeks after the Russian invasion.  Responsible Statecraft said of her comments in September 2024, “Victoria Nuland’s comments lend further credence to the proposition that a settlement between Russia and Ukraine was on the table in Istanbul, that the West played a role in shaping Ukrainian thinking on the desirability of pursuing negotiations, and that Western leaders apparently conveyed the view that it was a bad deal.”  

Nuland masterminded the coup which began the longer war in Ukraine in 2014. Though she is no longer at the U.S. State Department, her husband continues the family business of promoting war to this day. 

Kagan’s latest piece in last week’s Atlantic warns that “Trump is facing a catastrophic defeat in Ukraine” – by seeking to stop the killing.  

In her report Applebaum sneers at the notion that the populist “right” can be serious about peace. She charges that Donald Trump is in league with Viktor Orban, who she frames as a thieving “autocrat.” Her view of Trump is of a criminal who “harasses women.” Of the new administration and its vision for the world, she says: “When conspiracy theories and nonsense cures are widely accepted, the evidence-based concepts of guilt and criminality vanish quickly too.”  

It is breathtaking that a woman who has made a career out of defense industry-funded war propaganda should accuse anyone of what she has done herself.  

The evidence, as Kennedy points out, points to the fact that the U.S. “wanted this war, and now 600,000 kids are dead” – at a cost of 200 billion dollars to Americans. Is that not evidence of a crime? Who is guilty of this crime? Surely people like Applebaum, who has been well paid for years to sell this and other wars to Americans would feature on that charge sheet. 

In a curious twist, she is married to disgraced former foreign minister of Poland, Radoslaw Sikorski. He briefly attained fame at the scene of another crime – the detonation of Germany’s NordStream gas pipeline. Here is an image of his now-deleted tweet thanking the U.S. government for bombing a vital part of Europe’s strategic energy supply. 

Spotlight on Russia war hysteria

As far back as 2017, the Ron Paul Institute warned that “Neocon Anne Applebaum has never seen a bed she did not expect to find an evil Russian lurking beneath.” In it, Daniel McAdams reveals her One Great Trick to keep the money rolling in. 

“Applebaum is, like most neocons, a one trick pony: the U.S. government needs to spend more money to counter the threat of the month. Usually it’s Russia or Putin. But it can also be China, Iran, Assad, Gaddafi, Saddam, etc.”  

This trick relies on countering evidence against the case for permanent war by smearing anyone who presents it – as Applebaum does. McAdam describes her type, common in the mass production of pro-war talking points.  

“She has apparently made a tidy fortune warning us that the Russians are coming, but she wants even more. She is buried in defense industry funded think tanks and she does the bidding of her masters. Every intelligent American reader should ridicule her as the propagandist she is.”  

The GrayZone’s Dan Cohen reported in 2021 how leading “U.S. national security reporters serve at [a] pro-war Pentagon-funded think tank.” Called the Center for a New American Century, it promotes the neoconservative Zionist worldview of the Project for a New American Century – founded by Robert Kagan and William Kristol in 1997. Its members directed the United States to remilitarize after the Cold War – and launch the “war on terror.” What followed were decades of regime change wars which produced, among others, the crisis in Ukraine.   

In addition to selling wars by demonizing alleged enemies and smearing sanity, neocon propagandists like Applebaum frame legitimate concerns as fantasies, and the dangerous dreams of neocons as the only rational point of view. They completely disregard the God-given sacred value of every human life, from innocent babies to the elderly, cruelly destroyed in each of their profitable wars. 

An earlier report by McAdam from 2014 recalled how Applebaum had written of “The Myth of Russian Humiliation” for the Washington Post – in which she describes the expansion of NATO up to Russia’s borders not as a threat to Russian security – but as a “success.”

This of course runs counter to the evidence presented by Kennedy. Following George Kennan, who predicted in 1997 that NATO enlargement would be “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era”, Kennedy pointed out in his video interview with Christian channel Daystar that, “In 1992 when Gorbachev disbanded the Soviet Union” U.S. and U.K. leaders promised “we would not move NATO one inch to the east. Since then we have moved it a thousand miles to the east.”

Kennedy says former U.S. Foreign Secretary James Baker, then-President H.W. Bush and former U.K. Prime Minister John Major “all said we will not move it one inch to the east.”

This promise has been repeatedly framed as a lie, as Russian propaganda, with “fact checkers” calling it “Putin’s Myth.”  

According to the National Security Archives of the U.S. government, however, “Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion [made] to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner.”

Documents from the meetings between President Bush, Gorbachev – and a range of Western leaders, show that these promises were indeed made to the Russians – and broken.  

Nothing gets the fact checkers busier than an outbreak of the truth – of course. 

The “debunkers” escalated their efforts after Putin himself raised this point in his annual news conference of December 2021.  

Replying to a question from the U.K.’s Sky News about Russian negotiations, Putin said the question was about whether Russia could trust any security guarantees given by the U.S.-led West, “We remember, as I have mentioned many times before and as you know very well, how you promised us in the 1990s that [NATO] would not move an inch to the East. You cheated us shamelessly: there have been five waves of NATO expansion, and now the weapons systems I mentioned have been deployed in Romania and deployment has recently begun in Poland. This is what we are talking about, can you not see?”  

Most people in the West cannot see, of course, because the mainstream media never show them. What is there in reality is too controversial to be seen by the public, because it would lead them to realize they have been misled in the march to war with Russia. 

Putin made an additional point – who is threatening whom? 

“We are not threatening anyone. Have we approached U.S. borders? Or the borders of Britain or any other country? It is you who have come to our border, and now you say that Ukraine will become a member of NATO as well. Or, even if it does not join NATO, that military bases and strike systems will be placed on its territory under bilateral agreements. This is the point.” 

This is the point that Kennedy is trying to make to Americans. There are reasons for this war we are not being told by a media whose main function today seems to be to sell them all to us – and silence the voices of sanity. Some of these voices warned us almost thirty years ago against creating the crisis we now inhabit.  

Kennan’s warning of a fatal error 

In his 1997 piece warning of the “fatal error” of NATO expansion, George Kennan asked, “Why, with all the hopeful possibilities engendered by the end of the cold war, should East-West relations become centered on the question of who would be allied with whom and, by implication, against whom in some fanciful, totally unforeseeable and most improbable future military conflict?”  

Kennan was the U.S. national security chief who is credited with decades of steering U.S.-Soviet relations away from the brink of nuclear war.  

His grand strategy of Soviet “containment” saw him mobilize the production of Western culture in tandem with the CIA in what he called “Organized Political Warfare.”   

An architect of Deep State propaganda and a master of diplomacy, his prescient warning of a “fanciful military conflict” was discarded. Why? As with Macgregor, speaking the truth about this new neocon power was simply inconvenient, and so it was dismissed.  

In the video, Kennedy stresses the urgent danger of this reckless strategy of escalation in place of sane diplomacy. 

“We walked away from two strategic missile treaties [with Russia] – which would have prevented us from putting missiles in Ukraine that can [now] hit Moscow.” 

Why else do the Russians have a “legitimate security concern” over Ukraine, as Kennedy claimed? He explained, “The last time the Russians were invaded through Ukraine Hitler killed one in seven Russians” – about 27 million people, a number vastly exceeding the lives lost by any allied nation, including the United States. It was the Soviet Union, above all, that defeated the Nazi regime.  

The simple truth of the war in Ukraine is explained in five minutes by Kennedy. His brief account of the facts of the case opens up a decades-long legacy of disaster by design, directed by a political and media class captive to a lucrative war machine. 

It is to be hoped his presence in the new administration – and his championing of the wisdom discarded by a corrupt political class – will finally see America make a break with the awful past of permanent war and death by design.