Peace on Earth, Peace in Ukraine...?

Maybe not. Russia has declared war on Santa Claus.

Ukrainians Want Peace… Putin, Maybe Not
Ukrainians are optimistic about a Trump presidency, but they are not as confident as Trump’s team about Russia’s interest in peace. They see Putin becoming more aggressive.

Let’s start with arguably the most weird. Arguably because it is a coin flip between Russian forces shooting Santa out of the sky and Putin airing nude photos of Melania on Russian national TV on election night to congratulate Trump on his victory.

Click on the photo below to watch the demise of Santa Claus over Moscow. Worth one minute of your time.

Santa shows up in Russian airspace shouting Christmas greetings to the Russians while carrying NATO weapons, for some reason. After a jolly “Ho Ho Ho” he is shot down by a Russian anti-aircraft missile. The next scene shows Grandfather Frost, the Soviet version of Santa, congratulating a missile technician on the kill. “We do not need anything foreign in our skies,” Frost says.

This commercial aired on Christmas day, the same day a Russian anti-aircraft missile hit an Azerbaijani airliner, forcing a crash landing in neighboring Kazakhstan, killing 38 people. European news sources are reporting that Russia denied the crippled plane an emergency landing at Russian airports, forcing the pilots to fly some 60 minutes to Kazakhstan.

Does Putin respect Trump?
If he does, he is not making that clear. He has almost doubled his drone and missile attacks on Ukrainian civilians since election day.

Perhaps more telling, the leading Russian propaganda show for domestic audiences, Sixty Minutes, aired nude photos of Melania Trump on election night as congratulations to Trump for his win.

Will Russia Honor a Trump-Brokered Treaty?
Russia has either violated or pulled out of hundreds of peace treaties, ceasefires and international agreements of all sorts with dozens of countries including the United States of America.

The Trump Administration needs to take this into consideration when engaging in peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. Nobody has given me a good reason why Putin will honor this particular agreement when he has ignored so many others.

Without iron clad security mechanisms, we are likely to see Russia attack Ukraine or another neighbor a few years down the road.

What Will Russia Do After a Peace Agreement with Ukraine?
Open source research indicates that Russia is spending in excess of 10% of its economic output on the war. For perspective, this is more (by a lot) than any country in the world except Ukraine. Remember, when Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Putin called it a three day special military operation. That was almost three years and some 750,000 Russian casualties ago. Russia has lost about 9,600 of the tanks that crossed the Ukrainian border in 2022.

Look around your house. Do you have anything with this stamp in your home?

Russia doesn’t make anything. They dig things out of the ground - oil, gas, gold, diamonds - and make weapons of war. The Russian made AK-47 has killed more people than any other weapon ever made.

The Lada is the classic Russian car. On the left is a Finnish advertisement for the Lada 2107 the first year it was made. On the right is the Lada 2107 the last year it rolled off the assembly line. Do you see the innovations over thirty years? They changed the bumper from silver to black.

Do you want a Lada in your driveway?

Russia’s economy is geared up for war. What will Russia do if there is peace with Ukraine? Go back to making TVs? Russia doesn’t make TVs. Or computers. Or much of anything else. Russia will continue to manufacture tanks and missiles in anticipation of the next opportunity to invade a neighbor.

Estonia, a country that borders Russia and has been occupied by Russia, is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on border defenses. Estonia devotes more of its economic output to defense than any other NATO country but one, and it is not the USA. Poland, another NATO country that borders Russia and has been occupied, spends the most. Five of the top six highest spending European NATO members border Russia.

The people that have the most information about Russia and the most to lose don’t have a lot of confidence in seeing a peaceful Russia.

What will Trump do?
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is now Trump’s problem. We have been to Capitol Hill twice since the election and have found that opposition to Ukraine has softened a bit. There was a part of the GOP who felt that if Biden is for it, we must be against it. Biden is gone. It is easy to (figuratively) throw bombs at the party in the White House, but if it is your party, that option is taken away.

The Russians have already unkindly dismissed Trump’s first proposal for a peace plan. Fox News says “Russian foreign minister blasts Ukraine peace deal reportedly floated by Trump's team: 'Not happy'" Trump views himself as a master dealmaker, so this is probably not the headline Trump was looking for. There is a good chance Trump is not happy either.

Trump tends to make hyperbolic announcements on the campaign trail then do something different when he is in office. He famously said during his first term “Nobody knew healthcare could be so complicated.”

He may be learning that the Russians are pretty complicated as well.

Anya and I are listening to Bob Woodward’s book “War” while on a cross country Christmas road trip visiting family in California. Woodward and Bernstein interviewed Trump in 1989, and Woodward relays excerpts of it in his book.

One relevant quote from Trump: “You’ve got to know your audience, and by the way, for some people, be a killer, for some people, be all candy. For some people, different. For some people, both.”

Seems like candy is not working with Putin.