Tag Archives: Russia

Kyiv Independent: Trump officials ‘fed up’ with Europe’s efforts to strengthen Ukraine, Economist reports

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Some Trump administration officials are dissatisfied with European countries’ ongoing support for Ukraine, underscoring the growing rift between Washington and Europe, the Economist reported on April 15, citing undisclosed diplomatic sources.

Kyiv’s European partners have sought to present a united front on Ukraine, pledging additional assistance and preparing a “reassurance force” of troops to monitor a potential ceasefire.

As Trump’s Amerika slides into international irrelevance …

Trump officials ‘fed up’ with Europe’s efforts to strengthen Ukraine, Economist reports

Some Trump administration officials are dissatisfied with European countries’ ongoing support for Ukraine, underscoring the growing rift between Washington and Europe, the Economist reported on April 15, citing undisclosed diplomatic sources. Kyiv’s European partners have sought to present a united front on Ukraine, pledging additional assistance a…

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/trump-officials-fed-up-with-europe-s-efforts-to-strengthen-ukraine-economist-reports/ar-AA1D2afd

Financial Times: EU issues US-bound staff with burner phones over spying fears

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European Commission officials heading to IMF and World Bank spring meetings advised to travel with basic devices

The European Commission is issuing burner phones and basic laptops to some US-bound staff to avoid the risk of espionage, a measure traditionally reserved for trips to China.

Commissioners and senior officials travelling to the IMF and World Bank spring meetings next week have been given the new guidance, according to four people familiar with the situation.

They said the measures replicate those used on trips to Ukraine and China, where standard IT kit cannot be brought into the countries for fear of Russian or Chinese surveillance.

“They are worried about the US getting into the commission systems,” said one official.

The treatment of the US as a potential security risk highlights how relations have deteriorated since the return of Donald Trump as US president in January. 

…

Officials said the guidance for all staff travelling to the US included a recommendation that they should turn off phones at the border and place them in special sleeves to protect them from spying if left unattended.

The advice was unsurprising, according to Luuk van Middelaar, director of the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics, a think-tank.

“Washington is not Beijing or Moscow, but it is an adversary that is prone to use extra-legal methods to further its interests and power.”

https://archive.is/8HLcg#selection-2229.0-2240.0

USA Today: Tourists detained by ICE say they were treated like ‘the worst criminal’

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Uncommon detainees are bringing new attention to the U.S. immigration detention system

A British backpacker. A Harvard researcher. A Canadian actress. An Australian mixed martial arts coach. Dozens of international college students.

The Trump administration’s sweeping immigration-and-visa crackdown has begun ensnaring a class of people long-accustomed to being welcomed with open arms into the United States.

And those uncommon detainees are bringing new attention to the often-harsh U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention system, where people can be held without charge indefinitely, sometimes in shocking conditions, or abruptly removed from the country.

This type of treatment has long been the case in ICE detention, but the people held by the government often didn’t have the resources ‒ the access, language or middle-class expectations ‒ to denounce the conditions.

Now, with President Donald Trump’s crackdown, native English speakers, people with PhDs, and others are getting the word out to a broader public about a system they describe as arbitrary and punishing ‒ although ICE detention is not supposed to resemble prison.

“It’s insane how easily someone can take away your freedom, lock you in a federal prison, without a clear reason. No explanation. No warning,” ….

Tourists detained by ICE say they were treated like ‘the worst criminal’

Uncommon detainees are bringing new attention to the U.S. immigration detention system

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/04/12/ice-tourist-detention-border-trump-immigration/82740260007

New York Times: Inside Trump’s Plan to ‘Get’ Greenland: Persuasion, Not Invasion

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The island’s population might not be easily convinced as the president tries to clinch one of history’s greatest real estate deals.

Mr. Trump’s advisers have already begun making their public case, arguing that Denmark has been a poor custodian of the island, that only the United States can protect it from encroachment by Russia and China, and that America will help Greenlanders “get rich,” as Mr. Trump has put it.

Given how King Donald has trashed our own economy the past 2.5 months, Greenlanders would be nuts to wish the same upon themselves.

The Trump administration is also studying financial incentives for Greenlanders, including the possibility of replacing the $600 million in subsidies that Denmark gives the island with an annual payment of about $10,000 per Greenlander.

Denmark provides them with a comprehensive health care system. Why would they trust the bozo who plans to destroy Medicaid?

Some Trump officials believe those costs could be offset by new revenue from the extraction of Greenland’s natural resources, which include rare earth minerals, copper, gold, uranium and oil.

Trump officials argue that American capital and industrial might can gain access to the island’s largely untapped mineral wealth in a way that Denmark cannot. “This is about critical minerals,” Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, told Fox News in January. “This is about natural resources.”

Those natural resource belong to the people of Greenland, not to Trump and his billionaire cronies. Only the people of Greenland can decide their future and how to share the wealth, if they even choose to share it.

Trump is drooling over a land that isn’t his and never will be.

http://archive.is/gc3A7#selection-951.0-1026.0

2paragraphs: Kristi Noem [Bimbo #2] “Mistakenly Sent Email” to Ukrainians Terminating Parole in U.S., Say Two U.S. Senators

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U.S. Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire), who is also Ranking Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem calling on Noem “to immediately explain how the Department of Homeland Security mistakenly sent an email to Ukrainians on humanitarian parole in the U.S. that they had seven days to leave the country.”

As seen in the letter below, Murkowski and Shaheen explain that “Ukrainians who have participated in the Uniting for Ukraine program have entered the U.S. lawfully, passed rigorous screening and vetting requirements and have been required to find financial support from private U.S. sponsors.”

The Senators added, “Abruptly and cruelly telling victims of Russia’s war to leave the country would not reflect American values — and it risks emboldening Putin to continue the war, despite President Trump’s stated objectives to establish peace.”

Murkowski and Shaheen wrote that “The fact that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) drafted such a notification is alarming,” noting that Congress has not been notified regarding any proposed changes to the program. The lawmakers said their congressional staff inquiries to DHS “resulted in conflicting responses that demonstrated a disturbing lack of interagency coordination or strategy on the status of humanitarian parole for Ukrainians.”

Why would you expect anything better from a bimbo?

Kristi Noem “Mistakenly Sent Email” to Ukrainians Terminating Parole in U.S., Say Two U.S. Senators

U.S. Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire), who is also Ranking Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem calling on Noem “to immediately explain how the Department of Homeland Security mistakenly sent an email to Ukrainians on humanitarian parole in the […]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/kristi-noem-mistakenly-sent-email-to-ukrainians-terminating-parole-in-u-s-say-two-u-s-senators/ar-AA1CyjzQ

Guardian: Vance’s posturing in Greenland was not just morally wrong. It was strategically disastrous

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Thanks to Trump’s administration, the US could soon have to fight wars to get things that, just a few weeks ago, were there for the asking

The American vice-president, JD Vance, visited a US base in Greenland for three hours on Friday, along with his wife. National security adviser Mike Waltz and his wife also went along. Fresh from using an unsafe social media platform to carry out an entirely unnecessary group chat in which they leaked sensitive data about an ongoing military attack to a reporter, and thereby allegedly breaking the law, Waltz and Vance perhaps hoped to change the subject by tagging along on a trip that was initially billed as Vance’s wife watching a dogsled race.

The overall context was Trump’s persistent claim that America must take Greenland, which is an autonomous region of Denmark. The original plan had been that Usha Vance would visit Greenlanders, apparently on the logic that the second lady would be an effective animatrice of colonial subjection; but none of them wanted to see her, and Greenland’s businesses refused to serve as a backdrop to photo ops or even to serve the uninvited Americans. So, instead, the US couples made a very quick visit to Pituffik space base.

At the base, in the far north of the island, the US visitors had pictures taken of themselves and ate lunch with servicemen and women. They treated the base as the backdrop to a press conference where they could say things they already thought; nothing was experienced, nothing was learned, nothing sensible was said. Vance, who never left the base, and has never before visited Greenland, was quite sure how Greenlanders should live. He made a political appeal to Greenlanders, none of whom was present, or anywhere near him. He claimed that Denmark was not protecting the security of Greenlanders in the Arctic, and that the US would. Greenland should therefore join the US.

It takes some patience to unwind all of the nonsense here.

Vance’s posturing in Greenland was not just morally wrong. It was strategically disastrous | Timothy Snyder

Thanks to Trump’s administration, the US could soon have to fight wars to get things that, just a few weeks ago, were there for the asking, says professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University

Vance’s posturing in Greenland was not just morally wrong. It was strategically disastrous | Timothy Snyder | The Guardian

The Atlantic: The Hungarian Model

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MAGA conservatives love Viktor Orbán. But he’s left his country corrupt, stagnant, and impoverished.

But the nationalist kitsch and tourist traps hide a different reality. Once widely perceived to be the wealthiest country in Central Europe (“the happiest barrack in the socialist camp,” as it was known during the Cold War), and later the Central European country that foreign investors liked most, Hungary is now one of the poorest countries, and possibly the poorest, in the European Union. Industrial production is falling year-over-year. Productivity is close to the lowest in the region. Unemployment is creeping upward. Despite the ruling party’s loud talk about traditional values, the population is shrinking. Perhaps that’s because young people don’t want to have children in a place where two-thirds of the citizens describe the national education system as “bad,” and where hospital departments are closing because so many doctors have moved abroad. Maybe talented people don’t want to stay in a country perceived as the most corrupt in the EU for three years in a row. Even the Index of Economic Freedom—which is published by the Heritage Foundation, the MAGA-affiliated think tank that produced Project 2025—puts Hungary at the bottom of the EU in its rankings of government integrity.

Tourists in central Budapest don’t see this decline. But neither, apparently, does the American right. 

…

What is this Hungarian model they so admire? Mostly, it has nothing to do with modern statecraft. Instead it’s a very old, very familiar blueprint for autocratic takeover, one that has been deployed by right-wing and left-wing leaders alike, from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to Hugo Chávez. After being elected to a second term in 2010, Orbán slowly replaced civil servants with loyalists; used economic pressure and regulation to destroy the free press; robbed universities of their independence, and shut one of them down; politicized the court system; and repeatedly changed the constitution to give himself electoral advantages. During the coronavirus pandemic he gave himself emergency powers, which he has kept ever since. He has aligned himself openly with Russia and China, serving as a mouthpiece for Russian foreign policy at EU meetings and allowing opaque Chinese investments in his country.

Orbán’s Hungary Could Be America’s Future – The Atlantic

The Independent: Under Trump, 80 years of collective security have been dismantled in as many days

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The Atlantic Alliance used to believe it had liberal democratic values in common and a shared interest in collective security and free trade. That, thanks to the US president, is no longer true. Europe must adjust to this altered reality, or die.

It may be that the US’s tilt to the Kremlin, accompanied by the twin-track diplomatic and trade wars now being waged on friends and allies, will before long drive Europe to stand on its own two feet and be the independent force in world affairs that the founding fathers of the project of European unity dreamed about. At long last, Europe begins to assert itself. To borrow a famous phrase from a happier era of US-European relations, Europe, like president Barack Obama, is saying: “Yes we can.”

The “coalition of the willing” (or “coalition of action”, as French president Emmanuel Macron prefers to call it) is a concrete example of this emerging European consciousness. The project is to provide a safe and secure future for Ukraine, irrespective of what Russia or the US might desire. Russia is rightly distrusted, while there is still hope that the Americans can contribute in some way to keeping the peace in Ukraine – and in Europe more widely.

Under Trump, 80 years of collective security have been dismantled in as many days

Editorial: The Atlantic Alliance used to believe it had liberal democratic values in common and a shared interest in collective security and free trade. That, thanks to the US president, is no longer true. Europe must adjust to this altered reality, or die

Under Trump, 80 years of collective security have been dismantled in as many days | The Independent

NBC News: Trump quickly works to concentrate power and muzzle critical voices

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From law firms and universities to the arts and the press, Trump has targeted these independent actors and tried to bend them to his worldview — willingly or not.

One by one, he is bending ostensibly independent actors under the weight of his power. So far, Trump has targeted the legal community, universities, the arts, career government employees and the press and brought them to heel in some measure, willingly or not. Law firms with even indirect ties to past investigations of Trump now face punitive measures that could put them out of business.

If Trump prevails by the end of his term, he’ll have influenced who votes in American elections and who does not, who gets to stay in America and who must leave, who pays off their student loans and who gets relief, who gets to question the president and who doesn’t.

He’s facing pushback, but working to sweep it away. A pliant Congress has largely forsaken its oversight role since Trump thundered back into office, leaving the courts as the main impediment to his ambitions. And Trump is challenging their authority with a resolve that has nudged the nation closer to a constitutional crisis than at any point in the last half century.

Pessimistic about government’s ability to hold Trump to account, one U.S. senator said a mass uprising may be the only means of derailing his plans.

“Ultimately, popular mobilization” is the only way to tame Trump, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said in an interview. The nation’s fate may come down to “the people on both the right and the left rising up in protest and demanding reform.”

Trump quickly works to concentrate power and muzzle critical voices

From law firms and universities to the arts and the press, Trump has targeted these independent actors and tried to bend them to his worldview — willingly or not.

Trump quickly works to concentrate power and muzzle critical voices

Rolling Stone: ‘Lives Are In Danger’ After a Trump Admin Spreadsheet Leak, Sources Say

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Two Trump administration spreadsheets – which each include what numerous advocates and government officials say is highly sensitive information on programs funded by the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) – were sent to Congress and also leaked online. 

The leak, which sent a variety of international groups and nonprofits scrambling to assess the damage and protect workers operating under repressive regimes, came after the organizations had pressed the Trump administration to keep the sensitive information private and received some assurances it would remain secret.

Reached for comment, White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly says: “These documents were transmitted to Congress and not publicly released by the State Department.” She urged Rolling Stone to contact “whoever leaked it and in turn, made it public.”

…

“Please do not share the spreadsheet that was circulating yesterday with terminated awards listed and if possible remove it or ask it to be removed from anywhere you’ve seen it,” reads one message shared in a private USAID chat late this week. “It contains information about partners who are working in unsafe environments with restricted civil society space or terrible LGBTQ laws etc. A few of our friends already had to pull staff on an emergency basis yesterday due to threats and unwanted attention from their governments. Please pass along to anyone you think needs to see this.”

One top executive at an international nonprofit and U.S. government implementing partner that’s been grappling with the fallout bluntly tells Rolling Stone: “In all our years of receiving grants from a range of governments, we have never seen the safety of government partners treated with such reckless abandon. People will lose their liberty, and possibly even more, because of this.”

Another source with knowledge of the situation – a State Department career official – says: “Lives are in danger that did not have to be.” 

What do you expect when your government is run by a bunch of wannabes from Fox News?

‘Lives Are In Danger’ After a Trump Admin Spreadsheet Leak, Sources Say

‘Lives Are In Danger’ After a Trump Admin Spreadsheet Leak, Sources Say