It appears that the Russian’s maybe ‘inventing’ a drone strike on a Putin residence to put off any serious cease-fire moves….
I have below part of a extensive NY Times piece that opens up the Trump Admin disjoined dealings with the Ukraine….
I also have below a look at Putin’s Russia, which IS suffering thru the wars economy and disposal of it’s young…
As of HAS been posted here….
Donald Trump & Co. ARE in over their heads…..
Trump 2.0 got rid of those who handled these sort of things in the American Government….
Trump is running a amateur operation that Putin seems to be playing….
It IS my belief that Putin likewise IS stuck….
Remembering the Wagner attempt to depose him?
He simply cannot settleANYTHING with SOMETHING he can CALL a BIG WIN…
It has been said that Vladimir , an EX-KGB Corneal, wants to bring back the old Soviet Union?
THAT is NOT gonna happen….
I still think Putin HAS SOMETHING ON Donald Trump that Trump is afraid of….
Oh, ?
These guys keep punching at each other…..
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who now sits on Russia’s security council, accused the Ukrainian leader of “trying to derail the settlement of the conflict,” in a post Monday on the social platform X, referring to ongoing peace talks aimed at ending the war between Russia and Ukraine.
“He wants war,” Medvedev continued, referring to Zelensky. “Well, now at least he’ll have to stay in hiding for the rest of his worthless life.”
Russia has continued bombarding Kyiv with strikes, as U.S.-brokered negotiations have continued, raising questions about whether Moscow wants to derail peace talks. President Trump has said he believes Putin wants to achieve peace, despite the ongoing strikes…..
The Trump American effort to step back from helping Ukraine…
Driven by an American President that IS in over his head on the World Stage…
Day after day, then, thousands upon thousands of 155s earmarked for Ukraine had lain waiting on pallets at the ammunitions depot. The American commander in Europe, General Christopher G. Cavoli, had fired off email after email, pleading with the Pentagon to free them. The jam had been broken only after intervention from Jack Keane, a retired Army general and Fox News contributor who was friendly with the president.
But on July 2, as the train approached the Ukrainian border, a new order came in to the U.S. military’s European Command: “Divert everything. Immediately.”
Exactly why the liberated shells had been taken captive again was never explained. In the end, they waited for just 10 days, in a rail yard near Krakow. Yet to U.S. military officers who had spent the last three and a half years fighting to shore up the Ukrainian cause, the interrupted journey of the 18,000 shells seemed to encompass the entirety of America’s new, erratic and corrosive role in the war.
“This has happened so many times that I’ve lost count,” a senior U.S. official said. “This is literally killing them. Death by a thousand cuts.”
It was to hold back the Russian tide, perhaps even help win the war, that the Biden administration had provided Ukraine with a vast array of increasingly sophisticated weaponry. The Americans, their European allies and the Ukrainians had also joined in a secret partnership of intelligence, strategy, planning and technology, its workings revealed earlier this year by The New York Times. At stake, the argument went, was not just Ukraine’s sovereignty but the very fate of the post-World War II international order.
Mr. Trump has presided over the partners’ separation.
The headlines are well known: Mr. Trump’s televised Oval Office humiliation of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in February. The August summit with Mr. Putin in Alaska. The furious flurry of diplomacy that led to the Mar-a-Lago meeting on Sunday with Mr. Zelensky, the latest high-stakes but inconclusive negotiation in which the fate of Ukraine has seemed to hang in the balance.
It is still unclear when, and if, a deal will be reached. This is the chaotic and previously untold story behind the past year of head-spinning headlines:
The Ukraine specialists at the Pentagon afraid to utter the word “Ukraine.” Mr. Trump telling his chosen envoy to Russia and Ukraine, “Russia is mine.” The secretary of state quoting from “The Godfather” in negotiations with the Russians. The Ukrainian defence minister pleading with the American defense secretary, “Just be honest with me.” A departing American commander’s “beginning of the end” memo. Mr. Zelensky’s Oval Office phone call, set up by the president, with a former Miss Ukraine.
This account draws on more than 300 interviews with national security officials, military and intelligence officers and diplomats in Washington, Kyiv and across Europe. Virtually all insisted on anonymity, for fear of reprisal from Mr. Trump and his administration.
Mr. Trump had scant ideological commitment. His pronouncements and determinations were often shaped by the last person he spoke to, by how much respect he felt the Ukrainian and Russian leaders had shown him, by what caught his eye on Fox News.
Policy was forged in the clash of bitterly warring camps.
Mr. Biden had left the Ukrainians a financial and weapons nest egg to cushion them for an uncertain future. Mr. Trump’s point man for peace negotiations presented him with a plan to maintain support for Ukraine and squeeze the Russian war machine.
But that strategy ran headlong into a phalanx of Ukraine skeptics led by the vice president, JD Vance, and like-minded officials he seeded at the Pentagon and elsewhere in the administration. In their view, instead of squandering America’s depleted military stocks on a sinking ship, they should be reapportioned to counter the greatest global threat: China.
A cold wind — what one senior military officer called “a de facto anti-Ukraine policy” — swept through the Pentagon. Time and again, Mr. Hegseth and his advisers undermined, sidelined or silenced front-line generals and administration officials sympathetic to Ukraine.
Against that backdrop, Mr. Trump granted Mr. Hegseth and other subordinates wide latitude to make decisions about the flow of aid to Ukraine. On several occasions, when those decisions brought bad press or internal backlash — as with the 18,000 shells — Ukraine-friendly commentators at Fox stepped in and persuaded the president to reverse them.
Even as Mr. Trump bullied Mr. Zelensky, he seemed to coddle Mr. Putin. When the Russian stiff-armed peace proposals and accelerated bombing campaigns on Ukrainian cities, Mr. Trump would lash out on Truth Social and ask his aides, “Do we sanction their banks or do we sanction their energy infrastructure?” For months, he did neither.
But in secret, the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. military, with his blessing, supercharged a Ukrainian campaign of drone strikes on Russian oil facilities and tankers to hobble Mr. Putin’s war machine.
Day to day, Mr. Trump was inconsistent. But he was still a deal maker determined to broker a deal — and convinced that, in the calculus of leverage, the advantage lay with the stronger. Both sides fought a war within the war, to shape the president’s perceptions. “They look invincible,” he told aides in May after seeing footage of a military parade in Moscow. Three weeks later, after Ukraine mounted an audacious covert drone operation inside Russia, Mr. Zelensky sent a parade of aides to the White House with his own victory message: “We are not losing. We are winning.”….
“I would never have signed a contract if I’d known what it’s like out there. Our television is lying to us,” said Fyodor, a young soldier from Siberia. Like others in this article, The Washington Post is not identifying him by his full name to protect him from any repercussions for criticizing the war.
Fyodor had his lower leg blown off by a mine two days previously during an advance on Lyman in Ukraine with what remained of his unit. He said he was one of just 10 people left of the 110-strong unit he joined two years ago.
He had no regrets over the loss of his leg. “It means that I can finally go home — alive.”
“We’re fighting for fields that we cannot even take,” interjected a fellow soldier, Kirill, also in his 20s, laughing wryly. “This war will never end. … It feels like it’s only just begun.”
Scenes like this one remain invisible to most Russians, erased by state propaganda and glossy government projects supporting returning veterans. But inside the country, fatigue and resentment are festering beneath the suppression of dissent.
There is no outlet for public frustration and no relief from the mounting national exhaustion with a nearly four-year-long war that is corroding the country from within and making society more dysfunctional, broken and paranoid, according to observers and those interviewed for this article.
Over the past year, the Russian economy has lurched from spectacular growth to near stagnation. Russia’s digital repression and isolation are deepening as more apps and platforms are banned. According to Western intelligence, more than a million Russian fighters have been killed or wounded — many in battles for marginal gains. And as Moscow’s search for internal enemies intensifies, its machine of repression is turning on its own children and patriots.
During Russian President Vladimir Putin’s meeting with his Human Rights Council this month, film director Alexander Sokurov spoke out against censorship, the country’s suffocating foreign agent laws, the rising cost of living and the lack of opportunities for young people. “If Russia doesn’t change how it works with young people, it faces a dead end,” he said. Putin said he would respond later to his grievances.
A former senior Kremlin official told The Post that he was “very worried” about the “dark picture inside Russia.”
“We can’t turn the clock back easily; political will is needed to reverse this, and it simply does not exist,” the former official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to freely discuss sensitive matters….
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He said in Russia right now the state is trying to build a strict loyalty based on behaving a certain way “in order to simply exist.” Around him he’s watched people accept a situation they were once horrified by and shift into a survival mode….
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Russia launched waves of drones to attack the Black Sea ports of Pivdennyi and Chornomorsk with two civilian ships hit as they arrived to load wheat, the Ukrainian navy and government officials said. The Panama-flagged civilian vessels Emmakris III and Captain Karam were struck, said the navy, adding that the attacks on Tuesday “threaten the lives of civilians and undermine global food security. Targeted strikes on civilian objects are a deliberate war crime”. Ukraine is a major agricultural producer and exporter. Oil storage tanks were also hit, said Oleksiy Kuleba, the Ukrainian deputy prime minister, who added that both ports continued to operate.
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Russia’s continued and intensifying strikes on Ukraine are “an act of defiance” against the US plan to end the Ukraine war, a French presidential source said on Tuesday. Additionally, Moscow’s allegations of a Ukrainian drone attack against a residence of Vladimir Putin are not backed “by any solid proof, including after cross-checking information with our partners”, the source said.
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The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said: “Regarding the attack on [Putin’s residence at] Valdai, our negotiating team connected with the American team, they went through the details, and we understand that it’s fake. And, of course, our partners can always verify thanks to their technical capabilities that it was fake.”
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A Ukrainian drone attack damaged port infrastructure and a gas pipeline in Russia’s Black Sea port of Tuapse, the regional administration said on Wednesday, adding no injuries were reported. Tuapse and its refinery comprise one of Russia’s key Black Sea outlets for oil products that Ukraine targets because they are exported to finance the war or used directly to power the Russian military. The port and refinery have been hit repeatedly by Ukrainian drone attacks.
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Ukraine also launched drone attacks on Tuesday targeting Moscow, parts of western Russia and annexed Crimea, injuring one person near the capital, Russian authorities said.
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Zelenskyy said Ukraine would convene a meeting with leaders of Kyiv’s allies next Tuesday, 6 January, in France, as diplomatic efforts to end the conflict intensified. The summit would be preceded by a meeting of their security advisers, planned for this Saturday, 3 January, in Ukraine.
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Germany accepted €10m to drop its investigation of the Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov for alleged EU sanctions violations, prosecutors said on Tuesday. The agreement was made on the basis of the “presumption of innocence”, the prosecutors said. Usmanov is a close ally of Putin and head of the International Fencing Federation. He had been accused of using funds frozen under EU sanctions to pay for two properties in Germany to be monitored by a security company. In a separate investigation, prosecutors in Frankfurt had accused Usmanov of money laundering. That case was settled in November after Usmanov paid €4m.
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The US meanwhile removed sanctions from Alexandra Buriko, the former chief financial officer of Russia’s state-owned Sberbank, according to a post on the US treasury department website. Buriko was among senior executives and directors who resigned from western-sanctioned Sberbank shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Buriko went to court in December 2024 seeking the sanctions’ removal, arguing she had severed ties with Sberbank. She and the US government were known to have been in negotiations to resolve the case……
ISW….Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, December 30, 2025
- The Kremlin continues to offer no evidence to support its claims that Ukrainian drones targeted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s residence on the night of December 28 to 29 and even rejected the notion that it should provide evidence.
- Kremlin officials are using the alleged Ukrainian strike against Novgorod Oblast to justify Russia’s continued insistence that both Ukraine and the West capitulate to Russia’s original demands from 2021 and 2022.
- Russian forces continue to increase the range of their drones to strike deeper into Ukraine, underscoring Ukraine’s urgent requirements for traditional air defense systems.
- The Kremlin is moving forward with efforts to mobilize active reservists compulsorily, likely to eventually deploy reservists to combat in Ukraine as Russia continues to suffer a disproportionately high casualty rate compared to its territorial gains.
- Russian President Vladimir Putin officially enacted into law on December 29 the 2026 conscription decree which will transition Russia’s conscription cycle away from biannual spring and fall conscription cycles to a single year-round conscription cycle.
- Ukrainian forces recently advanced near Pokrovsk and Kupyansk.
Daily Kos grunt report for Today….
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