Note: Trump Administration Resumes Weapons Shipments to Ukraine

Yesterday (March 11, 2025), the Trump administration announced 1) that it would resume the delivery of weapons and intelligence to Ukraine 2) based on Ukraine agreeing to a thirty-day ceasefire with Russia. While this move is apparently intended to assuage Americans, thirty-four years of deception by the US toward the Russians is but a fraction of the baggage currently poisoning the relationship.

The problem with ceasefires, if I may presume the Russian position from past history, is that the West has used them to rearm and resupply for more war. According to former European leaders Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande (as well as Israel’s Naftali Bennett), the ‘Minsk Agreement(s)’ I and II were cynical diversions put forward by the EU, Brits and the Americans to build out the CIA’s army in Ukraine to launch further attacks against Russia.

While (Marco) Rubio’s statement has plausibility as ‘art of the deal’ strategy from the Trump administration, three decades of deception from the Americans places it on a continuum of imperial predation against Russia by the US. As strategy, the American problem is that the Russians have won the war on the battlefield in Ukraine. With the only ‘card being held’ by the US being more war, the Russians know 1) that the US is out of weapons and 2) Mr. Trump is committed to resuming the US genocide in Gaza.

The apparent domestic political setup of Trump / Rubio is to build on Biden administration propaganda by claiming that the war is as the Biden administration claimed it was, ‘unprovoked.’ Impressively, in terms of convincing the educated, if psychologically vulnerable, American bourgeois that the war is just, the same wildly misleading talking points used by the Biden administration accompanied the Trump administration’s announcement.

For those with sincere interest, the three main points of contention regarding the genesis of the war are 1) NATO expansion, 2) the American coup in Ukraine of 2013 – 2014, and 3) the ethnic cleansing of Russian-speaking Ukrainians that was underway when Russia responded in February, 2022. In plain language, after decades of the Americans expanding NATO to Russia’s border in contravention of multiple guarantees not to do so (link above), the Americans overthrew the elected government of Ukraine in a US – led coup and assumed effective political control of it.

Then, according to a lengthy, if late, selective, and premised in fake history, account in the New York Times, the CIA built and trained a Ukrainian army to attack Russia with. In February, 2022 this CIA - Ukrainian army was committing ethnic cleansing against Ukrainians in Ukraine (OSCE maps in link above). That is, the Biden administration, the CIA, and the Ukrainian army were slaughtering Ukrainian civilians when the Russians entered Ukraine in February 2022. The CIA’s army had slaughtered 14,000 Ukrainian civilians in the lead-up to this date.

Regular readers will recall that I have been less sanguine than the Judge Nap(olitano) crowd (who I have the highest regard for) over the ultimate resolution of the American war against Russia in Ukraine. I am hoping quite fervently to be wrong about this. What is disheartening in Rubio’s statement is that it channels the very same uninformed, cynical, arrogance of the Biden administration. And doubling down on the fake history put forward by Biden makes selling a likely peace deal that much harder. If Mr. Trump imagines that this is clever, this is America 2025.

FWIW, I’ve been writing about oil geopolitics between the US, Russia and Ukraine since the US coup in Ukraine (2014). Anyone who is interested can find my pre-2022 essays in the Counterpunch archive under my name. Since late 2021, new essays on this topic can be found at my Substack.