The Guardian:

Kyiv has proposed to Moscow a new round of peace talks next week, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Saturday, after negotiations stalled in early June.

Two rounds of talks in Istanbul between Moscow and Kyiv failed to result in any progress towards a ceasefire, instead yielding large-scale prisoner exchanges and deals to return the bodies of killed soldiers.

“Security council secretary [Rustem] Umerov also reported that he had proposed the next meeting with the Russian side for next week,” Zelenskyy said in his evening address to the country.

“The momentum of the negotiations must be stepped up,” he added.

Zelenskyy reiterated his readiness to have a face-to-face meeting with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. “A meeting at the leadership level is needed to truly ensure peace – lasting peace,” he said.

A “meeting at the leadership level” would be a meeting between Presidents Putin and Trump–because Zelensky is just a sock puppet. But it does not seem like Trump really has a handle on anything happening in the world, anyway.

What is the angle that Zelensky is trying to work here? Is this merely a reflection of the fact that we understand our proxy army is collapsing while Russian momentum is increasing?

Condoleeza Rice says that Trump’s total betrayal of MAGA is the turning point. She also thought the Iraq war was a great idea, so take that with a grain of salt.

See also: Russia Makes Gains In Ukraine In Summer Offensive

Al Jazeera:

On July 14, United States President Donald Trump teased a sea change in his approach to Russia’s war against Ukraine. Trump declared he would send significant additional air defence units to Ukraine, whose cities are now subject to an average onslaught of more than 100 Russian drones and missiles daily. Leaks from the White House even claimed Trump had inquired with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a preceding phone call about what offensive weaponry Kyiv needed to hit Moscow directly.

Trump also made his most explicit sanction threat to date, proposing a 100 percent “secondary tariff” on countries that buy Russian oil, if the Kremlin does not agree to a ceasefire in 50 days, by September 3. But Trump’s tough talk has fallen far short of moving the dial. Russian officials have laughed off his claims about hitting Moscow. Air defence deliveries may lower the damage from Putin’s aerial onslaught, but delivering them in anything like the numbers Trump floated will take many months.

When President Trump incredibly-stupidly issued his dumb 50-day ultimatum earlier this week for Russia to voluntarily lose our war in Ukraine, he effectively gave himself fifty days to back down. Russia will not be intimidated, our sanctions are never going to collapse their economy, we do not have the defense industrial capacity to match their firepower, and they can shoot down everything we shoot at them.

All President Trump has done is pointlessly escalate himself into an embarrassing corner. He is letting the worst ideologues coax him into all of these idiotic moves. Or he is totally compromised, or he was always full of shit about MAGA, or whatever.

Any way you look at it, President Trump has taken complete ownership of the US/EU/NATO strategic defeat in Ukraine and thus he continues his losing streak.

See also:
–Russia Says Trump’s New Weapons Pledge A Signal For Ukraine To Abandon Peace Efforts
–Russia Says NATO Threatens WWIII In Latest Deterrence Plan That Could Take Down Kaliningrad ‘Faster Than Ever’
–EU Targets Russia With Toughest Sanctions Package In Years

USA Today:

President Donald Trump said he plans to make a “major statement” early next week on Russia as he escalates his criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin amid Russia’s recent wave of attacks on Ukraine.

The only “major statement” he needs to make is that all support and assets have been pulled from Ukraine. That is the only way he can end the war. But something happened, the Deep State got him, so we can count on him to only do the stupidest, most wrong, dumb, bad thing ever by escalating.

Agence France-Presse:

US President Donald Trump said Russia just wanted to “keep killing people” and hinted at sanctions  after Moscow launched its largest ever drone and missile attack on Ukraine in the three-year-old war.

Trump said Friday he was “very unhappy” about his telephone call with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, saying: “He wants to go all the way, just keep killing people, it’s no good”.

The US president said he and Putin talked about sanctions “a lot”, adding: “He understands that it may be coming”.

In yet another example of how President Trump has very stupidly taken full possession of our very stupid war in Ukraine, he is now threatening to hit Russia with even more stupid sanctions which absolutely will not do anything to change the fact that we have lost the war.

This is not “4D chess.” He is not accidentally getting everything wrong, foreign policy-wise. There are currently no active Deep State coup plots being overtly carried out against him, and he is giving them everything they ever wanted. MAGA is dead.

See also: Russia Launches Largest Missile And Drone Barrage On Kyiv Since War In Ukraine Began

CBS News:

The Netherlands’ military intelligence and the security service, together with the German intelligence service, found that the use of prohibited chemical weapons by the Russian military had become “standardized and commonplace” in Ukraine.

I doubt many people are stupid enough to believe any of this. Russia won the war that we started in Ukraine as soon as we started it, and they did so with conventional weapons. But, we better play it safe: the Netherlands better start an Iraq-style war of regime change against Russia.