Kremlin officials cheer as they sense a blossoming Putin-Trump alliance; is that what Americans want? They had better think about it as Nov. 3 draws near

Better together? Russians think so (Reuters)

If you live in the United States and ever have voted for Donald Trump, did you do so with the expectation that he would bring cheer to . . . Russia? That is what appears to be happening right now in the wake of Trump's most recent pro-Putin steps, according to a report at The Washington Post. In fact, folks at the Kremlin seem positively giddy about the notion that Trump's actions suggest Western support for Ukraine is tumbling. When is the last time Americans -- perhaps aside from a few MAGA cultists -- were giddy about anything Trump has done? Under the headline "Russia, sensing victory, cheers Trump's latest shift against Ukraine; Kremlin officials are crowing that Western support of Ukraine is about to collapse, and Trump's recent moves are steps to closer alignment between Russia and the United States," Catherine Belton writes:

The Kremlin is counting the Trump administration’s latest turn against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a major triumph and, coupled with political upheaval in Europe, a sign that Western support for Ukraine is finally crumbling.

In the 10 days since Vladimir Putin last spoke by telephone with the American president, Donald Trump has announced a sanctions waiver for Russian diesel supplies to the global market, throttled Ukraine’s access to vital battlefield satellite systems, put sweeping new sanctions against Russia on hold, as well as moved even more firmly to Russia’s side by calling for Zelensky’s ouster and holding up supplies of critical interceptor missiles.

On Monday, Trump blasted the Ukrainian president again, saying it was “time for somebody else to negotiate on behalf of Ukraine.” 

Looking back to the subhead above on The Post's story, it raises this question: Has any American ever voted for Trump with the hope that it would help bring closer relations between Russia and the United States? If so, those voters should be happy because Kremlin officials appear to be delighted about the possibility. Belton writes: 

The stakes seem higher than ever. Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff traveled to Oslo on Tuesday to meet Zelensky, Finnish President Alexander Stubb and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, joined via video link. 

“The aim is to put diplomatic efforts on a more constructive path,” Store said.

Zelensky said on Sunday that if Washington aligned with Russia, Ukraine would not survive. 

“If the United States will support Putin — it’s unbelievable, it’s a tragedy,” he told NBC News’ Meet the Press on Sunday. “If these two countries will be together, of course we will not prevail. And we will not be able to stand.” 

While the European leaders and Zelensky might hope to use the Oslo meeting to steer the Trump administration to a tougher stance against Moscow, Kremlin officials have been crowing that victory over Ukraine is on the horizon, and that Trump’s recent moves are steps toward an ever-closer alignment between Washington and Moscow. 

Trump’s recent ratcheting-up of pressure on Zelensky could mean the U.S. president is again seeking to strong-arm the Ukrainian leader into a deal on terms favorable to Moscow. 

Even Russian elites, which inlude a number of pro-Putin oligarchs, seem to sense that things are turning in their direction, Belton reports. A Kremlin spokesman suggests an inevitable and unfavorable outcome looms in Ukraine's future. What is all this Moscow-based positivity about? It seems to be a gift from Donald Trump -- perhaps in his role as what Hillary Clinton once called "Putin's puppet." Belton writes:

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Tuesday that Witkoff was expected to brief Putin following the Oslo talks. 

Earlier, Peskov said Ukraine’s recent resumption of strikes on Russian oil refineries — in defiance of Trump’s demands — showed Zelensky’s administration in its death throes.

“Some final signs of agony are being observed,” Peskov said. “The Kyiv regime is resisting. But this cannot change the course of events.” 

“Checkmate,” Kremlin special envoy Kirill Dmitriev posted triumphantly. 

In Moscow, members of the Russian elite said that Putin, a former KGB officer, once again managed to turn the U.S. president.

Putin has decades of experience charming and manipulating foreign leaders, and has demonstrated a consistent ability to flatter Trump and pull him on side, analysts and officials said.

Those words suggest prominent Russians expect Trump to be an easy mark for Putin. My guess is that they are right about that. Knowledgeable observers say that Putin took a different tact with Trump this time. Instead of flattering the U.S. president, Putin played on his insecurities -- especially an unsettled situation at home, marked by a scuffling economy, consumer angst, and cratering poll numbers. Here is more from The Post:

This time, (analysts) said, the Russian leader preyed on Trump’s fears over low approval ratings and sky-high energy prices ahead of the U.S. midterm elections, offering a deal on Russian diesel fuel that will supply just a fraction of America’s daily consumption and have no impact on prices. 

On Friday, the average U.S. diesel price continued to climb to $6.33 per gallon, an increase of about 5 cents per gallon from the previous week. 

“Russia’s leaders have achieved a certain political victory,” said a Russian academic close to senior Russian diplomats, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy. “All this happened after their telephone call. Probably Putin was able to convince Trump. 

”Putin, the academic added, “probably conducted this conversation very professionally and prepared his arguments well.”  

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s richest man and now an opposition leader in exile, said recent events followed a pattern in Putin’s relations with Trump. 

“I am absolutely convinced that they believe they managed to take advantage, as they always do; they are opportunists,” Khodorkovsky said. “In this case, they believe they have waited for the moment of Trump’s additional weakness and [taken] advantage of it.”

“For Putin, everything that is happening today are signs of the West’s weakness,” he said. 

Many Americans probably do not realize it, but Russian officials already have a vision of how a tight U.S.-Russia relationship might look and operate. Donald Trump is central to their plans, Belton reports:

Dmitriev, the special envoy, and other Russian officials hailed the diesel deal and Trump’s waiving of tough sanctions that were to be imposed under a bill adopted in honor of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, a firm GOP supporter of Ukraine, as steps toward broader Russia-U.S. economic cooperation.

Historically, Russia and the U.S. have never been big economic partners, with Russia exporting little of interest to the U.S. market.

“There is a whole range of economic and investment projects being discussed with the American side that will be implemented,” Dmitriev told a Russian energy forum last week. “Our list of projects being discussed with the American side also includes various projects in the Arctic, energy projects, LNG [liquefied natural gas] projects and other areas.”

Belton's sources point to a late-August event in North Carolina as a turning point in the Putin-Trump alliance:

After an Aug. 31 meeting with Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov at a Group of 20 event in Asheville, North Carolina, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent blamed Ukraine’s strikes on Russian oil refineries as the reason for surging fuel prices — rather than the war in Iran.

It was then easy for Putin to recruit Trump into sharing that viewpoint, some observers said. 

“The simplest explanation is that Trump was interested in having a talking point for the midterms on diesel, that he has a deal to lower it, said Daniel Fried, a former assistant secretary of state for Europe during George W. Bush’s administration. 

“I think it is just Trump lashing out because he’s feeling cornered and unhappy with the midterms, and Zelensky stood in his way,” Fried said, especially after Zelensky publicly derided Trump as “weak” after he announced the diesel deal. 

“Trump then extended his frustration to add pressure and try to force a settlement based on a great power deal with Putin, who is skilled at playing his more gullible interlocutors,” he said. 

If Putin is big on "gullible interlocutors," he almost certainly found the right guy in Trump. Officials close to the situation seem to know that. It's unclear if American voters, with midterm elections coming on Nov. 3, know that. At the heart of all this is a view that Putin and Trump have shared for many years, even decades, Belton writes:

That Trump and Putin share a view that strongmen should dominate a world divided into spheres of influence made it even easier for Putin, Fried added. “Trump appears to have been attracted to this view for decades,” he said. “And therefore, Ukraine is expendable on strategic grounds, in Trump’s view, and it was standing in the way of a perfectly good campaign talking point.”

A world where the White House is allied with the Kremlin has come to pass, thanks to Trump and his Republican enablers; will Americans put Democrats, members of our only functional party, in charge?

(Fox 10 Phoenix, Facebook)

We are 13 days from the 2026 midterm elections, and it is time for Americans to consider an irrefutable fact: Our president, the leader of the Republican Party, has made the United States an ally of Russia. This is the same party, at least in title, whose leader in the 1980s famously labeled the Soviet Union the "evil empire." And Ronald Reagan did not distinguish between the Soviet Union and Russia. In "The Evil Empire Speech, he used the words "Russia," "the Russians, "Moscow," and "the Soviet Union" interchangeably. 

Reagan voters are starting to get up there in years, but many of them remain, and undoubtedly will be going to the polls in large numbers on Nov. 3. As they prepare to vote, they need to ponder this question: "If you were a Reagan supporter then, and you respect his legacy now, are you considering a vote for Donald Trump, the candidates he supports, and the party he now leads? Can you imagine that Ronald Reagan would countenance a successor, who has unabashedly jumped in bed with Vladimir Putin, a career officer of the KGB during the Soviet era? Can you imagine Reagan supporting a president who has repeatedly turned his back on NATO and Ukraine in order to favor his ongoing "bromance" with Putin?

Maybe your response to these questions is along the lines of, "Well President Trump knows what he's doing, and he means no harm, so I'm willing to give him a chance to work these things out." In other words, perhaps your thoughts are that Trump hasn't screwed things up all that badly. If that's the case, we invite you to come with us as we check out a revealing new piece at The Atlantic by Tom Nichols, a veteran journalist who is a professor emeritus of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, where he taught for 25 years and is an instructor at the Harvard Extension School.

In short, Nichols is a learned guy whose words need to be heard. His piece is unsettling, but it is must reading as we are about to determine whether our country will begin to rebuild our democracy or let it slide into oblivion at Trump's reckless hand. Under the headline "America is now an ally of Russia; Donald Trump has abandoned the Western order," Nichols writes:

In the past week, the president of the United States has conclusively turned America into an ally of the Russian Federation.

Donald Trump has now abandoned pretense and is openly aiding the Kremlin in its war against a friend and partner of the U.S. The American commander in chief has abandoned the Western order, the most successful—and powerful—security arrangement in human history. To judge from the available evidence, he has not done so out of a cold calculation of the national interest. Instead, he has based his decisions on his own interests; his open admiration for Russia’s dictator; his resentment of Ukraine’s democratically elected president; and quite possibly other factors that so far have remained obscured from the American public.

In September, Trump signed a sanctions bill that Congress had passed, named after the late Senator Lindsey Graham, a pro-Ukraine hawk. The legislation sanctioned Russia as well as other countries that are supporting Russia’s invasion and brutalization of Ukraine. The bill was approved with bipartisan support, but some Republicans and most House Democrats voted against the law, arguing that it contained a trap door, a provision that would allow Trump to suspend the prescribed sanctions at will.

Those critics were correct to be worried. Trump pulled the lever on that trap door just two days before the law was supposed to go into effect. In an executive order signed on Friday, Trump said that “such a waiver at this time is in the national interests of the United States”—he declined to explain exactly how the waiver was in America’s interests— and that the law would remain unexecuted until such time as his administration decides otherwise. This waiver came a short while after Trump lifted restrictions on Russia’s sales of diesel fuel to the U.S. and other markets.

Republicans control both houses of Congress, so they clearly helped create the trap door and then enabled the president to use it -- to the benefit of Russia. And that brings us to one of the core problems that has brought us to a precipice: GOP members simply refuse to exercise the oversight role of Congress. Project 2025 has pushed its "unitary executive" theory, and a Repubican Congress has interpreted that to mean they are to let a Republican president do whatever he wants -- no matter his incompetence, and how ill-suited he has proven to be for the job. That is why it is critical that Americans vote to put Democrats in charge. Republicans have proven they will not do the job, and putting them back in their cozy seats likely will not cause them to start. The sad truth: We only have one functional party at the moment, and if Americans don't recognize that and vote accordingly, our democracy might not survive. 

In Tom Nichols' view, any sentient American who has been paying attention should be aware of what Trump is doing. He writes:

Trump’s recent actions in support of Russia are so obvious that they have generated a rare moment of bipartisan disgust: Both Democrats and Republicans now seem to share a horror at the betrayal of Ukraine, and at the president’s reckless abdication of America’s role as leader of the free world.

The president’s aides are scrambling to explain why this capitulation to Russia isn’t exactly what it looks like. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, when pressed by a reporter, said the administration would “assess” the impact of the Graham Act after a 60-day period. This was nonsense: The executive order includes no such timeline, and no one seriously believes that the administration is running numbers to decide whether sanctions are a good idea. 

Rubio was joined in his excuse making by a handful of desperate Republicans who tried to cast Trump’s decision as some sort of tough-love patriotism. When asked on Sunday whether he agreed with Trump on lifting sanctions, Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma said, “He is choosing the American people first, is what he’s doing.” But few even on the American right seem willing to buy it. Trump loyalist Senator Ted Cruz called Trump’s move  “a mistake,” and Senator Darline Graham, who now holds her brother’s seat, broke with Trump as well.

Some conservative commentators, including Andy McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who writes for National Review, expressed considerably more rage. McCarthy wrote on Saturday that Putin is on a “quest to reconstitute America’s Soviet enemy,” and that “President Donald Trump is giving him aid and comfort.” As a lawyer, McCarthy surely did not choose those words at random. Aid and comfort are part of the criteria in Article III of the Constitution of the United States that define treason.  McCarthy called for “immediate hearings about this week’s shocking escalation of the Trump-Putin alliance.”

Trump has offered several limp explanations for his heightened alliance with Putin, but none of them has fooled Nichols -- and American voters must make sure that they aren't fooled. Nichols writes:

Trump’s decision has nothing to do with American national security. His de facto alliance with Russia is a sordid arrangement rooted in his own fears and hatreds.

First, Trump knows that Republicans are almost certainly facing a beating in the midterm elections, in part over the price of gas—a spike caused by the kind of war in Iran that he promised during his 2024 campaign to never start. He is desperate to do anything he can to lower the price of gas, and because he does not seem to understand how the international economy works, he may well believe that some janky diesel deal with Russia will alleviate high fuel prices in the United States. (It will not, although it will certainly help some Russian companies.)

As Malcolm Rifkind, a former defense minister of the United Kingdom, put it this weekend: “Donald Trump has shown himself as a person to be repulsive; as a president of the United States to be a disgrace to his own people as well as to his international responsibilities. We all know his actual reasons for this are a grubby attempt to win a few more votes in the midterms by trying to get oil prices down.” The result, Rifkind rightly added, is that Trump will now be “directly responsible” for the deaths of Ukrainians who will die while Putin uses the Russian alliance with America to continue the fighting.

But even if the American economy were in better shape, Trump’s history with Putin suggests that he was never going to allow the sanctions in the Graham Act to be enforced. Trump’s suspension of the law is a signal to Ukraine, to Russia, to Europe, and to America’s NATO allies that the Trump White House and Putin’s Kremlin are now on the same side. 

An array of political observers have been trying to figure out why Trump has consistently shown such an affinity for the murderous dictator of a longtime foreign adversary. It can't be because of Putin's charm because he surely registers a 0.0 on all known charm meters. Former U.S Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi might have gotten close to the real dynamics when she said over the weekend:

On October 16, 2019, I told Donald Trump, “With you, Mr. President, all roads lead to Putin.”

On October 16, 2026, Trump signed an executive order waiving new sanctions on Russia passed by bipartisan majorities in Congress and signed into law just last month.

This decision insults America’s commitment to democracy and our brave men and women in uniform, as Russia helps Iran target American forces.

I join Republican senators in condemning this unconscionable capitulation to a Russian dictator who illegally invaded Ukraine and butchers innocent civilians.

As I have asked for years: What does Putin have on Trump that he would sell out America’s values?

Nichols seems to be on a similar wavelength with Pelosi, but like many Americans, he remains befuddled by what exactly is going on:

Trump’s man-crush on the Russian dictator has been well documented and need not be recounted in all its unctuous detail. His attachment is so obvious that for years it has sparked various complicated theories about its origins, but Occam’s razor suggests a more direct explanation: Trump is a weak man who is intimidated by stronger and smarter men. His humiliating relationship with Putin is different only in degree from the way he interacts with other authoritarian leaders, including China’s Xi Jinping and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un (a dangerous totalitarian with whom Trump claimed to have fallen in love).

As if to prove the point, this afternoon Trump posted a whiny screed on his Truth Social site in which he pleaded with the public to understand how overmatched he is against Putin. Trump tried to explain that he is accommodating the Russian leader because he doesn’t “want to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table.” In a deeply pathetic admission, he warned that angering Putin could have consequences in Iran: “Perhaps more importantly, Russia is doing very little, if anything, to help the Islamic Republic of Iran, compared to what they could be doing, and I want to keep it that way, and will, unless stupid people get in the way.” He then said that Zelensky has gotten so much money from the Biden administration and from Europe that “he doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did.”

With that statement, Trump sank to the level of a certifiable loon. And this is the guy who is supposed to lead us out of the morass he has created? That is not going to happen, and the sooner Americans realize it, the sooner we can begin the ardurous task of whipping our country back into shape. We, as a nation must get rid of Trump, and that process begins on Nov. 3. Nichols seems to sense that it will go down as one of the most important dates in American history:

Consider what the American president just told the entire world: Please don’t interfere in my relationship with a murderous dictator, or he might help the country that America’s men and women in uniform are fighting at this very moment. The leader of the most powerful nation on the planet—yes, that’s still the United States right now—is trying to get everyone else, including the American Congress, to avoid antagonizing Putin, instead of warning Putin not to even think about aiding Iran. Nothing better illustrates just how weak a supplicant Trump has become in his relationship with the Kremlin boss.

Trump engages in this kind of personalized diplomacy in part because he believes himself to be—against all evidence—a master dealmaker. But the greater irony, considering how much he rails against globalism, is that he also behaves this way because he is in fact a globalist himself. He does not view the world as a collection of sovereign nations; he sees it instead as territories run by mob bosses. The weaker ones, especially America’s allies, can be abused and threatened at will. The stronger godfathers, including America’s dedicated enemies, are peers and thus treated with respect. The interests of the innocent millions in those countries are of no consequence. What matters is what’s good for Trump, his underbosses, and his family.

Trump also seems to be motivated by his open loathing of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a hostility that can be traced back to Trump’s first term, when the unwillingness of Ukrainian authorities to be part of a scheme to investigate Joe Biden led to Trump’s first impeachment. But Trump’s antipathy toward Zelensky is more than score settling: To him, it seems, Zelensky is a loser, a nobody who is causing needless trouble for his friend Vladimir. The American president cannot understand why Zelensky and his people do not simply accept their situation and lie down under Russia’s tank treads. 

Earlier this month, Trump called for Zelensky’s removal. Now he seems determined to let Putin, rather than the people of Ukraine, fulfill that demand. 

Will America ever be able to extricate itself from an inept president and his weak-willed enablers? Nichols does not sound too optimistic about that:

In the words of another famous Russian named Vladimir, What is to be done? The answers are not comforting.

Congress, when it reconvenes, can try to pass new legislation, but a bill amending the Graham Act would require a veto-proof majority to become law. Republicans have shown no interest in taking the power to tariff out of Trump’s hands, and they are equally unlikely to strip him of the power to lift the sanctions they just tried to impose. The courts are also unlikely to challenge the president when he invokes national security, which he does for almost everything he wants.

An additional problem is that both Trump’s secretary of defense and his vice president are likely to support a policy aimed at securing a Russian victory. Vance joined Trump in an attempt to bully Zelensky during their infamous meeting in the White House in early 2025, and he is unlikely to ask Trump to reconsider helping Putin. Pete Hegseth, for his part, appears willing to say and do whatever keeps him in the Pentagon. America’s senior military officers may be sympathetic to Ukraine—as are most American citizens—but the idea that the adolescent, self-styled “secretary of war” is going to suddenly deliver a mature and stoic defense of democracy against Russian imperialism is laughable. 

For the foreseeable future, Ukraine’s fate depends on aid from Europe. Perhaps Europe will continue to step up, and a new Congress might try to demand more support from the White House. But everyone will have to hurry: Winter is coming.

Zelensky, sadly, knows that a Russian victory looks to be exactly what Trump wants. If “the United States will support Putin,” he said on Sunday, “it’s unbelievable. It’s a tragedy.” He added: “If these two countries will be together, of course we will not prevail. And we will not be able to stand.”

A world in which the White House is allied to the Kremlin was, until now, the stuff of paranoid fiction. Manchurian candidates and red presidents were fantasies, dark tales that Americans told themselves, like ghost stories around a campfire. But this alliance now exists. If Stalin and his Cold War successors could see what Trump and Putin have created, and how the mighty United States has been humbled and humiliated, they might think that their evil hopes were not wrong, but only that they dreamed them too early.

New reporting reveals that Donald Trump and Elon Musk acted jointly to limit Ukraine's ability to defend itself from deadly Russian missile attacks

(Raza Samo, Facebook)

The No. 1 question going into the weekend here at Legal Schnauzer was, "Who stabbed Ukraine in the back by limiting its ability to defend against Russian missile attacks?" Was it (A) Donald Trump; (B) Elon Musk; or (c) Both. Based on one of the best articles I've found that addresses our question, the answer is both. That is a sickening outcome, but it should not surprise anyone who is familiar with the public actions of Trump and Musk in recent years. 

Our go-to source on this issue is Laura Rozen, a veteran foreign-policy journalist who has worked at AI-Monitor, Politico, Foreign Policy, and now writes the Diplomatic newletter at Substack. On the question at hand, Rozen nails it in the headline: "Report: Musk proposed & Trump agreed to throttle Ukraine satellite system." She adds the following informative subhead: "Billionaire Republican donor Elon Musk proposed and US President Donald Trump agreed to throttle a Musk-owned satellite system that Ukraine uses to defend civilians from Russian ballistic missiles and drone attacks this week, new reporting has revealed."

Rozen's piece is cross-posted at The Cosmopolitan Globalist, which includes a scathing op-ed piece on the Trump-Musk duo from founder-editor Claire Berlinski. We will feature that at the end of this post, and it is worth the wait.

First, we turn to Laura Rozen who writes:

The Daily Telegraph’s diplomatic editor, Joe Barnes, reported on Oct. 16:

Elon Musk approached Donald Trump with the idea of slowing down Starlink in Ukraine, the Telegraph can reveal.

[Musk] approached the US president with the proposal to introduce speed limits on the system, which hampered Ukraine’s drone defences, according to four sources familiar with the discussions.

One of the sources said Mr. Trump ‘agreed’ with Mr. Musk’s suggestion, paving the way for the Pentagon to execute the slowdown of the Starshield, the military-grade version of the satellite communications system. […]

However, after what was described as a ‘night of carnage’ in Kyiv because of the blackout, a senior source said Mr. Musk had been alarmed about the possibility of adverse consumer reaction in Europe.

That Musk, what a guy? Notice he isn't concerned about the people who were killed or injured; he's concerned about his bottom line. No wonder he is a conservative. Rozen continues:

Musk had previously tried to distance himself from the decision to impose limits on the speed and usage of the Starlink and Starshield, which are owned by SpaceX, in Ukraine this week. But his statement did not explicitly deny that he had played a role in proposing the idea to Trump.

“Starshield systems are owned and controlled by the U.S. government,” Musk wrote on Twitter (which he also owns) on Oct. 14. “Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.”

Trump, asked today who gave the order for Starlink to go down in Ukraine, dodged, dissembled and prevaricated.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I am not sure that it ever came down.”

“It wasn’t us,” he added, disingenuously. 

How is that for a profile in courage? Speaking of courage, Rozen turns to a leader who has a proven he has plenty of that rare commodity:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, speaking with the media after meeting with European leaders in Brussels today, said the service was throttled this week, impeding the ability of Ukrainian drone operators from being able to intercept Russian ballistic missile and drone strikes on the country.

“Starlink wasn’t turned off—its speed was reduced,” Zelenskyy wrote on Twitter. “And when the speed was reduced, we were unable to intercept a certain number of jet-powered ‘shaheds.’ We couldn’t use a tool that helps protect people. That’s very painful and frustrating.”

“Has the speed been fully restored to what it was before? No. Is it being restored now? Yes,” his post continued.

The press was on top of the story late last week, Rozen notes:

Reuters’ Erin Banco reported on Thursday:

The order to limit a satellite system used by Ukraine for battlefield communications and drone operations came from inside the White House, according to two US officials and a Western official briefed on the matter.

The officials said leaders at the Defense Department received a message that the SpaceX Starshield service for the Ukrainian military needed to be slowed. […]

The White House said in a statement that no such request was made by the president, but did not answer questions about whether anyone else did. 

Congress also is paying attention, and while I'm not aware of any member using the term "war crimes," a reasonable question might be this: Could the actions of Trump and Musk constitute war crimes, such as  "crimes against humanity," as defined by, and perhaps investigated by, the International Criminal Court (ICC), upon which Trump has leveled sanctions, drawing a stern response from the court. Rozen writes:

A bipartisan group of nine Senators wrote the Pentagon Inspector General on Thursday requesting an investigation into what caused the disruptions to US-supported communications and intelligence sharing capabilities in Ukraine this past week. Notably, they said that the disrupted service had endangered American diplomatic and security personnel by preventing them from receiving alerts to reach bunkers ahead of Russian air raids.

“We understand that American personnel experienced serious difficulties reaching safety during Russia air raids,” Senators Jeanne Shaheen (D-New Hampshire), Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), Richard Durbin (D-Illinois), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Jack Reed (D-Rhode Island), Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), John Cornyn (R-Texas), Christopher Coons (D-Delaware) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) wrote in a letter to Department of Defense Inspector General Platte Moring. “Given the potentially deadly consequences, these incidents require immediate investigation.”

“We also request that you ensure agencies and parties preserve communications, contractual records, technical directives, and correspondence concerning these incidents, including communications between the Department of Defense, SpaceX and other relevant agencies,” they also requested.

Here is the op-ed from Claire Berlinski, founder and editor of The Cosmopolitan Globalist:

Note that in addition to everything else, they casually put the lives of American diplomatic, military, and security personnel at risk. This too is illegal: Not just immoral, but illegal. If anyone imagines Trump would hesitate to kill you--be it because you're a US citizen or otherwise harmless--you're wrong. Trump (and Musk) are psychopaths. That's not just rhetoric. Because of their outsized power, they're a danger to everyone alive.

With a side trip through Canadian politics, journalism, and music, we learn that the order to limit Ukraine's ability to defend itself came from Trump White House, and Zelensky reponds by resuming strikes on Russian oil facilities

Smoke rises from Russian oil refinery after Ukrainian drone strike (BBC)

The order to limit Ukraine's ability to defend itself from Russian missile attacks came from inside the Trump administration. As we reported in yesterday's post, Ukrainian officials generally were pointing fingers of blame in Trump's direction. Now we have a jointly published report from Reuters and Yahoo! News indicating Ukraine's leaders were right on target. We also have a report from Foreign Policy that Ukraine has resumed strikes on Russian refineries in direct defiance of Donald Trump. First, under the headline "Order to limit Starshield for Ukraine came from inside White House, sources say," Erin Banco and Gram Slattery write:

The order to limit a satellite system used by Ukraine for battlefield communications and drone operations came from inside the White House, according to two US officials and a Western official briefed on the matter.

The officials said leaders at the Defense Department received ‌a message that the SpaceX Starshield service for the Ukrainian military needed to be slowed.

The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, did not specify who in ‌the White House made the decision or who was responsible for implementing the order. The Pentagon is the biggest customer of Starshield, which is the military-grade version of the Starlink service.

Ukrainian officials said this week that military-grade Starlink receptors stopped ​working in Ukraine when mounted on fast-moving objects, interfering with the performance of Ukrainian drones that rely on them for onboard guidance systems over Ukrainian territory. 

A person in Ukraine's Defence Ministry said on Thursday that the receptors were now working when in motion, but only at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour (160 kph). 

In what should be a surprise to no one, the Starshield episode reveals that Trump is a frightfully inept negotiator. If I might don my amateur psychiatrist's hat for a moment, I think Trump's status as a malignant narcissist makes him -- ironically known as "Mr. Art of the Deal" -- useless at the real-world negotiating table. I learned in med school (hah!) that a narcissist at Trump's level listens only to whatever spasms his own brain is sending to him. He has little concern about how his words sound to others and almost no ability to even listen to what others around the table are saying.  With the contingent from Ukraine, led by President Vlodymor Zalensky, Trump is not dealing with a bunch of dolts. Trump tipped his hand in recent public statements, and Ukrainians picked up on it immediately -- and as we will learn shortly, responded accordingly. Here is more from the Reuters/Yahoo! report:

The move to temporarily restrict the vital communications system came as President Donald Trump has pressured Kyiv to stop its attacks on Russian refineries, which he has blamed for the soaring energy prices that are denting his Republican Party's prospects in the ‌November midterm elections.

But experts say that surge in energy costs is ⁠mainly the result of the US-Israeli war with Iran, which brought Iranian attacks on energy facilities and has largely shut the vital Strait of Hormuz.

In response to a request for comment about the order to limit Starshield, a senior US official said: "No such request was ever made by the president."

Uh, right. Any chance Zelensky is stupid enough to buy that? Nope, not even a little. Trump  went so far recently as to suggest Ukraine needed to get a new president. Many Americans responded online with retorts like "We think the U.S. is the one that needs a new president." I could not agree more, and I would be delighted (for selfish reasons) to see a one-for-one Zelensky-for-Trump deal. It could be like one of those major-league baseball (MLB) deals that happen right before the annual trading deadline. Heck, we could even throw in a couple of minor prospects-to-be-named later just to get rid of Trump.

This notion, however, does make me queasy because the people of Ukraine have suffered deeply with Putin as their neighbor, and the last thing they need is to have Trump dumped on their plate. (This scenario reminds me of a classic line that grew out of the capture and release of 52 Americans in the 444-day Iranian Hostage Crisis, which began in 1979 when 66  Americans were taken hostage at the U.S. embassy in Tehran and ended with the release of all living hostages in 1981. MLB decided to celebrate the hostages' freedom by offering them a personalized, bronze lifetime pass to any major- or minor-league game. Beano Cook, a prominent sports-media figure at the time responded by saying, "Haven't they suffered enough?" The line was so memorable that it became the title of Cook's posthumously published memoir.) 

My flights of political fancy also include a scenario where we dump Trump on Canada in exchange for Prime Minister Mark Carney. I know that is a horribly one-sided trade, but hey, I'm desperate, and Carney is one heck of a smart guy who could get the U.S. back on track in his spare time. He probably would not have to give up his gig in Canada; I suspect he could handle both roles effortlessly. Carney has a doctorate in economics from Oxford University, so do you think he's smarter than Trump? It shouldn't take long to answer that question.

The notion of dumping Trump on Canada hurts my conscience. Legal Schnauzer has long had a strong readership in Canada, and it's a place Mrs. Schnauzer and I would love to visit someday, preferably in the summer. I've gotten to know some of our Canadian readers personally over the years and found them to be the kind of intelligent, engaged readers any blog would love to have. Also, I've become a fan of Dean Blundell and Zev Shalev, a pair of Canadian raconteurs who can make you laugh and make you think. You can find their work at the Podcast Collaborative Blog and narrativ.org, which also includes FiveStack with Dean and Zev. They are devout libs, who know their stuff and are talented communicators. I hope you will check them out.

The U.S., in its current state, looks like a banana republic -- or as Trump would say, "a shithole country" -- in comparison to Canada. One of Trump's greatest sins -- and there have been many -- has been doing his best to ruin the longstanding alliance between the U.S. and Canada. With Trump stowed away behind bars in, say, Moose Jaw, I suspect Carney could restore that relationship in no time. He will need a competent, respectful partner as U.S. president, and I submit that a U.S. Reconstruction Commission -- which we will need to reverse the damage Trump and his GOP allies have wrought -- appoint Hillary Clinton to serve as president, a role Trump and Russia stole from her in 2016. Mrs. Clinton might want to appoint Michelle Obama to lead the effort to restore our democracy and devise documents to ensure we never have another Donald Trump anywhere near the White House.

Maybe Canada has a nice cozy jail in some very cold place -- like Moose Jaw or Medicine Hat. When the time is right, they could hand over Trump and his Republican enablers to the International Criminal Court (ICC) to be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. I might be so bold as to petition Mark Carney to transport Trump through a route that passes Winnipeg, the Manitoba city that produced The Guess Who, one of my favorite rock bands of the 1960s and '70s. Led by founding members Burton Cummings and Randy Bachman (who went on to found Bachman-Turner Overdrive of "Takin' Care of Business" fame), The Guess Who came out of the Canadian prairie, so they named their first album "Wheatfield Soul," which produced  "These Eyes," which seemingly can be heard on classic rock stations at most any time of day (even though it's a ballad). Their second album, "Canned Wheat," produced another monster hit, "Laughing," and is generally considered their first classic LP. 

The Guess Who went on to produce a staggering string of hits in their early days -- "Undun," No Time" "American Woman," "No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature," "Hand Me Down World," and "Share the Land." All of those, and more, are on The Best of the Guess Who, which might be one of the best compilation albums ever produced.

Later hits include "Albert Flasher," "Rain Dance," "Life in the Bloodstream," "Heartbroken Bopper," "Running Back to Saskatoon," and "Follow Your Daughter Home." The hits continued into the nid '70s with "Dancin Fool," "Star Baby," and "Clap for the Wolfman" (which went to No. 4 in Canada and No. 6 in the U.S.) 

The Guess Who broke up in 1975, and Cummings embarked on a solo career, which produced a number of major hits, including "Stand Tall," "Break it to Them Gently," "I'm Scared," "My Own Way to Rock," and "You Saved My Soul."

The band reunited several times over the years, most notably for the "Runnin' Back Through Canada Tour," which produced a live album, concert film, DVD, and sold more than 200,000 tickets.  

From 1978 to 2024, the founding members were embroiled in a conflict over the band's name. It started when bassist Jim Kale discovered the band's name had never been trademarked and filed registrations with the U.S. trademark office for the band's name. Unbeknownst to the other original members, Kale used his newly registered mark to continue performing under the Guess Who name. Because he owned the name, Kale leased the rights to the rest of the group for  the Runnin' Back Through Canada Tour," earning a 20 percent share, despite not performing in the lineup.

From 2006 to 2024, Kale and original drummer Garry Peterson formed a partnership to lead a group under the Guess Who name. Kale retired several times but continued to pay musicians to play under the Guess Who name, even though most of them had no historic connection to the original band. Albums from Kale's version of The Guess Who were not released on major labels, did not sell well, and generally received poor reviews. There were times when the band played with no original members present.

This led to bitter words from Cummings and Bachman who wrote and/or sang many of the band's most famous songs. They called the other band "Kale's Klones" and said it produced "fake bullshit shows." In October 2023, Bachman and Cummings filed a false advertising lawsuit against Kale and Peterson, claiming their band used the Guess Who name, photos of Bachman and Cummings, and original recordings to give the false impression that Cummings and Bachman were performing as part of the cover band. Bachman and Cummings sought $20 million in damages, and when a judge refused to dismiss their lawsuit, Cummings took the additional step of going through his music publishing company to terminate his license agreement with BMI so that his catalog would be removed from BMI's blanket license agreement with music venues. This meant that not only would any musician publicly performing a Cummings-authored Guess Who song be liable for monetary damages, so would the owners of any venue where the song was performed. Following this action, Kale's group was unable to perform The Guess Who's biggest hits because Cummings wrote or co-wrote almost all of them. The cover group's concerts were immediately canceled, and its website was shuttered in July 2024, effectively bringing an end to this version of the band. 

Cummings and Bachman announced they had gained control of The Guess Who name and reformed the band for the "Taking It Back Tour" in 2026. In March, Cummings and Bachman announced dates for their first tour as The Guess Who in 23 years, featuring former Eagles guitarist Don Felder, who wrote the music for Hotel California,"  as the opening act. 

Here is a link to one of many positive online reviews of The Guess Who reunion tour.

I hope you enjoyed our side tour through Canadian politics, journalism, and rock music. As it turns out, thanks to the Jim Kale trademark conflict, The Guess Who saga has a strong legal component. But we need to return to the aforementioned article where Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky essentially told Donald Trump to "blow it out your ass" when the latter demanded he stop bombing Russian oil refineries to help lower rising fuel prices in the U.S as midterm elections draw near. Under the headline "Ukraine resumes strikes on Russian refineries; Zelensky directly defies Trump," Foreign Policy's Alexandra Sharp writes:

Despite the White House repeatedly urging Kyiv not to target Moscow’s energy infrastructure, Ukrainian forces resumed strikes on Russian oil refineries on Thursday. “The block [on attacking refineries] is out. We’re done,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told the Financial Times on Thursday.

U.S. President Donald Trump has faced growing pressure to tackle rising fuel prices,  inflamed by the wars in Ukraine and Iran ahead of next month’s U.S. midterm elections. In a bid to bring down energy costs, Trump had urged Zelensky to halt all strikes on Russian oil refineries, and on Friday, he suspended U.S. sanctions on Russian diesel exports. 

Then, on Sunday, Trump unilaterally declared an energy truce between Russia and Ukraine while also calling for Zelensky’s removal. Ukraine agreed to the truce and suspended such strikes for three days. However, during those three days, Russian forces launched dozens of ballistic missiles at critical Ukrainian energy infrastructure, plunging around 600,000 people in Kyiv into darkness on Wednesday. 

According to Zelensky, the decision to resume strikes on Russian oil refineries was made in response to several controversial decisions out of Washington. They include U.S. military officials reportedly threatening to withhold intelligence if Ukraine continues to hit Russian energy targets, new restrictions on Ukraine’s Starlink access (which SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has accused the Trump administration of orchestrating), the White House’s apparent eagerness to ink business deals with Moscow, and Trump’s repeated admiration of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Putin is an enemy for us, and he’s the real evil of today. Absolutely,” Zelensky told the Financial Times. “How can Trump be friends with him?”

Some experts suggest that by bucking Trump’s demands, Zelensky risks widening the rift between them. Trump has long had a rocky relationship with Zelensky, going so far as to berate him during a White House summit in February 2025 and repeatedly parroting Kremlin talking points that question the Ukrainian president’s legitimacy. 

Despite the risks, many of Ukraine’s European allies have backed Zelensky’s decision. “The faster all the Russian refineries and ability to sell energy will be blown to smithereens, the better, because Russia is funding the war with that,” Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal said.