Trump to Meet Putin and Stop the Pointless Killing. Our Oligarchs Go Into Conniptions, by John Zmirak

By John Zmirak, The Stream, August 15, 2025

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.

Pushing back against the orchestrated force of elites in the U.S. and Western Europe, President Donald Trump is preparing to meet with Vladimir Putin today at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska. Their goal? To end the war in Ukraine.

Recall the deep roots of this war: An empty promise from the George H.W. Bush administration in the waning days of the Soviet Union that if Mikhael Gorbachev dissolved the Warsaw Pact, the U.S. wouldn’t push NATO westward toward Russia’s borders. We went on to break that pledge.

Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush used the chaos and poverty of the failing Boris Yelstin administration to fill the power vacuum in Eastern Europe, eventually pulling most of Russia’s neighbors into our nuclear hair-trigger military alliance. In 2013, our CIA helped orchestrate a coup against the duly elected pro-Russian leader of Ukraine, handpicked his replacement, and honeycombed that country’s institutions with American agents and assets. …

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