If you watch the entire Oval Office meeting between Trump and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, you’ll notice that Trump was thanked by Zelensky, not once, but twice, three minutes into the meeting. Zelensky thanked Trump again at the 7:35 mark. At minute 41, Zelensky said, “God bless, now, Trump will stop Putin.”

Before minute 41 was over, Vice President (sic) JD Vance told Zelensky, “You should be thanking the president.” At minute 44, JD asked, “Have you said ‘thank you’ once?”

Maybe JD should have been studying a brief on recent Ukrainian/Russian history instead of focusing on ambushing Zelenskyy. If he had, then maybe he wouldn’t have suggested something as stupid as “maybe engaging in diplomacy.”

The Minsk Agreements were negotiated and signed in 2014 to end the fighting between Russian separatist groups in Ukraine.

The agreement consisted of a package of measures, including a ceasefire, withdrawal of heavy weapons from the front line, release of prisoners, constitutional reform in Ukraine granting self-government to certain areas of Donbas, and restoration of control of the state border to the Ukrainian government. The agreement was signed, with Russia getting the better end of the deal.

It was signed in September 2014, and in January 2015, the Russian military entered the region to continue fighting with the separatist groups. In 2022, Vladimir Putin declared that the Minsk Agreement “no longer existed” and commenced a full invasion of Ukraine.

In 2019, Russia and Ukraine agreed to a “full and comprehensive ceasefire” that included prisoner swaps, which never happened.

At 4:25, President Zelensky explains this, quite elegantly, to Trump and JD.

Zelensky starts with, “Can I ask you?” Vance says, “Sure. Yeah.”

Zelensky: “OK. So he (Putin) occupied it, our parts, big parts of Ukraine, parts of east and Crimea. So he occupied it in 2014. So during a lot of years — I’m not speaking about just Biden, but those times was (Barack) Obama, then President Obama, then President Trump, then President Biden, now President Trump. And God bless, now, President Trump will stop him. But during 2014, nobody stopped him. He just occupied and took. He killed people. You know what the –”

Trump: “2015?”

Zelensky: “2014.”

Trump: “Oh, 2014? I was not here.”

Vance: “That’s exactly right.”

Zelensky: “Yes, but during 2014 ‘til 2022, the situation is the same, that people have been dying on the contact line. Nobody stopped him. You know that we had conversations with him, a lot of conversations, my bilateral conversation. And we signed with him, me, like, you, president, in 2019, I signed with him the deal. I signed with him, (French President Emmanuel) Macron and (former German Chancellor Angela) Merkel. We signed ceasefire. Ceasefire. All of them told me that he will never go … But after that, he broke the ceasefire, he killed our people, and he didn’t exchange prisoners. We signed the exchange of prisoners. But he didn’t do it.”

And this is my favorite part.

Zelensky asked, “What kind of diplomacy, JD, you are speaking about? What do you mean?”

And that’s where Trump and JD got pissed and the shouting match began, although, the only ones doing the shouting was Trump and JD. This was a planned ambush, and it didn’t go as planned for Trump and JD. They didn’t expect President Zelensky to push back on the “diplomacy” bullshit. That probably made them angrier.

I believe Trump’s proposal to trade military support for Ukraine’s “Rare Earth” minerals was a bluff, and Zelensky called it. Trump is a terrible negotiator. Trump doesn’t want to help Ukraine defend itself from Russia.

For JD Vance to suggest that Ukraine engage in diplomacy is like asking the British and French after Germany broke the agreement signed with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and started World War II, “Have you tried talking to Hitler?”

Hitler should have been a guy easy to negotiate with, right? He was a vegetarian dog lover. Even Trump doesn’t like dogs, and his only vegetable is ketchup. Is it possible that Hitler, who murdered over six million Jews, was more human and likable than Donald Trump? Maybe we could have stopped the invasion of Poland by negotiating over some eggplant lasagne (or maybe living on a diet of nothing but eggplant lasagne (an ex made me some once) is what could start a world war. I bet Neville Chamberlain could have gone for some eggplant lasagne.

Trump and JD have never suggested to Putin that he try diplomacy. For Putin, diplomacy is just another method of swindling.

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