What Happens If The U.S. Sells Out Ukraine
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It's Thursday, February 20th. I'm Jane Koston, and this is What A Day, the show that is thrilled President Donald Trump is coming up with brand new, definitely never, ever used ways to combat teen drug use. Because we're going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars advertising how bad drugs are so that kids don't use them, that they chew up your brain, they destroy your teeth, your skin, your everything.

Yes, let's spend hundreds of millions of dollars on TV ads to tell kids how bad drugs are. This has never been tried before. Groundbreaking information we're learning. On today's show, New York City Mayor Eric Adams' corruption case and political future are still uncertain. And Elon Musk wants to buy your favor. But let's start with the war in Ukraine and President Donald Trump's decision that the best way to end it is to make Russia happy while bashing Ukraine along the way.

We've been talking on the show this week about Secretary of State Marco Rubio's meetings with Russian diplomats in Saudi Arabia in an effort to end the war on Ukraine that Russia launched by invading the sovereign country in February 2022.

Notably, Ukraine has not been invited to those meetings. And Trump has made it clear over the last few days why. He thinks the war is Ukraine and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's fault. On Tuesday, Trump said Ukraine should have, quote, never started the war, the one which, you might recall, it didn't start.

Zelensky shot back Wednesday saying Trump was in a web of disinformation and that the U.S. is doing Russia a favor. He says there, I would like Trump's team to have more truth. All of this definitely doesn't have a positive impact on Ukraine. They are letting Putin out of isolation, and I think Putin and Russians are really happy.

But Trump kept hammering the Ukrainian president Wednesday, writing on Truth Social in part, quote, Europe has failed to bring peace and Zelensky probably wants to keep the gravy train going. And he doubled down on his attacks on Zelensky during remarks he gave at a Saudi investment conference in Miami Beach. He skewered Zelensky before launching into his diatribe against Ukraine. A modestly successful comedian,

President Zelensky talked the United States of America into spending $350 billion to go into a war that basically couldn't be won, that never had to start. And he kept going. He refuses to have elections. It's low in the real Ukrainian polls. I mean, how can you be high with every city is being demolished? It's hard to be high. Somebody said, oh, no, his polls are good. Give me a break. Every city is being demolished.

They look like a demolition site, every single one of them. And the only thing he was really good at was playing Joe Biden like a fiddle. He played him like a fiddle. That's an expression we use, yes, sir, to say that he's pretty easy, pretty easy.

A dictator without elections, Zelensky better move fast or he's not going to have a country left. But Russia, the country that started the war that's killed thousands of people, the one doing the demolishing of all those cities Trump talked about, according to the Trump administration, they now get normalized diplomatic relations with the United States and priority in negotiations aimed at ending the war they started. Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance seem to now view Russia as a partner and potential ally.

But while they may talk about wanting a lasting peace between Russia and Ukraine with the borders established nearly a decade ago, NBC News reported Tuesday that intelligence shows Putin wants something else. All of Ukraine. This is part of an overall shift in American foreign policy, away from our traditional allies and towards countries whose leaders espouse right-wing cultural talking points and a belief in wielding power for power's own sake.

So I had to talk to Julia Ioffe, founding partner and Washington correspondent at Puck News and a longtime observer of Russian politics. Julia, welcome to What Today. Thanks for having me, Jane. So what did you make of the talks this week between U.S. officials like Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia? What to you was the most notable thing that's been coming out of them?

Well, the most notable thing has been the fact that this is it. This is the new American foreign policy. That when we talk about American allies, et cetera, we're not talking about the same parties anymore. We're no longer talking about NATO. We're not talking about the EU, Emmanuel Macron, or the Christian Democrats in Germany. We're talking about

Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban of Hungary, the AFD in Germany, those are the new American allies because that is who ideologically aligns with the Trump-Vance administration. Unfortunately, that means that our allies like Ukraine get tossed under the bus. Or rather, I mean, I think being tossed under the bus would be preferable at this point to what is happening. I think they're going to be

carved up and sold for parts. I keep thinking about like

What does the U.S. get out of sidelining Ukraine in favor of direct peace talks with Russia, the aggressor who invaded them? Like, what is the upside for us? Because I'm looking at the conversation and Putin still wants more. He still has more demands. I also don't know what we'd be getting, but the Russians did through the head of the Russian Sovereign Wealth Fund, who was president.

brought to the meeting, he presented a document to the American side that said, hey, American companies have lost over $300 billion by pulling out of Russia in the wake of the full-scale invasion three years ago. And they could make a lot of money, especially the U.S. oil majors, if they were to come back into Russia. And of course, that really comports with Putin's view of Americans, which is that

We're soft, cowardly, fickle, and motivated exclusively by money. That we don't have this kind of soul the way Russians do for which we are willing to die.

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky has compared what's happening in Ukraine now to the way the Trump administration set the table to pull out of the war in Afghanistan by negotiating directly with the Taliban over the U.S.-backed government at the time. We saw what happened there. The Taliban now once again controls Afghanistan, which is bad. Can you tease out that analogy a little bit as it relates to Ukraine? What happens if Ukraine becomes Afghanistan 2.0, as Zelensky says?

Well, Ukraine has a history of guerrilla war, of fighting powers they don't agree with. You know, a few days ago, my grandmother passed away. She was 96 and she was from Zhitomir in central Ukraine.

And her older brother, who died a couple years before her, was a doctor. And he was posted by the Soviet government to Ivan Frankivsk in the far west of Ukraine in 1947, two years after the end of World War II. And in the middle of the night, he was kidnapped by Ukrainian nationalist guerrillas who were still fighting in the forests of western Ukraine because one of their commanders had broken his leg and they needed somebody to fix it.

But basically, like, they did this in Soviet times, they did this in Tsarist times, and the promise seems to be that we will do this to Putin as well, even if it's in the form of guerrilla warfare. And I think the Russians understand that because everywhere that they've occupied, they've had to use brutally repressive, basically counterinsurgency tactics.

techniques to pacify the population. If you recall in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, when the Ukrainian forces liberated it, they found a torture chamber that was specifically for teenagers because they needed them to rat out their parents, their teachers, etc. Mass graves that keep being found in parts of Ukraine that are retaken. I think that's also what awaits Ukraine if they are subjugated by Russia.

Zelensky has been escalating his attacks on Trump, saying Wednesday that the president is caught in a web of disinformation. What risks do you think Zelensky is taking here by being more aggressive in confronting Trump this way?

Well, he got an immediate response from J.D. Vance, who told the Daily Mail from the West Wing that Zelensky risked a major blow-up by, quote, bad-mouthing Trump, and that this was despicable and that he was disrespecting the will of the American people. The thing is that he has a whole country to answer to, and...

And if he were to just kind of roll over for Trump, I don't know that the Ukrainian people would like that very much. Ukrainians are rightly incredibly offended and terrified by what has been coming out of Washington for the last week. If Trump does sell out Ukraine even more than he already has, and Russia is able to claim the eastern parts of the Ukraine it's currently occupying and also keep Crimea, which it took over in 2014,

What would that signal to Putin? Because I'm guessing he's not going to be like, oh, I'm done now. We're good. Wow. Jane, you really got this guy. You have his number.

I mean, that's the thing, right? That's why there have been so many Munich comparisons floating around, because Putin has never hidden his desire to dismantle Ukraine as a separate entity. And that is why he has been demanding new elections before any peace deal can be signed, because he needs a puppet regime, one that he can fully control.

in Kiev. That's what he wants. He wants a completely supplicant, colonized Ukraine. And the fact that Trump is echoing that is insane. But yeah, he's not going to stop. There was an intelligent assessment that came out earlier this week or that was leaked earlier this week that Putin would never stop. But that is, I mean, file that under no shit, Sherlock. And what would this mean for Europe more broadly? What would selling out Ukraine mean for the continent?

I think there are other echoes there. For example, if Syria, I think, would mean another flood of refugees into Europe, which would further destabilize the politics of the continent and probably further empower far-right parties and movements on the continent. I think that would be the end of NATO. I think that would be also the end of Europe as a kind of

real political force. The other broader kind of even more global implication is that it would drive home a point that Putin has been making for years now, decades, is that

look, guys, America will be your ally, and then a year and a half later, they'll have congressional elections or presidential elections, and the policy will flip because different people will come into office, and you'll be thrown under the bus. Whereas if you're our ally, we will stick with you to the bitter end. This is why it was so important to stick by Bashar al-Assad until the very end. It was to show that

This is how we treat our allies versus how the fickle Americans treat theirs. And I think that is a message that's aimed over the heads of Europe and the West, more at the global South.

Now, Trump being Trump, he's now taken to calling Zelensky, not Putin, a dictator, because as you mentioned, Ukraine hasn't had elections since Russia invaded three years ago. And you tweeted on Wednesday, quote, if the kind of elections that Putin has are more legitimate in Trump's eyes than the ones that put Zelensky in power, you can expect to start seeing many such elections here in the U.S. Mark my words. Can you unpack what you're saying there?

Well, you know, the joke kind of going around among liberals since Election Day was that that was our last election, that there won't be elections. But if Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin have taught right-wingers all over the world one thing is that you don't have to get rid of elections. You just have to engineer them very carefully, and that way you can maintain a patina of legitimacy. You know, for example, Putin had elections more recently than Zelensky, of course, and

He ran against dummy candidates, voting was rigged, and election boxes were stuffed by election workers, and no true opposition candidate ran, nor have they had access to state-controlled media for decades. So my point is, why get rid of elections when you can just

Just engineer them to go your way and say, look, the people elected me. It's not me. I'm not forcing myself on the people. The people are asking me to do this. And given how many American states are run entirely by the GOP, which is run entirely by Donald Trump, who's to say? Julia, thank you so much for joining me today. You're so welcome. I hope I've improved your mood.

That was my conversation with Julia Ioffe, founding partner and Washington correspondent at Puck News. We'll get to more of the news in a moment, but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads.

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Here's what else we're following today. Headlines.

Catchy. A top Department of Justice official was in Manhattan court Wednesday to justify the decision to drop corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Adams was also in the courtroom, and protesters showed up outside the courthouse to boo him on his way in.

Federal prosecutors charged Adams with bribery, wire fraud, conspiracy, and more back in September. But last week, Trump's acting Deputy Attorney General, Emil Bove, ordered prosecutors to drop the case entirely. He argued in the memo and in court Wednesday that Mayor Adams can't do his job and enforce Trump's immigration crackdown if he's under criminal investigation. Several department prosecutors resigned in protest.

Adams maintained his innocence in court on Wednesday, saying, quote, I have not committed a crime. But that argument could be moot if New York Governor Kathy Hochul uses her state constitutional power to remove Adams from office. She met with city officials to discuss the possibility on Tuesday after four of Adams's deputies resigned over the scandal. U.S. District Judge Dale Ho, a Biden appointee, did not issue a ruling as of our recording time Wednesday night. He said that he needs more time to make a decision.

Trump signed an executive order Tuesday intended to give the White House more control over independent regulatory agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Federal Communications Commission. White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf announced the order for Trump at a press conference Tuesday.

This executive order would establish important oversight functions in the Office of Management and Budget and its subsidiary office, OIRA, supervising independent agencies and many of their actions, and also reestablishes the longstanding norm that only the president or the attorney general can speak for the United States when stating an opinion as to what the law is.

Oh boy, that was boring. But the TLDR version of that wonky government speak is that the order gives Trump more power over agencies that Congress set up specifically to have some independence from the White House.

The order requires independent agencies to submit proposed regulations to the White House for review. It also gives the White House the power to block them from spending money on projects that don't align with the president's priorities. The order says, quote, The order is expected to face legal challenges.

Civil rights groups sued the Trump administration on Wednesday, arguing that some of the president's executive orders discriminate against Black and transgender Americans. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund and Lambda Legal filed a joint federal lawsuit on behalf of three nonprofits that serve unhoused folks, people living with AIDS and HIV, and urban communities.

The suit claims that the president has exceeded his authority by signing executive orders that target diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and establish a binary definition of gender as either male or female. The plaintiffs also argue that these executive orders violate their constitutional right to free speech and equal protection, as well as prevent them from providing essential services to marginalized communities.

A White House spokesman said in a statement on Wednesday that lawsuits like this one are, quote, nothing more than an extension of the left's resistance and that the administration is ready to take them on in court. Elon Musk has been making a little news lately, hasn't he, though? Very positive news. Stand up, Elon. He's a great guy.

While Trump praised Elon Musk at his Miami Saudi investor conference Wednesday, a new poll showed a majority of adults in the U.S. aren't super thrilled with the billionaire. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, just over half of American adults have an unfavorable view of Musk, the world's richest man. Hmm. I wonder why.

Even less popular is Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The poll found two-thirds of respondents have an unfavorable view of him. But would $5,000 change your opinion of Musk? He posted on Twitter Tuesday that he'll, quote, check with the president about sending out checks to Americans because his Department of Government Efficiency dudes are saving the government so much money with all the cuts they're making. The idea started with a tweet from James Fishback, a CEO of the investment firm Azoria.

He suggested that tens of millions of households across the country should be eligible for a chunk of Doge's $2 trillion in targeted budget cuts, or $5,000 for each household. Trump said the concept is under consideration. The numbers are incredible, Elon. So many billions of dollars, billions, hundreds of billions, and...

We're thinking about giving 20% back to the American citizens and 20% down to pay back debt. But before you start figuring out how you're going to spend a magical check for $5,000 that just shows up, a few things to keep in mind. In an interview on Twitter earlier this year, Musk backed off from the goal of $2 trillion in budget cuts. He said that there's a good shot of getting half of that.

Also, to get even close to cutting trillions of dollars, Musk would have to slash popular programs like Medicare and Medicaid, which Trump has said are off limits. And that's the news.

Before we go, another week, another Trump scheme to gut the government, this time by coming for the workers who actually keep it running. We're talking food inspectors, mail carriers, and even those serving in the military. On today's Assembly Required, Stacey unpacks the mass layoffs. Then AFL-CIO President Liz Schuller joins to explain why this GOP power grab won't just hurt workers, it'll backfire. Plus, what you can do to protect workers. Listen to Assembly Required now, wherever you get your podcasts.

That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review. Think about whether or not Delta offering you $30,000 would make it okay that your plane flipped over and tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading and not just about how, yes, $30,000 is a fair amount of money, but also your plane flipped over, like me, what a day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at cricket.com slash subscribe. I'm Jane Koston and Delta, get it together.

Water Day is a production of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producers are Raven Yamamoto and Emily Fore. Our producer is Michelle Alloy. We had production help today from Johanna Case, Joseph Dutra, Greg Walters, and Julia Clare. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, and our executive producer is Adrienne Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gillyard and Kashaka. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.

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