As the British Would Say, "Rubbish"

Former Ohio senator and current Vice President and master of irony:

JD Vance on Russia-Ukraine: "What I admire about the president is he's not trying to focus on every nitpicky detail of how this thing started three and a half year ago, he's trying to focus on the nitpicky details of now." pic.twitter.com/UCXG63U317

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 24, 2025

Focusing on a nitpicky detail of how the thing started three and a half years ago is exactly what Donald Trump has done. He always has blamed Ukraine, invaded from the east, for starting the war with Russia. As President, on February 18 he told reporters at Mar-a-Lago of Volodymyr Zelensky "You should have never started it. You could have made a deal." At the White House on April 14, he stated "you don't start a war against someone 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles."   And speaking on Fox and Friends the day after the August 19 summit with European leaders, he argued 

Russia is a powerful military nation. You know, whether people like it or not, it's a powerful nation. It's a much bigger nation. It's not a war that should have been started. You don't do that. You don't take on a nation that's 10 times your size.

Donald Trump likes and admires Vladimir Putin. Putin projects strength, as does the American President.  However, unlike Trump, the Russian President is in total control of his country, a goal Trump obviously has set for himself.

And wealthy, perhaps the fourth richest individual in the world. Although we don't know the source of his wealth

The Russian president is worth up to $200 billion, according to financier Bill Browder. Once the largest foreign investor in Russia, Browder testified in 2017 that Putin's wealth was amassed after the Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky was jailed in 2003 for fraud and tax evasion.

"After Khodorkovsky's conviction, the other oligarchs went to Putin and asked him what they needed to do to avoid sitting in the same cage as Khodorkovsky," Browder told the US Senate Judiciary Committee. "From what followed, it appeared that Putin's answer was, '50%.'"

That $200 billion estimate would make Putin one of the richest people in the world, behind Elon Musk and Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, and above Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Putin is often photographed wearing "high-end luxury watches" that retail "for multiple times his supposed annual income", said Fortune. He is also rumoured to be the owner of numerous homes and hundreds of cars, as well as dozens of aircraft and helicopters.

His "lavish lifestyle" is regularly "on display" said the UK Foreign Office in 2022, after the war with Ukraine broke out and the new sanctions on Russia were announced.

That's very important. As former Trump national security advisor John Bolton has explained, "if Trump believes that he has friendly relations with someone, you know, like Vladimir Putin, then relations between the two countries will be much better."

As a consequence, Trump

has made a habit of blurring the boundary between domestic policy grievances and foreign policy goals. He is uniquely vulnerable to manipulation, critics say, because he views national and international affairs through a single prism of self-interest. 

And so the American President has embraced Vladimir Putin and the latter's argument and rhetoric, which makes it less likely that an outcome critical to the security of Ukraine and the European continent will be achieved. That's hardly the stuff of "nitpicky details."

 

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