larry johnson shows how the orange man fumbled again;

Steve Bryen, as usual, put up an excellent piece at his Substack describing a major mistake by Donald Trump regarding the issue of providing security guarantees to Ukraine as part of a peace deal with Russia. According to Steve:

The Trump administration made a massive political blunder on August 20th in its pursuit of a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. The blunder centered on a “virtual” meeting led by NATO.

Prior to that meeting, Trump had promised the Russians that any deal would rule out Ukraine’s NATO membership. Apparently the Russians read Trump’s assurance to include no NATO peacekeepers. That was a mistake.

The NATO-led meeting was intended to lay out military options to meet Ukraine’s request for security guarantees. The discussion apparently considered different views on what a security guarantee would actually look like: would it, for example, include troops and if so, how many, where would they be based in Ukraine and what role would they perform? Stories are around that some countries, the British and French in one version, the British, Germans and Poles in another (unlikely option), would actually put boots on the ground in Ukraine, although British sources insist that its troops would not be on the front line but “far back” from the action. . . .

Russia’s reaction came quickly and rejected foreign participation in security guarantees for Ukraine. Speaking about the possibility of foreign troops being deployed on Ukrainian territory, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said that Moscow has always viewed this as unacceptable. “And I hope they understand that this would be absolutely unacceptable for Russia and for all sensible political forces in Europe,” Lavrov said.” He went on to say that such proposals are a “road to nowhere.”...........more...........