By Gilbert Doctorow, Website, 1/22/25
Ignorant and delusional: Trump proposes to continue the Biden policy of ramping up sanctions on Russia
In the past 24 hours, several leading voices in the Alternative Media have published information suggesting that Biden’s awful policy towards Russia over the Ukraine war is being overturned by the new President alongside the rest of the Biden ‘legacy.’
In his 21 January article on Sonar 21, Larry Johnson explains how the Pentagon ‘has reportedly fired or suspended all personnel directly responsible for managing military assistance to Ukraine.” Meanwhile the Pentagon’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia, is said to have already resigned. But does this mark ‘the beginning of what some see as a strategic pivot’ as Johnson tells us?
On his substack platform, Simplicius76 makes the same point about firings and suspensions. To this he adds the following interesting news: “The US this morning in Washington, withdrew all applications to contractors for logistics through Rzeszow, Constanta and Varna. At NATO bases in Europe, all shipments to Ukraine have been suspended and closed.”
On the face of it, these dispatches are important and suggest light at the end of the tunnel of the Biden years. But then I wonder why the Russian news and analysis television programs have not said a word about all of this. Instead, they focused on Donald Trump’s remarks this morning on his Truth Social platform, which tells a very different story about the President’s intentions. And the Russians are not alone in ignoring the seemingly good news and directing all attention to the bad news that we find in Trump’s written statement. The Financial Times this evening has just published a lengthy article on this very subject.
Per the FT, Trump said he wants the Russians to enter into talks with the Ukrainians to end the war NOW, and if they do not agree he will punish them severely. He intends to impose still tougher sanctions on the Russian oil and gas industry and he will put very high tariffs ‘on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries.’
Russia’s Sixty Minutes program this afternoon discussed all of the points of possible punishment that Trump put into his Truth Social text. They laughed aloud at the idea of raising tariffs on Russian goods sold in the United States, since the total volume of Russian exports to the USA in 2024 was 350 million dollars, and much of that was for uranium which US power stations badly needed to stay operating. Th also ridiculed Trump for some foolish and ignorant statements that he made to journalists this morning: that he didn’t want to hurt the Russian people, since ‘Russia had helped us to win WWII,’ and that Russia had lost 60 million of its citizens in that war. For Russians, the question of who helped whom to win WWII is precisely the inverse, and their war dead, bad as they were, amounted to 26 million.
As for coming to the negotiating table with Zelensky, whom they do not recognize as the legitimate president of Ukraine given that his term expired 9 months ago, that is a nonstarter. Vladimir Putin has said repeatedly that the war will end on Russia’s terms with or without a negotiated document.
Accordingly, what we see here is not the ignorant and delusional notions about how the U.S. will dictate the end to the war given to the public by General Kellogg or Michael Waltz or Marco Rubio, but ignorant and delusional notions from President Trump himself. As of today, Trump is the laughing stock of Russian elites.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025