Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio during their meeting at Diriyah Palace, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on February 18, 2025. (AFP/SPA)
We must be able to acknowledge that Donald Trump has created a serious constitutional crisis while also recognizing that changing the U.S. relationship with Russia is groundbreaking and a necessity.
“Mueller Finds No Trump Russia Conspiracy …” proclaimed a portion of a New York Times headline on March 24, 2019. Two years of special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation ended with a whimper after endless screeds about “walls closing in” on an alleged Trump conspiracy with the Russian government. The corporate media and elements of the surveillance state fed public dislike of the seemingly accidental president with false tales of “pee tapes,” Russians hacking the Democratic National Committee, and other claims later found to be false. Yet six years later the frame of Donald Trump as a Russian stooge/Manchurian candidate/traitor is trotted out with great effectiveness because millions of people still believe that the well orchestrated trope is true.
It takes a special level of political maturity to seriously analyze the actions of this administration. On a daily basis, Trump lurches from foolish declarations about changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to punishing the Associated Press because they refused to go along with the inane renaming. His alliance with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is beset by lawsuits and reliably republican voters having buyers’ remorse. Even elements of the Trump team are showing signs of division with some agencies saying that 2 million federal workers must tell Elon Musk how they spend their work day while others saying that they don’t.
Despite these numerous crises created by Trump himself, he has a great deal of leeway on foreign policy and he is using it to do what he intended in his first term, make a historic change in relations with Russia. Even before the 2022 proxy war in Ukraine began, successive presidents were engaged in decades long brinkmanship with the Russian Federation. After the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States and its “collective west” allies continued an expansion process that put every Warsaw Pact country in the European Union and into the NATO military alliance.
NATO expansion and a western backed 2014 coup in Ukraine began the trajectory for the war which began on February 24, 2025. In 2015, Germany, France, and Ukraine signed and then refused to implement the Minsk Agreements, which would have provided autonomy and language rights to the Donbas region and provide Ukraine with security guarantees.
But the collective west was collectively dishonest. After leaving office Angela Merkel of Germany and Francois Hollande of France admitted they never had any intention of making good on the Minsk guarantees and saw them as an opportunity to rearm Ukraine. In turn Ukraine continued its attacks on Donbas and killed an estimated 14,000 people before Russia began what it called a Special Military Operation.
None of this easily provable information ever made it into the pages of major corporate media or onto network broadcasts. While ultimately the only Mueller investigation prosecutions were for process crimes such as false statements and obstruction, the myth of Trump being “owned” by Russian president Vladimir Putin continued. Trump left office under a cloud after refusing to concede or to condemn his supporters’ rampage in the Capitol building on January 6, 2021. Joe Biden succeeded him but the Democratic Party practice of talking left during a campaign while governing right once in office soured voters who were also noticing Biden’s obvious decline. The last minute effort to replace him with a less than stellar vice president along with a commitment to continue a U.S. funded genocide in Gaza, made Trump the 47th president of the United States yet he is still heartily disliked by half the population of this country.
It was inevitable that once he announced meetings between his Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his Russian counterparts, that Russiagate would reemerge as a talking point. It is very unfortunate that corporate media colluded with the Biden administration to hide the facts of the Ukraine crisis from the public. Only readers of independent media such as Black Agenda Report are aware that there is evidence that in 2022, the Biden administration blew up the NordStream pipeline, which brought Russian gas to Europe and to Germany in particular. Likewise, the fact that Russia and Ukraine engaged in peace talks in April 2022 is also known only to consumers of independent media. The war could have ended quickly and many lives could have been saved, but the U.S. and the United Kingdom assured Ukraine of a continuing flow of arms if they continued the war. Ukraine did so to its own detriment. It has decisively lost the war and any efforts to keep funding it amount to little more than fighting to the last Ukrainian.
Now it is left to Donald Trump, the man who pardoned the January 6 rioters and who says he doesn’t have to follow court orders, and who officially declared that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs caused a plane crash, to turn around dangerous policies. Trump’s effort is groundbreaking. Even in his final months in office, Joe Biden attempted to escalate the war by promising the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) to the Ukrainians. In a comical effort to win a propaganda war while losing on the battlefield, they even created mythical North Korean soldiers, some 11,000, who were said to be stationed in Kursk, Russia. Every aspect of the Ukraine war has been visible on video footage, including knife fights to the death and drone attacks, but there was no evidence that 11,000 North Koreans were in Russia. The desperate war propaganda could not have been created absent the continued partnership of the Biden team and their friends in corporate media.
The bipartisan U.S. effort to fund not just the war but all government spending in Ukraine has cost some $175 billion. Millions of people here were kicked off of Medicaid and SNAP nutrition benefits while money was shoveled down a Ukrainian rabbit hole while the tide of war turned against the U.S. and its allies. No national political figure except Donald Trump has suggested doing anything differently. It is little wonder that millions of people believe the Ukraine war to be the result of an evil Russian leader and nothing else. It is left to the disreputable Trump to change the trajectory of a catastrophe.
While court cases against Trump’s attempt to usurp every branch of government proliferate, Ukrainian men are being dragged off the streets and out of their homes to be sent to their deaths on the front lines. Money that could house the homeless and pay for everything from education to health care continues to be given to the military-industrial complex in a futile effort to weaken Russia.
Despite these contradictions, it is vital that a chance for a terrible conflict to end be supported for humanitarian and political purposes. The U.S. cannot sanction Russia into oblivion or regime change. A normalization of relations between the two nations is desperately needed.
Margaret Kimberley is the author of Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents. You can support her work on Patreon and also find it on the Twitter, Bluesky, and Telegram platforms. She can be reached via email at margaret dot kimberley at blackagendareport dot com.
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