Donkey-Eared Rubio's Meeting with Lavrov: Amateurish Surrender to Putin

He's got pretty big ears, like a jackass. Trump's "24-hour end to the war in Ukraine" turns into a "long and difficult process". Just as they are doing with Palestine, these ignorant amateurs reduce solutions to world conflicts to a moronic Hollywood movie in which John Wayne walks into the saloon and shoots the bad guys. Amerika, Amerika, grow up! Brawn without brain was never good.

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Excerpts from: The BULWARK, Marco Rubio Is Walking into a Trap 

by Mark Hertling, Tue, February 18, 2025

I’M AN ETERNAL OPTIMIST. But my gut, informed by a career spent studying and implementing American foreign policy, tells me this week will not go well. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is set to meet Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Rubio’s diplomatic experience is limited to his time in the Senate, during which he served on the Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees. He has primarily focused on Latin American policy. Lavrov, on the other hand, has been Russia’s foreign minister since 2004, which makes him the longest-serving foreign minister in modern history. Before that he was a career diplomat. He is known for both his diplomatic savvy and his mastery of deception.The subject of the Rubio-Lavrov discussions will be Ukraine, a nation that will not have a representative at these alleged peace talks. President Volodymyr Zelensky stated that any decisions made during these talks without Ukraine's participation are unacceptable. Representatives from NATO, the EU, or any European nation have not been formally invited to take part in the sessions. Perhaps my gut is just reflecting my bias toward Ukrainians being allowed to defend their territorial sovereignty and their nation’s independence.

In late February 2022, as Russian tanks rumbled toward Kyiv and the world braced for Ukraine’s collapse, I had a gut reaction, too. While many analysts and even some U.S. government officials expressed concern that Ukraine would collapse within days, I publicly predicted that Ukraine would not just hold their own but repulse the invasion, which they did. My assessment was based on my experiences with both the Russian military (which I said at the time was inept) and Ukraine’s fledgling army (which had shown significant improvement since the early 2000s). Ukraine’s unique culture, spirit, resolve, and refusal to bow to tyranny have since become world famous.

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THE MEETING BETWEEN RUBIO AND LAVROV will not be one of equals. As a senator, Rubio was, until late in his tenure, a strong supporter of aid to Ukraine. But he now must represent a more transactional president whose skepticism of Ukraine and friendliness to Russia go back years. Lavrov represents a paranoid, aggressive, authoritarian regime that still sees itself as engaged in a long-term war against the United States and Europe. The hastily announced meeting being held in Saudi Arabia—an authoritarian Gulf Arab state—may have repercussions far from the war that is ostensibly being settled. The Trump administration and Ukraine must both be struck by the parallels to a previous Trump peace agreement in which another inexperienced secretary of state made a deal with a more seasoned enemy to end a war without any American allies in the room—Trump’s Doha Agreement with the Taliban.

Trump has claimed that the American withdrawal from Afghanistan—which his Doha Agreement guaranteed—inspired Putin to invade Ukraine. If that’s the case, he should consider what lessons others, like Xi Jinping, might take from an American abandonment of Ukraine.

Back in February 2022, the night before tanks rolled across the border of Ukraine, all intelligence indicators suggested that Russia was indeed about to invade, but I remember thinking no one in their right mind would be so foolish as to start such a war. But because of what I’ve learned about Putin over decades serving in Europe, watching him become increasingly emboldened, my gut told me he would be just that rash and reckless. Putin did give the order, his troops indeed crossed into a sovereign country, and the costs to Russia will take generations to recover.

The United States and NATO can counter Putin’s criminal action and restore international order—not just in Europe, but anywhere an aggressive, authoritarian country might be considering a land-grab. I hope this time my gut is wrong, and that our support for Ukraine continues.