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Whatever is in the deal, Trump will ensure it favours Putin. Zelenskyy is over a barrel here without Trump’s support. Nor will Putin necessarily stick to his end of any deal. He has renegged on previous agreements like the Minsk accords. He and Trump are a lot alike. I think Trump sees him simply as a junior real estate rival that he can either beat or do deals with. They are in the same business.

So you’re saying that the Europeans should have caved to Putin’s threat, which is all it was, and let him overrun Ukraine? Trump’s way of defusing Putin’s threat is to reward him for invading Ukraine, trashing Zelenskyy and NATO countries for trying to stop him. and robbing Ukraine of its rare earth minerals because he has now decided Ukraine has to retrospectively pay back what the US gave freely. On top of that, none of that will defuse Putin’s threat in the future because he will simply try it again. He still has his nuclear warheads and he still hasn’t got Ukraine.

As Macron said, they do regard them as donations. Ukraine doesn’t have to pay them back. If eventually the frozen Russian assets are used to help rebuild Ukraine and possibly recompense the Europeans, no guarantees that either will happen at this point, it will be reparation for Putin’s invasion and destruction of Ukraine. Of course with Trump and Putin now on the same side who knows what will happen to the Russian assets.

I don’t know whether Australia has frozen any Russian assets. Hopefully we have if they had any here. Why would Albo expect anything back for what was donated to Ukraine to defend themselves against Putin’s aggression? We give a lot of assistance to all kinds of countries and aid organisations for humanitarian and goodwill reasons and don’t expect repayment.

Agreed, especially with Trump going in to bat for Putin and dumping Ukraine and his former NATO allies.

If Putin wants his assets unfrozen all he has to do is pull his troops out of Ukraine. The Ukrainians are not too happy about Putin stealing their country either.

Which ones? Those crossing into Canada?

Trump and Macron spoke to the press after their meeting. Trump said that Europe’s contributions to Ukraine were loans that would be paid back while the US had got nothing for their efforts. Macron corrected him on the spot and said they weren’t loans, unless Russian’s frozen assets were possibly used one day to repay the Europeans. Trump was not at all happy about being contradicted in public and it showed on his face. He will have it in for Macron now for being corrected in front of the cameras. That won’t help the peace deal.

The brickwork in those workshop buildings is a work of art. A number have been converted internally to house medical facilities of various types as well as the WA Police Operations Centre. All the internal framing of the buildings has been left exposed even down to the railway lines in some areas. It’s a great example of how to re-purpose buildings in an intelligent way to preserve the past but make them useful in the present.

I think Trump himself is just the frontman in that effort. He’s not a strategic thinker but his instincts, competitiveness and contempt for partnership arrangements plus the inherent acquisitiveness of a real estate developer fit neatly into that scenario. He operates on a more personal level where personal grievances and a desire to dominate govern his behaviour more than any thoughts of implementing a global geopolitical plan. However no doubt that suits those sitting quietly in the background who have those global aspirations very well.

I think that’s optimistic. It’s not happening that fast. They may be running the country into the ground but they are still running it and there’s not a lot an unhappy population can do about that until the mid-terms.

Putin will be eyeing off the Baltic states too in his quest to re-establish the Soviet empire. From his point of view he’s just had one of the best months of his career knowing that the US won’t lift a finger to stop him.

Trump just did an interview with Brian Kilmead on Fox News titled “I’ve had it!”. I can’t post a link at the moment, but it’s worth listening to because it shows just how appalling Trump is as a person and as the leader of the free world. It’s pretty sobering.

There are plenty of nice remote beaches where they could land but they’d be marching for a week before they came across someone to conquer.

No. Surprisingly, Dutton has actually called out Trump for saying Ukraine is responsible for the war. I don’t think he would have risked that if he was PM but he has an election coming up so he’s mindful of his more important audience and contrasting himself with Albo’s approach.

I think Albo and Co are smart to be publicly non-controversial and hopefully more aggressive behind the scenes. It’s unfortunate, but anything that Trump hears that he doesn’t want to hear gets his back up and you’ve suddenly become his enemy. See what happened to Zelenskyy when he said that Trump was living in an information bubble, even though he said he had great respect for the president and the US. It seemed to me that he was only trying to suggest that Trump was being fed misinformation, but Trump took it as Zelenskyy calling him an idiot. Of course that suited Trump very well anyway, because he’s looking for any excuse to shaft Ukraine.

You got that right, Nev.

That is why we have a democracy. Most people are middle of the road and vote that way. That’s why someone like Pauline Hansen is not running the country even though she has a seat in Parliament. That’s also why we currently have so many independents. The gap between extremists will never be narrow because if it was they wouldn’t be extremists.

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Where is the evidence that this equilibrium and balance that you talk about actually exists to either produce some kind of middle ground or cancel each other out? It seems to me to be just an abstract, meaningless concept.

Trump just wants to end the war as quickly as possible and will do whatever it takes so that he can brag that he did it when no one else could. He doesn’t care whether the terms pave the way for Putin to re-start the war in the future or invade some other country, as long as it doesn’t happen on his watch. He doesn’t like Zelenskyy and doesn’t care about Europe. He sees the Ukraine war as just some remote conflict that he doesn’t want to be involved in. His only interest in Ukraine is their minerals.

He’s now called Zelensky a dictator who should ‘move fast’ or he won’t have a country left. Putin is saying that he has now given Trump the correct information about Ukraine. This is not going to end well for Ukraine.

The takeover of the Justice Department by the convicted felon continues:

Not forgetting that the FAA fined Musk over $600,000 for launch safety violations.

Keith Dunstan started it in 1967