The Ukraine Freedom Project is currently running a digital ad campaign for the thirty second ad Putin is a Liar to a targeted list of 4,000 Washington DC insiders. We project our audience will see the commercial about 96x each on average. You can watch it here.
Vladimir Putin has violated every ceasefire he has signed with Ukraine. Putin doesn’t want peace. He won’t stop with Ukraine. He wants to take over Eastern Europe, rebuild the Soviet Union and threaten America.
President Trump is the only person in the world who can stop him.
Any peace agreement today requires some amount of good behavior from Putin, a characteristic which he has yet to display.
Putin is currently in violation of at least 25 ceasefires with Ukraine between 2014 and the full scale invasion in 2022. Most ceasefires were violated by the Russians almost as soon as they were signed. The longest any ceasefire lasted was about four months. Putin has also violated or abandoned more than twenty agreements with dozens of countries including the U.S.A.
If Putin signs a peace agreement now, the only question is how long it will take him to break it. The world needs America to lead in making a peace agreement with teeth. Only President Trump can do it.
China and Iran are helping Russia build drones which Putin has launched into Poland and Romania, both NATO countries. Suspected Russian drones have shut down airports in Berlin, Munich, the Netherlands, Latvia, Norway and five in Denmark.
This could happen in America. And worse.
China and Russia are working together, along with North Korea, what is left of Iran and most of the Islamic extremist groups. Chinese Premier Xi Jinping has called Vladimir Putin his best friends on many occasions.
America has spent tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to help build Ukraine’s military into the largest in Europe - nearly a million people and more than a third of Europe’s combined military forces. Any peace agreement that limits the size of Ukraine’s military is not placing America First - it is letting Putin decide how to spend American taxpayer dollars.
Without tough negotiations, peace in Ukraine will last long enough for Putin to rebuild his military and try again.
Putin has a personnel problem. He has to pay Russian volunteers who fight in Ukraine exorbitant amounts to walk into that meat grinder - the purchasing power parity (PPP) equivalent of $21,000 per month in the US, $4,200 in cash. Similarly, he is paying an estimated $116,000 in cash to families for death benefits, the PPP equivalent of $580,000 to an American. With some 1.4 million casualties, Putin’s military personnel costs add up to some $35 billion or $45 billion annually.
Iranian-designed Shahed drones cost about $50,000 each to build. These are the long range drones Putin uses to kill Ukrainian civilians. If Putin can stop paying personnel costs for a year, that allows him to build as many as a million of these drones to launch into Europe.
When would he launch these drones? Likely when China goes into Taiwan, North Korea goes into South Korea and Islamic terrorists strike in the Middle East and around the world.
All of America’s adversaries are working together.
When Putin’s drones start flying and the rest of the world catches fire, America will need to recoup its investment in Ukraine. Ukraine is the only country in the world that has shown the ability to stop Russian drone attacks whether through tech or tactics.
Our stuff doesn’t work in Ukraine.
We have spent a lot of money on Ukraine. Let’s not let Putin make the decision on how to use U.S. taxpayer funds.
We need a strong hand in negotiations with Putin. President Trump is the only one who can do it.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.