I heard about a couple of interesting developments recently concerning the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which are things I have written would happen.

1. China has actually entered to the negotiation process with Russia and Ukraine. The whole idea of Trump taking the rare earth metals in Ukraine is a bizarre idea. It seems to come from the neocons like Lindsey Graham who thought that there are 11 trillion dollars in rare earth minerals in Ukraine. This makes absolutely no sense since that would put Ukraine in the top 10 natural resource rich resource nations in the world, just in terms of rare metals alone. So I think that this is overstated. As you probably have heard, there were US officials dispatched to Kiev who were supposed to sign a deal with Zelenskyy for the rare earth metals in exchange for security. But because now there is going to be no security from the US, Zelenskyy declined to sign. The basic situation is that the “Kyiv regime” is willing to sell off all of Ukraine in return for security, which would be very bad for the people of course.

So China entered into the process and they’ve stated to both Russia and Ukraine that they are willing to dispatch engineers and scientists to determine how much mineral resources actually exist in Ukraine and help to develop them. Most of mineral resources actually exist in the Donbas and other regions that Russia already controls (somewhere between 53 to 75 percent according to different estimates), so China and Russia are going to be working together to rebuild the region.

In the near future, we will see many countries jockey — not to buy Ukraine’s resources in exchange for security guarantees — but to buy Ukraine.

2. The other development is that both the city of Pokrovsk and the city of Kostyantynivka, which are two major linchpins in the Ukrainian defense lines, are caught in tactical cauldrons right now. Once supply lines are cut off, which could be anywhere between now and June, those cities will fall to the Russians.

So unless Trump, Vance, Rubio and team are willing to cede control of the entirety of the four oblasts plus Crimea, the battle is likely to rage on at least until the end of 2025. But the upshot of this is that Russia could also take anywhere between five to eight oblasts, not just the four, if the Ukrainian army collapses.

The former may actually happen first due to the fact that the United States doesn’t really have anything to negotiate with. Trump doesn’t technically control the Ukrainian government’s position. And there may be no Ukraine to negotiate with if the army collapses. Shortly after that the government would collapse, or they could be in a state of civil war.

What would make the most sense for Trump is to accept the majority of Putin’s terms and throw in a few other chestnuts like a worldwide summit meeting to control nuclear arms, and then just submit it to the Zelenskyy regime saying “Take it or leave it, otherwise we’re defunding you.”

The third item is unrelated, but it has to do with the US and the EU economy.

3. In 1981, the US had 31.8% debt to GDP ratio. Now it’s over 120% and unless the United States cuts spending, it’s going to spiral into the 200% range at which point there might be no coming back from that. Cutting military spending is the biggest chunk that we can do right now. And it’ll be advantageous to get China and Russia to agree to also cut back on nuclear arms race, which is what Trump just said a few hours ago. It might be that behind the scenes, the economic advisors actually know what trouble that we’re in, and that they’re desperately cutting everything that they can cut in order to bring down the debt.

Already Europe is divided and most of their economies are in shambles and growing at a rate of near zero percent per year, even while Russia posted a 4.1% GDP growth for 2025, which was way above estimates. That’s the estimate given by the IMF and the World Bank in Washington DC by the way, and the real amount might actually be higher than that when they take account of everything in a few months. The Russian stock market skyrocketed after February 12th of last week, and it looks like that their GDP growth estimates are going to be the same, if not higher for 2025. That ought to scare a lot of people in Europe and force them into taking stock of their relationship with Russia economically and politically.

If the EU is in trouble, the same thing could happen in our country, although we have quite a buffer due to the fact that we hold the world’s reserve currency and can print money anytime we want. The devaluation of the euro actually makes it look like our dollar is more sound, although we’re actually in a similar freefall, just at a lesser rate. Everything is relative. Most people don’t get that out relative GDP growth is actually funded by the three trillion dollars in printed money that went into the economy from 2020 and 2024. Without that stimulus, we would have sunk into a depression.

The EU is caught between a rock and a hard place. They need cheap Russian energy to function. Their sanctions are only helping Russia and harming them more, and lifting the sanctions and returning the stolen billions of USD would probably put Russia into a growth curve similar to what they experienced from 2001 to 2007, in other words, close to double digit growth.

So the White House isn’t really capitulating to Russia, they’re just acknowledging that the US lost the proxy war on every single level, economically, politically, technologically, militarily, kinetically, etc. Further, the White House can’t do anything to stop BRICS. That would throw the world economy into a depression.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the Biden administration’s foreign policy was the absolute worst disaster in American history — greater than that of James Buchanan and anything since then.

The important thing to take into account is that Biden’s “Ukraine Project” policy goes all the way back to the Obama administration in 2009 and prior to that the George W. Bush administration. Then you could even throw in the Cheney, Libby, Kristol, Kagan, Nuland (“The New American Century”) axis going all the way back to 1992. This has been a rotten egg that has taken a long time to hatch and now the chickens have come home to roost.