| | | from quora:
[Elena Gold is a prolific writer about the Ukraine-Russian war, born in Russia and seems to have a lot of connections in both countries. Sometimes--like this time--the questions on quora are absurdly simplistic but they evoke interesting nuanced answers.]
Elena Gold
Fri
Why does Trump say Putin wants peace when Putin launches the greatest attack of the war between Russia and Ukraine?
Trump says a lot of things.
Most are plain lies.
(Rubio’s body language: priceless.)
But in regards to Putin, Trump obviously has to demonstrate he’s helping him to maul Ukraine to submission.
Meanwhile, Trump has to also pretend that he believes that Putin wants peace, hoping that the Ukrainians would give up. Otherwise, Trump’s game falls apart.
Trump’s “2 weeks” fake “deadlines” have 2 goals:
- Make Americans forget and move on from Ukraine’s war, overwhelmed by their own pressing issues.
- Give Ukrainians and Europeans a false sense of security and hope, to exhaust their psychological resilience.
In the book about surviving a Nazi concentration camp, Viktor Frankl says that the first to die were those who hoped it would end soon.
Trump’s advisors probably still use the same paradigm, in attempts to exhaust the Ukrainians’ psychological resilience capital. What the advisors forgot to tell him (because they haven’t been watching this war from the start) is that the Ukrainians already got “vaccinated” against this technique.
At the start of the war, freelance advisor to the office of the president of Ukraine Alexei Arestovych (who fled Ukraine in Sep.2023) was using the same technique, promising the war would end “in 2–3 weeks”. This became an infamous byline — which actually helped the Ukrainians survive the horrors of the first weeks of the invasion.
Popular video blogger Mark Feigin invited Arestovych on his channel to provide daily briefings about the war to the public in the first days of the war in Feb.2022. This is how Arestovych scored his “trust rating” in Ukraine. In mid-2023, Feigin abruptly cut daily videos with Arestovych, refusing to reveal why. Recently he explained it was because Arestovych wanted him to become part of an info-coup. Soon after that, Arestovych fled Ukraine.
So, the Ukrainians already don’t believe anyone saying things would massively improve in “2 weeks”.
The most trusted politician in Ukraine now is Valery Zaluzhnyi, former commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces (until February 2024) and current Ukraine’s ambassador in the UK. He said that if the war goes the way it goes, it “can last until 2034” — so, the Ukrainians aren’t under rose-colored illusions.
Curiously, after the clash in the Oval Cabinet on February 28, 2025 — when Trump and Vance attacked Zelenskyy and “threw the Ukrainians out of the White House” — Vance tried to call Zaluzhnyi, seeking to replace the Ukrainian president — but Zaluzhnyi declined his call.
Instead, Zaluzhnyi met Zelenskyy at the airport in London, as he was flying back from the U.S., and posted a photo with him.
Reportedly, Vance’s team tried various diplomatic and other channels, to contact Zaluzhnyi in an attempt to sound out possible replacements for Zelenskyy — to no avail.
Zaluzhnyi stood with Zelenskyy to demonstrate unity, feeling that Ukraine was “humiliated”.
And here is more.
As you know, Vance is Thiel’s guy, and Thiel and Musk are part of the same group.
Musk is also close with blogger Lex Fridman, and Fridman visited Ukraine in late 2022 and met with Arestovych.
My theory is that it was Fridman who encouraged Arestovych to resign and flee, on behalf of Musk-Thiel group, who picked him as greedy and ambitious (Arestovych resigned on his own volition in early 2023).
At the time, Arestovych had the trust rating second only to Zelenskyy — he was doing video streams about the situation at the front, which became the “go to” daily summaries of events. (After his escape he lost all the trust in Ukraine, barely 5% of Ukrainians still trust Arestovych.)
So, my theory is that Thiel-Musk wanted to make Arestovych their puppet president of Ukraine, who would be helpful in making Ukraine surrender to Russia. But because he lost all ratings by now, they had to look for someone else — and solution was to approach Zaluzhnyi.
Interesting, when Lex Fridman came to interview Zelenskyy in early January 2025 — this was the time when Musk had a huge influence on Trump — Fridman kept repeating that “Putin just loves his country”, trying to make Zelenskyy say that Russia and Ukraine should be friends again.
I hear the same phrase now (from some commentators here) about Trump — “president Trump loves his country” — this absolutely makes my hair stand on end. It’s the same notion: “The guy is doing horrible things but that’s because he simply loves his country.” (And I suspect the notion comes from the same camp.)
No, the guy is doing horrible things because he is a horrible person who doesn’t have empathy for others and respect for the law. He’s doing horrible things because he thinks he can get away with that.
I’m convinced that Fridman is an FSB mole.
He was born in the USSR — just like Sergio Gor, Trump’s chief of personnel, who is now being sent to India as the U.S. ambassador. (Would you send a suspected Russian asset as an ambassador of your country to a key regional ally? Weird.)
So, Thiel-Musk camp is certainly infiltrated by the FSB (Fridman) and traitors (Arestovych), and they seem to be supported by online MAGA (fake Americans, created by Russian troll farms under control of Simonyan and Dugin) and western influencers on Russian payout.
Actually, it looks like Musk is the one paying the westerners now: Russian troll farms amplify posts favorable to Russia, and Musk pays the influencers (based on post’s views) through X-Twitter. The more pro-Russia content they post, the more they get paid.
Trump by now is just a figurehead for Project 2025 (Miller, Bannon), and Vance is the figurehead for Palantir (Thiel-Musk).
The puppeteers are staying behind the scenes. |
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