Bill Browder skriver litt om alt som skjer:
"Despite his best efforts, Trump may just have won the war for Kyiv
Putin gambled that the West would lose its nerve, and Ukraine would always be held on a short leash by its friends. That leash has snapped .Trump never meant to help Ukraine win. But he may have done it anyway.
By stripping away America’s grip over Kyiv, the president handed Ukraine the freedom to take the war to Russia.
During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised again and again that he would end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. Of course he didn’t. We are now more than 1,580 days into this war and it still rages. But here is the irony. Trump’s own actions, none of them meant to help Ukraine, may have brought the end of this war closer than anything that came before.
Go back to Joe Biden. He promised that America would stand with Ukraine “for as long as it takes”, and he sent more than $66bn in military aid. That was welcome. But it came with a crippling condition. In return for American weapons, Washington demanded that Ukraine do nothing to “escalate”. The Biden administration had swallowed Putin’s nuclear sabre-rattling whole, and it forced an impossible position on Kyiv.In practice it meant Ukraine could only strike Russian forces once they had crossed into Ukraine. Think about how absurd that was. Russia could mass its troops on the border in complete safety. Ukraine had to wait until those troops invaded before it was allowed to fire back. So the war dragged on. Russia took staggering losses, and still time was on its side.
Then Trump arrived. One of his first moves was to choke off American money and weapons. He demanded that Ukraine pay America back for Biden’s aid through a one-sided minerals deal. And he humiliated Volodymyr Zelensky in front of the world in that Oval Office meeting, telling him, “You don’t have any cards.”
It was demoralising for Ukraine and for everyone who wants Russia to lose. But it opened a door. Once Washington no longer bankrolled Ukraine, Washington could no longer give Ukraine orders. The leash was off. The United States could no longer demand that Ukraine spare targets inside Russia. That single change has altered the course of the war. For months now, Ukraine has used its own drones and missiles to take apart Russia’s oil refining and export industry. We wake up to images of refineries on fire across Russia. When Putin opened his flagship economic forum in St Petersburg in June, the so-called “Russian Davos”, it began with a Ukrainian strike on the city’s oil terminal and black smoke hanging over the skyline. A warship burned in the harbour. His guests arrived to the sight of his war coming home.
The damage is real. At times these strikes have knocked out close to a quarter of Russia’s refining capacity. In late May, Russian refining fell to its lowest level in two decades. Dozens of regions have brought in fuel rationing. There are queues at petrol stations, and in Crimea the pumps have stopped serving ordinary drivers. An oil and gas superpower can no longer supply its own people with petrol. That is remarkable. While Trump and Europe dither over oil sanctions, Zelensky has imposed his own, one burning refinery at a time.
Ukraine is hitting weapons plants and military targets too, and it is strangling the supply lines into occupied Crimea in ways we could not have imagined a year ago. Trump told Zelensky he had no cards. It turns out Putin is the one holding nothing.
This is no moment to sit back and applaud. It is the moment to press harder. The West should help Ukraine finish the job.
That means more weapons. It means more air defence, so that Russia’s inevitable retaliation against Ukrainian cities is far less deadly. It means we finally confiscate Russia’s roughly $300bn in frozen central bank reserves, most of it sitting in Europe, and hand it to Ukraine to fund the fight. More than four years on, that money is still only frozen, not seized. And it means secondary sanctions on the refineries in India, China and Turkey that keep buying Russian oil, so that Putin’s war machine is starved of cash and grinds to a halt.
I have spent more than a decade as one of Putin’s most determined opponents. I know how he reads weakness, and I know how he reads strength. He gambled that the West would lose its nerve, and that Ukraine would always be held on a short leash by its own friends. For once, that leash has snapped.
Our job now is to make sure it stays off."
Sir William Browder KCMG is an American-born British financier who formerly headed the largest foreign investment fund in Russia. In 2005 he was declared a threat to Russian national security and deported to the UK
[uthevninger er gjort av untertegnede]
tl;dr: Hjelp som kommer med begrensninger på bruk er ikke hjelp, men snarere en tvangstrøye
