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I come from a long line of Jewish Bundists. Now, Molly Crabapple is part of our family.
My grandparents live in a small apartment in Santa Monica. It has white walls and wood floors and is full of light. The living room window faces the street, and my grandma, Kathy, likes to poke her head out and talk to her neighbors, many of whom moved here after the Palisades fire, just like them.
To me, the Palisades house where my grandparents lived for 60 years always felt frozen in time. While opulent mansions sprung up on their street, their house served as a reminder of the days when a humble community college English professor (my grandpa, Marvin) could buy property in those idyllic, quiet, near-enough-to-smell-the-ocean streets. It was filled with books and family photographs. The living room mantle was covered in beach glass, sea-shells and surf paraphernalia, reminders of Kathy’s 1950s Malibu surf career that was immortalized in my great-grandfather’s novel Gidget, which inspired a series of books, a movie and a TV show.
Marvin’s office was filled with hundreds of Yiddish books with multi-colored spines and black-and-white photos, some of which showed his Bundist father in Polish prisons. As a child, I would scan the spines of fat history books with frightening titles like The War Against the Jews 1933-1945 and Never Say Die! Printed out and pinned to the wall was a quote by Marek Edelman, the Bundist second commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: “To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed & never the oppressors!”
The Bund was a socialist Jewish political party, at one point the most popular in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe. The party was founded on the premise of doikayt, or hereness, the belief that Jews deserved to live in freedom and dignity wherever they happened to be. In practice, this meant that the Bund ran a complex network of schools, self-defense squads, athletic clubs, literary journals, unions and local courts, designed to celebrate Jewish life and protect Jews from ever-surging antisemitic hostility. Knowing that my great-grandfather and namesake, Rubin Zuckerman, was a Bundist meant knowing that he was secular, proudly Jewish, believed firmly in egalitarian values, and was critical about the founding of Israel.
During the pandemic, I would sit in Marvin and Kathy’s overgrown garden, six feet away next to a rusted exercise bike. I would practice my Yiddish by reading aloud postcards sent from some young woman Marvin thought was the greatest — Molly Crabapple.
Molly began interviewing Marvin for her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund, seven years ago. She has a resume that would make anyone’s head spin. Her art is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and her journalistic output has covered Occupy Wall Street, Syrian rebels, and Guantanamo Bay. She’s won two Emmys and was nominated for a National Book Award.
Marvin told me about her with glowing eyes, and I responded with the type of disinterest reserved for recommendations from elder family members. OK, yes, there’s this young woman, she cares about the Bund, she makes art. But I too was a young woman who cared about the Bund and made art, and the narcissism of small differences precluded any real enthusiasm.
In 2026, with my grandparents’ Palisades sanctuary in ashes, I came to their house with a galley copy of Molly’s book. I had received it in the mail a few days earlier, and was quickly stripped of any skeptical haughtiness. Molly was describing a world, an ideology and a sensibility I knew so dearly and intimately from Marvin and Kathy. I had never seen this world so well described, neatly explaining concepts I have failed to adequately convey to even my closest friends.
I was eager to show Marvin the book, hear what Molly had gotten right or wrong, and share in the strange melancholic joy that comes from jewels of truth surviving over time, even as the physical, lived experience is washed away. With our personal archive up in smoke — the letters written by my great-grandparents, the stray notes, the marginalia in books toted from Poland to the Bronx to the Palisades — Molly’s book had a lot to live up to.
We sat on the couch and Marvin licked his finger to flip through the first pages. He went down the opening “Cast of Characters,” which outlines major players in Bundist history.
“Rafael Abramovich — I met him,” he said. “Meyer London — my father was in a picture with him.”
At 93, Marvin struggles to read without reading glasses and a dentist-grade clip-on magnifying glass. I read the introduction aloud to him and he recognized himself as the “octogenarian Yiddish scholar” who sang “partisan hymns” to Molly.
I continued to read aloud — about Molly’s own connection to her Bundist great-grandfather, her experience with leftist organizing, the overwhelming outpouring of support when she wrote about the Bund for the New York Review of Books, and her travels to the former Pale of Settlement, Ukraine and Gaza.
Despite my best intentions, my voice broke when I read this line: “The Bundists built alternate worlds of beauty, of courage, and of hope, which allowed their people to persevere even in the midst of an apocalypse. Their ideas are still vital today.”
I turned to Marvin and he was weeping as well.
“It’s true,” he said, “they were beautiful, beautiful people.”
“Are you two crying?” Kathy called in disbelief from the kitchen.
In Santa Monica, my grandpa’s office is inside of a closet. When I first got the news that the Palisades house had burned down, I emailed David Mazower, the curator at the Yiddish Book Center. I wanted to know if he could help me replace Marvin’s Yiddish books. Over the course of several months, he generously mailed nearly 100 books to us. They have strangers’ names written on their inside covers.
Feteshizing books
Family history embeds itself in your psyche through roundabout means. Marvin picked me up from school every Wednesday from the time I was in kindergarten until I graduated high school. He would buy me ice cream and listen to my favorite CD’s — The Beatles or Simon & Garfunkel, which sounded brand new to him since he stopped listening to popular music after Benny Goodman and prefers classical to anything else. He was my caring friend, who prioritized my own curiosity over anything else. Words like Bund, Yiddish, democratic socialism, Poland, the Holocaust, Zionism entered my subconsciousness, but I didn’t recognize the particular bent of Judaism I was born into until my later teens, when I started to seek out my own community.
Marvin urged me to attend the Yiddish Book Center’s Great Jewish Books program for high school students in 2015. Stepping inside their shtetl-inspired wooden building deep in lush Western Massachusetts was the first time my Yiddishist, Bundist history had a context. I recognized a Jewishness based in literature. A Jewishness based in solidarity and multiculturalism, without borders or armies. Today, my great-grandparents, Manye & Rubin, are featured in the permanent exhibit curated by David Mazower. Their picture stands above a bookshelf with Yiddish translations of Darwin, Marx and George Brandes’ literary criticism, and a full set of Guy de Maupassant and Jack London. Next to the books is a video of Marvin, describing how his parents, although they had no formal education and were garment workers, read all the time. When I tell friends that my great-grandparents are in an exhibition, they ask what they achieved.
“They liked to read,” I say, with my heart full of pride. Their values speak to me as loud as any accomplishment.
“Secular Yiddish literature and the Bund grew together,” Molly writes in her book, “until Bundists became the literature’s greatest champions.”
“Jews fetishized books,” Molly writes elsewhere, describing the “gluttony” for knowledge most working class Eastern European Jews nourished.
Marvin is often critical of any work describing his history, but as we read the first 30 pages of Here Where We Live Is Our Country aloud, he had little to say other than brief exclamations of excitement and agreement. Molly’s writing style is full of delicious and evocative details that allow us to fully inhabit this vanished world. As we read about how Polish borders were drawn and re-drawn, Marvin told me about how he would fill out forms for his parents when he was a child.
“The forms would ask when were you born,” he said, “well, they didn’t really know. OK. Then, the forms ask where you were born. They would shrug and look at each other, saying, ‘Poland? Russia? Was it Russia then? Was it Poland?’
“Then the form would ask, what is your profession. They would say ‘operator.’ They meant sewing machine operator, but as a boy, I just thought, what’s wrong with these people? They don’t know when they were born, they don’t know where they were born, and they’re telling me ‘operator’ is a real job?”
Molly and I share the same generational gap from our Bundist great-grandfathers. Both of us have parents who are not Jewish. And we are both women. Her perspective about female psychology, sexuality and experience allowed me to relate to Bundist history from a new axis. She writes about women who lost their virginity or had sex with multiple men in one day while surviving in the Warsaw Ghetto. She brings Pati Kremer to the forefront over her better known husband, the official founder of the Bund, Arkady Kremer, starting with Pati’s abandonment of her bourgeois upbringing and ending with a visit to her unmarked mass grave in Poland. Molly articulates the pull that many women, including myself, feel to “[subsume themself] in the domestic sphere that takes so many women out of historical record, while sometimes compensating them with private joys”
Women in Here Where We Live Is Our Country crush on their “family maid with sapphic fervor,” have long noses that “a male comrade mentioned unkindly in his memoirs,” make men their projects, sustain relationships with incarcerated men, or sometimes, “never married… had no lovers… just worked for the Bund.” She describes Sophia Dubnova’s efforts to disseminate birth control and lecture series about a woman’s right to orgasm. A non-Jewish Polish Socialist ally woman hides a message in her lipstick case. Abortion happens inside the Warsaw Ghetto, where many women were unwilling to risk bringing a life into such terrifying circumstances. It’s thrilling to hear these subjects written about so candidly, with no sense of shame or secrecy. I realize that in some ways, only a woman from my generation can do this.
A family affair
This past New Year’s Day, my parents and siblings crowded into Marvin and Kathy’s cramped living room. We ate the pastries Kathy had carefully assembled until the atmosphere abruptly shifted from friendly to tense. My father, a sociology professor, admitted he was planning on going to an academic conference in Israel. Although all of our family leans heavily left, my father feels a more profound connection to Israel. He lived there and worked on a kibbutz for several years.
My dad and I fell into the kind of argument many children have had with their parents since Oct. 7th, 2023. Despite fully knowing our shared values, we couldn’t help accusing the other of representing extremes: My dad must believe war crimes and genocide are legitimate means of self defense; I must believe Jews don’t deserve their own country. Marvin intervened thoughtfully, trying to bring our commonality to the forefront. Repeatedly, he referenced the Bund.
The Bund’s story is able to sidestep so many claustrophobic tropes around Zionism. Their devotion to Jewish safety and cultural autonomy leaves no room for accusations of antisemitism. If nothing else, they prove a point that bears urgent repeating for Jews and non-Jews alike — there has never been a singular Jewish consensus on the necessity of our own ethnostate. Like the Warsaw Ghetto fighters Molly resurrects in her book, like my own family, Jews have always argued about the best way forward.
I take enormous comfort reading Bundist leader Henryk Erlich’s 1933 speech, one that Marvin shared with me a few years ago when I was full of desperation about the atrocities unfolding in Gaza. Reprinted in Molly’s book, his words are clear as ever: “Our nationalism is just as ugly, just as harmful, and has the same inclination to fascist debauchery as the nationalisms of all nations.”
A strange sense of ownership
A few days after finishing Molly’s book, I met her at Canyon Coffee, and the two of us sat on the sidewalk while the east side creatives meandered by.
“I feel this strange sense of ownership over your book,” I said.
“You should,” said Molly, “without your grandfather’s encouragement, I would have never been able to finish it.”
I was overwhelmed by a new feeling. Here we were, chatting about the hectic nature of her upcoming book tour and the stress I’ve been feeling as a bridesmaid for my friend getting married next month. Against all odds, the movement that united our great-grandparents created a thread strong enough to find us sitting together. I felt that Molly was family.
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Israeli-Arab influencer behind ‘Nas Daily’: Anti-Zionism is antisemitism
(JTA) — DENVER – Israeli-Arab social media entrepreneur Nuseir Yassin, of the viral vlog “Nas Daily,” said he believes “anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism” and stressed his commitment to overturning “misguided hate” against Jews, at a conference devoted to the subject this week.
Yassin, 34, was speaking with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on the sidelines of the conference, hosted by the David Merage Foundation for Confronting Antisemitism. A self-described “village boy” from the Lower Galilee town of Arraba in Israel, he achieved massive success through viral short-form videos that attracted viewers from all over the world. Today he boasts more than 68 million followers across numerous social networks.
Yassin is a Muslim of Palestinian origin, although he said he is not religious. Asked why it was important for a non-Jewish person to participate in a conference about combatting antisemitism, Yassin equated this battle to fighting for his family, noting that “the success of Israel and the Jewish people is also my success as an Israeli citizen.”
“I’m not a fan of the Israeli government, and I’m not here to defend it, just like I’m not a fan of many governments,” Yassin noted, but he asserted that the reaction to the government “is absolutely fueled by antisemitism.”
“I do believe anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism,” he added.
He said he views Zionism as “the most vanilla thing in the world – a group of people wanting a place to live,” and has therefore concluded that Israel’s detractors “just really don’t like Jews.”
Yassin, who first broke through in 2016, has become increasingly outspoken in recent years about his combined Israeli and Palestinian identity. During the conference, he recalled that he grew up labeling himself Arab-Israeli. After the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, he started listing Israeli first and Palestinian second.
“I could not relate to the extremism that I saw, and I wanted to distance myself from it without erasing my identity connected to it,” Yassin said. “I’m not just Israeli because I think it removes a little bit of spice, but I’m also not just Palestinian anymore.”
“A lot of Israeli culture is inside me,” he continued. “I never agree with people. I’m always disagreeable. That’s Israeli. I speak up.”
Yassin noted that he was “the first guy to go study in the United States out of my entire lineage,” graduating from Harvard University in 2014 with a degree in economics and a minor in computer science. Despite having grown up in Israel, Yassin said that Harvard was the place where he made his first Jewish friend.
After working as a software developer for Venmo in New York, Yassin left his job in 2016 to travel and document his journeys. Ultimately, he launched a Facebook page called Nas Daily – using the word for “people” in Arabic – where he posted one-minute videos for 1,000 days, telling the stories of communities around the world.
What was once a personal brand has since expanded into the parent Nas Company, which offers platforms for solo entrepreneurs to build and monetize their online businesses.
Yassin earned an honorary degree from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in 2025 in recognition of his advocacy work for Israeli and Palestinian coexistence. This past August, he also joined the advisory board for the Genesis Prize Foundation, which each year celebrates inspiring Jewish individuals for their achievements.
“I do not relate to hundreds of men on the street shouting ‘Allahu Akbar,’” Yassin told JTA, adding that there needed to be more women and fewer religious fanatics participating in the Israeli-Palestinian conversation.
Yassin argued that he’s “not a weird Arab for saying this” and that “the entire country of the UAE says the same thing,” referring to one of the Gulf countries that signed onto the Abraham Accords normalizing relations with Israel. He also challenged “Free Palestine” activists to envision a concrete future for Palestinians rather than fixating on Israel’s transgressions.
“We should all be ‘Free Palestine’ – but from what?” Yassin asked. “We disagree on the solution, not on the problem. We don’t want suffering. Nobody wants suffering.”
“I’m a free-Palestine-from-Hamas guy,” he continued. “Just free Palestine,” he said, ”is not an answer. I’m free-Palestine-from-extremism.”
Yassin affirmed that there is room for criticism of Israel’s government, noting, for example, that he would like to see an Israeli-Arab presence in the government.
But he marveled at the notion that an alien visiting Earth would likely guess that the most hated country in the United Nations is North Korea, when in fact “It’s not – It’s Israel.”
That struck him as absurd because “the Israel-Palestine conflict is not a big deal when you compare it to everything else that’s happening on planet Earth. The only thing that makes it a big deal is that we, as Palestinians, have the perfect enemy.”
That enemy, he continued, is “the most hated type of enemy, which is the Jews.”
As part of his appearance at the conference, Yassin presented a recap of a fellowship he launched this past spring in partnership with the David Merage Foundation to help 50 content creators – 25 Jewish and 25 Muslim – produce meaningful material.
Participants received $1,000 and spent a month learning from the Nas Daily team about viral and impactful storytelling during the fellowship, named for Yassin’s first Jewish friend, Zaki Djemal, who recently died of a sudden heart attack.
To Laura Merage, the Iranian-born Jewish co-founder of the foundation, Yassin was a natural partner for this bridge-building effort. Given his social media following and “infectious personality,” Merage said she felt “that’s what we need more of in the world.”
At the conference on Tuesday, Yassin announced two winners of the fellowship’s influencer competition: recent McGill University graduate Raihaana Adira, a Canadian Muslim, and Grace, a Jewish-American digital content creator who preferred to use only her first name for privacy reasons. Grace tells stories about unique public figures, such as the first Arab “Miss Israel.” Adira, meanwhile, began posting about antisemitism and Muslim-Jewish relations after witnessing anti-Zionist protests at McGill.
“When I see a Jewish person being attacked on campus or online, it feels like I’m watching someone from my own community hurt,” Adira told JTA, noting that she started posting because no one believed her when she talked about incidents on campus.
“I wanted the protests and the graffiti on the walls that said ‘Death to the IDF’ to be seen,” she continued. “I am a Canadian, I am a Muslim, and when people at school on the streets say, ‘Death to Canada, We are Hamas, Hamas is heroic’ – that is not me.”
Adira said she received many death threats when she first started posting. While acknowledging how difficult that was, she also emphasized an influx of support that has helped “drown out the hate.”
Yassin offered a similar perspective, noting that at the beginning of his career, he “used to amplify the blowback and talk a lot about it,” referring to the criticisms he’d receive for promoting coexistence and calling out antisemitism. But after realizing that this deterred others from speaking out, he deemed the threats insignificant, calling them “the smallest price to pay for the largest outcome you can possibly imagine.”
During his travels around the world, Yassin said he has witnessed how flawed people’s perceptions of Jews can be and that he feels “a responsibility to set the record straight.” He also noted that he is dating a Jewish woman, author and influencer Aija Mayrock, whom he is marrying next year and with whom he expects to have children.
“They’re going to be Jewish, so that’s my family – literally, my family,” Yassin said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Four Seats or No Seats? Why Israel’s Final Polls Disagree Over Amcha Yisrael
Conflicting projections for Ofer Winter’s party illustrate the uncertainty of measuring public support near an electoral threshold.
A Channel 12 poll gives Ofer Winter’s Amcha Yisrael four parliamentary seats.
An i24NEWS survey reaches the same seat total.
Other final polls find that the party does not qualify for representation.
How can surveys conducted close to the same election produce such different results?
The answer lies partly in the difference between measuring a vote share and converting it into parliamentary seats.
A Statistical Boundary
Israel’s electoral threshold is 3.25 percent.
For a party receiving substantially more than that percentage, modest sampling fluctuations may change its expected number of seats without calling its parliamentary presence into question.
For a party whose support lies near 3.25 percent, the same type of fluctuation may change its projected representation from several seats to zero.
This does not necessarily mean the polls are measuring completely different political realities.
They may be producing estimates close to the same threshold but on opposite sides of it.
Sample Size Is Only One Factor
The i24NEWS survey conducted on October 22 included 5,124 adult respondents and reported a sampling error of plus or minus 1.4 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.
That is a substantial sample by conventional political polling standards.
But a larger sample does not eliminate every source of uncertainty.
Different pollsters may employ different recruitment methods, weighting systems and procedures for estimating turnout.
They may also differ in how they handle respondents who are undecided or reluctant to state their preferences.
These choices can matter particularly for smaller parties.
The Problem of Turnout
Opinion polls generally estimate voting preferences before actual voting takes place.
Election results reflect the ballots cast by people who participate.
Differences between intended and actual turnout can affect parties in different ways.
Analysts must therefore consider not only how many respondents express support for a party, but also whether the poll’s turnout model accurately reflects the eventual electorate.
Without transparent, comparable information about the methods used by each polling organization, it is difficult to identify which methodological difference is responsible for a particular disagreement.
Reading the Final Surveys
The appropriate interpretation of Amcha Yisrael’s polling is neither that its parliamentary representation is guaranteed nor that exclusion is certain.
The available surveys demonstrate uncertainty around a legally decisive boundary.
The four-seat projections reported by Channel 12 and i24NEWS are meaningful observations.
So are the below-threshold findings published by Channel 13, Maariv and Zman Yisrael.
Each survey is a measurement of electoral intentions under a particular methodology, not a count of actual votes.
For readers following Israel’s election, this makes Amcha Yisrael an instructive case study in how polling uncertainty interacts with electoral law.
The final result will provide the definitive seat allocation. The polls explain why the outcome was difficult to measure in advance.
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As Trump betrays Ukraine, it’s beginning to feel a lot like Munich
In Munich on Sept. 30, 1938, the leaders of Britain and France signed an agreement with Adolf Hitler that caved to the Nazi leader’s demand that Germany be given a chunk of Czechoslovakia. Five months later, Hitler ordered the German military to forcibly take the remainder of the neighboring country.
On Oct. 9, 2026, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin struck a deal allowing Russia to sell diesel fuel to global markets, most importantly to the US. Then Trump waived a package of sanctions on Russia that had been passed by Congress. By replenishing Russia’s war coffers, it is likely more Ukrainians will die because of these twin gifts from America’s president to the warmongering Russian autocrat.
Why is Trump doing this? He seems to be hoping the diesel deal will help him avert disaster in the upcoming midterms. Or maybe there’s more to it than that. Perhaps Trump seriously thinks that this will get him the Nobel Peace Prize by ending the war in Ukraine through helping Putin win it. Perhaps it’s one more scheme to further enrich himself and his family. Or maybe Putin really does have something on Trump.
In any event, it feels like Munich all over again.
There are some remarkable parallels between Czechoslovakia’s predicament in 1938 and Ukraine’s nine decades later: separatists in two vulnerable Central European democracies were encouraged and supported by a neighboring authoritarian regime that sought to seize adjacent territory under the pretext of protecting a minority from oppression.
And at the center of both narratives is betrayal: of Czechoslovakia by Britain and France, and Ukraine by Trump.
In the spring and summer of 1938, Konrad Henlein, leader of the Nazi-allied Sudeten German Party in Czechoslovakia, held secret meetings with Hitler and other Nazi officials. They concocted a plan: Cause so much disorder in the Sudetenland that the Czech government would declare martial law, thus creating an excuse for German troops to march in to protect the ethnic German minority.
Tensions that had long existed along the Czech frontier erupted into gunfire and death in the Sudeten town of Habersbirk on the morning of Sept. 13, 1938. A mob of German separatists hung a swastika banner from a church tower, stormed the police station, kidnapped the wife of a cop, and engaged in gunfights with police officers that lasted hours. Four Czech police officers and four insurgents died. Outbreaks of violence, terror and torture raged along the border for days, backed by Freikorps paramilitary troops who crossed from Germany and by SA and SS men who took part in cross-border sabotage and armed attacks.
The uprising had the desired impact. Just 17 days later — on Sept. 30, 1938 — Britain, France, Italy and Nazi Germany signed the Munich Agreement, yielding to Hitler’s demand that the Sudetenland be ceded to him. After landing at an airport outside London, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain waved a document in his hand and jubilantly proclaimed:
“The settlement of the Czechoslovak problem which has now been achieved is, in my view, only the prelude to a larger settlement in which all Europe may find peace.”
“I believe it is peace for our time,” Chamberlain said later that day.
But it didn’t take long for Hitler to show he could not be trusted. Hitler’s army marched into Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939. Germany’s invasion of Poland followed less than six months later, and by 1942 German forces controlled territory spanning from the Atlantic Ocean to deep inside the Soviet Union.
Ethnic Germans’ uprising in Czechoslovakia in 1938 found an echo nine decades later in Ukraine’s Donbas region, where unrest that began with pro-Russia protests in 2014 evolved into the war Russia has been waging on its neighbor for nearly five years.
In the spring of 2014, paramilitary units led by Russian intelligence officers stormed government office buildings in several towns and cities in Donbas, seizing weapons and clashing with police. In a scene reminiscent of the Habersbirk siege of 1938, on April 14, 2014, pro-Russian militants seized the police station in Horlivka, beat up the police chief, and murdered a member of the city council, whose body was found in a river. Similar clashes occurred throughout Donbas.
Two Kremlin-backed pseudo-states soon emerged: the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic. Russia funneled tanks, artillery, air defense systems and fighters into Donbas, fueling a war between separatists and Ukrainian forces that dragged on for years.
Like Hitler in the Sudetenland, Russia’s de facto occupation of Donbas was not enough for Vladimir Putin. His eyes were on all of Ukraine, and he spent years manufacturing pretexts for the full-scale invasion that began on Feb. 24, 2022.
Trump has been buttering up Putin for more than a decade, starting with his 2015 campaign for president, when he effusively praised the ruthless Russian autocrat’s leadership style. Putin is a “strong leader,” is “far more respected than our president,” meaning the immensely popular Barack Obama, and was someone he “would get along with very well,” Trump said back then.
Trump’s admiration for Putin took on ominous tones after becoming president. During a press conference after the two leaders’ 2018 Helsinki summit, Trump questioned intelligence findings on Russian election interference and said he believed Putin’s denial. “I don’t see any reason it would be Russia,” Trump told reporters, with the Russian strongman standing at his side.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, during Biden’s presidency, Trump called it “a pretty smart move,” praised Putin as a “genius,” and also said it wouldn’t have happened if Trump was still president, remarks that were amplified by Russian state media.
During Trump’s second term, his buddy-buddy relationship with Putin has turned into a virtual strategic alliance, as the American president repeatedly makes moves and statements that seem designed to please the Russian autocrat. There are Trump’s threats to abandon NATO, his humiliation of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky during a February 2025 meeting inside the Oval Office, and most recently Trump’s demand that Ukraine cease its drone attacks on Russian oil refineries, his call for Zelensky’s ouster, and envoy Steve Witkoff thanking Putin for being a “humanitarian.”
Putin has proposed a summit between himself, Trump, and Chinese leader Xi Jinping to discuss ending the war in Ukraine. It’s notable that Ukraine has not been invited. This is also what happened in Munich nine decades ago, when Czech delegates were excluded from the room, and others decided Czechoslovakia’s fate.
Last October, aboard Air Force One, Trump told reporters the Donbas region should be “cut up,” leaving most of it in Russian hands.
“Let it be cut the way it is,” he said. “They can negotiate something later on down the line.”
It seems the fate Trump envisions for Ukraine is similar to the one Hitler envisioned for Czechoslovakia. It would be naïve to think that Putin’s expansionist ambitions would stop there.
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