Putin has decided to talk peace with Trump while he dominates the battlefield in eastern Ukraine. His troops are closing in on Donetsk’s main urban centers, whose capture would give him total control of Donbas, where he already fully occupies the province of Luhansk. But it could be looking to get the best deal possible while he is ahead. The prolonged sieges and intense urban warfare that capturing Donetsk’s cities of Kramatorsk, Kostyantynivka, and Sloviansk with a combined population of one quarter million and fortified by Ukrainian military engineers during months, risks dangerously overstretching his army and straining Russia’s overheated economy, whose oil revenues have dropped by 18.5 percent, due as much to sanctions as to persistent Ukrainian done strikes against refineries. (RELATED: Putin Caught in an Expanding Spiderweb) These factors, combined with the secondary sanctions that the White House has just announced against India to start blocking Russian oil exports through third countries, are what’s driving him to meet Trump in Alaska this Friday. It’s Putin who requested face-to-face discussions with Trump, according to U.S. officials who say that he instantly agreed to hold the summit on U.S. territory in an unexpected show of deference that indicates much eagerness on his part. Putin is losing everywhere except Donetsk, and as he focuses on encircling the Ukrainians, Trump is working to encircle him. When talk of peace talks began soon after Trump took office last February, The American Spectator noted a brief statement by Putin saying that negotiations would start in “six months.” That was how long he might have projected it would take for his army to enter Donetsk’s main urban centers, containing Ukraine’s military logistical hub in Donbas and important industrial facilities and rare earth mines. (RELATED: Zelensky Has Left Ukraine With a Poor Hand) Time is now up, and Russia has cut the main arteries connecting Kramatorsk and Kostyantynivka to the surrounded citadel of Pokrovsk at the southern end of Ukraine’s defensive lines in Donetsk’s defensive lines, which are effectively broken. Last week, Russia finally cleared the hilltop fortress town of Chasiv Yar, controlling strategic high ground above Kramatorsk and Kostyantynivka — after a 16-month siege. Putin may be getting close to his objectives, but more intense fighting lies ahead as his generals increasingly opt for tactics of gradual encirclement rather than massed frontal assaults to spare the huge casualties that the army may no longer be able to sustain and adapt to a growing shortage of tanks. Even as Putin moves on Kramatorsk from all directions, the heightened level of fighting anticipated as the U.S. starts squeezing Russia’s war machine with stepped-up sanctions has clearly incentivized Putin to get sincere with Trump after ignoring his previous calls for a ceasefire. He desperately needs to test whether Trump can arrange Ukraine’s handover of Kramatorsk in return for a cessation of hostilities, which is the U.S. president’s long-stated objective. “It’s going to be very difficult,” said Trump, aware of the grim battlefield realities and President Zelensky’s doctrine of holding every inch of Ukrainian territory at all costs. Ukraine’s president has publicly opposed ceding territory to Russia as the latest plan gets unveiled, but Trump says that Zelensky should be included in future meetings with Putin, to which Vlad the Impaler has surprisingly agreed. (RELATED: Why Trump and Zelensky Don’t Get Along) Trump talks about “land swaps” in which Ukraine might concede Donetsk in exchange for Russian withdrawals from other parts of eastern Ukraine. According to State Department sources familiar with the Moscow talks between Putin and White House special envoy Steven Witcoff, Russia would return the southern provinces of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. This seems unrealistic, and Witcoff has walked back statements attributed to him concerning Putin’s willingness to abandon the territories providing vital land corridors linking Russia and the Donbas to the strategic Black Sea peninsula of Crimea occupied in 2014 and incorporated through a referendum. The most to which Putin could readily agree are limited withdrawals from empty land surrounding a nuclear power reactor located along the outer layers of Russian front lines. It has been operating under the protection of the U.N.’s IAEA since the start of the war. Russia might also return areas it has recently occupied along the marshy Dnieper river delta, separating the Ukrainian-held part of Kherson on the west bank from the Russian-occupied east bank. Moscow is unlikely to have much of a problem in formally agreeing to divide the region with the waterway as the demarcation line in a prospective ceasefire. Putin might also be expected to pull troops out of the northern province of Sumy, which he invaded in pursuit of Ukrainian forces expelled from Russia’s neighboring Kursk region last April. Zelensky gambled on holding Kursk for a big land swap with Putin but lost badly at great cost to his army, whose crack units got decimated. Putin’s daily missile and drone barrages on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities also seem to be taking their toll on Ukrainian morale. According to the latest Gallup polls, 69 percent of Ukrainians favor conceding territory for a peace deal with Russia, the inverse of where public opinion stood six months ago. (RELATED: New York Times Commits Sin of Honesty) Putin has Zelenskyy squarely on the backfoot but fears that a prolonged siege of Kramatorsk could exhaust his army, undermine his strategic position, and gradually weaken future negotiating leverage. Trump says that he wants to “stop the killing as soon as possible,” but may hold back on a deal with Putin and even up the ante economically and militarily to get concessions from him. Aside from the sanctions that Trump is gradually implementing and will take some time to impact Russia’s war machine, there are reports that the administration is preparing to step up arms deliveries to Ukraine to enhance its defensive as well as offensive capacity. According to unconfirmed reports, a $10 billion package is on its way to Kyiv that includes Patriot batteries scraped up from U.S. stocks over the objections of certain sectors of the Pentagon: large numbers of AMRAAM missiles for the 32 F-16s delivered by NATO allies allowing Ukraine to challenge Russia’s air superiority and new HIMARS systems and ATACMS missiles for added punch. (RELATED: While Trump Arms Ukraine, US Firms Arm Russia) It’s telling that when Putin’s National Security Council chairman Dmitry Medvedev went on one of his customary rants about going nuclear against countries supporting Ukrainian missile strikes on Russian territory, Trump announced that he was moving two U.S. nuclear submarines closer to Russia. Trump also reportedly called Zelenskyy to ask if he could hit Moscow and St. Petersburg, according to what seems like a controlled leak to the Financial Times. There are further reasons why Putin is suddenly jumping at the chance to talk to Trump. In the same week that the White House announced the Alaska summit, Trump met at the White House with the presidents of Russia’s neighboring Central Asian states of Azerbaijan and Armenia, which formed part of the former Soviet Union. He brokered a peace deal over a longstanding territorial dispute between them and established a U.S. strategic presence along Russia’s sensitive underbelly. The agreement establishes rights of U.S. energy companies to manage a “South Caucasus transit corridor” for gas pipelines into Turkey and eastern Europe and lifts restrictions on defense cooperation between Azerbaijan and the U.S. In the aftermath of Putin’s manifest impotence against the U.S. and Israel in the war with Iran, closer ties between his Muslim neighbors and the U.S. are of serious concern to the Kremlin. Putin seems to be losing everywhere except Donetsk, and as he focuses on encircling the Ukrainians, Trump is working to encircle him. Russia’s leader may be a dangerous sociopath but is not divorced from reality. Another major factor present in his mind is Trump’s deal with Europe for the purchase of $750 billion of American fossil fuels. This leaves Russia out of the European market, which has continued to consume Russian gas, eliminating Moscow’s economic leverage on America’s NATO partners. NATO’s agreement to raise its defense spending to 5 percent similarly vanishes any real chance Putin may have of reconstituting the Soviet empire and turning all of Ukraine into a vassal state. As Putin tests Trump on getting him Donetsk so he can consolidate the only reconquest he is ever likely to make and sell it as a victory to the Russian people, Trump might gauge whether Putin could be scared enough to settle for a ceasefire demarcation line in Donetsk, somewhere east of Kramatorsk. READ MORE from Martin Arostegui: The Kremlin Is Worried NATO Will Go After Putin’s Soft Underbelly Spanish Socialist Is a Problem for NATO ‘Midnight Hammer’ Doesn’t Mean Iran Can’t Hurt Us

“We’re all Nixonians here.” Luke Nichter had spent the preponderance of his academic career shining a light on the historical legacy of Richard Nixon. Long condemned by a unanimous chorus of left-wing critics, Nichter had worked to tell the stories of Nixon administration members before they passed and bring nuance to the debate. On this warm May evening in Southern California, he had made the drive from his office at Chapman University to the nearby Claremont Colleges at the invitation of a College Republicans chapter. (RELATED: Murray on Rogan on Woodward) Richard Nixon has become a popular figure on the right again, half a century after his ouster from office in 1974. The young Republicans who assembled to welcome him bore Richard Nixon’s face emblazoned on shirts, his slogans printed on pins, and bushels of trivia about his struggle to redeem America. Had you told Luke Nichter to expect a sight like this 20 years ago, he might have called you crazy. Today, however, Richard Nixon has become a popular figure on the right again, half a century after his ouster from office in 1974. Right-wing corners of every social media platform laud the man at every turn. The Nixon Foundation’s official accounts put his inspirational speeches to peppy music or mark Valentine’s Day with depictions of him and the First Lady laden with hearts. Ronald Reagan still maintains his stature as a figure of renown on the right. To many, however, Richard Nixon’s story simply resonates more.  Nixon came out of nowhere. His devoutly Quaker family owned a hardscrabble general store and couldn’t afford to send their talented son to attend Harvard after he was admitted. In Congress decades later, the establishment laughed off his claims to have unmasked State Department official Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy. Hiss bragged about attending Harvard Law in front of Congress and slyly smiled as he noted Nixon’s own pedigree from humble Whittier College.  Nixon kept fighting. After the fall of the Soviet Union, declassified documents proved that Hiss had indeed been a communist agent. As president, he was the first conservative to face the post-1960s radical Left. The recent work of historians such as Luke Nichter is opening the eyes of more Americans to his legacy. Others, such as Geoff Shepard, have worked to expose the crimes of the establishment that targeted Nixon with Watergate, including in the pages of The American Spectator. (RELATED: The Left’s Hypocrisy About the ‘Imperial Presidency’) He led a more divided America — and lost to the radicals after decades battling them. Nixon’s resignation on Aug. 8, 1974, is, in many ways, the crowning political achievement of the institutional Left. Every voice in the media, academia, Hollywood, and the political establishment turned against a man who had won the largest landslide in American political history less than two years earlier.  Roger Ailes felt compelled to found Fox News after the realization, brought on by Watergate, that conservatives had no way to counter the dominance of the mainstream media. Today, Christopher Rufo is among the most prominent conservative activists seeking to revive Nixon’s legacy. On Rufo’s Substack, he lauds Nixon as America’s “blueprint for counterrevolution.”  Rufo produced a short film entitled Nixon Forever, defending the “law-and-order” leadership of the last president to mount a sustained attack on the managerial state until the advent of DOGE. Many conservatives have recognized what Rufo once argued in a City Journal piece, that “[I]f we can rehabilitate Richard Nixon in a balanced and fair manner… it will give us the skills, where we can more effectively defend a [modern] conservative president against these kinds of attacks.” That Richard Nixon was little more than a crook has been one of the most persistent myths of the Left’s order. The potential for its overthrow has caught the attention of liberal media as well. Politico slammed the new Nixon praise on the right as “crazy” after Vivek Ramaswamy gave an homage to the 37th president at the Nixon Presidential Library during his own campaign for the White House.  Rufo and Politico have both recognized that the battle over Nixon’s presidential legacy often mirrors the conflict over Donald Trump’s ongoing presidential moment. Veterans of conservative politics argued that the toolbox used to remove Richard Nixon from office had been put to work again. This time, however, it has failed in the present because of the same arguments being used to reassess the past.  In a few weeks, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders will receive an award from the Nixon Foundation. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, journalist Bret Baier, and several others are headlining events there this fall. Countless conservatives will flock to Yorba Linda, California, to see them and experience the Nixon Library in the process. The leftist gatekeepers of the American zeitgeist will continue to scratch their heads in puzzlement. In the meantime, more young conservatives will see themselves in the president’s struggle with each passing day.  The Nixon revival may have just begun. READ MORE by Shiv Parihar: Superman Captures the Fall of 20th Century Liberalism Marxists Have No Claim to Archbishop Oscar Romero Young Conservatives Should Conquer Liberal Colleges Instead of Attending Hillsdale

by Bradley Jaye, Breitbart: Democrats are claiming the Texas state legislature is attempting to “rig the midterm elections” despite an analysis demonstrating that Democrat-led states disenfranchise Republican voters on a massive scale through gerrymandering. Across the nation, prominent (and ambitious) Democrat governors like Gavin Newsom (CA), J.B. Pritzker (IL), and Kathy Hochul (NY) are making […]

from Sputnik News: ANKARA (Sputnik) – Turkish newspaper Aydinlik published on Monday the bank accounts of companies based in the UAE involved in the corruption scheme of Volodymyr Zelensky’s cronies, about $50 million are transferred to the Middle Eastern country every month. Since last year, Ukraine has been rocked by allegations of corruption, which can “strike […]

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