Rachel Carson

Trump blames Ukraine for Russia’s bloody war because it would not agree to Putin’s terms

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

April 23, 2025

After previously suggesting that the U.S. would not involve European representatives in negotiations to end Russia’s war against Ukraine, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and presidential envoy Steve Witkoff met in Paris last week for talks with Ukrainian and European officials. The U.S. presented what it called “the outlines of a durable and lasting peace,” even as Russia continued to attack Ukrainian civilian areas.

A senior European official told Illia Novikov, Aamer Madhani, and Jill Lawless of the Associated Press that the Americans presented their plan as “just ideas” that could be changed. But Barak Ravid of Axios reported on Friday that Trump was frustrated that the negotiations weren’t productive and said he wanted a quick solution.

Talks were scheduled to resume today, in London, but yesterday Rubio pulled out of them. The U.S. plan is now “a final offer,” Ravid reported, and if the Ukrainians don’t accept it, the U.S. will “walk away.”

On a bipartisan basis, since 2014 the United States has supported Ukraine’s fight to push back Russia’s invasions. But Trump and his administration have rejected this position in favor of supporting Russia. This shift has been clear in the negotiations for a solution: Trump required repeated concessions from Ukraine even as Russia continued bombing Ukraine. Axios’s Ravid saw the proposed “final offer,” and it fits this pattern.

The plan would recognize Russia’s occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea and its occupation of almost all of Luhansk oblast and the portions of Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts Russia has occupied. This would essentially freeze the boundary of Ukraine at the battlefront.

Ukraine would promise not to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the post–World War II defensive alliance that first stood against the aggression of the Soviet Union and now stands against the aggression of Russia.

Sanctions imposed against Russia after its 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine would be lifted, and the United States, in particular its energy and industrial sectors, will cooperate with Russia.

In essence, this gives Russian president Vladimir Putin everything he wanted.

What the Ukrainians get out of this deal is significantly weaker. They get “a robust security guarantee,” but Ravid notes the document is vague and does not say the U.S. will participate. We have been here before. After the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991, Ukraine had the third-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. In exchange for Ukraine’s giving up those weapons, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia agreed to secure Ukraine’s borders. In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, they agreed they would not use military force or economic coercion against Ukraine.

Russia violated that agreement with its 2014 and 2022 invasions, making it unlikely that Ukraine will trust any new promises of security.

Under the new plan, Ukraine would also get back a small part of Kharkiv oblast Russia has occupied. It would be able to use the Dnieper River. And it would get help and funds for rebuilding, although as Ravid notes, the document doesn’t say where the money will come from.

There is something else in the plan. The largest nuclear power plant in Europe is Ukrainian: the Zaporizhzhia plant. It will be considered Ukrainian territory, but the United States will operate it and supply the electricity it produces to both Ukraine and Russia, although the agreement apparently doesn’t say anything about how payments would work. The plan also refers to a deal between the U.S. and Ukraine for minerals, with Ukraine essentially repaying the U.S. for its past support.

Ravid notes that the U.S. drafted the plan after envoy Steve Witkoff met for more than four hours last week with Putin. But the plan has deeper roots.

This U.S.-backed plan echoes almost entirely the plan Russian operatives presented to Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort in exchange for helping Trump win the White House. Russia had invaded Ukraine in 2014 and was looking for a way to grab the land it wanted without continuing to fight.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election explained that Manafort in summer 2016 “discussed a plan to resolve the ongoing political problems in Ukraine by creating an autonomous republic in its more industrialized eastern region of Donbas, and having [Russian-backed Viktor] Yanukovych, the Ukrainian President ousted in 2014, elected to head that republic.”

The Mueller Report continued: “That plan, Manafort later acknowledged, constituted a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.” The region that Putin wanted was the country’s industrial heartland. He was offering a “peace” plan that carved off much of Ukraine and made it subservient to him. This was the dead opposite of U.S. policy for a free and united Ukraine, and there was no chance that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who was running for the presidency against Trump, would stand for it. But if Trump were elected, the equation changed.

According to the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, Manafort’s partner and Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik wrote: “[a]ll that is required to start the process is a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push) from D[onald] T[rump] saying ‘he wants peace in Ukraine and Donbass back in Ukraine’ and a decision to be a ‘special representative’ and manage this process.” Following that, Kilimnik suggested that Manafort ‘could start the process and within 10 days visit Russia ([Yanukovych] guarantees your reception at the very top level, cutting through all the bullsh*t and getting down to business), Ukraine, and key EU capitals.’ The email also suggested that once then–Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko understood this ‘message’ from the United States, the process ‘will go very fast and DT could have peace in Ukraine basically within a few months after inauguration.’”

According to the Senate Intelligence Committee, the men continued to work on what they called the “Mariupol Plan” at least until 2018.

After Russia invaded Ukraine again in 2022, Jim Rutenberg published a terrific and thorough review of this history in the New York Times Magazine. Once his troops were in Ukraine, Putin claimed he had annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, two of which were specifically named in the Mariupol Plan, and instituted martial law in them, claiming that the people there had voted to join Russia.

On June 14, 2024, as he was wrongly imprisoning American journalist Evan Gershkovich, Putin made a “peace proposal” to Ukraine that sounded much like the Mariupol Plan. He offered a ceasefire if Ukraine would give up Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, including far more territory than Putin’s troops occupy, and abandon plans to join NATO. “If Kyiv and the Western capitals refuse it, as before,” Putin said, “then in the end, that’s their…political and moral responsibility for the continuation of bloodshed.”

On June 27, 2024, in a debate during which he insisted that he and he alone could get Gershkovich released, and then talked about Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Trump seemed to indicate he knew about the Mariupol Plan: “Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my—this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream.”

Now that plan is back on the table as official U.S. policy.

Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky has said that his country will not recognize the Russian occupation of Crimea. In this determination, he speaks for the global rules-based order the U.S. helped to create after World War II. Recognition of the right of a country to invade another and seize its territory undermines a key article of the United Nations, which says that members won’t threaten or attack any country’s “territorial integrity or political independence.” French president Emmanuel Macron and other European leaders are standing behind those principles, saying today in a statement from Macron’s office that they reject Russian territorial gains under the U.S. plan. “Ukraine’s territorial integrity and European aspirations are very strong requirements for Europeans,” the statement said.

But Trump himself seems eager to rewrite the world order. In addition to his own threats against Greenland, Canada, and Panama, in a post today on his social media site he echoed Putin’s 2024 statement blaming Ukraine for Russia’s bloody war because it would not agree to Putin’s terms. Today, Trump said Zelensky’s refusal to recognize the Russian occupation of Crimea was “inflammatory,” and he pressured Zelensky to accept the deal.

Curiously, he felt obliged to write that “I have nothing to do with Russia…”.

On Earth Day, Trump announces “we finally have a president who follows science”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

April 22, 2025

Today [April 22] is Earth Day, celebrated for the first time in 1970. The spark for the first Earth Day was the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. A marine biologist and best-selling author, Carson showed the devastating effects of people on nature by documenting the effect of modern pesticides on the natural world. She focused on the popular pesticide DDT, which had been developed in 1939 and used to clear islands in the South Pacific of malaria-carrying mosquitoes during World War II. Deployed as an insect killer in the U.S. after the war, DDT was poisoning the natural food chain in American waters.

DDT sprayed on vegetation washed into the oceans. It concentrated in fish, which were then eaten by birds of prey, especially ospreys. The DDT caused the birds to lay eggs with abnormally thin eggshells, so thin the eggs cracked in the nest when the parent birds tried to incubate them. And so the birds began to die off.

Carson was unable to interest any publishing company in the story of DDT. Finally, frustrated at the popular lack of interest in the story behind the devastation of birds, she decided to write the story anyway, turning out a highly readable book with 55 pages of footnotes to make her case.

When The New Yorker began to serialize Carson’s book in June 1962, chemical company leaders were scathing. “If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson,” an executive of the American Cyanamid Company said, “we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.” Officers of Monsanto questioned Carson’s sanity.

But her portrait of the dangerous overuse of chemicals and their effect on living organisms caught readers’ attention. They were willing to listen. Carson’s book sold more than half a million copies in 24 countries.

Democratic president John F. Kennedy asked the President’s Science Advisory Committee to look into Carson’s argument, and the committee vindicated her. Before she died of breast cancer in 1964, Carson noted: “Man’s attitude toward nature is today critically important simply because we have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself? [We are] challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.”

Meanwhile, a number of scientists followed up on Carson’s argument and in 1967 organized the Environmental Defense Fund to protect the environment by lobbying for a ban on DDT. As they worked, Americans began to pay closer attention to human effects on the environment, especially after three crucial moments: First, on December 24, 1968, astronaut William Anders took a color picture of the Earth rising over the horizon of the moon from outer space during the Apollo 8 mission, powerfully illustrating the beauty and isolation of the globe on which we all live.

Then, over 10 days in January–February 1969, a massive oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, poured between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels of oil into the Pacific, fouling 35 miles of California beaches and killing seabirds, dolphins, sea lions, and elephant seals. Public outrage ran so high that President Nixon himself, a Republican, went to Santa Barbara in March to see the cleanup efforts, telling the American public that “the Santa Barbara incident has frankly touched the conscience of the American people.”

And then, in June 1969, the chemical contaminants that had been dumped into Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire. A dumping ground for local heavy industry, the river had actually burned more than ten times in the previous century, but with increased focus on environmental damage, this time the burning river garnered national attention.

In February 1970, President Richard M. Nixon sent to Congress a special message “on environmental quality.” “[W]e…have too casually and too long abused our natural environment,” he wrote. “The time has come when we can wait no longer to repair the damage already done, and to establish new criteria to guide us in the future.”

“The tasks that need doing require money, resolve and ingenuity,” Nixon said, “and they are too big to be done by government alone. They call for fundamentally new philosophies of land, air and water use, for stricter regulation, for expanded government action, for greater citizen involvement, and for new programs to ensure that government, industry and individuals all are called on to do their share of the job and to pay their share of the cost.”

Meanwhile, Gaylord Nelson, a Democratic senator from Wisconsin, visited the Santa Barbara oil spill and hoped to turn the same sort of enthusiasm people were bringing to protests against the Vietnam War to efforts to protect the environment. He announced a teach-in on college campuses, which soon grew into a wider movement across the country. Their “Earth Day,” held on April 22, 1970, brought more than 20 million Americans—10% of the total population of the country at the time—to call for the nation to address the damage caused by 150 years of unregulated industrial development. The movement included members of all political parties, rich Americans and their poorer neighbors, people who lived in the city and those in the country, labor leaders and their employers. Fifty-five years later, it is still one of the largest protests in American history.

Today the White House under President Donald J. Trump celebrated Earth Day by announcing that “we finally have a president who follows science,” with policies “rooted in the belief that Americans are the best stewards of our vast natural resources—no ‘Green New Scam’ required.” One of the policies the White House champions is “opening more federal lands and waters for oil, gas, and critical mineral extraction.”

Four days ago, on April 18, journalist Wes Siler noted in his Wes Siler’s Newsletter that the day before, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum had signed an extraordinary order. The order assigned to the assistant secretary for policy, management, and budget, or AS-PMB, control over the Department of the Interior, including its personnel and its budget.

Siler explains that “[t]he person currently serving as AS-PMB (which in normal times would require Senate confirmation) is DOGE operative Tyler Hassen, the CEO of a Houston-based energy company.” Jennifer Rokala, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Western Priorities, said in a statement: “Elon Musk is now effectively in charge of America’s public lands.”

Siler notes that Burgum has handed power over the Department of the Interior to “a hitherto unknown political operative” who is holding his position in violation of the appointments clause of the Constitution.

He also notes that the Department of the Interior “manages the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Indian Education, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, Bureau of Trust Funds Administration, Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the U.S. Geological Survey,” in addition to the National Park Service. “As such,” Siler writes, “Hassen is now responsible for 70,000 employees, the administration of numerous international treaties, the welfare of 574 Native American Tribes, 433 national park sites, over 500 million acres of public lands, 700 million acres of subsurface minerals, and 3.2 billion acres of the Outer Continental Shelf.”

Burgum’s order says that his order is designed “to effectuate the consolidation, unification and optimization of administrative functions within the Department of the Interior…in order to achieve effectiveness, accountability and cost savings for the American taxpayer.” In other words, he is falling back on the idea of further cuts to the U.S. government in order to save money.

In fact, the public lands already make billions of dollars a year for the United States through tourism, but since the 1970s, the right wing has come to see the public ownership of lands as an affront to the idea that individuals should be able to use the resources they believe God has put there for them to use. Developers have encouraged that ideology, for privatization of America’s western lands has always meant that they ended up in the hands of a few wealthy individuals.

That impulse shows in Project 2025. As Melinda Taylor, senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin Law School, told Bloomberg Law in November: “Project 2025 is a ‘wish list’ for the oil and gas and mining industries and private developers. It promotes opening up more of our federal land to energy development, rolling back protections on federal lands, and selling off more land to private developers.”

Burgum appears to be on board with that plan. On January 16, in his confirmation hearings, Burgum made it clear that he sees selling the public lands as a source of revenue, referring to them as “America’s balance sheet.” “[W]e’ve got $36 trillion in debt,” he said, but “[w]e never talk about the assets, and the assets are the land and minerals.” The Interior Department, he said, “has got close to 500 million acres of surface. It’s 700 million acres of subsurface and over 2 billion acres of offshore…. That’s the balance sheet of America…. I believe we ought to have a deep inventory of all the assets in America. We ought to understand…what is our assets, 100 trillion, 200 trillion? We could be in great shape as a country.”