By Jim Geraghty
Friday, June 05, 2026
The U.S. has sent Candace
Owens and Andrew Tate to Russia; as a staunch opponent of Moscow’s
aggression who wants the Russian regime to suffer, I think sending the pair
seems like an effective first strike.
We’ve known that long-forgotten has-been action movie
star Steven Seagal has cheerfully embraced his role as a mascot for Vladimir Putin’s regime;
what you may not have known is that there’s an excellent
chance you’re now in better shape than Seagal is. Apparently, the only
thing that’s under siege these days is a buffet table.
Also enjoying the fireworks at this week’s St. Petersburg
International Economic Forum — and when I say “fireworks,” I mean the nearest oil terminal getting blown up by Ukrainian drones —
is one U.S. government official, U.S. Commission of Fine Arts Chairman Rodney
Mims Cook Jr. Apparently, Cook is Schroedinger’s
delegation, both an official U.S. government representative and not an official
U.S. government representative at the same time.
Cook, appointed to
the government commission by President Donald Trump, is the first US official
to attend the forum since 2017. His presence has been much touted by the
Kremlin, which described him as the leader of the first official U.S.
delegation at SPIEF for many years.
Cook told Russian
state media on Wednesday he had permission from Trump and the State Department
to visit Russia. However, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a Senate
committee hearing on Wednesday that he was “not aware” of an official
delegation attending, despite Moscow’s suggestions otherwise.
The U.S. should not be sending any government official to
an event hosted by a government that is committing war crimes with metronomic regularity.
In the war, Ukraine is slowly but discernibly improving
its leverage, albeit at considerable cost and with its cities still bombarded,
night after night.
Yaroslav
Trofimov, the chief foreign affairs correspondent of the Wall Street
Journal, wrote Wednesday:
Russia’s
inability to break through the stalemate in Ukraine is becoming so evident that
significant voices in the Russian establishment have publicly started to call
for an end to the conflict.
…
The calls don’t
just come from the business elites and more liberal parts of the Russian
establishment. Some of Russia’s best-known hawks have also become much more
open in expressing a belief that Moscow simply doesn’t have the capacity to
achieve an outright victory against Ukraine.
In his testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee this week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said
of Russia, “the invasion of Ukraine has been a strategic disaster for them.
They are not going to achieve the objectives they set out on day one, for
certain, and they may not even be able to militarily ever achieve the
objectives they’re demanding now in negotiations.”
And before the House Foreign Relations Committee, Rubio said:
We are not
impartial mediators in that war. We don’t provide weapons to Russia. We only
provided weapons to Ukraine. We don’t impose sanctions on Ukraine. We only
impose sanctions on Russia. So, we have clearly taken a side. We continue to
sell weapons to Ukraine, by the way, through the PURL program, unimpeded by
what’s happened in the Middle East or anywhere else. And look, we’d love to see
that come to a negotiated settlement. As of right now, the prospects don’t look
great that either side is prepared to make the concessions necessary in order
to reach an agreement, but we stand ready and we’ve engaged and invested a
tremendous amount of high level time on that conflict over the last
year…Hopefully this year will bring better news. I don’t have any news for you
on that front today, but we are ready.
President Trump’s favorite foreign negotiator, Steve
Witkoff, and Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev, have not met since March 11 in
Florida — although Witkoff is reportedly going to visit Kyiv and Moscow at some point in the near future. (Witkoff
has never visited Kyiv.) Witkoff and his primary partner,
Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, have had their hands full with negotiations
with Iran in recent months.
Earlier this week, I met with an ambassador from a NATO
member country who believes that the Trump administration has decided to more
or less just not say anything about Russia and the invasion of Ukraine.
Saying nothing is better than berating Volodymyr
Zelenskyy in the Oval Office and bellowing — glaringly inaccurately, both at
the time and even more so in retrospect — that Ukraine doesn’t have “any
cards.” Still, not saying much about the invasion of Ukraine isn’t going to
make the problems associated with it go away.
I’d really like to tell you that the Russian invasion of
Ukraine is approaching its end. At the end of May, Anne Keast-Butler, director of GCHQ, the
British electronic surveillance agency, said new intelligence showed that
nearly a half-million Russian soldiers had been killed in the Ukraine war. If
accurate, that would be about 100,000 more killed in action than the U.S. suffered in the entirety of World War II. In fact, that
figure would be about 38 percent of all U.S. killed in action in all wars . . .
ever, going back to the state of the Revolutionary War.
Unfortunately, as discussed in previous editions of this newsletter, over the past four years
(more, really) Russia has reorganized its economy to be a war economy. Half of
all government spending is on the military or internal security. Livelihoods,
companies, profits, and industries now depend upon the war continuing. Plus,
there’s the sunk costs; if Putin were to admit he’s traded a half million lives
for 44,600 square miles of Ukrainian territory — a bit more than 11 soldiers
for each square mile — he would effectively concede that he killed off a chunk
of Russia’s next generation for some thoroughly destroyed no-man’s-land and a
permanently hostile Ukrainian state next door.
The Worst Man to Run for Senate Ever?
The claim from Graham Platner on MS NOW last night was that his
girlfriend from 2013 to 2015, conservative activist Lyndsey Fifield, knew that
the tattoo on his chest was a Nazi SS Totenkopf, and she told her friends that
he had a Nazi tattoo, but she never told him that she recognized it as a Nazi
tattoo, never discussed it with him, and that she is lying when she says he
referred to it as “my Totenkopf.”
“I feel like, you know, we’re kind of rehashing the thing
we’ve been through. I’ve had that tattoo for 17 years,” Platner whined last
night.
Well, when the tattoo on your chest is the insignia on the hats of the guards in the concentration camps of the
Holocaust, people are going to have a lot of questions, and they’re going
to have a very hard time believing that a “military history buff” who chatted
about World War II on Reddit threads never recognized it over an
18-year period.
Platner also says that in those years he was
“self-medicating with alcohol” but can also say with absolute certainty that
Fifield’s description of physical abuse that she shared with the New York Times never happened:
Mr. Platner could
be rough with her, Ms. Fifield said, particularly when they were drinking,
leaving her shaken and sometimes afraid. In the interviews, Ms. Fifield
grappled with how to process her experiences. She was quick to note that he
“never hit me, he never punched me.”
But she said he
regularly grabbed her by the shoulders — sometimes hard enough to leave marks —
and, on one occasion, yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument
when she wanted to stay in the car.
During one
argument, she recalled, he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a
bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out,
telling her to remain there until she was “calm.” Eventually, Ms. Fifield said,
she fell asleep and left the next morning.
“It hurt,” she
said. But she added: “It didn’t cause an injury, it didn’t break my arm.”
Mr. Platner
“strongly disputes” any claims of physical intimidation or altercations, his
campaign said. The Times could not independently corroborate Ms. Fifield’s
account of the altercations.
Those who are habitually abusing alcohol do not always
have the most reliable memories of what they did and didn’t do while they were
drunk, do they?
Remember that detail in the Wall Street Journal’s account of Platner’s meeting
with Senate Democrats in Washington on Tuesday?
Massachusetts Sen.
Elizabeth Warren, who also attended the meeting, followed up and said there is
a big difference between marital issues and allegations of sexual assault, the
people said. Platner agreed and denied any credible allegations of assault were
forthcoming.
Boy, that sure makes it sound like Warren had some idea
that allegations of sexual assault are lurking out there.
Also, here is Platner’s vague answer on when he stopped
sexting with other women behind his wife’s back.
MSNOW’s Chris
Hayes: If there was stuff that you’re not proud of, that you worked out with
your wife, and you don’t want to talk about the details, when did it stop?
Platner: Well,
it stopped when it was happening. I mean, like, it was — Amy and I, Amy and I… it happened soon after we got married. And we
dealt with it very, it was very, very early in our relationship and so that’s,
that’s when it stopped.
Once again, Platner gets asked whether there are other
problems in his life that he’d like to be forthcoming about with the voters.
Hayes: Maybe
you’ll be the nominee, probably be the nominee for the Maine Senate on Tuesday.
And then it’s October 10th. And here’s a text or picture of Graham Platner that
is not the kind of thing that you want to see. Like, are you worried about
that? Are there texts like that?
Platner: I’m
not worried about it. I mean, one, I went, as I’ve talked to him, I went
through my life through a number of years struggling and not exactly acting
under — with the best behavior. I’ve been very, very open about that.
Except, he hasn’t been “very, very open about that.” As mentioned yesterday, Platner has been asked directly —
several times — whether he had any other issues, scandals, or concerns the
voters deserved to know about, and each time he’s said “no.” And then we keep
learning about new ones.
Platner insisted, “These are things that happened before
I became a public figure, before I got into politics.” I mean, he announced his
Senate campaign August 19, 2025. We’re talking about less than a year ago.
Since then, he’s been running on a campaign claiming that
his GOP rival, Susan Collins, is “bought and paid for by Benjamin
Netanyahu, and she votes accordingly.”
You see, he can’t be a secret Nazi, because he’s arguing
that the Jews control American society openly.
Early this morning on X, Fifield
laid out how the New York Times article did not include other
supporting evidence of her account that she provided the reporters.
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