Pete Hegseth Gives Russia Alarming Win on Ukraine War

The Trump administration’s Ukraine policy is off to a poor start.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is visiting Europe, and met with the Ukraine Defense Contact Group Wednesday in London, immediately telling U.S. allies that liberating all of Russia’s occupied Ukrainian territory “is an unrealistic objective.”

Then it got even worse, with Hegseth telling the alliance of 57 countries, including all 32 members of NATO, that “the United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement.”

“Instead, any security guarantee must be backed by capable European and non-European troops,” Hegseth added.

Hegseth seems to have given up two main points to Russian President Vladimir Putin, including a key piece of leverage in future negotiations to end the war between Ukraine and Russia. One of Putin’s major complaints about Ukraine has been the prospect of the country joining NATO along with the rest of eastern Europe.

Coupled with Donald Trump’s comments on the release of American Marc Fogel from a Russian prison Tuesday, where he claimed “we were treated very nicely by Russia,” Hegseth’s remarks suggest the new administration will prioritize better relations with Putin over defending Ukrainian sovereignty. The deal to secure Fogel’s release raises questions, too, as a suspected Russian cybercrime kingpin was part of the swap.

While campaigning for president, Trump boasted that he could end the war in Ukraine within “24 hours.” Shortly after Trump’s election, Russia shot down that idea, and even boosted its troop numbers days later. The president’s choice for special envoy to Ukraine and Russia, Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, has in the past suggested withholding aid for Ukraine in order to force negotiations with Russia, something Trump did just days into his presidency.

In the past few weeks, Trump has said he will use tariffs as leverage against Russia and shaken down Ukraine for its natural resources in exchange for continued support. All of this doesn’t bode well for the future of Ukraine, which seeks not only to end Russian occupation of its land, but also better relations with the U.S. and Europe instead of a subservient relationship with Russia. Trump seems more concerned with keeping Putin happy and getting a payoff.

U.S. inflation was up in January, with Americans taking yet more hits from the rising costs of groceries, rent, and energy.

The consumer price index indicated that prices rose by 3 percent in January compared to a year earlier, according to data released Wednesday from the Labor Department.

Rent alone made up 30 percent of that increase, according to The Washington Post’s economic columnist Heather Long, who noted on X that the “core” consumer price index—which excludes the volatile prices of food and energy—had practically stalled since June.

But Americans were still feeling sticker shock for some key grocery staples in January, when the price of a dozen eggs soared by 13.8 percent and averaged $4.95 across the country—a price tag that’s still up by 53 percent from last year, according to The New York Times. Egg prices are only expected to increase amid a widening outbreak of avian flu, which has temporarily shuttered New York City’s poultry markets and skyrocketed the cost of a standard dozen eggs to more than $12 in Key Food and CTown supermarkets, amid a nationwide egg shortage.

But Donald Trump felt that there was only one person to blame. ““BIDEN INFLATION UP!” the president posted on Truth Social Wednesday morning.

On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly pledged to lower costs for American consumers on “day one.” But three weeks into his second administration, Trump has repeatedly avoided answering the hard questions on exactly how he’s going to provide relief for American’s wallets.

“You said that tariff is a beautiful word,” pressed Fox News’s Brett Baier in an interview with the president over the weekend. “There are some signs in the market, consumer confidence, that they’re a little jittery. So, if all goes to plan, when do you think families would be able to feel prices going down, groceries, energy? Or are you kind of saying to them, hang on, inflation may get worse until it gets better?”

But Trump quickly changed the topic, instead lumping the responsibility of rising inflation onto other countries.

“I think we’re going to become a rich—look, we’re not that rich right now,” Trump said. “We owe $36 trillion. That’s because we let all these nations take advantage of us. Same thing, like 200 billion with Canada. We owe 300—we have a deficit with Mexico of $350 billion. I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to let that happen.”

Last week, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that the Trump administration doesn’t “have a timeline” for alleviating the nation’s critically high cost of living.

On Monday, U.S. Agency for International Development Inspector General Paul K. Martin released a report noting that Trump’s dismantling of the agency will likely result in nearly $500 million worth of food going bad. On Tuesday, he was fired. 

Martin’s initial searing report found that the uncertainty from Trump’s policies “put more than $489 million of food assistance at ports, in transit, and in warehouses at risk of spoilage, unanticipated storage needs, and diversion.” He also found that an additional 500,000 metric tons of food are currently at sea or ready to be shipped and that Trump was making it impossible to properly track the $8.2 billion in unspent humanitarian aid. 

This report—which pointed out a massive, wasteful inefficiency—was met with a swift termination. 

“On behalf of President Donald Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as Inspector General of the United States Agency for International Development is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service,” deputy director of the White House Office of Presidential Personnel Trent Morse wrote in an email to Martin Tuesday evening. 

“Look what happens when you write a report critical of this administration: They fire you the next day,” Michael Missal, another one of the 17 former inspectors general who was terminated  by Trump last month, told The Washington Post. “This chills independent oversight, and that’s exactly what we need right now.”

Trump is looking to install staunch loyalists as inspectors general, as they provide critical oversight into the activities of federal agencies. 

Both Trump and Martin have yet to comment.

More and more, the president appears to be a puppet of the world’s richest man.

During an Oval Office press conference on Monday, Donald Trump remained hunched over the Resolute Desk while Elon Musk took the reins, spending more time answering reporters’ questions than the president himself.

Trump had called journalists into his office to observe the signing of a new executive order, which effectively green-lighted Musk’s work to cull large swaths of the federal workforce through DOGE. But the jarring visual of a multibillionaire hovering over a U.S. president and answering questions for him stayed with and rattled political commentators.

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell called Trump’s “presidential subservience” to Musk the “most powerless image of a president of the United States ever created by a camera.”

Musk—who was not elected by anyone to systematically dismantle the federal government—did “everything he possibly can to tell the world, without saying a word, that ‘Donald Trump is not the boss of me,’” according to O’Donnell.

The Tesla CEO also violated Oval Office norms by appearing at the press conference in casual garb and with his son. By O’Donnell’s measure, Musk spoke 3,666 words at the executive order signing, whereas Trump spoke 2,487 words.

Compare that to the role that Trump’s vice presidents play in his political realm: Former Vice President Mike Pence never spoke more than Trump did at a Trump-centric event during his first term, and Vice President JD Vance likely never will, either. That discrepancy calls into question what power Musk, who donated more than a quarter of a billion dollars to Trump’s presidential campaign, really has in the administration.

And Americans at home were equally unnerved by the visual.

“The optics are wild with Trump hunched over the [desk] and [Musk] looming above him. Trump looks cowed and subservient, Elon triumphant. Incredible imagery,” posted one user on X.

“The least someone could have done was give Trump a coloring book and some crayons to keep busy while President Musk answered questions,” wrote Campaign for New York Health executive director Melanie D’Arrigo.

Donald Trump secured the transfer of Marc Fogel, an American detainee in Russia, back to the United States.  A U.S. official confirmed to ABC News Wednesday that the president had made a deal to swap a Russian crypto-criminal to do it—even though Trump has railed against prisoner exchanges in the past.

Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz released a statement saying that Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East and other advisers had “negotiated an exchange that serves as a show of good faith from the Russians and a sign we are moving in the right direction to end the brutal and terrible war in Ukraine.”

But the statement didn’t immediately say what the U.S. gave up in the “exchange.”

Trump has regularly bragged about how he doesn’t need to agree to prisoner swaps to free Americans detained overseas. In August, when Joe Biden secured the release of three American citizens who were wrongfully imprisoned in Russia, Trump demanded to know the details and threw a massive fit about how prisoner swaps were extortion.

“So when are they going to release the details of the prisoner swap with Russia?” Trump wrote on Truth Social in August—the first of his many questions. 

“How many people do we get versus them? Are we also paying them cash? Are they giving us cash (Please withdraw that question, because I’m sure the answer is NO)? Are we releasing murderers, killers, or thugs?”

“Just curious because never make good deals, at anything, but especially hostage swaps. Our ‘negotiators’ are always an embarrassment to us! I got back many hostages, and gave the opposing Country NOTHING—and never any cash. To do so is bad precedent for the future,” Trump wrote.

“That’s the way it should be, or this situation will get worse and worse. They are extorting the United States of America. They’re calling the trade ‘complex’—That’s so nobody can figure out how bad it is,” he added. 

At the time, it seemed like Trump was throwing a tantrum that he couldn’t claim to have rescued the American detainees he’d promised to free on the campaign trail. Now, that seems even more correct, because Trump may have struck the exact kind of deal he railed against six months ago. 

Politico’s senior legal affairs reporter Josh Gerstein wrote on X that it’s possible Trump had arranged to trade Fogel for Alexander Vinnik, a Russian national.  

Vinnik pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering in May, for his involvement in operating BTC-e, a cryptocurrency exchange that allowed cybercriminals to launder and store the proceeds of their crimes, according to the Department of Justice. From 2011 to 2017, BTC-e processed more than $9 billion, and serviced one million users. The Justice Department has alleged that Vinnik himself is personally responsible for more than $120 million in losses. He  had yet to be sentenced. 

By comparison, in 2022, Fogel was sentenced to 14 years in Russian prison for carrying a small amount of marijuana that had been prescribed to him by his doctor in the U.S. 

Gerstein wrote on X that a federal judge “abruptly and hastily” scheduled a status conference for Vinnik’s case Tuesday. The conference was supposedly open to the public, but when Gerstein tried to join remotely, he said he was not able to access the meeting, and it did not appear on the judge’s schedule for the day. 

“I called the Alameda County Jail, where Vinnik has been held, and was told he was ‘picked up yesterday,’” Gerstein wrote in another post on X. 

Vinnik’s lawyer had previously requested that he be released from a protective order, so that he might be included in a prisoner swap. His lawyers did not respond to Gerstein’s request for comment, though a U.S. official revealed Wednesday that Vinnik was the prisoner involved in the exchange. 

Trump called the exchange “very fair, very reasonable,” and said that Russia got “not much” in return. It seems his administration may have been intending to keep up the farce that the trade hadn’t cost them anything: Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed Tuesday that Fogel’s freedom was “not in return for anything,” which is clearly not true. 

This story has been updated.

After American Marc Fogel was released Tuesday after more than three years in a Russian prison, Secretary of State Marco Rubio bragged that his freedom was “not in return for anything.”

“There wasn’t some deal here where we had to release, like, 10 spies. And I think it shows President Trump’s commitment to bringing home Americans,” Rubio told NewsNation Tuesday.

But Russia threw cold water on that assertion Wednesday, saying that Fogel’s release definitely was part of an exchange, with a Russian citizen being freed from a U.S. prison. Even Trump told reporters late Tuesday that Russia got “not much” in return for Fogel.

“We were treated very nicely by Russia,” Trump said. “Actually, I hope that’s the beginning of a relationship where we can end that war and millions of people can stop being killed.”

According to Trump, the deal with Russia was “very fair, very reasonable,” and that “somebody else is being released” Wednesday “that you will know of.”

Conservatives are keen to show a difference between how Biden and Trump negotiated for Americans to be released from overseas, with the right trashing American basketball player Brittney Griner’s release from Russia in exchange for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout in 2022.

Trump continued to bash the Griner deal as recently as October on the campaign trail, and had an unhinged response to the release of four American citizens, including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, from Russian captivity last year. It seems as though Trump wants his administration to reap praise for securing the release of Americans held captive overseas, while putting down Biden for the very same thing.

Employees at the Small Business Administration started getting fired before the ink on President Trump’s most recent executive order was dry.

On Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order formally forcing federal agencies to cooperate with Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency takeover of the federal government. Just hours later, a few hundred SBA employees received emails with formal termination notices. People involved with the SBA told Politico that employees had actually received similar notices on Friday, then were told the notices were a mistake on Monday, before being officially cut on Tuesday.

“They seemingly jerked people around like this for the sake of EO choreography,” a source familiar with the matter said.

Musk stood by the firings on Tuesday, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office while standing behind Trump like the slimy adviser to some medieval lord. “If the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?” Musk said. “It does not match the will of the people, so it’s just something we’ve got to fix.”

But is firing hundreds of federal employees really the “will of the people?”

“Firing huge numbers of federal employees won’t decrease the need for government services,” American Federation of Government Employees president Everett Kelley said in a statement. “It will just make those services harder or impossible to access for everyday Americans, veterans, and seniors who depend on them.”

Donald Trump’s MAGA makeover of the federal government extended to judges on Tuesday, with the commander in chief telling a crowd of reporters in the Oval Office that the judiciary would be the next branch of government to receive a massive reimagining under his stewardship.

“Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth, much more than that, in just a short period of time. We want to weed out the corruption. It seems hard to believe that a judge could say, ‘We don’t want you to do that,’ so, maybe we have to look at the judges,” Trump said. “I think it’s a very serious violation.”

Trump had called press into his office to observe the signing of a new executive order, which effectively greenlights Elon Musk’s work to cull large swaths of the federal workforce through DOGE. But the president’s comments were made in specific reference to attempts that his administration made on Friday to cut funding to biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health. The slashed spending was intended to affect $4 billion in “indirect funding” for research, a category that encompasses administrative overhead, facilities, and operations.

Those efforts were waylaid by a federal judge Monday, who temporarily blocked the spending cuts. A coalition of attorneys general from 22 states across the nation sued to block Trump’s order, arguing that the initiative violated a 79-year-old law intended to dictate how agencies administer regulations.

“Without relief from N.I.H.’s action, these institutions’ cutting-edge work to cure and treat human disease will grind to a halt,” the lawsuit read.

The Association of American Medical Colleges impressed in a statement that losing the indirect funds would “mean less research.”

“Make no mistake,” the AAMC wrote. “Lights in labs nationwide will literally go out. Researchers and staff will lose their jobs.”

But Musk was, apparently, not aware of the impact his cuts would have, by the end of the weekend. In a concerning exchange with Vanity Fair’s Molly Jong-Fast, the world’s richest man appeared totally oblivious to the disastrous results of his recommended cuts.

Several of Trump’s other pet projects, including freezing all funding for government grants and loans and letting Musk root around in Treasury Department data, have also been blocked in the courts.

“If the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have? If the people cannot vote and have their elected representatives, in the form of the Senate and the House, then we don’t live in a democracy. We live in a bureaucracy,” said Musk—who was not elected by anyone to systematically dismantle the federal government—following Trump’s remarks.

Democrats apparently aren’t going to use the upcoming spending fight to take a stand against Donald Trump’s attempts to dismantle the federal government. 

During a press conference Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was asked whether the Democrats intended to withhold their support from an upcoming government spending bill that would keep the government open past March 14.

“Look, here’s the bottom line: The Republicans are already shutting down good chunks of the government,” Schumer said. “Democrats don’t want to shut down, but it’s in Republicans hands, it’s up to them.”

Schumer seems to think that any way the cookie crumbles, Trump and the Republicans will chart their own course with government spending—a particularly disturbing attitude for the head of the opposition party.

This seems like a significant reversal from the Democrats. Just two weeks ago, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries promised that Democrats would fight Trump’s agenda in the legislature, in the courts, and even “in the streets.”

And he kept up that energy the following week, pledging that his party would use the upcoming spending fight to try and put a stop to Trump’s illegal funding freeze.

“I have made clear to House Republican leadership that any effort to steal taxpayer money from the American people, end Medicaid as we know it or defund programs important to everyday Americans, as contemplated by the illegal White House Office of Management and Budget order, must be choked off in the upcoming government funding bill, if not sooner,” Jeffries wrote Monday in a letter to his colleagues. 

Other Democrats appeared to get on board with this idea. “I never support a shutdown, but I can see where it could happen in this situation. It’s an extreme situation,” said Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, according to The Hill.  

But by the end of the week, Jeffries appeared to have backed off his threat to play hardball with Republicans.*

“I’m trying to figure out what leverage we actually have. What leverage do we have?” Jeffries said Friday. “They control the House, the Senate, and the presidency. It’s their government! What leverage do we have?”

“We are going to try to find bipartisan common ground on any issue. We will work with anyone in this town to get things done for the American people,” Jeffries continued. “We have repeatedly made that clear. But Republicans have decided to go it alone.”

Now, Schumer’s not even pledging that Democrats will oppose Republicans’ plans—rather they will be complicit, so as not to cause the shutdown they have long worked to avert, and consequently forfeiting their only shot at leverage over Trump.

* This story originally misstated the day Jeffries made his comments about leverage.

Trump signed an executive order Tuesday to strong-arm federal agencies into bowing down to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

The executive order, first reported by Semafor and Reuters, has specific instructions for agency leaders to cooperate with DOGE’s culling of the federal workforce and limit future hiring. The order will allow agencies to only rehire one worker for every four people who leave the workforce. This is all a part of DOGE’s “workplace optimization initiative,” which is code for overhauling the bureaucratic apparatus in MAGA’s image.  

The order is a signal that Trump is backing all the anti-woke chaos that Musk and his DOGE minions have inflicted thus far. Musk even stood next to Trump as he signed the order in the Oval Office, saying that “it’s important that the public’s elected representatives decide what happens rather than a large unelected bureaucracy,” according to Reuters’s Nandita Bose. Musk is an unelected official. 

Federal agencies, their employees, and the courts have been fairly resistant to DOGE’s takeover up to this point, filing multiple lawsuits and refusing to take buyouts. But this executive order clearly shows that Trump does not respect the basic power of the judiciary and will do everything he can to carry out his agenda faster than a court can rule against it—including signing executive orders like this one.