Opinion
By Jeff Childers
12/8/25
Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! It’s my final day of travelblogging, and I’m writing to you now from a dark hotel room in Manhattan (Michelle’s sleeping). We should be home for dinner, assuming everything goes according to plan. In today’s abbreviated roundup: the Ukraine peace deal explodes all over Europe and indeed, the world. Zelensky, NATO, and legions of cartoonish European ‘leaders’ look like they’re on their last legs. It’s the wildest geopolitical drama in modern memory.
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Over the steady course of the last four years, as we’ve navigated a troubled journey through war-tossed Eastern Europe, we’ve endured obnoxious and ubiquitous “Ukraine flags in bio,” “Glorious Spring Offensives” (in Summer), relaxed prêt-à-porter military sweats, “game-changing weapons” (that changed nothing), nuclear brinksmanship, Putin derangement syndrome, a merry-go-round of cartoonish European characters, and the profound poetry of “if you can’t give us the money, then give me a credit.” Along the way, we have often been teased and disappointed with glimpses of what seemed to be the ending credits. But this time, it might actually be the final act for former comedian and progressive heartthrob Volodomyr Zelenskyy (note: two y’s). Late last week, the New York Times ran a story headlined, “Zelensky’s Government Sabotaged Oversight, Allowing Corruption to Fester.”
The sub-headline ominously added, “A Times investigation found that President Volodymyr Zelensky’s own administration removed guardrails.” I say “ominous” because of the terrible portent contained in those words. It’s not just a nasty bit of negative news, but the Times did an ‘investigation.’
An important nuance largely overlooked by the American public —because we have a perfectly useless media— is that political corruption is Zelensky’s Achilles’ Heel. The former comedian was elected only because he played an anti-corruption president on TV. His campaign had one issue: stopping corruption.
Before we dive into the details, note that this story bears all the hallmarks of a classic intelligence community plant. The Times began by saying its ‘investigation’ —which nobody ever heard was underway— resulted from “documents and interviews with about 20 Western and Ukrainian officials who have worked closely with company boards or served on them.”
But never, not once, did the Times explain where the documents came from (never mind identify them), who identified the “officials” (never mind who they all were), or who coordinated the “interviews.” The sources and details remain a baffling reporting mystery, which either violates every journalistic ethical canon, or else the story was written in Langley rather than New York.
Keep that in mind.
🚀 The Times didn’t mince words: “Over the past four years, a New York Times investigation found, the Ukrainian government systematically sabotaged oversight, allowing graft to flourish. Mr. Zelensky’s government itself neutered Energoatom’s anticorruption supervisory board.”
Apparently —though I can’t recall any media reporting this at the time (let me know if you remember it)— it was always well known that Ukraine was a hotbed of official graft, theft, and a cosmopolitan culture of surreptitious sharing that would make a Somali warlord gasp in wonder. The Times put it this way: “Ukraine’s vital wartime industries — power distribution, weapons purchases and nuclear energy — were controlled by state-owned companies that have long served as piggy banks for the country’s elite.”
Since everybody (except the taxpaying public) knew about this long-standing corruption problem, officials in Washington and Brussels required Kiev to set up a variety of anticorruption panels, called “supervisory boards,” at all the key bureaucratic spigots through which the big money would flow.
It didn’t work. Ukraine’s professional grifters, long schooled in the art of lifting a few diplomatic dollars from the international aid purse, saw them coming a mile away.
The “supervisory boards” were quickly neutralized through clever bureaucratic jiu-jitsu, like leaving enough unfilled slots so that boards always lacked a quorum, or by packing boards with connected insiders. It was child’s play.
And everybody knew it: “European leaders have privately criticized but reluctantly tolerated Ukrainian corruption for years,” the Times said, leaving American leaders safely out of the equation, “reasoning that supporting the fight against Russia’s invasion was paramount.” Private criticism means it was never reported to anyone, especially us. Again— all along, corporate media never bothered telling us, the witless dupes who financed this sewage-fest. They’re only telling us now.
One fairly wonders why the unnamed ‘European leaders’ were so private in their supposed criticisms —leaving no records— and were so tolerant of the corruption. It’s perfectly fair to ask about their incentives, as well.
The Times didn’t ask any of the “European leaders.” But it randomly inquired of Christian Syse, Norway’s special envoy to Ukraine, who offered the childlike explanation that, “We do care about good governance, but we also have to accept that risk, because Ukraine is defending Europe from Russian attacks.”
Christian’s sentiment pretty much summarizes the European perspective. Western Europe shares an irrational conviction that Russia, which they constantly claim is running out of men, money, and machines, through some diabolical necromancy, is also perpetually on the brink of launching a much bigger war against everybody.
The thing is, a little corruption between friends is not the real problem. The real problem is that corrupt governments don’t fight wars very efficiently. It’s a recipe for catastrophe. As one example, the article reported that the Defense Ministry was found to be approving “dubious contracts” that required “15% kickbacks.” But “many shells failed to fire.”
Accepting the risk is probably little comfort to conscripts at the front, who race to stuff shells into their artillery guns, frantically pull the levers, expecting to watch the bomb launch across the lines at the advancing Russians, but then … PLONK. No launch. Just a blinking frowny face on the touch screen.
Toleration of corruption isn’t just a kind of “tax” that comes with the Ukrainian territory. Toleration of corruption is a recipe for losing the war, the mirror opposite of the intended goal, the reason we funded the war in the first place. Funding corrupt war efforts is not just wasteful, it’s unconscionably stupid. Increasingly, one gets the sense that the technocrats who run Europe are mentally deficient.
So much for Europe’s vaunted public education system.
🚀 As I wrote at the beginning of this piece, this isn’t the first time Zelensky has endured some brief negative press coverage intended to nudge him back into line. What’s different this time is everything else swirling around the story.
First of all, and of course, the context is the push for Trump’s peace plan. Despite Zelensky’s increasing isolation, negotiations are currently stuck, thanks to the intransigence of corruption-tolerant Europeans, who are encouraging the Green Sweatshirt to keep fighting. Headline from the UK Independent, this morning:
Zelensky’s support system and all his corrupt cronies have been stripped away by the current corruption scandal. But the European leaders are racing in, to fill the gaps in the line.
Thus, with a peace deal dangling so close, but teetering on a British razor’s edge, on Friday, Reuters ran an exclusive headlined, “US sets 2027 deadline for Europe-led NATO defense, officials say.” Trump gave NATO a one-year deadline, not merely to bump up their membership fees, but to completely take over. He wants “Europe to take over the majority of NATO’s conventional defense capabilities, from intelligence to missiles, by 2027,” Reuters said.
“If Europe does not meet the 2027 deadline,” Reuters said, “the U.S. may stop participating in some NATO defense coordination mechanisms.” The unspoken message to the meddling Europeans was: fine, if you want to run things so badly, go ahead. You can have it.
Third, piling on that latest NATO ultimatum, also on Friday, State Department officials began what could fairly be called an anti-European crusade. Here’s Deputy Secretary of State Chris Landau, saying NATO has basically morphed into the EU, and the EU into NATO, so that NATO is not so much of a mutual defense pact anymore as it is a giant, woke, anti-American lobbying group:
In a separate post, Deputy Landau pointed out how the EU’s recent $140 million fine against Twitter/X was just one example of how our supposed ‘allies’ attack us and are antithetical to our security and our constitutional freedoms:
But all of that was just the warmup act.
🚀 On Friday, President Trump published the main event— an astonishing National Security Strategy (NSS) that instantly became the weekend subject of massive media coverage, podcasts, YouTube videos, and social media chatter amongst all the geopolitical élites. For instance, the excellent independent analyst Alexander Mercuris described widespread “alarm, panic, and depression” across Europe thanks to Trump’s NSS.
I wrote about this remarkable document at more length yesterday, and I encourage you to read the whole thing. It’s about 30 pages long, but if you start, I bet you’ll have trouble stopping. I’ve never seen a government document quite like it. It’s easy-to-read, well-organized, uses engaging lay English, and includes a preamble personally penned by President Trump.
There’s much that could be said about the NSS and its incredibly encouraging and optimistic description of the national way forward, both in terms of foreign and domestic policy. The table of contents included an entry for each world region: Asia, South America, the Middle East, and so on.
But the viciously critical section about Europe stood apart.
Europe, it said, is suffering “economic decline,” “cratering birthrates,” self-destructive “migration policies,” “low self-esteem,” and faces “civilizational decline.” Astonishingly, the NSS questioned the very viability of America’s continuing alliance with Europe. “As such,” the NSS concluded, “it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will soon have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies.”
It was kind of like when your girlfriend remarks in front of your entire family at Thanksgiving dinner that she’s not sure whether this relationship is going anywhere. At minumum, it’s a red flag.
For this morning’s purposes, a single sentence from the NSS must have filled European leaders with terror and dread:
It is a core interest of the United States to negotiate an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine, in order to stabilize European economies, prevent unintended escalation or expansion of the war, and reestablish strategic stability with Russia, as well as to enable the post-hostilities reconstruction of Ukraine to enable its survival as a viable state.
In other words, the whole world now knows that it is a core US and Ukrainian interest to end the war in Ukraine as fast as possible. That’s not good news for the Western Europeans, whose core interest is to extend the war as long as possible. By publicly confirming in writing that we need to end the war as quickly as possible, by merely saying so, it concedes cascades of notional leverage, which infuriated diplomats in Brussels who prefer to play a long game with Moscow.
Trust me, that was the least important comment in the NSS. (Like I said, read the whole thing.) But that “core interest” remark was critical for this particular moment in time.
🚀 What can we make of this synchronous attack from all sides? While Zelensky waffles and loses all his corrupt buddies, and European leaders leap in to encourage him to resist making a deal with Trump, Trump escalated. Kiev’s corruption scandal spilled into the New York Times, Donald Trump Jr. hinted at a walkaway, the State Department delivered simultaneous NATO ultimatums and EU broadsides, and President Trump issued an Earth-shaking National Security Strategy that threatened the continuation of the European alliance itself if Ukraine isn’t quickly resolved.
In other words, Trump is escalating the geopolitical rhetoric, to match the meddling Europeans’ stubborn pushback. They are all playing chicken with President Trump, who is a master of the game. Don’t blink!
Most geopolitical dramas play out behind the scenes. I cannot recall a more exciting, public, and high-stakes international potboiler as we’re watching unfold. Stay tuned.
Have a marvelous Monday! We’re off to the airport, and if everything goes smoothly, tomorrow morning we will return to regularly scheduled C&C programming. Till then.
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The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida.
