What Trump-Vance Means for Ukraine | Paul Kagame Isn’t Going Anywhere | China’s Presence in Latin America Has Expanded Dramatically, and more

For Vance’s part, as he has done on other issues since overcoming his aversion to Trump and embracing the full MAGA agenda, he makes his case in the crudest and most extreme terms. To justify his opposition to aid for Ukraine, he has gone out of his way to paint the country as a den of iniquity and corruption. He has avidly spread the false—and Russian-inspired—story that President Zelensky’s wife, Olena, employing American military aid money, bought a rare Bugatti Tourbillon sports car for $4.8 million while visiting Paris for D-Day commemorations in June.
In the Senate, Vance played a leading role in the effort to kill off the Ukraine aid bill. After a six-month delay that may have cost the lives of hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers and innocent civilians, an aid package was finally enacted with strong bipartisan support in April. Vance was blithely indifferent to the consequences of his dilatory grandstanding. “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” said Vance on Steve Bannon’s podcast back in 2022. “I’m sick of Joe Biden focusing on the border of a country I don’t care about while he lets the border of his own country become a total war zone.”
Whatever else can be said of it, the selection of Vance for the GOP ticket is thus clarifying. It tells us that Trump means what he says. What Trump reportedly confided to Viktor Orbán at a meeting in Mar-a-Lago this past March will come to pass: America, under a Trump administration, is going to cut Ukraine loose.

How the West Misunderstood Moscow in Ukraine  (Julia Kazdobina, Jakob Hedenskog, and Andreas Umland, Foreign Policy)
The war in Ukraine  began in February 2014 with the occupation of Crimea by regular Russian troops, followed by Moscow’s illegal annexation of the peninsula in March.
Over the course of six months in 2014, there was a manifest, expanding Russian military aggression in the heart of Europe. Yet the West reacted barely at all—with meek diplomatic statements and a few minor sanctions. Besides their limited scope, the sanctions were initially focused narrowly on the annexation of Crimea. The first larger sectoral sanctions followed the shooting of MH-17, which killed dozens of EU citizens. Never were the sanctions a coherent response to the most significant attack on a European country since 1945. During the years that followed, even as fighting continued, little additional action was taken. The West continued business as usual with Russia or even upgraded relations, like Germany’s push to build the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.
How could it be that it took the West until Feb. 24, 2022—when Moscow expanded the war it launched in 2014 to a full-scale invasion—to wake up to the reality that Russia is a revisionist state seeking to impose, by any means necessary, its own version of European security order?
Between 2014 and 2022, Western politicians, commentators, and journalists, with few exceptions, continued to believe that Russia’s aims were limited—and that the war simmering in eastern Ukraine was a Ukrainian civil conflict taking place in isolation from Russia’s much larger revisionist aims. Not only did Western efforts to resolve the conflict fail. Since the West continued with business as usual, it also inspired Moscow to press on and paved the way for the 2022 invasion.

Why did the West fail to properly diagnose Russia’s war in Ukraine for eight long years? What lessons from this failure are important today?

Paul Kagame Isn’t Going Anywhere  (Nosmot Gbadamosi, Foreign Policy)
Rwandan President Paul Kagame has won a fourth term in office, provisional results show. Kagame reportedly received 99 percent of votes following presidential and parliamentary elections on Monday, with 79 percent of the ballot counted so far. Final results are expected July 27. Kagame ran virtually unchallenged since most of his opponents were barred from running against him.
Kagame first came into office in 1994 after leading the armed wing of the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front rebel group to victory over Hutu extremists, ending a genocide that killed more than 800,000 people, mostly Tutsi, in just 100 days. He became vice president shortly after, before being elected as president by parliament in 2000 after the resignation of Pasteur Bizimungu. He has won every election since. He gained 99 percent of the votes in the last 2017 elections, which critics deem implausible in a democratic ballot. Each election is run without any real competition since Kagame’s most vocal critics are nearly always disqualified for various reasons.
Frank Habineza, of the Democratic Green Party of Rwanda, and Philippe Mpayimana, an independent candidate who is a former journalist, were the two opponents allowed to run—the same ones Kagame faced in 2017. They lack the financial resources and campaign machinery to mount a successful opposition, political analysts say.