Al Jazeera: Trump, Zelenskyy hail progress toward Russia-Ukraine peace deal

United States President Donald Trump and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy have expressed optimism that a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine is close following their talks in Florida, even as the thorny issue of territory remains outstanding.

Addressing reporters after meeting Zelenskyy at the Mar-a-Lago estate and an earlier call with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday, Trump said that Moscow and Kyiv were “closer than ever” to a peace deal.

“We have made a lot of progress on ending that war, which is certainty deadliest war since World War II,” Trump said during a news conference with Zelenskyy.

“We will see if it gets done, but it’s very close certainly.”

Zelenskyy said that a 20-point peace plan unveiled last week was “90 percent agreed” and that US-Ukraine security guarantees were “100 percent agreed.”

“We agreed that security guarantees are key milestone in achieving lasting peace and our teams will keep working on all aspects,” Zelenskyy said.

Still, the talks produced no visible breakthrough on the sensitive issue of Ukrainian territory.

Trump acknowledged that one or two “very tough” issues remained outstanding, including the status of the eastern Donbas region, which was annexed by Russia following its 2022 full-scale invasion.

Trump said the sides were “closer” to an agreement on a US proposal to create a “free economic zone” in parts of the region, under which Kyiv would withdraw its forces as part of a negotiated peace.

“I would not say agreed, but we’re getting closer to an agreement on that, and that’s a big issue. Certainly, that’s one of the big issues, and… it’s unresolved,” Trump said.

Zelenskyy reiterated his position that the issue of territory should be decided by the people of Ukraine and said that different aspects of the peace plan could be put to the public in a number of referenda.

“Of course, our society has to choose … because it’s their land … not of one person. It’s the land of our nation, for a lot of generations,” he said.

Following their talks, Trump and Zelensky held a joint phone call with key European leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Trump has been trying to end the nearly four-year war in Ukraine since returning to the White House in January, showing irritation with both Zelenskyy and Putin while publicly acknowledging the difficulty of resolving the conflict.

Before his meeting with Zelenskyy on Sunday, Trump said the sides were in the “final stages of talking” and they had the “makings of a deal that’s good for Ukraine, good for everybody.”

Russia intensified its attacks on Ukraine’s capital in the days before the Florida meeting.

During talks between US and Ukrainian negotiators in Berlin earlier this month, the Trump administration agreed to offer certain security guarantees to Ukraine similar to those offered to other members of NATO.

The proposal came after Zelenskyy said he could agree to no longer seek membership of the security alliance if Ukraine received NATO-like guarantees to protect the country from Russian attacks.

Hope this whole thing can be put to rest ASAP, doesn’t look like Trump has much patience for it anymore. Putin probably won’t bite though.

China just test launched its YJ-20 hypersonic anti-ship missile. Here are a few interesting details about this weapon system:

"Maneuverable missiles that can exceed Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound, are considered hypersonic missiles, said Chinese military affairs expert Zhang Junshe. He told the Global Times that based on the appearance of the YJ-20, it is a boost-glide missile consisting of a rocket booster and a bicone glide vehicle. The bicone can form shock waves during hypersonic flight, which enables the missile’s air rudders to perform maneuvers during the missile’s terminal flight, boosting its defense penetration capabilities.

The YJ-20 can hit surface vessels via a nearly vertical angle like a ballistic missile, and with its hypersonic speed, it is very difficult to intercept, according to Zhang."

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202512/1351645.shtml

https://xcancel.com/atrupar/status/2005401724844945799

Trump on his message to the families of Americans who died fighting for Ukraine: “So sad that a thing like that would happen”

Not sure where to post this so it goes here as it’s in a newspaper. Just an absolutely insane article I read in the Financial Times today, if you ever need a reminder that the ultrarich are ghouls.

Some of the richest Americans are confronted with a thorny question this time of year: is spending the festive season with family worth paying millions more in taxes? For millionaires and billionaires that declare permanent residency in low-tax jurisdictions but spend much of the year elsewhere, their location in December’s final days can be a determining factor for the size of their tax bill. And with the full-on return of in-person work meetings and events since the Covid-19 pandemic, the wealthy have increasingly turned to a stable of tools, including the apps TaxBird and Monaeo, to help them make sure they spend less than six months and a day in high-tax jurisdictions such as New York.

What the fuck is the point of having unfathomable wealth if you can’t even spend the holidays with your family? Like what the fuck are you doing? Why do you need an app to track whether you spend 183 days in Manhattan per year??

But being prudent comes with choices. One friend recently told Jim Simon, who co-founded TaxBird in 2016, that his “damn app” kept him from visiting family this year.

“I would’ve liked to have taken the grandkids to the tree a few years ago,” said Klein, referring to the famous Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center that is illuminated with lights every December. “But I couldn’t.”

This devotion to keeping down taxes can lead to extremes. Klein said some of his clients fly into New Jersey and wait on one side of the George Washington Bridge, which connects to New York, until just after midnight to avoid triggering another day in the state.

Imagine the sad life you must live where tax obligations of like 5% on income of over $30 million “keep you” from hanging out with your grandkids. Imagine just fucking around in New Jersey until midnight all to save like a million dollars in taxes when your net worth is in the tens or hundreds of millions. Insanity. Being rich rots your brain so much that the rich aren’t even good at being rich.

Per https://archive.is/atV7O

I forgot to mention but last month, on the same day Arce stopped being president, he got expelled from MAS by, I’m not kidding, the same guy he put to replace Evo as the President of MAS. They said something about him stealing funds, but seems like bullshit, he lost all political power and is now in jail because of that. I wonder if Evo is going to try and take back MAS now that all his rivals are basically in jail or too irrelevant to do something.

Protests across Syria, the government is shooting protestors and bringing armored vehicles to Latakia to crack down.

Also Gaza has been literally flooding for weeks/months now.

Local radio station used to operate an internet-only secondary service that consisted of the programming director’s digitized music collection set to shuffle. I have something similar in my brain, and I can’t shut it off. A lot of the time it’s something like This or This but sometimes it’s something like This and I can’t do a damn thing about it.

In news:

Denis Nikitin / Kapustin, aka White Rex, leader of the Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK), a unit of Russian neo-nazis created by Ukrainian military intelligence, has been killed at the front.

The RDK announced it on their social media, claiming that he was killed by a Russian FPV drone on the frontlines of the Zaporizhzhia oblast.

Kapustin was quite an important figure in the global neo-nazi scene. As a child, he received a visa to move from Russia to Germany. A rather special visa — for those of Jewish descent. This didn’t stop him from opening a white nationalist merchandise network called ‘White Rex’, which also became his nickname. Eventually wanted for violent crimes in both the EU and Russia, he found a welcome home in Ukraine. After 2022, Ukraine’s military intelligence gathered the motley crew of Russian neo-nazis around Nikitin to create the Russian Volunteer Corps.

Nikitin’s strategy of opening MMA fight clubs for racially conscious whites only has become popular for neo-nazis around the world. Nikitin and his Russian emigre friends in Ukraine also played a major role in glorifying the 2019 Christchurch massacre, translating the racist manifesto into Russian numerous times.

Nikitin also played a direct role in aiding neo-nazi forces as far away as the southern hemisphere. Australian media was already writing in 2021 of Nikitin’s influential role and even direct involvement in organizing Australia’s ‘National Socialist Network’, which nowadays is becoming more and more visible.

[…]

Nikitin’s RDK has in fact lost a number of troops to frontline fighting in recent weeks. One week ago, RDK media put out obituaries for a number of its fighters.

According to Ukrainian blogger Anatoly Shariy, Nikitin died fighting for the southern town of Huliaipole. I’ll cover the situation there tomorrow, but what’s important is that the city is now essentially lost to the Russians. The RDK was chucked in to try and salvage a disastrous situation.

Things are clearly bad at the frontlines if the likes of the RDK are being thrown into dangerous assault missions. There clearly just isn’t enough dispensable infantry left. Now it’s up to the RDK, which was originally intended as a psywar tool to undermine Russian society, rather than an infantry assault unit.

An ignominious fate for the RDK. This is a very well-funded unit, with support from powerful Russian (-Israeli) oligarchs like Leonid Nevzlin. The RDK is one of the star units of Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR), and its leaders constantly go on interviews, playing the part of the fearless special op superhero.

The infantry deficit must be quite bleak if UA is throwing their media battalions into already lost cities.

Canada Ukraine 2.5 Billion dollars

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/canada-pledges-additional-usd-2-194918690.html

South-east Asia’s broken east flank in Indochina: Myanmar’s problem

I don’t agree with everything the author says, his commentary is quite typical of ASEAN non-alignment, with some (mild) anti-China sentiments abound but not typically to the level of the West.

Choice quotes below.

The scale of China’s dependence on Myanmar reveals the depth of this transformation.

In 2023, Myanmar became China’s largest external supplier of heavy rare earth elements such as dysprosium and terbium—critical inputs for electric vehicles, advanced electronics, and modern weapons systems.

China imported roughly 41,700 metric tons that year, accounting for more than 90 percent of its heavy rare earth supply.

Yet these minerals do not come from areas controlled by the central government in Naypyidaw.

They are extracted almost entirely from territories governed by ethnic armed organisations in Kachin and northern Shan States.

…[China] does not secure its supply chains in Myanmar by choosing between the junta and the resistance, or by waiting for an elusive national peace. Instead, it works with whoever governs the ground that matters.

Central institutions in Beijing handle formal diplomacy, sovereign agreements, and military-to-military ties with Naypyidaw. At the same time, provincial security and intelligence agencies based in Yunnan manage relations with ethnic armed organisations along the border. These local agencies possess decades of experience, granular intelligence, and practical leverage that central ministries lack.

…Yet this strategy carries grave risks.

The more China relies on armed groups to secure its interests, the more it erodes the authority of the central state.

If Naypyidaw weakens beyond a critical threshold, Myanmar could slide into total state collapse. Such an outcome would not serve China’s interests.

…China is therefore engaged in a delicate balancing act: weakening the state enough to ensure compliance, but not so much that it disintegrates. It is betting that permanent fragmentation can be managed indefinitely.

For South-east Asia, this is a sobering lesson. Indochina’s eastern flank is no longer simply contested by great powers; it is being reorganised around corridors, commodities, and controlled disorder.

Traditional notions of sovereignty and non-interference are increasingly misaligned with realities on the ground.

…The real question is no longer who will rule Myanmar — but whether the region can prevent fragmentation from becoming the default model of order.

Today, Russian forces fully liberated the Donetsk People’s Republic city of Dimitrov and the Zaporozhye oblast city of Gulyaypole: https://tass.com/politics/2065749

Meanwhile, Russian forces continue repelling Kiev regime attacks on the Kharkov oblast city of Kupyansk: https://sputnikglobe.com/20251227/russian-forces-repel-3-ukrainian-attacks-aiming-to-break-through-to-kupyansk---mod-1123373996.html

Some (18+) combat footage of Russian FPV drone strikes on Kiev regime troops attacking Kupyansk: https://s1.cdnstatic.space/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/r2-1.mp4

A satellite photo released by the Chinese private aerospace intelligence firm MizarVision showed a fleet of U.S. F-35 fighter jets at Jose Aponte de la Torre Airport, Puerto Rico, Dec. 25, 2025.

Yesterday was Mao’s birthday and Chinese game developer Hoothanes released a new gameplay trailer for their game “The Defiant” set in WW2 China.

Pretty “Internationale” news worthy because this might actually make it the first time ever (at 5:00 in the video) I think the song has been used in a game trailer (I can’t recall any games in general that used it at all either).

Nigerian locals say that the area that Washington drone attacked today has not had a terrorist presence for many years:

"African media journalist Nasiru Suleiman claims that in the Tambuwal district of Sokoto State, local residents haven’t heard of any militants or radicals for at least a decade. And residents of the Nigerian village of Jabo were sleeping peacefully in their homes at the time of the American attack, until they were awakened by the explosion of an aerial bomb.

Suleiman’s colleague, Mahmud Jeba, who is originally from Sokoto State, was very surprised to learn that this particular region was the target of the American attack. He argued that if the US military had wanted to strike militants from Boko Haram, an ISIS affiliate, they should have attacked Borno State, where the terrorists have been based since approximately 2009."

https://en.topwar.ru/275672-smi-udar-ssha-prishelsja-po-rajonu-nigerii-gde-mnogie-gody-ne-bylo-terroristov.html