Feb. 12: Can Trump End the Ukraine War?

Israel backs Trump ultimatum, threatens return to war; Inflation spiked in January; Iranian oil stuck at sea

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The Big Story

President Donald Trump appears to be making his first steps toward fulfilling his campaign promise to end the war in Ukraine. In a Wednesday post on Truth Social, the president announced that he had a “lengthy and highly productive” phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, in which the two had agreed to “work together, very closely, including by visiting each other’s Nations.” Most notably, Trump said that he and Putin “agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately” to end the war.

Trump’s announcement comes amid a flurry of diplomacy and policy pronouncements related to the nearly three-year war. Earlier on Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth addressed a gathering of NATO’s Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels, Belgium. Hegseth bluntly told the attendees that Washington was committed to ending the war and that it was “unrealistic” to expect a return to prewar borders or eventual Ukrainian membership in NATO. While Hegseth backed “robust security guarantees” for Ukraine and reiterated that Washington “remains fully committed to the NATO alliance,” he ruled out deploying U.S. troops to Ukraine and said that European countries would need to “take ownership of conventional security on the continent.” “Stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe,” Hegseth said, citing Washington’s new focus on domestic security and strategic competition with China. The previous evening, Russia had released Marc Fogel, an American teacher who’s been imprisoned in Russia since 2021 on trumped-up drug-trafficking charges, in a prisoner swap for the Russian “cybercrime boss” Alexander Vinnik. National Security Advisor Mike Waltz characterized the exchange in a statement as a “show of good faith from the Russians and a sign we are moving toward ending the brutal and terrible war in Ukraine.”

Trump also spoke Wednesday with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy—who has recently complained about the administration’s “dangerous” decision to exclude the Ukrainians from U.S.-Russia talks—and discussed “opportunities to achieve peace,” per an X post from Zelenskyy. The Ukrainian president met with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in Kyiv today and is scheduled to meet Friday at the Munich Security Conference with Vice President J.D. Vance (who snubbed him at last year’s conference), Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and special envoy for Russia and Ukraine Keith Kellogg. The United States’ exact negotiating posture vis-à-vis the Ukrainians is unclear, but in an interview that aired on Fox on Monday, Trump said that the Ukrainians had “essentially agreed” to provide the United States with the equivalent of $500 billion in rare earth minerals in exchange for continued U.S. support. Zelenskyy, for his part, acknowledged for the first time in a Tuesday interview with The Guardian that he would accept certain territorial concessions as part of a peace deal. “We will swap one territory for another,” Zelenskyy said, explaining that Ukraine could trade land it has seized in the Kursk region during its recent offensive in exchange for other areas currently held by Russia.

As Zelenskyy pointed out to The Guardian, however, the trick may be getting Putin to offer concessions in a war that he believes he is winning. A Ukrainian source estimated to The Scroll recently that Ukraine can fight for another six months to a year at most; while the Russians are also suffering, he said, both sides understand that Moscow can hold out for longer. Two Wednesday morning stories in the Financial Times combined to offer a sense of the problem. The first was that Ukraine had launched a new military recruitment campaign targeting 18- to 24-year-olds, who are currently exempt from the draft but are barred by law from leaving the country. Zelenskyy has resisted drafting men in this age bracket for fear of creating future demographic problems for the country, but according to the FT, he’s now facing increased pressure from the United States to lower the conscription age to 18 to maximize military manpower.

The second item concerned a new report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, which underlined just how formidable the Russian war machine has become. According to the think tank, total Russian defense spending in 2024 amounted to $462 billion on a purchasing power parity basis—more than the $457 billion spent by the rest of Europe combined.

IN THE BACK PAGES: Tablet contributor Izabella Tabarovsky on getting canceled … in Finland

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The Rest

→Things are heating up in the Middle East again following Trump’s Saturday hostage-release ultimatum to Hamas. After a great deal of self-contradiction and futzing about by Israeli officialdom—the result of many in the Israeli security establishment wanting to see phase one of the cease-fire deal through to the end—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Tuesday evening that “intense fighting” would resume in Gaza if “our hostages” were not released by noon Saturday. (That artful formulation left ambiguous whether Bibi was talking about all the hostages, as Trump has called for, or merely the remaining hostages scheduled for phase one.) Both sides are seemingly preparing for war: Israel has recalled reservists, while Hamas, according to reports, has instructed its officials to stop using their phones and called for global “solidarity marches” among the masses of the “Arab and Islamic nation,” presumably including white communists in Bushwick. The Egyptians and Qataris, meanwhile, are hard at work in Cairo attempting to save the flagging truce. According to the Associated Press and The Times of Israel, Israel has agreed in these negotiations to deliver more “tents, shelters, and heavy equipment” to Gaza. We don’t know from the press reports what Hamas is offering exchange, but Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff on Wednesday repeated his boss’s demand, telling reporters that there would be a “big problem” if Hamas did not release the captives by the Saturday deadline.

→The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced Wednesday that prices rose 3% in January over the previous year and 0.5% over the previous month, surpassing economists’ predictions. As The Wall Street Journal notes, businesses often choose to raise prices in January, meaning that inflation has been particularly high in the month for each of the past three years. But business and consumer sentiments, initially optimistic over Trump’s expected wave of tax cuts and deregulation, have soured in response to Trump’s latest round of tariffs and tariff threats. On Friday, the University of Michigan released data from its preliminary index of consumer sentiment, which found that expectations for inflation in the coming year had jumped a full point between January and February, from 3.3% to 4.3%.

→Russian and Iranian oil is increasingly being stranded on ships, as tougher U.S. sanctions are reducing the number of buyers, according to a Wednesday report from Reuters. The sanctions against Iran, recently escalated by the Trump administration’s return to “maximum pressure,” have led Iran’s floating oil storage—i.e., oil held on ships that cannot dock to unload their cargo—to increase by between 10 and 20 million barrels so far in 2025, according to estimates from industry analysts. Sanctions on Russian oil imposed by the Biden administration late last year, meanwhile, have tripled the cost of shipping oil from Russia’s Far East to China and caused Russia’s floating oil storage to hit a two-month high at the end of January. The two countries’ difficulty with offloading their oil was increased last month, when China’s Shandong Port Group announced that sanctioned tankers would be banned from ports in Shandong province, “home to most of the independent refiners that are the main buyers of Russian and Iranian oil,” according to the report. However, a Wednesday article in Lloyd’s List noted that Russia and China appear to be devising workarounds to continue their oil trade: Over the weekend, a Panama-flagged, sanctioned Russian oil tanker turned off its transponder for four days while approaching a port in Shandong. When it began transmitting signals again, it had unloaded its cargo of 702,000 barrels of Russian crude.

→A U.S. airstrike in Somalia earlier this month killed 14 ISIS-Somalia operatives, including Ahmed Maeleninine, described as a “key ISIS recruiter, financier, and external operations leader” in a Tuesday press release from United States Africa Command (Africom) announcing the results of the operation. The airstrikes, a joint operation with the Somali government, took place on Feb. 1 and targeted a “series of cave complexes” used by the ISIS-Somalia leadership, according to Africom. In an article on the strikes, Voice of America reports that since 2022, Somalia has been home to one of ISIS’s nine regional offices and has become a “key cog” in the terror group’s international financial network. Recent intelligence cited by VOA estimates that ISIS-Somalia has “doubled in size over the past year and may now have as many as 1,600 fighters.”

→Stat of the Day: $731,113

That’s the amount that Washington, D.C., public schools received from the Qatar Foundation International, the international arm of the state-backed Qatar Foundation, between 2017 and 2024, according to open records requests from the watchdog OpenTheBooks. While that overall number may seem small, OpenTheBooks notes in messages to The Scroll that such an amount is often sufficient for full teachers’ salaries and programming costs for QFI-backed Arabic Studies programs, which are hotbeds for Qatari state propaganda. A January 2024 report in The Free Press, for instance, found that a QFI-funded “Arab Culture Arts” program at a Brooklyn public elementary school displayed a map of the Middle East that showed every country in the region except for Israel, which was simply labeled “Palestine.”

For a review of some Open The Books recent findings on Qatari influence, read here: https://thefederalist.com/2025/01/30/exclusive-qatars-influence-network-in-american-public-schools-has-unwitting-teachers-advancing-its-propaganda/

→A reality check on Department of Government Efficiency, courtesy of our Chart of the Day:

That’s from The New York Times’ (admittedly incomplete) calculation of the Trump administration’s cuts to the federal bureaucracy so far. The total is a little more than 9,000 employees, or about 0.4% of the federal workforce of 2.4 million. At the moment, the vast majority of those cuts are more theoretical than actual. More than 7,000 of those employees work for the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has indeed been “targeted for agency dismantling,” though the real dismantling has been at least partially blocked by the courts. Another 1,700 are employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau who received a stop-work order last week but have not yet been fired.

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Canceled ... in Finland

Turns out that Finnish academics are just as grossly lazy, airheaded, pompous, and self-serving—and just as eager to censor Jews—as their American counterparts

By Izabella Tabarovsky

In recent days, two Finnish universities canceled my scheduled appearances on their campuses, turning me briefly into a minor celebrity in the country. Åbo Akademi University, in Turku, barred me from delivering my keynote address at an international conference on antisemitism set to take place on its campus. The University of Helsinki killed what was supposed to be a public talk. The title of both lectures: “From the Cold War to University Campuses Today: The USSR, the Third World, and Contemporary Antizionist Discourse.” The two schools caved to a smear campaign orchestrated by a “pro-Palestinian” Instagram account that weaponized my pro-Israel social media posts for the purpose.

In the U.S., the censorship of “wrong-thinking” speakers, including Jews who hold Zionist beliefs, has become so commonplace that it’s practically a nonevent. But this was Finland’s first major controversy of this kind, and my photo got splashed across the local press. It was also a first for me, forcing me to confront head-on the same cowardice, hypocrisy, and stupidity that the American academy has displayed for years—especially in the wake of Oct. 7.

That the incident took place in Finland was particularly ironic for me, given the topic of my lecture and my background as an ex-Soviet Jew. For former Soviet citizens, Finland is indelibly linked to the history of the Bolshevik revolution. Not only did Lenin spend extended periods of time there, but also he and Stalin first met at a 1905 Bolshevik conference in the Finnish city of Tampere.

During the Cold War, Finland—forced to maneuver to retain its independence in the shadow of the neighboring USSR (see: Finlandization)—adopted a servile stance toward the communist superpower. Criticism of the USSR was taboo and self-censorship was rife—all of which Finnish media helped to enforce. Soviet influence extended to the country’s intellectual, political, and cultural elites. In the 1970s, a scandal broke out when one of Finland’s municipalities successfully inserted materials from the Finnish-Soviet Friendship Society—a branch of the USSR’s global “friendship societies” influence network—as well as from Soviet textbooks into the school curriculum for grades 1-9, teaching Finnish children that there was no pollution in the USSR and that socialist central planning was superior to capitalism.

When Moscow launched its rabid anti-Israel propaganda campaign in 1967 and started building its “Anti-Zionist International,” Finnish intellectuals were drawn in as well. In 1975, Finnish writer Matti Larni, whose book castigating the U.S. made him popular in the USSR, published a piece about Israel in the Literary Newspaper—the Soviet Union’s most influential cultural publication. Larni’s article echoed key Soviet talking points, branding Israel a Jewish supremacist, racist state and depicting Soviet Jewish immigrants in Israel as miserable, regretful traitors longing to return to their Soviet motherland. In 1980, the article was republished in Zionism: Truth and Fiction, a collection edited by Yevgeny Yevseyev—one of the USSR’s most viciously antisemitic ideologues with close ties to the KGB, who played a pivotal role in shaping the key tropes of Soviet “anti-Zionist” ideology.

Another Finnish name appears in the Soviet 1984 propaganda pamphlet Criminal Alliance of Zionism and Nazism. The pamphlet recounts, in English, a press conference staged by the “Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public”—a notorious KGB front designed to vilify Israel and Zionism to foreign audiences under the guise of representing Soviet Jews. The entire event was dedicated to spreading the toxic equation of Zionism with Nazism—a cornerstone of Soviet anti-Israel propaganda—to international audiences. Known as Holocaust inversion, this false equivalence is widely viewed by scholars of antisemitism as a potent tool of incitement against Jews, used by both the far right and the far left. As Deborah Lipstadt has noted, the trope contains a grain of Holocaust denial, exaggerating “by a factor of zillion any wrongdoings Israel might have done,” while simultaneously diminishing, by the same factor, the acts of the Germans. The USSR and its Western enablers—including, it seems, the Finnish ones—played a significant role in embedding this inversion among the global left.

The cancellation of my lectures by the two Finnish universities, then, echoed in a weird way some of their country’s Cold War history. One of my Finnish contacts may have been right when she told me that Finland has yet to fully come to terms with that past.

It replayed some long-forgotten past experiences for me as well. For ex-Soviet Jews, the anti-Israel campaigns that have permeated university campuses in recent years serve as a stark reminder of what we endured under the USSR. Maxim Shrayer, a refusenik and professor at Boston College, recalls how in the 1970s and ’80s, all “expressions of Jewish pride and Jewish spiritual and intellectual self-awareness” were dubbed “‘Zionist’ and targeted for public ostracism and vilification.” Under the pretense of combatting Zionism, “brainwashed Soviet young people acted on their antisemitic urges. A non-Jewish teenager at my Soviet school tried to beat up a Jewish kid because ‘the Zionists have taken over the Golan Heights.’”

For us, Soviet Jews, the state’s obsession with Zionism led to relentless discrimination, barring us from certain universities, careers, and professions. This lived experience taught us that while “anti-Zionism” doesn’t have to be antisemitic in theory, it inevitably produces antisemitic outcomes in real life. In the wake of Oct. 7, Jews around the world are learning what we knew decades ago: Whether school bullies call us “kikes” or “Zios,” the outcome is the same.

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The smear campaign against me began on Instagram on Wednesday, Jan. 22—one week before my scheduled appearance at a conference titled “Dialogue on Antisemitism: A Path Towards Understanding and Action.” Organized by the Antisemitism Undermining Democracy Project at the Polin Institute of Åbo Akademi University, the conference was meant to launch a conversation that, the organizers felt, had long been overdue in Finland. It was the first major international conference dedicated to contemporary antisemitism in the country. Leading the effort was Mercédesz Czimbalmos, a scholar with a an extensive body of research on antisemitism and Jewish life in Finland.

The campaign branded me a “genocide denier” who legitimizes a “settler-colonial apartheid state” and is an all-around dangerous extremist guilty of the ultimate transgression—equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. It also seized on a mistake by a conference team member, who had erroneously added “Ph.D.” next to my name on the conference site. The error was quickly fixed, but not before my detractors took notice and claimed I misrepresented my academic credentials. Angry calls and emails to university administrations followed. By Friday it was over.

Czimbalmos and her team fought hard, arguing on the merits: My lecture was not going to be about the Israel-Gaza conflict; diversity of opinions was important for stimulating dialogue; my expertise was widely known and acknowledged; the Ph.D. blunder wasn’t my fault. They were ultimately overruled. Still, they chose a gesture of defiance: Rather than officially cancel my keynote or replace me with another speaker, they asked me for an article to read aloud to the participants in place of my speech. I couldn’t think of a better piece for the occasion than “What My Soviet Life Taught Me About Censorship,” published in Quillette.

As a student of anti-Zionist propaganda, who has closely watched the rise of anti-Israel demonization on American campuses and its impact on Jewish students and faculty, I understood exactly what had happened. Still, I thought the decision-makers owed me an explanation. I sent an identical email to Åbo Akademi, addressing Rector Mikael Lindfelt and Dean Peter Nynäs of the Faculty of Arts, Psychology, and Theology, and to the University of Helsinki, addressing Rector Sari Lindblom and Dean Pirjo Hiidenmaa of the Faculty of Humanities. I explained my scholarly credentials and added that I was bringing my lived experience to the lectures. I also asked them, slightly tongue in cheek, for the reason behind the cancellation of my talks.

The correspondence that followed astonished me. It turned out that the learned men charged with deciding whether my talk could proceed hadn’t even bothered to check the facts, censoring me on the basis of hearsay and slander. When I came around asking questions, they stammered and came up with dubious excuses. They were fearful, and it showed.

Writing to me on behalf of the University of Helsinki was Hannu Juusola, a professor of Middle Eastern studies and the head of the university’s Department of Cultures. In a rambling response, Juusola blamed procedural faults but also stressed he knew nothing about my academic background—only that I didn’t have a Ph.D. More to the point, he’d been told that I had “strong political opinions”—a fact he clearly found objectionable. He also hoped I understood that the topic of my research was “currently very politicized.”

To me, this was hogwash. Information about my scholarly background had been sent to the university months before, and I had personally sent another bio in early December, further detailing my credentials. Universities regularly invite speakers with strong political opinions and no Ph.D.s, and the University of Helsinki is no exception. When Juusola later referred to my lecture as “controversial,” it became an open-and-shut case of political censorship by a faculty member whose own strong anti-Israel political opinions are well known.

In contrast to Juusola’s verbose and self-contradictory explanations, Nynäs at Åbo Akademi opted for evasion as a strategy. “The decision was based on an overall assessment where no single argument in itself was decisive for this,” he wrote. “Rather, as Dean, I felt that there were several difficult questions and that there was obvious uncertainty and lack of clarity around these. Furthermore, these posed risks to both individuals and other stakeholders that could not be clearly assessed or adequately addressed prior to the event.”

Obviously defensive, he added: “In light of this, I felt that the best solution for all was to proceed in this way so that the seminar could be held. We see great value in the seminar and in contributing to the understanding of anti-Semitism and to dialogue about it, a topic that should be more widely known and understood.” I couldn’t resist pointing out that my keynote, of course, would have made a significant contribution to the “understanding of antisemitism” and to “dialogue about it” among conference participants. Censoring a recognized expert in the field—who also brought firsthand experience of antisemitism to the conversation—was hardly the path to reach the stated goal.

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In the end, the conference at Åbo Akademi went on without a hitch. No one showed up to protest or disrupt it. Was it only because my talk had been canceled? I’m certain the outcome would have been the same had it gone ahead. And even if some protesters had shown up—so what? After the first day of the event, a Finnish academic wrote a venomous thread on X, celebrating my cancellation and attacking two other speakers at the conference. It got six likes. The media storm sparked by the censorship was undoubtedly far bigger than anything my actual presentation could have generated.

Now that the news cycle is moving on, the two universities may be tempted to breathe a sigh of relief, but that would be a mistake. Their cowardice and failure to uphold their own values (truth, freedom, inclusivity, yada, yada, yada) should prompt them to take some time to contemplate their raison d'être.

There were additional bad optics here. In this story, men in authority, who were not subject-matter experts, overruled their female subordinates—women who had organized the conference, were experts in their field and knew exactly who they were inviting and why. These men also thought it appropriate to censor a female speaker whose expertise had earned her an international reputation. The fact that three out of the four women affected were Jewish, and all were of Eastern European background, only worsened the optics.

In the end, the Finnish public missed out on a lecture I’ve presented at countless universities and academic centers around the world. But the leadership of the two universities shouldn’t see this as a barrier to their own learning. My articles and talks are available online and are an excellent place for the esteemed professors, deans, and rectors to expand their knowledge about antisemitism. Not the type that denies the Holocaust but the one that makes a show of commemorating dead Jews while refusing to hear those who are still alive.