The war in Ukraine was supposed to be a short conflict. But it has been three years since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, killing hundreds of thousands of people and destroying huge portions of the country. Now, the Trump administration has signaled that it wants to end the war in Ukraine, but there are significant questions and deep concerns about Trump’s plans for how to end the fighting.

The Trump administration has signaled it wants Ukraine to pay back the U.S. for American financial support of the war. But there are fears now that the U.S. may impose a diplomatic agreement onto Ukraine that results in crushing economic debts, damaging the country, while doing little to permanently ending the conflict..

Drop Site News’ Murtaza Hussain is joined by Rajan Menon, an expert on Ukraine and a Senior Research Scholar at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies.

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During a recent press briefing alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Donald Trump floated an idea for the U.S. to take ownership of the Gaza Strip, while expelling the surviving Palestinian population from the territory.

While outlandish, Trump’s statement emboldened many on the Israeli right who continue to dream of eliminating the Palestinian population of the land through forced displacement, siege, and mass killings.

On the latest episode of Drop Site News’s podcast, author Pankaj Mishra joins Murtaza Hussain for a discussion on the genocide in Gaza, how various regions of the world have responded to the genocide, and the broad historical context. Mishra’s book “The World After Gaza: A History” is out now.

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Joe Biden has just weeks left in his presidency. Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza is continuing at full force. In Lebanon, the so-called ceasefire was one-sided by U.S. design, meant to require only Hezbollah to cease its fire. A U.N. peacekeeping force official told CNN Tuesday that Israel had committed roughly 100 violations of the ceasefire, including gradually intensifying military strikes in southern Lebanon. After several days of Israeli attacks, Hezbollah fired back what it said was a warning to Israel. And now Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is saying he is going to escalate even further.

In the midst of all of this, in Syria, armed opposition forces seeking to topple the government of Bashar al-Assad stunned the region when they marched into Syria’s second largest city, Aleppo, and encountered almost no resistance from the Syrian armed forces or their allies. That operation was led by the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or the Organization for the Liberation of the Levant, which the U.S. government has classified as a terror organization. HTS has its origins in ISIS and Al Qaeda, though the group’s leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani has spent years seeking to rebrand HTS as a national liberation front that is no longer affiliated with either Al Qaeda or ISIS. While the events in Syria unfold against the backdrop of the U.S.-facilitated Israeli wars in Gaza and Lebanon, there are many factors that led to this moment in Syria. On the new episode of Drop Site News's podcast Intercepted, Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, a historian who focuses on jihadist groups in Iraq and Syria, joins Jeremy Scahill for a wide-ranging discussion on the unfolding situation.

This episode is a production of Drop Site News, brought to you, in part, by a grant from The Intercept. This episode was originally published at Drop Site News on December 3, 2024.

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