Huge and unprecedented words issued by America's Commander-in-Chief in a press briefing on Thursday...

Trump says Ukraine can "forget about" joining NATO: "That is probably the reason why the whole thing started."

Of course, Vice President J.D. Vance earlier this month voiced this point of view of the administration while addressing a gathering of defense leaders in Brussels. But never before has a US president so forcefully voiced that a path to NATO membership simply won't happen.

This also marks the most directly Trump has ever said NATO expansion is a key reason for the tragic war, which has taken hundreds of thousands of lives, having started in the first place. 

Mainstream media fact-checkers have been out in force, decrying this perspective as 'Russian propaganda'. But is this really the case?

The head of NATO itself in the recent past said the quiet part out loud and fully admitted that constant NATO expansion to Russia's doorstep was a central driving factor:

From the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we’ve been told that the issue of NATO expansion is irrelevant to the war, and that anyone bringing it up is, at best, unwittingly parroting Kremlin propaganda, at worst, apologizing for or justifying the war.

So it was curious to see NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg earlier this month say explicitly that Russian president Vladimir Putin launched his criminal war as a reaction to the possibility of NATO expanding into Ukraine, and the alliance’s refusal to swear it off — not once or twice, but three separate times.

“President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement,” Stoltenberg told a joint committee meeting of the European Parliament on September 7. “That was what he sent us. And [that] was a pre-condition for not invade [sic] Ukraine. Of course we didn't sign that.”

“He went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders. He has got the exact opposite,” Stoltenberg reiterated, referring to the accession of Sweden and Finland into the alliance in response to Putin’s invasion. Their entry, he later insisted, “demonstrates that when President Putin invaded a European country to prevent more NATO, he's getting the exact opposite.”

How much clearer could the then NATO Secretary-General have said it (in the Sept. 2023 comments)? Here's the clip below:

Trump also on Wednesday blasted the European Union...

"The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States, that's the purpose of it. And they've done a good job of it. But now I'm president."

Among other things, Europe has lately been accused of seeking to thwart Trump's peace plan for Ukraine, even offering a rival rare earth minerals deal. The Europeans and Ukrainians have been cut out of direct negotiations with Moscow under Rubio.

As for former NATO chief Stoltenberg's remarks which fully vouch for and back Trump's point of view on the cause of the Russia-Ukraine war, they can be accessed at NATO's website. The full transcript is here.