On the menu today: We’ll get to the latest horrific Graham Platner stuff in a minute, but there are increasing murmurs of discontent in Russia, even among war hawks. Secretary of State Marco Rubio tells Congress, “the invasion of Ukraine has been a strategic disaster for them . . . they may not even be able to militarily ever achieve the objectives they’re demanding now in negotiations.” Also, a lesson on why you don’t want California Democratic congresswoman Judy Chu to be your partner on Trivia Night. Read on.

The U.S. Ignores Russia and Hopes the Whole Thing Will Go Away

The U.S. has sent Candace Owens and Andrew Tate to Russia; as a staunch opponent of Moscow’s aggression who wants the Russian regime to suffer, I think sending the pair seems like an effective first strike.

We’ve known that long-forgotten has-been action movie star Steven Seagal has cheerfully embraced his role as a mascot for Vladimir Putin’s regime; what you may not have known is that there’s an excellent chance you’re now in better shape than Seagal is. Apparently, the only thing that’s under siege these days is a buffet table.

Also enjoying the fireworks at this week’s St. Petersburg International Economic Forum — and when I say “fireworks,” I mean the nearest oil terminal getting blown up by Ukrainian drones — is one U.S. government official, U.S. Commission of Fine Arts Chairman Rodney Mims Cook Jr. Apparently, Cook is Schroedinger’s delegation, both an official U.S. government representative and not an official U.S. government representative at the same time.

Cook, appointed to the government commission by President Donald Trump, is the first US official to attend the forum since 2017. His presence has been much touted by the Kremlin, which described him as the leader of the first official U.S. delegation at SPIEF for many years.

Cook told Russian state media on Wednesday he had permission from Trump and the State Department to visit Russia. However, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a Senate committee hearing on Wednesday that he was “not aware” of an official delegation attending, despite Moscow’s suggestions otherwise.

The U.S. should not be sending any government official to an event hosted by a government that is committing war crimes with metronomic regularity.

In the war, Ukraine is slowly but discernibly improving its leverage, albeit at considerable cost and with its cities still bombarded, night after night.

Yaroslav Trofimov, the chief foreign affairs correspondent of the Wall Street Journal, wrote Wednesday:

Russia’s inability to break through the stalemate in Ukraine is becoming so evident that significant voices in the Russian establishment have publicly started to call for an end to the conflict.

…

The calls don’t just come from the business elites and more liberal parts of the Russian establishment. Some of Russia’s best-known hawks have also become much more open in expressing a belief that Moscow simply doesn’t have the capacity to achieve an outright victory against Ukraine.

In his testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said of Russia, “the invasion of Ukraine has been a strategic disaster for them. They are not going to achieve the objectives they set out on day one, for certain, and they may not even be able to militarily ever achieve the objectives they’re demanding now in negotiations.”

And before the House Foreign Relations Committee, Rubio said:

We are not impartial mediators in that war. We don’t provide weapons to Russia. We only provided weapons to Ukraine. We don’t impose sanctions on Ukraine. We only impose sanctions on Russia. So, we have clearly taken a side. We continue to sell weapons to Ukraine, by the way, through the PURL program, unimpeded by what’s happened in the Middle East or anywhere else. And look, we’d love to see that come to a negotiated settlement. As of right now, the prospects don’t look great that either side is prepared to make the concessions necessary in order to reach an agreement, but we stand ready and we’ve engaged and invested a tremendous amount of high level time on that conflict over the last year…Hopefully this year will bring better news. I don’t have any news for you on that front today, but we are ready.

President Trump’s favorite foreign negotiator, Steve Witkoff, and Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev, have not met since March 11 in Florida — although Witkoff is reportedly going to visit Kyiv and Moscow at some point in the near future. (Witkoff has never visited Kyiv.) Witkoff and his primary partner, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, have had their hands full with negotiations with Iran in recent months.

Earlier this week, I met with an ambassador from a NATO member country who believes that the Trump administration has decided to more or less just not say anything about Russia and the invasion of Ukraine.

Saying nothing is better than berating Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office and bellowing — glaringly inaccurately, both at the time and even more so in retrospect — that Ukraine doesn’t have “any cards.” Still, not saying much about the invasion of Ukraine isn’t going to make the problems associated with it go away.

I’d really like to tell you that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is approaching its end. At the end of May, Anne Keast-Butler, director of GCHQ, the British electronic surveillance agency, said new intelligence showed that nearly a half-million Russian soldiers had been killed in the Ukraine war. If accurate, that would be about 100,000 more killed in action than the U.S. suffered in the entirety of World War II. In fact, that figure would be about 38 percent of all U.S. killed in action in all wars . . . ever, going back to the state of the Revolutionary War.

Unfortunately, as discussed in previous editions of this newsletter, over the past four years (more, really) Russia has reorganized its economy to be a war economy. Half of all government spending is on the military or internal security. Livelihoods, companies, profits, and industries now depend upon the war continuing. Plus, there’s the sunk costs; if Putin were to admit he’s traded a half million lives for 44,600 square miles of Ukrainian territory — a bit more than 11 soldiers for each square mile — he would effectively concede that he killed off a chunk of Russia’s next generation for some thoroughly destroyed no-man’s-land and a permanently hostile Ukrainian state next door.

The Worst Man to Run for Senate Ever?

The claim from Graham Platner on MS NOW last night was that his girlfriend from 2013 to 2015, conservative activist Lyndsey Fifield, knew that the tattoo on his chest was a Nazi SS Totenkopf, and she told her friends that he had a Nazi tattoo, but she never told him that she recognized it as a Nazi tattoo, never discussed it with him, and that she is lying when she says he referred to it as “my Totenkopf.”

“I feel like, you know, we’re kind of rehashing the thing we’ve been through. I’ve had that tattoo for 17 years,” Platner whined last night.

Well, when the tattoo on your chest is the insignia on the hats of the guards in the concentration camps of the Holocaust, people are going to have a lot of questions, and they’re going to have a very hard time believing that a “military history buff” who chatted about World War II on Reddit threads never recognized it over an 18-year period.

Platner also says that in those years he was “self-medicating with alcohol” but can also say with absolute certainty that Fifield’s description of physical abuse that she shared with the New York Times never happened:

Mr. Platner could be rough with her, Ms. Fifield said, particularly when they were drinking, leaving her shaken and sometimes afraid. In the interviews, Ms. Fifield grappled with how to process her experiences. She was quick to note that he “never hit me, he never punched me.”

But she said he regularly grabbed her by the shoulders — sometimes hard enough to leave marks — and, on one occasion, yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument when she wanted to stay in the car.

During one argument, she recalled, he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was “calm.” Eventually, Ms. Fifield said, she fell asleep and left the next morning.

“It hurt,” she said. But she added: “It didn’t cause an injury, it didn’t break my arm.”

Mr. Platner “strongly disputes” any claims of physical intimidation or altercations, his campaign said. The Times could not independently corroborate Ms. Fifield’s account of the altercations.

Those who are habitually abusing alcohol do not always have the most reliable memories of what they did and didn’t do while they were drunk, do they?

Remember that detail in the Wall Street Journal’s account of Platner’s meeting with Senate Democrats in Washington on Tuesday?

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who also attended the meeting, followed up and said there is a big difference between marital issues and allegations of sexual assault, the people said. Platner agreed and denied any credible allegations of assault were forthcoming.

Boy, that sure makes it sound like Warren had some idea that allegations of sexual assault are lurking out there.

Also, here is Platner’s vague answer on when he stopped sexting with other women behind his wife’s back.

MSNOW’s Chris Hayes: If there was stuff that you’re not proud of, that you worked out with your wife, and you don’t want to talk about the details, when did it stop?

Platner: Well, it stopped when it was happening. I mean, like, it was — Amy and I, Amy and I…  it happened soon after we got married. And we dealt with it very, it was very, very early in our relationship and so that’s, that’s when it stopped.

Once again, Platner gets asked whether there are other problems in his life that he’d like to be forthcoming about with the voters.

Hayes: Maybe you’ll be the nominee, probably be the nominee for the Maine Senate on Tuesday. And then it’s October 10th. And here’s a text or picture of Graham Platner that is not the kind of thing that you want to see. Like, are you worried about that? Are there texts like that?

Platner: I’m not worried about it. I mean, one, I went, as I’ve talked to him, I went through my life through a number of years struggling and not exactly acting under — with the best behavior. I’ve been very, very open about that.

Except, he hasn’t been “very, very open about that.” As mentioned yesterday, Platner has been asked directly — several times — whether he had any other issues, scandals, or concerns the voters deserved to know about, and each time he’s said “no.” And then we keep learning about new ones.

Platner insisted, “These are things that happened before I became a public figure, before I got into politics.” I mean, he announced his Senate campaign August 19, 2025. We’re talking about less than a year ago. Since then, he’s been running on a campaign claiming that his GOP rival, Susan Collins, is “bought and paid for by Benjamin Netanyahu, and she votes accordingly.”

You see, he can’t be a secret Nazi, because he’s arguing that the Jews control American society openly.

Early this morning on X, Fifield laid out how the New York Times article did not include other supporting evidence of her account that she provided the reporters.

ADDENDUM: California Democratic Congresswoman Judy Chu, questioning Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent during a hearing Thursday:

Congresswoman Chu: Do you agree with President Trump that you also do not care about Americans’ financial situations?

Secretary Bessent: Congresswoman, who was the president during World War I?

Chu: [long silence] Can you — are you refusing to answer my question?

Bessent: No, I’m asking. Who was the president during World War I?

Chu: I don’t know. But clearly you are not answering my question.

Come on, congresswoman. Woodrow Wilson was the U.S. president during World War I. Bessent was apparently trying to make the parallel that Trump’s action against Iran was comparable to Wilson’s entering the war against Germany, in light of the German threat to U.S. ships.