Good evening. It's Monday, August 18th. Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube. You may note that I admitted the word every Monday through Friday there. Thank you for indulging the last few days. I was in New York for a debate. On Tuesday, regarding Trump's immigration policy, which you could watch online if you haven't already seen,

and then had to spend the next several days doing interviews and other events.

We're very happy to be back.

So tomorrow I will return the word every to that introduction,

but in deference to the last few days, I decided to leave it out.

All right, tonight, the U.S. finance Proxy War against Russia, using Ukraine as its intermediary and pawn,

which I think is the best way to describe this war, is now well into its fourth full year.

There has been almost no Ukrainian progress over the last 18 months, while Russia slowly, though inexorably, expands the amount of

territory in Ukraine, it now controls roughly 23% of that country, with almost all of the

front-line movements heading westward as Russia consumes more and more of Ukraine as the war goes on.

Although it was heresy in the West for at least two years to point out

that Ukraine has no ability to achieve the goals of victory laid out by the U.S. and NATO at the start,

namely the expulsion of every Russian troop from every inch of Ukraine, including Crimea,

there is now virtually nobody willing to say with a straight face that this is an achievable goal.

Two years ago, if you said the Ukrainians can't manage that, they called you a Putin agent.

Now, of course, it's conventional wisdom.

All of that in that U.S. and NATO failure in Ukraine is really the critical context for the fury of efforts in which President Trump has engaged in the last

seven days to try to finally forge a diplomatic solution to this horrific, yet pointless war going

as far as to go meet Vladimir Putin in Alaska, and then hosting President Zelensky and European

leaders in the White House today. In some ways, all of this is really a thankless job to try and end this war.

Trump really is the only major Western leader to speak in the last four years of the urgent need to end this war and to stop its math death.

I've been accused of being a Russian agent for his efforts.

...