#so i wound up putting big light on her cover up the muddy color mistake but now she looks overblown ajdfafhfhdskfj

[dazzelmethat]

Dnd oc Nadia for pose practice, and lineart practice. I'm doing some art training these past few months.

[itach-i]

It’s been a while since I posted any writing. Here’s the first chapter in a new series. It’s connected to a fic called Under the Mountain I did a few months ago about Amarantha and Rhysand’s sister. Yeah, you read that right, his sister. Go check it out, it’s like a prologue to this one, even though this one takes place before that one...maybe this is the prologue...anyways...  

I’m still debating whether to call this ‘A Court of Sand and Secrets’ or just ‘Oblivion.’ Yay for indecision. 

So here we go.

Seraphim 

The first thing she could remember was the rain. The smell of petrichor and mud, the splashing of feet as people took shelter. She thought differently, smiling wildly at the pouring rain, not bothering to put on a rain coat as she placed on her green boots and left the house.

Her mother called after her, something about being careful, but she didn’t care, especially as she twirled and laughed while others tried to avoid her.

It had been a wonderful time, the joy, the freedom, the drops of water falling down her wings…until her unfastened boot caught on the edge of the cobblestone path-

And she fell face first into a puddle.

“Sera!”

…

“Brother?”

Rhysand barely glanced over, but she knew his attention was on her.

“Will you head to the camps today?”

She had never been there herself, but her mother had told her plenty of stories. It didn’t seem like a good place to go if you weren’t safe just for being female.

“I’ll be back soon, little one.”

A pat on the head she pushed away angrily. “I’m not little!” Rhys chuckled and it turned into a laugh when she huffed.

Her brother turned serious then and she felt a chill at the intensity, at the power there. Her wings flared and she noticed how his did the same. “Do you wish to be a brave warrior, Seraphim?”

The girl nodded. She’d always seen his weapons and leather armor. More than once had she spent her time in the gardens of the house pretending to be a warrior like her big brother.

“Do you know there are different kinds of warriors?”

“Yes!” She replied eagerly, “there are spearmen, and bowmen, and swordsmen, and-”

Rhysand chuckled again, “did you know our mother is a warrior?”

Mother? She thought, thinking that was the last thing her dress-making mother was. “Are we speaking of a different mother?”

When her brother patted the seat next to him on the chaise, Sera grinned, bouncing next to him as she sat. “Little one, there are different kinds of warriors, and not all of them are born and bred for battle.”

Although still confused, she nodded, liking that Rhysand was paying any sort of attention to her and not wanting to stop the conversation. He touched at her hair, his eyes staring at some point over her head. “When someone does something for the good of everyone else, for the good of our family?” He waited until she nodded, “That makes you a powerful warrior.”

Sera went quiet, thinking it over and it seemed her silence was answer enough for her brother, who kissed her brow and stood up. He watched her with a look she was too young to comprehend. “Don’t worry, little one, I will make sure you will never see a hint of violence in your life.”

…

It should not have been a surprise to know that Rhysand had been wrong.

Between tears and blood, Seraphim watched the large males take her mother away, while another held her body down into the muddy ground, reminding her of that first time she fell in a puddle when her foot caught a stone. Only this time, her mother would not come running to pick her up and wash away the dirt.

“…Mama…”

A scream pealed out of her mother and Sera wanted to close her eyes, wanted to plug her nose and cover her ears. She had never seen so much blood, had never known so much pain.

“Wait,” one of the males said, turning to Sera.

Her mother yelled at him, calling attention, begging them to let the girl go and to keep her. The male kicked her so hard in the head, Sera feared he had killed her.

As her mother groaned, the same male spoke again. He had a scar on his upper lip and eyes the color of fresh leaves, but he was as terrifying as the nightmares Sera had when she had been younger, of shadows and figures who hunted her in the middle of the forest.

“Cut off the kid’s wings first.”

Sera soiled herself, bile rising up, the fear so potent she was liable to pass out.

Her eyes grew the size of saucers as he approached her. As he sneered and brushed the wet hair out of her face. “Pretty little thing, aren’t you?”

“We came here for the mother.”

The silence that stretched made Sera aware of her own frantic breathing, of the loud beating of her heart. At her mother’s cracked voice, still pleading.

“You backing out of this, little brother?”

The pressure on her back lifted a fraction, but it did little to quell the terror. “Not at all, but why hurt the child when we came here for her?”

“…please.”

One of the other males kicked at Sera’s mother again, keeping her on the ground. “Quiet, whore.” The male’s voice was deeper than the first, older. When he turned to Sera she went still.

So much hatred in that gaze. Sera knew what awaited them, what awaited her.

“Cut off the girl’s wings first.”

Her mother screamed again, kicking and punching, making the one holding her grunt. But she couldn’t get to Sera, couldn’t stop what was about to happen. The first male hesitated, which made the older one scoff.

“Cowards. I’ll do it.”

Sera sniffed and met his gaze, the blue of his stare as deep as the ice on a lake. Perhaps her death would be brutal and slow, but she was going to meet it head on. Her father had once told her that the best way to beat death was to acknowledge it as it was.

She had not understood then. Couldn’t make sense of how she was to know something was coming before it did.

But she understood now.

Those blue eyes narrowed and a cruel smile spread upon the male’s lips. “Brave thing, to look death in the eye.” He took out a dagger, the glint shining even in the heavy rain.

The first strike was the worst, especially as the knife got stuck.

Sera could not tell if the ringing in her ears, the screaming, was her mother’s doing or her own, but she knew she had lost control of her limbs, her soul, her heart, as that male hacked away at her most precious possession.

Please, she begged-screamed it, perhaps-please let death come.

…

Seraphim awoke to pain and death and stone.

A gasp left her and her back was on fire, the patter of something causing flashes of blinding pain all over her back.

The absence hit her so hard, her vision went black for a few moments before returning and she cursed her body for forcing her to open her eyes, for making her go through this torment.

It’s a dream, it’s a dream, it’s a dream.

A moan threatened to leave her as Sera clawed at the ground.

This is but a nightmare. This would never happen to you. This will be over soon.

You will wake up.

“Cut off her head and then put them in the boxes.”

No, please, no. Anything but her wings. Anything but this being real.

“We must go back to Spring and celebrate. This was a victory tonight.”

…

Sera came back to consciousness with a scream, but her voice gave out as soon as she opened her mouth, and a harsh voice shushed her.

“Shut up, you don’t want them to hear you.”

Perhaps before she had been brave, had stared death in the face, but now she was nothing and sobs left her as she noted the absence again, the hole that was so deep she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t live like this.

“I said shut up!”

A hand covered her mouth and she was roughly pulled to her feet.

…

“Wake up!”

Sera groaned, wondering when this hell would end, questioning what kind of god was so cruel as to not let her die.

“You need to get up.” It was a male voice, she thought, the one who had spoken in her defense before, and had still let them take her wings.

Oh, no, her wings.

“No, no, don’t cry on me. You have to get up or you’re going to die.”

“Let me,” she answered, but nothing came out and this time, the male did not pull her to her feet, but he did grab her face.

Light hair, light eyes, the resemblance was clear. The ones who attacked her and her mother had to be family.

What kind of family went out to kill and maim for a living, she wondered, as her vision blurred.

“Shit,” she heard distantly, “I hate that I have to do this.”

Something was shoved into her mouth, some sort of liquid. It was so bitter, a coughing fit took over, so intense Sera had to sit up and heave. Her back was an inferno, like shards of glass being dragged upon it, salt being poured on the wounds.

“You have to get out of here,” the male said, standing up and moving away. “They might come back and notice I haven’t sent the boxes down the rivers.”

Another round of expletives left him and between half-lidded eyes Sera watched as he shook his wet hair with blood-covered hands. “Just…” every breath hurt, “just kill me.” She would do it herself if he wouldn’t. There was no way she could live her life without her wings.

The young male looked back at her and paused. He had the gall to cringe at her miserable form, and Sera hated that those eyes were on her. That he had seen her at her lowest and did not provide the remedy she needed.

“I’m not killing you. This was all…a mistake.” He cursed again, turning away. “You have to go. There’s a camp nearby, they’ll take you back to your brother.”

No.

The last person she wanted to see was Rhysand. Not like this, not without her wings.

She’d rather him think her dead.

“Kill me,” she ordered, thought her voice sounded shaky, weak.

The male shook his head again. “No. There is a camp nearby, you just have to walk for a little bit in that direction-” she didn’t care where he pointed “-and you’ll be fine.”

“No, please…”

But he had already disappeared.

…

“What’s wrong with you?”

Sera glared daggers at the other boy, lowering her face into her bowl, slowly eating the piping stew Kawan had made. The red-headed male had left to find them some water from the nearby stream and whenever he was gone the boy always tried to talk to her.

“Why don’t you talk?”

Her back ached, but she was used to the pain by now. She wondered if it would ever leave her.

“You haven’t even told us your name,” he scolded, and Sera glowered at his dark hair and up-tilted eyes. He seemed about her age, but sounded like he was five.

After the Spring male had left her close to the freezing river, Sera had come to the conclusion that she would just await death. She had been bleeding out and wild creatures would catch her scent if they hadn’t already. Death would follow soon, and she would be reunited with her mother and her wings and this torment would end.

But then the dream came.

It had been so vivid she had believed, at least for a few minutes, that it had been real. There were no words in her vocabulary to describe what she saw, but the word ‘home’ came close to it. It had been a place, but not. A destination, and a beginning. It was both a weapon and a flower. A part of her and something so foreign, she knew it would take a school full of scholars to even begin to decode it.

She awoke with a knowing, a feeling of outright truth that made it through her pain, the thirst and hunger. Her eyes had gone south, even when she had no clue which way that had been before.

Seraphim had started walking before her mind had caught up with what her body was doing. And she had no way of telling how much time had passed before she collapsed before a campsite. One that had already been occupied.

“We have to move; the weather will get worse.”

Swithon, the boy, jumped at the sound, and there was a dark sort of satisfaction in the fact that Sera had noticed Kawan arrive and he hadn’t.

It had been odd to see them accepting this dirty, bloody girl with no questions or requests. Kawan, the oldest of the three, was still young with unusual red hair and brown eyes. He had smiled at Sera when she awoke after arriving at the campsite, asking her if she ever dreamed.

The girl had been too numb to not accept their help, and while Swithon asked a thousand questions, he never once asked her if she wanted to go home or even where that was.

As the three of them walked further and further away from the Night Court, Seraphim couldn’t be more relieved.

[bountyofbeads]

The Cost of Trump’s Aid Freeze in the Trenches of Ukraine’s War https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/world/europe/ukraine-war-impeachment.html

The Cost of Trump’s Aid Freeze in the Trenches of Ukraine’s War

As President Trump froze military aid to Ukraine and urged it to investigate his rivals, the country was struggling in a bare-bones fight against Russian-backed separatists.

By Andrew E. Kramer, Photojournalist Brendon Hoffman | Published October 24, 2019 Updated 1:05 PM ET | New York Times | Posted October 24, 2019 |

ZOLOTE, Ukraine — Lt. Ivan Molchanets peeked over a parapet of sand bags at the front line of the war in Ukraine. Next to him was an empty helmet propped up to trick snipers, already perforated with multiple holes.

In other spots, his soldiers stuff straw into empty uniforms to make dummies, and put logs on their shoulders to make it look like they are carrying American antitank missiles — as a scare tactic.

“This is just the situation here,” he said, shrugging as he held the government’s position. “The enemy is very close.”

Fought in muddy trenches cut through hundreds of miles of farmland, the war in Ukraine has killed 13,000 people, put a large part of the country under Russia’s control and dragged on for five years almost forgotten by the outside world — until it became a backdrop to the impeachment inquiry of President Trump now unfolding in Washington.

Ukraine, politically disorganized and militarily weak, has relied heavily on the United States in its struggle with Russian-backed separatists. But the White House abruptly suspended nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine in July and only restored it last month after a bipartisan uproar in Congress.

The impeachment inquiry hinges on whether Mr. Trump froze the aid to pressure Ukraine into investigating his political rivals, especially former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., one of the leading candidates in the 2020 American election.

In closed-door testimony on Tuesday, the top American diplomat in Ukraine, William B. Taylor Jr., said Mr. Trump halted the aid to Ukraine and refused to meet the country’s leader until he agreed to investigate Mr. Biden and his son. Mr. Taylor called the decision “crazy” because it undermined a vital ally, strengthened Russia’s hand and put Ukrainian lives in jeopardy — all for the sake of a political campaign in the United States.

Ukrainian soldiers here at the front line were jolted by the suspension, too. While the aid was restored in time to prevent any military setbacks, it took a heavy psychological toll, they said, striking at their confidence that their backers in Washington stood solidly behind their fight to keep Russia at bay.

“It was very unpleasant to hear about this,” Lieutenant Molchanets said about the halt in American military assistance. But with or without allies, he added, he would continue to fight. “I tell you that as an infantryman and commander.”

Even at the tip of the spear of Ukraine’s armed forces, signs are everywhere of the poverty of the army.

The war began in 2014, after street protesters deposed Ukraine’s kleptocratic, pro-Kremlin president. Russia responded by helping stir up rebellions in two eastern provinces, and since then Russia has wielded the military advantage, able to slip tanks, antiaircraft weapons and soldiers into Ukraine at will.

Ukraine has fought back with repeated appeals for aid, diplomatic pressure, Western sanctions against Russia — and with an army that is holding on by its fingernails.

The war is fought in trenches, like World War I, owing to a peculiarity of the conflict: Neither side uses aviation. Russian antiaircraft systems have cleared the skies.

Soldiers live in log-covered dugouts smelling of socks and earth, warmed by wood stoves. Ukrainian troops cook their own meals from potatoes, carrots and onions, delivered in crates, and from handmade preserves kept in glass jars on wooden shelves.

Their weapons are also basic. Hanging on nails hammered into logs in Lieutenant Molchanets’s bunker were binoculars and a Kalashnikov rifle.

Both sides use heavy artillery, but the only piece of American military aid at the position was a much-prized infrared spotting scope for night fighting. Soldiers also carry American tourniquets in their medical kits, used to stanch bleeding.

“Our allies help us, but the hard and dirty work we do ourselves,” Lieutenant Molchanets said.

Even the most sophisticated weapons the United States offers are of little use here — at least, not in the way they are intended.

In 2018, the Trump administration authorized sales to Ukraine of a shoulder-fired anti-tank missile called the Javelin, reversing an Obama administration policy of supplying only non-lethal aid.

But there is a big catch. The Trump administration provided the missiles on the condition that they not be used in the war, Ukrainian officials and American diplomats have said, lest they provoke Russia to slip more powerful weaponry to the separatists.

“They are not to be on the front line,” Iryna Herashchenko, a former chief settlement negotiator, said of the missiles. Their precise deployment positions are kept secret.

So, Ukrainian soldiers at the front have improvised: They prop up the dummies of straw and extra uniforms that appear to hold the missiles, as a ruse, an army spokesman said.

Soldiers at Lieutenant Molchanets’s position said the fake missiles are conjured from logs and empty ammunition boxes, roughly mimicking the silhouette of a Javelin.

The American military aid suspension hurt Ukraine in another way as well, Ukrainian officials said: It signaled their weakness, just as they were trying to project strength in negotiations with the Russians and needed solid backing from Washington.

Since taking office in May, Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has wanted the United States to take a more active role in pressuring Russia to withdraw its forces from eastern Ukraine — which the Kremlin does not even acknowledge are there — and accept a peace deal to end the conflict.

Mr. Trump has also showed a clear desire for a peace deal on Ukraine, part of his longstanding effort to remove an issue that has driven a wedge between Russia and the West, and has made his cozy relations with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin harder to defend.

Soon after the July 25 phone call in which he urged Mr. Zelensky to investigate his political rivals — the call at the heart of the impeachment inquiry — Mr. Trump seemed confident that he would get a peace deal on Ukraine after all.

“I think he’s going to make a deal with President Putin, and he will be invited to the White House,” Mr. Trump said of the Ukrainian president.

But Mr. Trump has not pressed Russia and sided with Ukraine in the negotiations in the way Mr. Zelensky has urged. To the contrary, at a news conference in New York last month, Mr. Trump backed away from Mr. Zelensky and his troubles in the war, telling the Ukrainian leader, “I really hope you and President Putin get together and can solve your problem.”

By distancing himself from Mr. Zelensky in negotiations, Mr. Trump has made it harder for the Ukrainian government to defend the concessions it is making to end the war.

To revive settlement talks, Mr. Zelensky has already ordered his troops to pull back at some locations on the front line, a move that earned derision from his domestic critics, who called it a capitulation to Russia. Tens of thousands of people in Kiev, the capital, protested the decision this month in Independence Square, the site of the demonstrations that toppled Ukraine’s pro-Kremlin president five years ago.

Here in eastern Ukraine, the war is far from over. On a crystalline fall day, the contact line, as the front is known, opened onto a meadow of dry grass, stretching a few hundred yards to the opposing positions in a tree line, the oaks and maples in the brilliant autumn colors of orange and yellow.

Lieutenant Molchanets, who is 23, commands a platoon. On the second day of his command, the position came under heavy machine-gun fire. When it was over, he said, “there was a light euphoria. I had no sense of danger. Only later I realized we made mistakes, and we were just lucky.”

The luck soon ran out. A week later, on Sept. 17, two of his soldiers stepped on one of the area’s ubiquitous mines and were gravely wounded.

Kept under the pillow of his bunk was a Ukrainian flag inscribed by friends in Kiev, where he also left a girlfriend behind. “We believe in you,” one note on the flag said.

In the pale fall sunshine last week, soldiers chopped wood for their heating stoves and grilled a shish kebab over a campfire, unconcerned by the explosions in the distance.

“It’s not us” getting hit today, Lt. Ivan Dyachyk said. “It’s our neighbors,” a unit a few miles away.

Mr. Zelensky wants to move the Ukrainian front line back — from a few hundred yards away from the separatists to about 1,000 yards in several locations, including around the town of Zolote, the site of Lieutenant Molchanets’s position.

Separatist forces are also supposed to pull back in these areas, to put both sides out of sniper range and reduce skirmishing, paving the way for settlement talks.

The problem in the town Zolote — and what has set off protests here and in Kiev — is that pulling back will leave some neighborhoods in front of the army’s new trenches, exposing them to the enemy side.

“All of this is scary for me,” worried Larisa Prizova, a clerk in the mayor’s office of Zolote. Her home near the front line now seems likely to wind up inside the buffer area: a shooting gallery between the two armies.

“Maybe Mr. Trump, because of the election in the United States, wants a success in Ukraine” by pushing Mr. Zelensky into a settlement deal that Russia will accept, said Ms. Herashchenko, the former chief negotiator. “But peace and the illusion of peace are not the same things.”

Maria Varenikova contributed reporting from Zolote, Ukraine.

*********

Trump’s Syria and Ukraine Moves Further Alienate America’s Already Wary Allies

American allies in Europe have largely priced in President Trump’s tantrums and fixed ideas, but are increasingly worried about their dependency on an undependable president.

By Steven Erlanger | Published October 24, 2019, 3:00 AM ET | New York Times | Posted October 24, 2019 |

BRUSSELS — European leaders have long understood that President Trump is an unreliable ally, subject to loud tantrums, abrupt shifts and sudden whims. They have worried about his ambivalence toward NATO, resented his personal attacks and bristled at his use of trade policy and economic sanctions to restrict their companies and markets.

Until now, Europeans have done little except complain about him. But Mr. Trump’s recent actions in Syria and Ukraine may change that.

The more optimistic now argue Mr. Trump’s betrayals in those conflicts are of a different category of seriousness, and may accelerate what has been a slowly building process of European integration and peeling away from the United States. Others are not so sure.

But there is agreement that Mr. Trump has destabilized Europe’s near neighborhood in a major, even fundamental, way that requires a unified response, if only Europeans can come together.

Mr. Trump this month pulled American troops out of Syria, forsaking the Kurds who were guarding European jihadists, and allowing Turkey to invade. Mr. Trump’s impeachment inquiry has laid bare how through the course of the year he prized politics over policy in Ukraine.

Both episodes benefited President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has been working to destabilize European democracies, chip away at Western cohesion, and on Tuesday hosted his new friend, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, a NATO member.

As European leaders prepare for a meeting of NATO members in London in early December, Mr. Trump’s capriciousness is testing Europe’s ability to cohere and adjust.

“Europeans have put themselves in the position of being dependent on an undependable president,” said Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London.

“This just exposes again how Europeans remain overly reliant on the United States,” he said, “not only to deter Russia but to protect Western interests in the Middle East. But will Europeans do anything about it?”

Mr. Trump’s sudden withdrawal of American troops from northern Syria, and the quick response of Mr. Putin, have shaken Europeans. How deeply is the question.

“This has been more grist to the mill for the need for European governments to take more responsibility for their near neighborhood," Mr. Niblett said. “But that doesn’t mean it will get done.”

The European Parliament is preparing a resolution condemning Turkey’s offensive and urging economic sanctions, but governments are split on the matter.

While to some degree America’s allies have priced in Mr. Trump’s limitations and behavior, “this is a whole different level," said Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, “playing into all their fears about America as an unreliable ally.”

So unreliable has Mr. Trump proved, in fact, that his allies would not dare call the December meeting a “summit,” NATO officials concede. It will incorporate only a reception at Buckingham Palace and a single morning session at a golf resort hotel an hour’s drive from central London.

The main reason for that, officials say, is because of Mr. Trump’s tantrum about military spending that so distorted the last NATO summit meeting in Brussels in July 2018.

There, Mr. Trump was finally calmed down when the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, told him, “We get it, Donald, we need to buy more American arms.” The French president, Emmanuel Macron, told him: “We understand, we need to spend more so you can spend less.”

Such remarks are revealing of Europe’s deepening disdain for Mr. Trump, even before his meddling in Syria and Ukraine.

“European governments have a very low regard for Trump anyway," said Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform. “They know that they need to work with the United States, but it confirms to them that Trump is incapable of thinking strategically, handing victory to the Russians in Syria.”

Mr. Trump’s move in Syria was particularly neuralgic for the French. They have been vocally furious with American unreliability ever since 2013, when President Barack Obama decided to ignore his own red line and call off bombing strikes on Syria in response to the regime’s use of chemical weapons — a decision passed on to Paris just as French war planes were preparing to join the United States in the strikes.

France felt abandoned then, especially after becoming more aligned with Washington under Presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande and rejoining NATO’s command structure.

“But this is a whole new level of frivolousness in the way that the U.S. treats allies,” Mr. Leonard said.

Mr. Macron was particularly bitter last week about Mr. Trump’s unilateral Syria move, in a news conference after a Brussels summit meeting.

“I understood that we were together in NATO, that the U.S. and Turkey were in NATO,” Mr. Macron said. “And I found out via a tweet that the U.S. had decided to withdraw their troops."

Asked about the seeming impotence of the European Union, he added, “I share your outrage.”

But such decisions also help those in Europe, like Mr. Macron, who are trying to make the case for more European strategic autonomy, both in defense matters but also increasingly in financial ones, as Europeans try to protect their firms from both American tariffs and secondary sanctions against Iran.

Mr. Macron is pressing for more spending on European defense, especially on French armaments, as a way for Europe to counterbalance a long-term trend of American retreat from multilateral obligations.

But whereas the European Union has mostly joined together in a common regulatory system on matters of trade and finance, it often remains a bloc of 28 foreign policies.

“Europe is split,’’ Mr. Leonard said. “There are those deeply worried about what is going on and wanting to build a Europe that can defend itself, not just in defense but to push back on the extraterritoriality of American sanctions and Trump’s weaponization of the international financial system. And there are those who think they have to suck up to Trump bilaterally, like the Poles,” who only trust the Americans to deter Russia.

“And then there are those like Germany that will follow Macron to a degree rhetorically, but when it comes down to difficult decisions about how much to spend on defense, how assertive to be on sanctions, holds back," he said.

But the more Mr. Trump and Congress go after European national interest and leaders, threatening a trade war with Europe and insulting its leadership, the more countries are driven into the French camp.

“There are more structural developments that have shaken the way that Europeans view the United States,” said Manuel Muniz, dean of the School of Global and Public Affairs at IE University in Madrid.

He cited Mr. Trump’s questioning of NATO and collective defense; his abandonment of the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal; his imposition of trade sanctions on European products like steel and aluminum; his harsh attacks on individual European leaders at various times, including Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and former Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain; and the behavior of some of his ambassadors toward their host countries and institutions.

Mr. Trump’s criticism of European free-riding on defense is accurate, Mr. Muniz said, but it has also led to Europeans ceding responsibility for their own interests and fates.

But given his unreliability as an ally, “Trump will accelerate the process of European integration on defense and security,” he said.

In fact, in many corners of the world, America’s transformation from the indispensable ally to the unreliable one is now taken for granted.

“America’s unreliability as both a global leader and ally or partner is no longer in doubt — and countries are adjusting accordingly,’’ and not just in Europe, according to Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former Israeli foreign minister and now vice president of the Toledo International Center for Peace.

The Kurds and Turks quickly scrambled to make a deal with Russia, and India is also pursuing closer ties to both China and Russia. The South Koreans are seeking a form of rapprochement with the North and even Saudi Arabia is looking for better ties with Iran, he wrote in an op-ed article for Project Syndicate.

The main problem “is not just what Trump does, but how he does it,” Mr. Leonard said. It is not just Mr. Trump’s “America First” nationalism, he said. Alliances need predictability, “and Trump is so unpredictable.”

*********

‘The New Berlin Wall’: Why Ukraine Is Central to the Scandal

By Andrew Higgins | Published September 27, 2019 | The New York Times | Posted October 24, 2019 |

IVANO-FRANKIVSK, Ukraine — His voice crackling over what he complained was a “terrible” sound system, Donald J. Trump in September 2015 heaped praise on the oligarch who had invited him to speak by video link from New York to a conference in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine.

The Ukrainian oligarch, Victor Pinchuk, had secured 20 minutes of Mr. Trump’s time — and a heap of flattery from the future president, who described him as “a very, very special man” — with a donation of $150,000 to Mr. Trump’s now defunct foundation.

Mr. Pinchuk, a steel magnate long enmeshed with Ukraine’s business and political elite, had earlier donated more than $10 million to the Clinton Foundation and been invited to dine at the Washington home of Hillary and Bill Clinton.

The equal opportunity largess of powerful Ukrainians like Mr. Pinchuk helps explain why so many of the most dimly lit and hazardous roads of American politics keep leading back to Ukraine, a poor, dysfunctional country on Europe’s eastern fringe.

Caught between the clashing geopolitical ambitions of Russia and the West, Ukraine has for years had to balance competing outside interests and worked hard to cultivate all sides, and also rival groups on the same side — no matter how incompatible their agendas — with offers of money, favors and prospects for career advancement.

Paul Manafort, Rudolph Giuliani, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son Hunter and Hillary Clinton have all, at one time or another, found their way there, escorted by Ukrainian guides with deep pockets and a keen sense of how to appeal to their vanities, ambitions and greed.

“The fact is Ukraine is an amazing place,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Pinchuk’s conference in 2015. “I’ve known so many people over so many years in the Ukraine.”

He told Ukraine’s new president, Volodomyr Zelensky, much the same thing this week when they met in New York, though the only specific person from Ukraine he wanted to tell Mr. Zelensky about was a former Miss Universe contestant.

Ukraine, said Serhii Plokhy, a Harvard historian whose books include “The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine,” has for centuries been tugged in different directions by rival suitors, and became a “battlefield” between Russia and the West when it declared its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

“The front lines are always places that attract both heroes and villains who go there from world capitals to make a name, advance a career, make a fortune, etc. — and then carry back home legacies, memories and skeletons for their closets,” Mr. Plokhy said.

Ukraine’s allure for American carpetbaggers, political consultants and adventurers has put it at the center of not just one but now two presidential elections in the United States and a host of second-tier scandals.

Before becoming Mr. Trump’s campaign manager before the 2016 election, Mr. Manafort made millions of dollars in Ukraine, working as an adviser to the country’s leadership out of an office in Kiev. Mr. Giuliani — who has also wound up working with opposing sides in internal Ukrainian battles — has repeatedly looked to the same city and a new set of Ukrainian leaders for dirt on Mr. Trump’s political foes ahead of the 2020 election.

Yevhen Hlibovytskyi, a lecturer in philosophy at the Ukrainian Catholic University, said Ukraine’s pivotal position in geopolitical struggles had made Kiev, a picturesque capital of cobblestoned streets on the Dnepr River, into the 21st century’s equivalent of Cold War dens of intrigue like Vienna and Berlin, or Casablanca during World War II.

“Ukraine is the country that hosts the Berlin Wall at the moment,” he said. “Ukraine is the country where the clash between the free and unfree world takes place. It’s only natural that some players will be seeking protection in the West,” sometimes by crossing palms with silver.

Put upon over the centuries by more powerful neighbors claiming their land, notably Russia, Poland and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Ukrainians have rarely had firm allies or even their own functioning state, a situation that has encouraged a highly transactional approach to foreign and also domestic affairs.

Unlike Russia, ruled since the time of Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century by a single, strong leader, usually a tyrant, Ukraine has always been a land of competing power centers. This has made it a fertile ground for democracy but also left it a highly fractured nation with an ever shifting constellation of feuding power-brokers who often look to foreigners for help in their internal struggles.

The whistle-blower’s complaint released on Thursday revealed how Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, played into this dynamic, focusing his efforts to get Mr. Biden and his son investigated on a group of senior law-enforcement officials in Ukraine who had been locked for months in a bitter turf war with rival factions within the same state structure.

The officials Mr. Giuliani sought out in the name of fighting corruption were engaged in a long feud with Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau. The bureau, which has worked closely with the F.B.I. and was set up in 2014 with strong support from the Obama administration, is one of the few government agencies in Ukraine that Western diplomats in Kiev view as reasonably honest and competent.

Mr. Giuliani has his own business history in the country as well. More than two years ago, his company, Giuliani Security and Safety, signed a contract with a wealthy Ukrainian, Pavel Fuks, to consult on emergency planning in Mr. Fuks’s hometown, Kharkiv.

At the time, Mr. Fuks and others had become entangled in a complicated $1.5 billion deal to buy Ukrainian government bonds. In an investigation, Al Jazeera reported that the real sellers were sanctioned former insiders in the government of the disgraced former president of Ukraine, Viktor F. Yanukovych.

Political survival in Ukraine has for centuries often hinged on finding a strong patron abroad. This sometimes led to disaster, most famously in the case of Ivan Mazepa, the Cossack leader of an embryonic state in eastern Ukraine in the 17th century. Initially an ally of Peter the Great of Russia, Mazepa, worried by the rise of powerful Cossack rivals, switched sides to ally with Russia’s great enemy at the time, Sweden, which he thought would offer protection. Instead, it led him to crushing defeat by Russia at the Battle of Poltava in 1709.

“Ukrainians all the time tried to form an alliance with the stronger side,” said Volodymyr Yermolenko, editor in chief at Ukraine World, an online magazine. Mazepa, despite his defeat, is revered as a national hero in Ukraine for trying, albeit with catastrophic consequences, to hold Russia at bay by finding a powerful patron in the West.

Mr. Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager and now a convicted fraudster, made a fortune in Ukraine by convincing its since toppled pro-Russian president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, that he could, for a hefty fee, help woo Europe and blacken the reputation of his main political rival, Yulia Timochenko, who had been thrown in jail.

Mr. Biden’s son Hunter earned at least $850,000 for serving on the board of a Cyprus-registered Ukrainian gas company that needed help in cleaning up its image after falling foul of anticorruption investigators in Ukraine. The company insisted it was the victim of internal score-settling.

Yevhen Mahda, director of the Institute of World Policy, a research group, compared Ukraine’s recruitment of people like Mr. Manafort to the medieval practice of paying the Catholic Church for “indulgences,” which were supposed to reduce God’s punishment for sinful behavior.

“A lot of Ukrainian politicians have this stereotype that you pay an influential figure in the West, from Europe or America, and they will cleanse you of your sins,” he said.

The pursuit of foreign protectors and patrons has been a common feature of Ukraine’s political and business elite, no matter what their own political leanings.

Ukraine’s former president Petro O. Poroshenko, elected after street protests toppled his pro-Russian predecessor in February 2014, made good relations with the Obama administration his top foreign relations priority and then invested heavily in wooing the Trump administration, despite having favored Mrs. Clinton in the 2016 election.

Mr. Poroshenko’s eagerness to win over Mr. Trump and his growing fears that political rivals would thwart his re-election opened the way for Mr. Giuliani to press Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuri Lutsenko, who has since been fired, to help Mr. Trump’s own re-election by investigating Mr. Biden and his son.

How Mr. Poroshenko expected the Trump administration to help lift his sagging fortunes ahead of Ukraine’s presidential election, held in two rounds in March and April this year, is unclear. He got trounced anyway, losing emphatically to Mr. Zelensky, whose own officials quickly became the Trump team’s new targets in its drive to damage Mr. Biden.

While Democrats want Mr. Trump impeached over his dealings with Ukraine, the president and his allies have counterattacked with their own Ukraine-focused scandals. They have revived a debunked theory that the country colluded with the Clinton campaign to hurt Mr. Trump’s chances in 2016 and asserted, with little evidence, that Mr. Biden used his position as vice president to prevent Ukraine from investigating his son.

Ukrainians, jaded after years of watching their own leaders trade the power and privileges of office for personal financial or political gain, have mostly shrugged off what, for Mr. Trump, is possibly the most serious scandal to buffet the White House since Watergate toppled President Richard Nixon in 1974.

That a country few Americans paid much attention to in the past now commands center stage in Washington has stirred mostly bemusement in Ukraine. Those feelings are also tinged with a touch of pride that, after centuries in the shadow of Russia, its giant neighbor to the east, the nation is no longer seen as a backwater but a pivot around which the fate of the world’s most powerful country implausibly turns.

Pavlo Klimkin, Ukraine’s foreign minister under Mr. Poroshenko, said in a wry Twitter message this week that going down in history “as the country that led to the impeachment of the U.S. president” was “not a very fun prospect.” But, he added, “Now everyone understands what we are capable of.”

Andrew Kramer contributed reporting from Kiev, Ukraine.

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