“[General] Kellogg is no dove on Russia, and neither is his offspring. Kellogg’s daughter is Meaghan Mobbs, president of the R.T. Weatherman Foundation and a graduate of West Point.
The Ukrainians might not have a better friend than Mobbs. The R.T. Weatherman Foundation has been present in Ukraine since the start of the war. Its efforts include establishing and running a logistics hub on the Romania-Ukraine border and delivering more than 10,000 pallets of medicines, medical supplies and other aid to over 70 aid organizations and hospitals in Ukraine.
Besides delivering aid, the foundation helps evacuate American volunteer soldiers fighting in Ukraine to the U.S. military’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, where they can receive specialized medical care. It also repatriates the bodies of American volunteers killed in combat.
Mobbs stands at the not-so-common confluence of pro-Trump and pro-Ukraine America. She has fumed on social media that “Aid to Ukraine was slow-rolled by 1. Biden’s weak leadership and 2. Dysfunction at the DoD,” pointing to a Reuters report detailing a “chaotic weapons-tracking system in which even the definition of ‘delivered’ differed among U.S. military branches.”
The R.T. Weatherman Foundation also coordinated and sponsored a trip Kellogg took to Ukraine in January 2023. The following month, Kellogg testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee, declaring: “It is no mystery why this war happened. The Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin, has always resented the American victory in the Cold War, and has spoken openly of his desire to reverse it. … The path to bringing these negotiations about is to enable Ukraine to defeat the Russian Army in Ukraine. Putting the Russian Army in Ukraine at risk of defeat is a strong message Putin cannot ignore.”
He urged the Senate to “provide Ukraine with the military armament it needs to defeat the Russian Army, implement rigorous accountability measures for that military assistance, and do it now.”
Now, Kellogg is his own man and Mobbs her own woman. There’s no guarantee that the father always agrees with the daughter, and vice versa.
And as Trump’s declaration last week that he intends to have the United States “take over” the Gaza Strip made clear, we never know what he is going to do.
But there are other signs that the Trump team doesn’t want to get just any old deal that Putin is willing to sign, declare a diplomatic triumph and cut off aid to Ukraine — as it sometimes seemed during the presidential campaign.
“We’re telling Ukraine they have very valuable rare earths,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office last week. “We’re looking to do a deal with Ukraine where they’re going to secure what we’re giving them with their rare earths and other things.”…
Kellogg, announcing that he will speak at the Munich Security Conference in mid-February, wrote on X: “I look forward to speaking about [Trump’s] goal to end the bloody and costly war in Ukraine. I’ll meet with America’s allies who are ready to work with us.”
At the beginning of the month, Mobbs tweeted: “One of the new great falsehoods being pushed by bad actors is there is nothing worth fighting and dying for. Peace at all costs isn’t peace, it’s surrender disguised as virtue. True peace requires strength, sacrifice, and the willingness to defend what is right — even when it costs.”
This does not sound like a family interested in giving Putin a great deal.” [Washington Post]
Gen Kellog’s view on Ukraine >
