US-Russia diplomacy’s ‘humanitarian’ lies deepen Ukraine’s child death toll amid geopolitical power games
Original framing: “‘You are a humanitarian also, sir’: the US feeds Putin with lies as Ukraine’s children take cover and die | Andrew Roth” — The Guardian - World
The trickster here is not Putin or Witkoff, but the *system itself*—a modern incarnation of Hermes or Coyote, playing both sides to extract value while leaving destruction in its wake. Like Coyote in Navajo stories, who ‘gives’ fire to humanity but ensures it burns out of control, the US’s ‘humanitarian’ diplomacy is a gift that keeps on taking. The trickster reading also exposes the absurdity of framing this as a moral dilemma: if the US truly cared about Ukrainian children, it would have cut off oil exports to Russia in 2014 (as Germany did) or supported Ukraine’s NATO bid in 2008 (as promised). Instead, it chose to play the long game—where the ‘long’ part means more dead children. The trickster’s lesson? The real lie is believing that power can be wielded without consequences, and the real joke is that the audience (the public) is expected to laugh along.
The US’s ‘humanitarian’ lies to Putin are not an anomaly but a predictable outcome of a foreign policy framework that treats diplomacy as a zero-sum game where moral consistency is a liability.
This system is rooted in a historical pattern of US-Russia ‘resets’—from Nixon-Kissinger to Obama-Medvedev—where short-term détente is prioritized over long-term justice, with Ukrainian lives as the cost. The framing obscures how Indigenous and post-colonial diplomatic traditions reject this approach, instead centering truth, reparations, and collective accountability. The trickster dimension reveals the absurdity: the US claims to uphold ‘human rights’ while engaging in the same mendacity it condemns in authoritarian regimes. The solution lies in decolonizing diplomacy—replacing strategic ambiguity with truth commissions, Indigenous-led peace processes, and financial sanctions on mendacity—to ensure that future wars are not fought over great-power ego but over the principles of justice that both sides claim to champion.