Kady, much of what you say I do not disagree with. The important points being that there is real good that could come from the ceasefire and anything is good for the Syrian people but it may not be of much value to them. I think it has made sense for the US and Russia to work together on Syria. The Obama approach was hopeless there. He allowed himself to be worked into a neocon corner and couldn’t get out. I certainly don’t like Assad but the cost in destruction and human suffering for no clear reason is worse than a crime. But the point is that Putin is not in a strong position, as I (and others) said, as the Iranians have more control and they were left out of the deal. I just don’t think that the Russians are going to go that far to enforce this if it falls apart. If it works as Putin has presented it it could be good, as I understand it, for some 600k Syrian refugees. But that is a lot of weight on a very shaky and small ceasefire. We can only hope for the best. As for Trump, yes he is frantic and trying to claim anything to distract people, but the Syrian ceasefire isn’t going to save him. He is not going to make any difference in the Syrian disaster.

The issue that would sink Trump has alway been his funding that saved him from bankruptcy again. And that was predominantly Russian for the last ten years but there has been enough trips to the well to provide an endless stream of smoking guns. I just grabbed this from Bloomberg:

One of Bayrock’s principals was a career criminal named Felix Sater who had ties to Russian and American organized crime groups. Before linking up with the company [Bayrock] and with Trump, he had worked as a mob informant for the U.S. government, fled to Moscow to avoid criminal charges while boasting of his KGB and Kremlin contacts there, and had gone to prison for slashing apart another man’s face with a broken cocktail glass.

This was indicative of what Trump et al have worked with for years. Follow the money and that is what is being done. And this from yesterday at Business Insider:

That attorney, Natalia Veselnitskaya, represents the family of Pyotr Katsyv, the former vice governor of the Moscow region, whose son, Denis, owns the real-estate company Prevezon. The DOJ had been investigating whether Prevezon laundered millions of dollars through New York City real estate when the case was unexpectedly settled two days before going to trial in May.

There is so much of this and it is the good stuff on money laundering that might not have been deadly if we were not talking about a guy plus family and staff now squatting in the White House. You don’t ignore this kind of thing. Trump is a small time crook who had the money to become a large, small time crook.