Donald Trump’s extraordinary Oval Office eruption at Volodymyr Zelenskyy was another display of standover tactics towards Ukraine, siding with a Russia that opposition figure Gary Kasparov described as one where the mafia has its own state.
The US had already brought Russia in from the diplomatic cold while demanding little. Trump had undermined Zelenskyy by baselessly denigrating him as an illegitimate dictator, blaming him for allowing the invasion to start, talking to Russia without Ukraine, and voting with Russia against a UN resolution reinforcing previous calls for Russia to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty. The White House has ruled out future NATO membership for Ukraine or putting US boots on the ground to support or enforce a peace deal. It has signalled, before serious negotiations, that Ukraine will have to cede territory. That would violate the most fundamental principle of the postwar UN-based order — the ban of territorial conquest, which has largely been observed.
And now, alongside J.D. Vance, Trump has tried to kneecap Ukraine’s international standing with a performance that plays to his MAGA acolytes and reflects his grotesque misunderstanding of the cause of this war.
Such treatment of a victim of aggression is breathtaking.
Lev Parnas, a Soviet-born former fixer for Rudolph Giuliani, says Trump simply hates Zelenskyy and Ukraine for being the cause of his biggest problems during his first term. The latter include his 2019 impeachment by Congress for trying to strongarm Zelenskyy into investigating the Biden family’s activities in Ukraine, wielding the threat of stopping US arms supplies. Ukraine loomed large in the background of Trump’s disgraced former campaign manager Paul Manafort, as well as Trump’s claims about the “Russiagate” scandal during and after the 2016 Presidential election.
This much seemed obvious during Trump’s outburst alongside Zelenskyy where Trump ranted about Putin having to “endure” the investigations and then complained about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The dons in the Kremlin must be laughing all the way to their banyas.
The master of the “Art of the Deal” sounded in the White House like a Mafia boss — “You don’t have the cards”, “You’re buried there”. This is patent nonsense, unless Ukraine loses outside support. Economic sanctions have impeded Russia and could be tightened further. While Putin has the advantages in personnel, Ukraine is on the back foot in large part because the Biden administration and Europe were cautious and incremental in providing vital weaponry to Ukraine and by putting limits on its use. Russia has also needed large supplies of weaponry from North Korea and Iran and supplies from China.
So it remains a mystery what Trump’s real goal is: to achieve a — probably unsustainable — peace at any price, just to say he has done it? Or to bring Russia in from the cold and resume business as usual?
The dons in the Kremlin must be laughing all the way to their banyas. There is little to suggest that Putin’s goals have changed or seem out of reach. Splits between the United States and Europe will be a welcome bonus. Former US diplomat Thomas Graham, known for an “understanding” stance on Kremlin foreign policy, said after a recent visit to Moscow that Putin seeks a relationship with Ukraine like that with his vassal state of Belarus: not merely non-membership of NATO, but controlling Ukraine’s domestic politics as well.
Where this leaves support for Ukraine should quickly become clear. Trump had joined the standover merchants by demanding a deal to receive 50 per cent of future earnings from Ukraine’s mineral resources — ostensibly as “repayment” for US$350 billion in aid to Ukraine. That deal appears dead. The figure was bogus anyway — US aid promised since 2022 is about $182 billion, 70 per cent of which was designated for purchase of weapons and supplies in the United States, while less than half has actually been disbursed. Total US aid is less than half that from the European Union.
Russia has not resiled from its demands on Ukraine in talks in Istanbul at the beginning of the full-scale invasion. In essence, Russia sought Ukraine’s capitulation, including a commitment not to receive foreign arms supplies, and to limit its armed forces to extremely low levels (e.g. 85,000 personnel, no missiles of more than 40 kilometres range). Putin will push for the maximum he can get of these, believing he can outlast the West and obfuscate and delay in the absence of any serious pushback.
At a minimum, Putin will want to hang onto the one-fifth of Ukraine he has captured. But, as forensically analysed in the first full book on the subject, the Russian occupation is an ethnocidaltakeover rather than a military occupation in line with international law — a mix of Hitler’s Reichskommisariat Ukraine, Orwell’s 1984 and The Godfather. Not only is Russia eradicating Ukrainian identity and nationhood through violence, torture, administrative tools and indoctrination. Thousands of Ukrainian businesses and properties have been expropriated or stolen via legal fictions or thugs in uniform making offers that can’t be refused.
So even the kind of deal mooted earlier by Trump’s Ukraine envoy, General Keith Kellogg — a ceasefire with the status of the occupied territories left for future negotiations – would lack any credibility without two conditions: a) Russia must revoke its illegal annexations, otherwise there can be no pretense that their future can be negotiated; and b) international observers must be allowed into those territories to encourage a modicum of compliance with international law, of which there has been close to zero.
If Russia refused, which would seem likely at this stage, economic and political sanctions should be maintained or stepped up, along with arm supplies to Ukraine. Sadly, however, Trump seems a long way from enabling a just solution for Ukraine and global order. He seems more open to extending the lawlessness prevailing in those annexed Ukrainian provinces.