In just 10 days, the US president and his yes-men have blown apart the international security order which maintained peace on the European continent for the past 80 years. Donald Trump has aligned the US with Vladimir Putin and betrayed Ukraine, a country so eager to join the West that it enshrined the twin goals of Nato and EU membership in its constitution. It was to foil that ambition that Russia seized Crimea and much of the Donbas region in 2014 and launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago.
Trump boasts that he will end the war “that would not have happened if I were president” yet he made no attempt to end the war when it simmered on through his first term.
The earthquake started with an unctuous, pro-Putin post on Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, on February 12th. Trump recounted their 90-minute telephone conversation as if the Russian dictator were a respected statesman. Putin has ordered the murder of dozens of opponents, imprisoned thousands and extinguished free speech. The first thing Russian soldiers do each time they seize a Ukrainian town is set up a torture centre. Putin awarded medals to a brigade accused of mass atrocities in Bucha.
A few hours before Trump posted his paean to Putin, his defence secretary Pete Hegseth told a meeting in Brussels that Ukraine will not be allowed to join Nato. Under US leadership, the alliance had twice promised future membership to Ukraine. It was “unrealistic” to think that Ukraine could return to its pre-invasion borders, Hegseth said. Nor would the US send troops to prevent further Russian aggression. Thus, Hegseth granted three of Putin’s main demands before negotiations even started.
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At the Munich Security Conference on February 14th, vice president JD Vance excoriated European efforts to stem disinformation by far-right, pro-Putin parties, and supported the far-right Alternativ für Deutschland in the midst of the German election campaign.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, opened negotiations on the fate of Ukraine in Riyadh on Tuesday, without Ukraine or Europe. “Zelenskiy down. Europeans out. We are overjoyed,” the Russian television presenter Dmitry Kiselyov gloated. Another presenter, Yevgeny Popov, quipped that Trump was doing Russia’s job for it. “We wanted to saw the western world into pieces,’ Popov said. “But Trump decided to saw through it himself.”
When Volodymyr Zelenskiy said he would not accept an agreement concluded without Ukraine, Trump accused him of having started the war, a blatant lie. Speaking to journalists at Mar-a-Lago, Trump said, “Today I heard: ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years… you should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
After Zelenskiy said the US president “is living in this disinformation bubble”, Trump issued his most virulent social media post, accusing the Ukrainian leader of having “talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won.”
Trump earlier demanded $500 billion in “payback” for past US assistance. According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Europe has allocated $138 billion to the Ukraine war effort; the US, $119 billion.
Putin – who regularly rigs Russian elections – claims Zelenskiy’s rule is illegitimate because his first term was to have ended last May. Ukrainian law bans holding elections in wartime, but Trump parroted Putin’s demand for new elections and his rhetoric, calling Zelenskiy “A Dictator without Elections”, and falsely claiming he is “very low in Ukrainian Polls”.
The EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, accused Trump of appeasement. Charles Kupperman, who was deputy national security adviser in Trump’s first term, compared him to Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who gave part of the Czech Republic to Hitler in 1938.
[ Trump’s dash for a Ukraine deal is a godsend to Vladimir Putin’s regimeOpens in new window ]
One possible explanation of Trump’s behaviour is that he sees China as the US’s principal adversary and hopes to prise Russia away from China. By enlisting North Korea and Iran in his war on Ukraine, Putin has become the de facto leader of rogue states. Trump is bringing the US into this confrerie.
Despite his mercurial behaviour, Trump’s admiration for Putin has never wavered. Special counsel Robert Mueller concluded that Russia intervened on Trump’s behalf in the 2016 presidential election. Craig Unger’s 2021 book, American Kompromat, quoted former Soviet and US intelligence sources who claimed Trump became a Russian asset in the 1980s.
Trump never forgave Zelenskiy’s refusal to investigate the business dealings of former US president Joe Biden’s son in Ukraine. The Ukrainian leader infuriated him again in recent days by refusing to sign over half of Ukraine’s rare earth metals and hydrocarbons to US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent. Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz warned ominously that “President Trump is obviously very frustrated right now with President Zelenskiy.”
Europeans said the move smacked of neocolonialism. The Daily Telegraph reported that the US president’s demands of Ukraine amounted to greater reparations than those imposed on Germany after the first World War.
Trump is not the first western leader to betray Ukraine. The US and Britain were guarantors of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, under which Ukraine relinquished its nuclear weapons in exchange for promises of security. Neither budged when Russia seized Crimea. French and German leaders sought to placate Putin.
Biden gave Ukraine just enough weapons to keep fighting, but not enough to win.
But no western failings in the 34-year history of independent Ukraine compare to Trump’s bullying. An agreement that would grant impunity for Russian war crimes, lift sanctions and dispense with reparations, recognise Russian sovereignty over occupied territory or leave Ukraine defenceless against further aggression would signify not peace, but surrender.
Trump and Putin believe might makes right and that the weak must be crushed. As the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci wrote, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”
