What could possess Donald Trump to victim shame Ukraine’s president and endorse the actions of an indicted war criminal by backing Vladimir Putin? Personal hatred of Volodymyr Zelensky? A near-demented obsession with personal sleight? A radical strategic vision that’s upended world affairs? Something worse?
Probably.
Soon after the massacre in Sumy, where two Iskander missiles slammed into the provincial Ukrainian capital killing 35 people, including two children, Trump sloughed off the atrocity by claiming it had been a Russian mistake. Shocking, but not surprising, as Trump has consistently taken the Russian side at every opportunity this year.
Before most of the bodies could be collected from the city morgue, though, he had gone on the offensive by doubling down on his efforts to pin Ukraine’s suffering on its president.
“When you start a war, you got to know you can win,” he said of Ukraine’s leader.
Zelensky was not president when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. He was elected by a landslide in 2019. Russia launched its attempt to kill him, capture Kyiv, and colonise Ukraine in February 2022.
He didn’t start the war with Russia – and wasn’t president when Ukraine enshrined the goal of Nato membership in its 2018 constitution.
Zelensky did, however, earn Trump’s anger by being a disloyal recipient of America’s largesse, mostly financial aid, for failing to open an investigation into Hunter Biden’s business deals in Ukraine in July 2019. Joe Biden was the likely Democrat candidate in the election of 2020.
Back then, Trump was impeached by congress over his alleged threat to withhold $400m in US military aid to Ukraine unless Zelensky helped with the Biden campaign, and other anti-Democrat operations.
Trump was cleared by the senate but the damage had been done. He bears a deep grudge against Zelensky.
But Trump was already a Russian strategic partner. His relationship with Moscow goes back to 1987 when he made his first trip to the capital of the Soviet Union to scout for investment opportunities. He didn’t ever do any deals in Russia. But Russian bankers have backed some of his enterprises since.
Trump has always been sloppy with state secrets since his first term in office. His own top intelligence staff have risked easy penetration by foreign spies because they’ve been using their personal phones for top secret communications.
So it is reasonable to assume that America’s adversaries, like Russia, have deep knowledge and understanding of every aspect of the 47th president’s life – and have done for decades.
His support for Russian G7/8 membership, his refusal to put tariffs on Moscow this month, he has adopted every one of Russia’s initial negotiating principles as his own when it comes to Ukraine and said that he thought that the country may anyway “be Russian one day”. He wants to get back into doing business with Russia too.
But he goes further into the realms of bully-backing with his statement on Monday that “you don’t start a war against someone 20 times your size and then hope that people give you missiles”.
Again, Zelensky didn’t start the war. The US, UK, Russia and Ukraine did sign a memorandum in Budapest guaranteeing Kyiv security after Ukraine gave up its nuclear missiles in 1994. France and China backed the Budapest memo with their own document.
Ukraine, a western democracy with ambitions to join the European Union, is a sovereign nation that Putin has said he wants to bring back into the post-Soviet Russian empire. Putin has also said he has designs on the Baltic states, Moldova and Romania.
Support for Ukraine is a necessary condition of Europe’s defence. America’s network of allies in Nato and beyond have been the weft of Washington’s tapestry of alliances that have made it a global super power.
To Trump, though, it’s getting in the way of turning the world into spheres of influence in which the US, Russia, and China carve up the planet. That’s also, by the way, Putin’s vision.
“I believe, sadly, (that) Russian narratives are prevailing in the US,” said Zelensky at the weekend in an interview with CBS.
“How is it possible to witness our losses and our suffering, to understand what the Russians are doing, and to still believe that they are not the aggressors, that they did not start this war? This speaks to the enormous influence of Russia’s information policy on America, on US politics and US politicians.”
That may cost him dearly.
When Trump ranted at Zelensky in March during the Ukrainian president’s official visit to the Oval Office, Trump reiterated how deeply loyal he felt to Putin because the Russian president had been accused of backing his candidacy in 2016.
“Let me tell ya, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me – we went through a phony witch hunt when they used him and Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia,” Trump raged, as he got increasingly incoherent during the White House attack on Zelensky.
“That was a phony Hunter Biden, Joe Biden scam. Hillary Clinton, shifty Adam Schiff, it was a Democrat scam. And [Putin] had to go through that. And he did go through it. We didn‘t end up in a war. And he went through it.”
This gobbledygook makes little sense. It does, however, reveal the depth of his feelings for Putin who, at least since 2016, he has seen as sharing a trench with The Donald in the wider campaign to undermine the American oligarch.
Trump soon suspended military aid and then intelligence sharing with Kyiv after the Oval Office row, which coincided with Putin’s campaign to free the Kursk region captured by Ukraine in Russia last year.
Trump has turned America’s system of alliances with the west upside down and inside out.
His evisceration of America’s security establishment with ideological purges, attacks on the US judiciary, federal bureaucracy, education system and the Constitution itself have been combined with a wholesale trashing of Washington’s soft power and humanitarian operations.
This all serves the interests of the Kremlin. It’s Making Moscow Great Again.
A former KGB chief, Putin has reinforced his relationship with Trump by stroking his vanity. He’s relentless in his cultivation of the US president.
In his most recent effort he sent a portrait of the US president painted in Russia to the White House in the care of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s chief Ukraine negotiator.
Witkoff said his boss thought he painting was “beautiful”. The bad news is that Trump’s narcissism is Russia’s greatest strategic asset.
