Trump walks away from Ukraine
COMMENT/ANALYSIS
On Friday night Russia launched one of its biggest air attacks of the war on Ukraine, injuring dozens. And then on Saturday night it did it again, killing at least 12 in several towns and cities and injuring many more.
Meanwhile in the US Donald Trump last week was soliciting corrupt payments in the form of purchases of his meme coin, and launching a fresh attack against Harvard University.
It would have been so good to be wrong about Trump and Ukraine.
But amid all the razmatazz, brouhaha, made-for-television showdowns, and hot air; amid all the rambling in block capital letters on social media – the boast that Trump would end the war in 24 hours, and then in 100 days, turned out to be flabby bombast.
At the end of the day, far from shoehorning Moscow into a peace deal, and with an easy diplomatic win slipping through his fingers, the American president, as many of us had predicted, just walked away. Putin now has a green light to do his worst.
There were times in the last few months when when I almost dared to hope. At one point Trump seemed to get genuinely angry with Vladimir Putin after yet another murderous attack on Ukrainian civilians.
“I am not happy with the Russian strikes on KYIV,” Trump wrote. “Not necessary, and very bad timing. Vladimir, STOP!”
After another Russian attack on the northern city of Sumy he said it was '“a horrible thing.” And then there was the time when Trump said that Putin was ‘tapping’ him along.
But, then, after a two-hour phone call between Trump and Putin that was billed by the White House as a major chance for peace, Trump announced that it was up to Ukraine and Russia to make peace.
Even as the heads of European governments, irked by Russia’s unwillingness to agree to even a 30-day ceasefire, met to discuss a new tranche of sanctions, Trump began talking about the beautiful business deals he could make with the Kremlin.
Looking back on the last four months, to some extent, we have all been taken in.
We watched fixated as the various episodes of ‘Trump: the Ukraine-Russia file’ unfolded. Sometimes we were baffled, more often outraged, but we always tuned in.
First, there was the minerals deal that Trump initially offered Kyiv – which would have had one of the world’s most benighted countries pledge hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue to its richest – in exchange for….. absolutely nothing.
Then there was the shameful humiliation of Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House by Trump and his vice-president JD Vance, surely one of the most ignominious episodes of the modern US diplomatic era.
There were the ‘warm’ conversations between Trump and Putin, a man who had long been ostracised by the western world, where they talked nostalgically about World War Two and discussed the commercial potential of the Arctic.
And there was the incessant shuttling of Steve Witkoff – possibly the most under-prepared US envoy ever to be sent abroad – between Washington, Moscow and points east.
Then, last week, Trump lost interest.
The unvarnished reality of what Trump has achieved was summed up by Bridget Brink, the US ambassador to Kyiv and a long-serving foreign service officer, who handed in her resignation earlier this month.
“I respect the president’s right and responsibility to determine US foreign policy, she wrote. “It is the role of America’s foreign service to execute that policy. Unfortunately, the policy since the beginning of the Trump administration has been to put pressure on the victim, Ukraine, rather than on the aggressor, Russia.”
“I cannot stand by while a country is invaded, a democracy bombarded, and children killed with impunity. I believe that the only way to secure US interests is to stand up for democracies and to stand against autocrats. Peace at any price is not peace at all ― it is appeasement.”
So, now that Trump has left the table, where does all this leave the Ukraine-Russia conflict?
To make a sober assessment, we must first filter out the cheap talk. Talk of Putin’s desire for peace, and Zelensky’s lack of cards are both Trumpian falsehoods.
Putin has clearly decided that, for now at least, he wants to fight on. He still believes that the battlefield can deliver a better outcome for him than any of the recipes for peace currently on offer.
At one level, it is understandable that Putin fears peace. The day the war is over Russians, who have taken the best part of a million casualties in Europe’s bloodiest conflict since 1945, may begin to ask the obvious question: was it all worth it?
Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of embittered and brutalised soldiers will begin heading home bearing tales of the horrors they have witnessed, the incompetence and corruption of the higher-ups, and the ultimate futility of the fight they were engaged in.
Even to Russians who have an imperialist and expansionist bent selling the notion that seizing a small part of a much weaker enemy’s territory was worth years of sacrifice will be tough.
Nationalists will be tempted to turn on Putin, not for starting the conflict, but for failing to win it.
Furthermore the future of the average Russian will hardly be peaches and cream. With up to half of state spending propping up the military effort, the country’s infrastructure is slowly falling apart, social spending is being cut, and inflation is rising.
Meanwhile the ostensible aims of the war – defenestrating the ‘Nazi’ Ukrainian leadership and imposing a Quisling regime, and pushing Nato out of eastern Europe – are further away than ever.
And Ukraine? For the next several months Kyiv is going to be up against it. The Russians are beginning a summer offensive with the aim of seizing more of the Donbas and putting pressure on Kharkiv, Sumy and Dnipro provinces.
Ukraine has taken terrible casualties – though nothing like as many as the Russians – and its army is fatigued and overstretched. The argument over whether to draft men in their early twenties continues.
But, however we slice it, the country is doing better than was predicted a year ago. It has a vibrant nascent armaments industry, the economy is in dire shape but hanging on, and Zelensky has seen his popularity rise not fall in recent months.
Meanwhile, at least in some European capitals, there is a growing sense that if war with Russia is coming – and, by my reckoning, it is certainly possible though not inevitable – better to pour resources into fighting in Ukraine than in the Baltic States or Central Europe.
A well-founded marriage between EU money and Ukrainian military capability would be a powerful one.
Of course, much will depend on how things develop at the front. At present Ukraine’s army of drones has forced the Russians to sacrifice many thousands of men for even incremental advances.
But the pace of technological change is fast and unpredictable. Much could still go wrong for Kyiv. It could still be wrong-footed and lose considerable land. But it would be a big mistake to predict Kyiv’s imminent demise.
Ukraine is in a far better position than it was in Feb 2022 - and much better armed. It will have to fight on without the overt support of its most important ally, but Kyiv has long prepared for that day.
It would have been nice to be wrong about Trump.
But at least now Kyiv can concentrate on getting down to the real business at hand: halting the Russian advance across the eastern plains.