On Wednesday, February
12, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced at a meeting of the Ukraine
Defense Contact Group in Brussels, Belgium, that President Donald Trump
intended to back away from support for Ukraine in its fight to push back
Russia’s invasions of 2014 and 2022.
Hegseth said that Trump wanted to
negotiate peace with Russia, and he promptly threw on the table three key
Russian demands. He said that it was “unrealistic” to think that Ukraine would
get back all its land—essentially suggesting that Russia could keep Crimea, at
least—and that the U.S. would not back Ukraine’s membership in the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the mutual security agreement that has
kept Russian incursions into Europe at bay since 1949.
Hegseth’s biggest concession to
Russia, though, was his warning that “stark strategic realities prevent the
United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of
Europe.” Also on Wednesday, President Donald Trump spoke to Russia’s president,
Vladimir Putin, for nearly an hour and a half and came out echoing Putin’s
rationale for his attack on Ukraine.
Trump’s social media account posted that
the call had been “highly productive,” and said the two leaders would visit
each other’s countries, offering a White House visit to Putin, who has been
isolated from other nations since his attacks on Ukraine.
In a press conference on Thursday,
the day after his speech in Brussels, Hegseth suggested again that the U.S.
military did not have the resources to operate in more than one arena and was
choosing to prioritize China rather than Europe, a suggestion that observers of
the world’s most powerful military found ludicrous.
Then, on Friday, at the sixty-first
Munich Security Conference, where the U.S. and allies and partners have come
together to discuss security issues since 1963, Vice President J.D. Vance
attacked the U.S.A.’s European allies. He warned that they were threatened not
by Russia or China, but rather by “the threat from within,” by which he meant
the democratic principles of equality before the law that right-wing ideologues
believe weaken a nation by treating women and racial, religious, and gender
minorities as equal to white Christian men.
After Vance told Europe to “change
course and take our shared civilization in a new direction,” he refused to meet
with Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz and instead met with the leader of the
far-right German political party that has been associated with neo-Nazis.
While the Munich conference was
still underway, the Trump administration on Saturday announced it was sending a
delegation to Saudi Arabia to begin peace talks with Russia. Ukrainian
officials said they had not been informed and had no plans to attend. European
negotiators were not invited either.
When U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio
and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov spoke on Saturday, the Russian
readout of the call suggested that Russia urgently needs relief from the
economic sanctions that are crushing the Russian economy. The day before,
Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, an ally of both Putin and Trump, assured
Hungarian state radio on Friday that Russia will be “reintegrated” into the
world economy and the European energy system as soon as “the U.S. president
comes and creates peace.”
Talks began yesterday in Riyadh,
Saudi Arabia. In a four-and-a half-hour meeting, led by Rubio and Lavrov, and
including national security advisor Mike Waltz, the U.S. and Russia agreed to
restaff the embassies in each other’s countries, a key Russian goal as part of
its plan to end its isolation. Lavrov blamed the Biden administration for
previous “obstacles” to diplomatic efforts and told reporters that now that
Trump is in power, he had “reason to believe that the American side has begun
to better understand our position.”
Yesterday evening, from his Florida
residence, Trump parroted Russian propaganda when he blamed Ukraine for the war
that began when Russia invaded Ukraine’s sovereign territory. When reporters
asked about the exclusion of Ukraine from the talks, Trump answered: “Today I
heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you've been there for three years.
You should have ended it three years ago. You should have never started it. You
could have made a deal.” He also said that Zelensky holds only a 4% approval rating,
when in fact it is about 57%.
Today, Trump posted that Zelensky
is a dictator and should hold elections, a demand Russia has made in hopes of
installing a more pro-Russia government. As Laura Rozen pointed out in Diplomatic,
former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev posted: “If you’d told me just three
months ago that these were the words of the US President, I would have laughed
out loud.”
“Be clear about what’s happening,”
Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark posted. “Trump and his
administration, and thus America, is siding with Putin and Russia against a
United States ally.” To be even clearer: under Trump,
the United States is abandoning the post–World War II world it helped to build
and then guaranteed for the past 80 years.
The struggle for Ukraine to
maintain its sovereignty, independence, and territory has become a fight for
the principles established by the United Nations, organized in the wake of
World War II by the allied countries in that war, to establish international
rules that would, as the U.N. charter said, prevent “the scourge of war, which
twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm
faith in fundamental human rights.”
Central to those principles and rules was
that members would not attack the “territorial integrity or political
independence” of any other country. In 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) came together to hold back growing Soviet aggression under
a pact that an attack on any of the member states would be considered an attack
on all.
The principle of national
sovereignty is being tested in Ukraine. After the breakup of the Soviet Union
in 1991, Ukraine held about a third of the USSR’s nuclear weapons but gave them
up in exchange for payments and security assurances from Russia, the United
States, and the United Kingdom that they would respect Ukraine’s sovereignty
within its existing borders.
But Ukraine sits between Russia and Europe, and as
Ukraine increasingly showed an inclination to turn toward Europe rather than
Russia, Russian leader Putin worked to put his own puppets at the head of the
Ukrainian government with the expectation that they would keep Ukraine, with
its vast resources, tethered to Russia.
In 2004 it appeared that
Russian-backed politician Viktor Yanukovych had won the presidency of Ukraine,
but the election was so full of fraud, including the poisoning of a key rival
who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe, that the
U.S. government and other international observers did not recognize the
election results. The Ukrainian government voided the election and called for a
do-over.
To rehabilitate his image,
Yanukovych turned to American political consultant Paul Manafort, who was
already working for Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. With Manafort’s help,
Yanukovych won the presidency in 2010 and began to turn Ukraine toward Russia.
When Yanukovych suddenly reversed Ukraine’s course toward cooperation with the
European Union and instead took a $3 billion loan from Russia, Ukrainian
students protested. On February 18, 2014, after months of popular protests,
Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power in the Maidan Revolution, also known as
the Revolution of Dignity, and he fled to Russia.
Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster,
Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it. The invasion prompted the
United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia and
on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing
business in U.S. territories. E.U. sanctions froze assets, banned goods from
Crimea, and banned travel of certain Russians to Europe.
Yanukovych’s fall had left Manafort
both without a patron and with about $17 million worth of debt to Deripaska.
Back in the U.S., in 2016, television personality Donald Trump was running for
the presidency, but his campaign was foundering. Manafort stepped in to help.
He didn’t take a salary but reached out to Deripaska through one of his
Ukrainian business partners, Konstantin Kilimnik, immediately after landing the
job, asking him, “How do we use to get whole? Has OVD [Oleg Vladimirovich
Deripaska] operation seen?”
Journalist Jim Rutenberg
established that in 2016, Russian operatives presented Manafort a plan “for the
creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving Putin effective
control of the country’s industrial heartland.”
In exchange for weakening NATO
and U.S. support for Ukraine, looking the other way as Russia took eastern
Ukraine, and removing U.S. sanctions from Russian entities, Russian operatives
were willing to help Trump win the White House. The Republican-dominated Senate
Intelligence Committee in 2020 established that Manafort’s Ukrainian business
partner Kilimnik, whom it described as a “Russian intelligence officer,” acted
as a liaison between Manafort and Deripaska while Manafort ran Trump’s
campaign.
Government officials knew that
something was happening between the Trump campaign and Russia. By the end of
July 2016, FBI director James Comey opened a counterintelligence investigation
into Russian interference in the 2016 election. After Trump won, the FBI caught
Trump national security advisor Lieutenant General Michael Flynn assuring
Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak that the new administration would change U.S.
policy toward Russia.
Shortly after Trump took office, Flynn had to resign, and
Trump asked Comey to drop the investigation into Flynn. When Comey refused,
Trump fired him. The next day, he told a Russian delegation he was hosting in
the Oval Office: “I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut
job…. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”
Trump swung U.S. policy toward
Russia, but that swing hit him. In 2019, with the help of ally Rudy Giuliani,
Trump planned to invite Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, Petro Poroshenko, to
the White House to boost his chances of reelection. In exchange, Poroshenko
would announce that he was investigating Hunter Biden for his work with
Ukrainian energy company Burisma, thus weakening Trump’s chief rival, Democrat
Joe Biden, in the 2020 presidential election.
But then, that April, voters in
Ukraine elected Volodymyr Zelensky rather than Poroshenko. Trump withheld money
Congress had appropriated for Ukraine’s defense against Russia and suggested he
would release it only after Zelensky announced an investigation into Hunter
Biden.
That July 2019 phone call launched Trump’s first impeachment, which,
after the Senate acquitted him in February 2020, launched in turn his revenge
tour and then the Big Lie that he had won the 2020 election. The dramatic break
from the democratic traditions of the United States when Trump and his cronies
tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election was in keeping
with his increasing drift toward the political tactics of Russia.
When Biden took office, he and
Secretary of State Antony Blinken worked feverishly to strengthen NATO and
other U.S. alliances and partnerships. In February 2022, Putin launched another
invasion of Ukraine, attempting a lightning strike to take the rich regions of
the country for which his people had negotiated with Manafort in 2016.
But
rather than a quick victory, Putin found himself bogged down. Zelensky refused
to leave the country and instead backed resistance, telling the Americans who
offered to evacuate him, “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.”
With the support of Biden and Blinken, NATO allies and other partners stood
behind Ukraine to stop Putin from dismantling the postwar rules-based
international order and spreading war further into Europe.
When he left office just a month
ago, Biden said he was leaving the Trump administration with a “strong hand to
play” in foreign policy, leaving it “an America with more friends and stronger
alliances, whose adversaries are weaker and under pressure,” than when he took
office.
Now, on the anniversary of the day
the Ukrainian people ousted Victor Yanukovych in 2014—Putin is famous for
launching attacks on anniversaries—the United States has turned its back on
Ukraine and 80 years of peacetime alliances in favor of support for Vladimir
Putin’s Russia.
“We now have an alliance between a Russian president who wants
to destroy Europe and an American president who also wants to destroy Europe,”
a European diplomat said. “The transatlantic alliance is over.”
This shift appears to reflect the
interests of Trump, rather than the American people. Trump’s vice president
during his first term, Mike Pence, posted: “Mr. President, Ukraine did not
‘start’ this war. Russia launched an unprovoked and brutal invasion claiming
hundreds of thousands of lives. The Road to Peace must be built on the Truth.”
Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) said, “Putin is a war
criminal and should be in jail for the rest of his life, if not executed."
Courtney Kube and Carol E. Lee of NBC News reported that intelligence officials
and congressional officials told them that Putin feels “empowered” by Trump’s
recent support and is not interested in negotiations; he is interested in
controlling Ukraine.
A Quinnipiac poll released today
shows that only 9% of Americans think we should trust Putin; 81% say we
shouldn’t. For his part, Putin complained today that Trump was not moving fast
enough against Europe and Ukraine.
In The Bulwark, Mark
Hertling, who served as the Commanding General of the United States Army
Europe, commanded the 1st Armored Division in Germany, and the Multinational
Division-North in Iraq, underlined the dramatic shift in American alignment.
In
an article titled “We’re Negotiating with War Criminals,” he listed the crimes:
nearly 20,000 Ukrainian children kidnapped and taken to Russia; the deliberate
targeting of civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, schools, and energy
facilities; the execution of prisoners of war; torture of detainees; sexual
violence against Ukrainian civilians and detainees; starvation; forcing
Ukrainians to join pro-Russian militias.
“And we are negotiating with them,”
Hertling wrote. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo points
out that the talks appear to be focused on new concessions for American
companies in the Russian oil industry, including a deal for American companies
to participate in Russian oil exploration in the Arctic.
For years, Putin has apparently
believed that driving a wedge between the U.S. and Europe would make NATO
collapse and permit Russian expansion. But it’s not clear that’s the only
possible outcome. Ukraine’s Zelensky and the Ukrainians are not participating
in the destruction of either their country or European alliances, of course.
And European leaders are coming together to strengthen European defenses.
Emergency meetings with 18 European countries and Canada have netted a promise
to stand by Ukraine and protect Europe. “Russia poses an existential threat to
Europeans,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said today. Also today, rather
than dropping sanctions against Russia, European Union ambassadors approved new
ones.
For his part, Trump appears to be
leaning into his alliance with dictators. This afternoon, he posted on social
media a statement about how he had killed New York City’s congestion pricing
and “saved” Manhattan, adding “LONG LIVE THE KING!” White House deputy chief of
staff Taylor Budowich reposted the statement with an image of Trump in the
costume of an ancient king, with a crown and an ermine robe. Later, the White
House itself shared an image that imitated a Time magazine
cover with the word “Trump” in place of “Time,” a picture of Trump with a
crown, and the words “LONG LIVE THE KING.”
The British tabloid The
Daily Star interprets the changes in American politics differently.
Its cover tomorrow features Vladimir Putin walking “PUTIN’S POODLE”: the
president of the United States.
—Heather Cox Richardson
