What an eventful week it has been.
Just seven days prior, Ukraine’s proponents had been observing with anticipation, as nearly all indicators suggested Donald Trump would permit Ukraine to acquire long-range Tomahawk missiles during an upcoming meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday.
Granting approval for Ukraine to purchase and deploy these would have significantly boosted the country’s firepower and its capacity to target military infrastructure inside Russia.
However, Trump, whose stance toward Russia had apparently stiffened since his Alaska Summit with Putin in August yielded no meaningful outcomes, made a move that few had foreseen.
Zelensky’s most recent visit to Washington bore a striking resemblance to less productive encounters, such as the one that occurred in the Oval Office in February. In addition to Trump’s withholding of essential weapons for Ukraine, he reverted to some of his previous talking points. Most alarmingly, he insisted that any cessation of hostilities would necessitate Ukraine ceding territory to Putin—a region Russia has struggled to fully control despite 11 years of conflict.
According to a report, Trump allegedly informed the Ukrainian leader that if he did not submit to Putin’s demands, Ukraine would face “destruction.” The meeting reportedly escalated into a heated shouting match, with Trump allegedly discarding frontline maps, swearing repeatedly, and echoing a Kremlin narrative that the invasion is a “special operation, not even a war.”
Trump conducted a surprise phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin while Zelensky was en route to America.
During that call, Trump reportedly agreed to a summit with Putin, this time to be held in Budapest. Hungary is one of Putin’s few allies in the West, and its Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, has consistently impeded Western efforts to penalize Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. To merely state that it will be an embarrassment for many of its European allies would be a considerable understatement.
The meeting would allow Putin access to E.U. and NATO soil, where he is subject to arrest given an ICC arrest warrant. The spectacle of Putin standing alongside the world’s most powerful man in a NATO country will instead likely be leveraged as Kremlin propaganda—and serve as another indication that Trump has once again been outmaneuvered by Putin.
Despite all the hopes that have arisen each time Trump has made commitments to Ukraine, or encouraged NATO allies to increase their contributions, or seemingly began to perceive Putin for who he truly is, the facts speak for themselves. An analysis found that the number of Russian attacks on Ukraine has doubled since Trump’s inauguration. In recent weeks, escalating drone incursions have even penetrated further.
Trump’s desire for the war to conclude appears genuine. He has also made no secret of his aspiration to win a Nobel Peace Prize. But if the war in Ukraine ends with the nation’s future largely dictated by its aggressor, the very idea that Trump deserves the prize would be a dishonor.
The Russian President is a leader who operates by the principle: give an inch, take a mile. When the Obama Administration hesitated, Putin was more than willing to intervene to bolster his ally Bashar al-Assad. The West’s decision to overlook his annexation of Crimea in 2014 may have also emboldened him to launch his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Putin securing another summit with Trump constitutes a significant diplomatic victory. So too does Trump’s decision to withdraw support for Ukraine and revert to a perspective aligned with Putin’s thinking.
A version of Occam’s razor—that the simplest explanation for a phenomenon is likely the correct one—applies here. If Trump continues to reward Putin and penalize Kyiv, Putin will most probably further escalate actions in Ukraine and test the West.
There remains a possibility that Trump might yet shift his stance back to supporting Ukraine, and heeding Zelensky’s appeal for an additional 25 U.S. Patriot anti-missile batteries is essential.
Those in close proximity to the U.S. President should urge Trump to do more for Ukraine, and underscore that his current strategy is inadvertently making Putin appear smarter and stronger than Trump’s America.
For an individual who is highly concerned with public perception, that might represent Ukraine’s most effective approach.
