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Does President Donald Trump even know what he would like Russia and Ukraine to do in the war they’ve been fighting for 3½ years? Both Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky have emerged from recent phone calls with Trump believing that the man in the White House is on their side—but subsequent events have shown otherwise, or at best, sent confusing signals. It could be, as others have learned, that Trump tends to parrot the views of the last person he’s talked with.
In general, over the years, Trump has leaned more toward Russia. He admires Putin, envies his total political control, wants to restore good relations, and wouldn’t mind redrawing the spheres of influence of the Cold War era—but this time in partnership with Moscow, mutually aligned against Beijing. He has derided Zelensky as a “salesman,” buys Putin’s view that Ukraine is part of Russia, and still believes (or at least says) that the war never would have happened if he’d been president, even though Putin has repeatedly snubbed Trump’s calls for peace.
It may be no coincidence that after Trump’s hourlong Fourth of July phone call with Putin (during which the Kremlin dictator wished the American president a happy Independence Day), Russia unleashed the largest volley of missiles and drones against the civilians of Kyiv since the war began. The phone call followed, by a few days, reports that the Pentagon had decided to halt deliveries of munitions to Ukraine, especially air-defense missiles, on the grounds that America’s own stockpiles were running dangerously low (a claim that turns out to be exaggerated, at best). We don’t know the substance of the phone call, but it’s a fair bet that Putin wanted to gauge whether the news reflected Trump’s views. Putin emerged from the call convinced that it did; his aides publicly trumpeted the move as positive for Russia’s war effort.
In any event, Trump reacted with displeasure. “I was very unhappy,” he told reporters on Air Force One, referring to the attacks and the preceding phone call. Putin, he said, “wants to go all the way, just keep killing people, it’s no good.” The only surprise is that Trump was the slightest bit surprised. Putin has made clear, all along, that he has no desire to stop fighting until Kyiv surrenders. Trump mentioned he might levy sanctions, but it’s unlikely that Putin was shaken; Trump has issued such warnings since the start of his second term, but acted on none of them.
The next day, Trump did talk with Zelensky, who emerged calling it “the best conversation in all this time.” Still, there has been no announcement or leak of a reversal in the Pentagon’s decision to pause weapons shipments, and while Zelensky has learned from his European friends how to push and polish Trump’s buttons, he can’t be overly confident of a renewed geyser of arms aid from Washington anytime soon.
Trump himself, in his chat with reporters, repeated his long-standing claim that this is “Biden’s war,” adding that he is merely “caught in the middle of it” and is, therefore, inclined to stay out. This is nonsense on several levels. First, and most obviously, this is Putin’s war; it would end if he simply withdrew his troops; it wouldn’t end if Zelensky withdrew his or if the West held back its arms. Second, Russian special forces were fighting in eastern Ukraine all through Trump’s first term, and he did nothing about it. (His secretary of defense, James Mattis, sent Javelin anti-tank missiles, but they were kept locked up in storage in western Ukraine.)
Third, and above all, even if Trump’s jab at Biden were true, it’s irrelevant and irresponsible. Most presidents spend most of their time dealing with the fortunes and calamities they inherited from their predecessors. It goes with the job. Yet Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t write off the economic crisis as “Herbert Hoover’s Depression.” It belonged to FDR the moment his term began. The same goes for Trump and the war in Ukraine, especially since Trump boasted repeatedly that he would get the fighting stopped on his first day in office.
Is the cutoff of arms for real? Shortly after Trump reentered the Oval Office this past January, it was announced that the U.S. would no longer supply intelligence information to Ukraine’s military—which would have had disastrous consequences—but the move was soon reversed. Is what’s going on now a reprise? Hard to say. But it’s also hard for Kyiv’s military commanders to plan their operations, or for European allies to allocate their own assistance, if Washington—the leader in all European security matters for several years to come, whether the beneficiaries like it or not—behaves so unpredictably.
The difference in this latest case of Trump’s equivocation is that this time, Putin is stepping up the violence and going for all-out victory, perhaps assured—mistakenly or not—that Trump won’t stand in his way. Besides intensifying the missile and drone attacks, most of them designed to incite terror and despair among Ukraine’s people, Trump has sent 50,000 troops to surround the northern stronghold of Sumy. Even before the Pentagon announced the cutoff of arms, Ukraine’s supplies were running low; so many missiles were hitting targets because Ukraine had fewer missiles to shoot them down.
Still, as several military analysts have noted, the Ukrainians are far from defeated. They have built up their own weapons factories and arsenals, many based on innovative adaptations of cheap drones and other commercial technologies. Given that Putin’s aim is to conquer all of Ukraine, to wipe out its very existence as a sovereign nation, Zelensky’s army can keep that from happening. Even with Russia’s numerical edge in troops and firepower, their advances have been microscopic—a few kilometers back and forth. Putin thinks that Trump’s cessation of arms deliveries to Kyiv give Russia the chance of a decisive breakthrough. He’s probably mistaken, but he will fight on, ever more fiercely, if he’s persuaded otherwise.
I do think Trump really wants the war to end, if for no other reason than to fulfill his desperate hopes of winning a Nobel Prize. He needs to realize that this will happen only if Putin realizes that his goals are unachievable. The only way to do that is to ensure that the Ukrainians keep getting enough arms to fend off Russia’s advances—not to encourage Putin’s hopes that they might not.
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Trump news: The message that the U.S. Ukraine weapons pause is sending to Putin. – Slate
