Putin’s Protector in the White House

“Russia would like to make a deal... but for whatever reason, Zelensky does not want to make a deal,” Donald Trump told reporters on Oct. 10, speaking about his latest conversation with Vladimir Putin. The Russian president, he went on, was eager for peace; Zelensky could have ended the war many times; and Ukraine ought to choose a new president.

When the man at the head of the world’s most powerful democracy says such things, one has to ask what has become of American foreign policy when it casts the invader as a peacemaker and the president of the invaded country as the obstacle to ending a war that has devastated his nation for more than four and a half years.

So Trump cannot fathom why Zelensky will not accept the agreement Putin supposedly wants. The president of the United States has at his disposal the entire American intelligence apparatus, reports from diplomats around the world, and military assessments delivered to him every day. Yet somehow one elementary fact has escaped him. Russia invaded Ukraine, seized its territory, devastated its cities, and killed tens of thousands of its citizens.

For years, Putin’s army has been trying to accomplish what its commander in chief set out to do: destroy Ukraine’s independence. Zelensky leads a nation fighting to survive, and Ukrainians have learned enough from Moscow’s promises to know how little an agreement with the Kremlin is worth.

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He also accused Moscow of ignoring a US-backed energy ceasefire appeal, saying 19 regions came under attack in two days.

Perhaps, in Trump’s conception of foreign affairs, the Ukrainians’ attachment to their own country is an inexplicable quirk. Why won’t they simply hand the Russians what they demand, accept the redrawing of their borders, and allow the American president to announce another of his great diplomatic triumphs? What kind of obstinate people, after years of bombardment, thousands of funerals, and millions driven from their homes, still insist on deciding their own future? To a man who sees the world chiefly as an endless succession of deals, Ukrainian freedom must be a particularly baffling proposition.

What is especially repellent is the ease with which Trump speaks of Putin’s desire for peace. By Russia’s own stated demands, Ukraine is expected to surrender territory Russian forces have not even managed to conquer. There is no evidence whatsoever that Putin has abandoned the imperial ambitions that drove him to invade a sovereign country. Yet Putin apparently needs only to murmur into the telephone that he wants peace for Trump to take him at his word. Four and a half years of destruction count for less than a few whispered assurances from the other end of the line.

History has seen Western leaders convince themselves that an aggressor could be placated. In 1938, Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement, sacrificing Czechoslovakia to Hitler’s territorial ambitions, and returned to London convinced he had secured peace for Europe. Now imagine that after Germany invaded Poland a year later, he had told the British people that Hitler sincerely wished to reach an agreement, but that the Poles, for reasons known only to themselves, stubbornly refused to stop fighting. All that would have remained was for Chamberlain to advise Poland to elect a new president, one with a more accommodating attitude toward Berlin.

Grotesque as that imagined speech may sound, its logic is now coming from the mouth of an American president. There is, however, one historical distinction worth remembering. For all the calamity of his appeasement policy, Chamberlain declared war on Nazi Germany on Sept. 3, 1939, after Hitler invaded Poland. He eventually understood that there was a point beyond which retreat before an aggressor became a humiliation of his own country. More than four years into Russia’s invasion, Trump is still explaining to the world how much Putin wants peace and how Zelensky keeps spoiling things for him.

And if anyone doubted how affectionate this relationship has become, Putin’s adviser Yuri Ushakov was happy to oblige. After the presidents’ 90-minute conversation, Ushakov announced that neither man wanted to hang up first, so they finally ended the call at precisely the same moment. How touching. One might have thought he was describing two lovestruck teenagers on the phone after midnight, lingering through an endless succession of goodbyes, each insisting that the other hang up first, until they agree to hang up together. The only detail Ushakov omitted was which of them wished the other good night last.

The Kremlin seems so entranced by the warmth of the relationship that it believes the rest of the world deserves to hear its most tender details. While the two presidents compete over who can stay on the line longest, Russian pilots take off toward Ukrainian cities carrying bombs that will send parents scrambling to save their children that very night. Ushakov’s account becomes almost unbearable when the sentimental theater of two powerful men is set against what their politics mean for the people living beneath those bombs.

Within hours of Trump’s deal with Putin, Russian bombs struck residential buildings in Zaporizhzhia. At least 20 people were killed, including children. Reuters reported the grief of a grandfather whose six-year-old granddaughter had been pulled dead from the rubble. She was due to celebrate her birthday later in October. He stood beside her body and wept while the American president explained that Putin wanted peace.

Trump’s solicitude for Putin now has a very tangible economic expression. Following their Oct. 9 telephone conversation, the American administration issued a license temporarily relaxing sanctions restrictions on transactions involving Russian diesel. Trump announced deliveries that, by his own account, could total 4.8 million metric tons. He publicly thanked Putin for the arrangement even as European governments warned that easing the pressure on Moscow would help bankroll its war.

Consider the scale of the political humiliation involved. For years, the United States sought to restrict the Russian state’s energy revenue precisely because that money sustains its machinery of war. Now an American president personally negotiates with Putin to bring Russian fuel back to market and advertises the arrangement as a triumph. All this is happening just weeks before the congressional midterms, when diesel prices have become a serious domestic liability for the White House.

There is an almost insulting irony in Trump’s explanation. His administration is trying to relieve the extraordinary disruption in energy markets caused, in part, by the war the United States and Israel launched against Iran, yet Zelensky is a far more convenient target for blame over fuel prices. By this logic, Ukraine’s president is supposed to stop attacking Russian refineries because those attacks inconvenience American farmers and trucking companies. The American truck driver has a place in Trump’s thinking about this war; the Ukrainian child huddled in a shelter barely seems to register.

Ukraine’s strikes on Russian refineries serve a clear military and economic purpose. They disrupt Moscow’s ability to produce and supply fuel, drive up the costs of Russia’s war economy, and force the aggressor to divert resources to defend its industrial facilities. For years, Russia has systematically targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in an effort to deprive millions of electricity and heat. Yet when Ukraine strikes back at facilities that matter to Russia’s war economy, Trump responds with anger and demands that Zelensky stop.

Zelensky has offered a straightforward, verifiable compromise. Ukraine will stop striking Russia’s energy infrastructure if Russia simultaneously stops attacking Ukraine’s. That is the basic reciprocity any serious mediation should require. Trump, however, had already demanded that Kyiv halt its strikes unilaterally, while Putin received relief for his fuel exports. This distribution of favors and demands allows Moscow to preserve both the military and financial advantages of its aggression, while imposing yet another constraint on Ukraine’s defense.

Damage to America

This is the gravest damage Trump is doing to American foreign policy. There was a time when it was difficult even to imagine a US president publicly echoing the arguments of a country that had invaded its European neighbor, thanking its leader as his bombs killed civilians, and demanding political and military concessions from the victim. Barely two years ago, such a statement from the White House would have stunned even those who believed Washington should negotiate with Moscow. Trump has moved the boundaries of the politically conceivable so far, and so fast, that we now have to remind ourselves almost daily how extraordinary this rupture is.

For decades, America built its international authority on alliances, security guarantees, and the defense of a principle: a powerful country does not get to seize a weaker neighbor’s territory simply because it can. America’s own foreign policy record, of course, includes grave errors and serious violations of that very principle. But the country’s claim to leadership of the free world rested on the idea that democracies share an interest in restraining aggression. Trump is replacing that idea with personal arrangements, private deals, pressure on allies, and a bewildering indulgence toward Putin. The damage will outlast his time in the White House.

For America’s democratic allies, the implications are chilling. If a US president can recast the aggressor as the peacemaker and the country under attack as the obstacle to peace, what should countries that rely on American security guarantees now expect? What would that reasoning mean for the Baltic states, for Poland, or for any country confronted one day with the demands of a much more powerful neighbor? International order does not survive on the elegance of declarations about liberty. It survives when the states with the power to uphold those declarations are willing to act on them.

Imposing elections.

Trump’s call for Ukrainians to choose a new president is especially brazen. Volodymyr Zelensky was elected by Ukrainian voters in 2019. Subsequent presidential elections have been postponed because of martial law. Holding a free, safe, and fair vote while Ukrainian cities are bombed daily, millions of people have fled, and large stretches of the country are occupied presents challenges that cannot be waved away with an offhand remark in front of television cameras. Zelensky has now offered to hold elections if Russia agrees to a full, 60-day ceasefire. Putin has yet to demonstrate that he would accept even that.

By what right, in any case, does Trump tell Ukrainians who their president should be? Does the Ukrainian people’s right to choose their government expire whenever an American politician grows impatient with their choice? If Trump believes Zelensky should go because he refuses to accept whatever Trump and Putin agree between themselves, Trump might at least show a little respect for a people who have defended their democratic choice with weapons in their hands. Ukrainians have paid far too dearly for freedom to be told from Washington which candidate would be obedient enough to deserve their future.

Trump, for his part, might exercise a little caution before recommending that other countries change presidents. Americans will vote in congressional midterm elections on November 3, and the results could significantly alter the balance of power in Washington. Congress has the constitutional authority to oversee the executive, investigate abuses, and, where there are lawful grounds, initiate impeachment proceedings. A midterm election will not itself remove Trump; conviction and removal require a two-thirds vote in the Senate. But there is a perfectly legitimate question about how long America’s democratic system can withstand a foreign policy that is wrecking the country’s international standing and damaging relations with its most important allies.

An end to Trump’s policy toward Ukraine would be welcome news for the democratic world. If American institutions were one day to establish grounds for his impeachment and removal, I doubt there would be much celebration in the Kremlin. Nor would dictators and autocrats elsewhere have much reason to rejoice. Trump’s treatment of Putin has already encouraged them to believe that American support for democracy is negotiable, subject to the president’s personal preferences and interests. Fortunately, America is larger than one man in the White House. It has institutions, a free press, Congress, courts, and citizens who have repeatedly shown that they can defend their democratic order.

Meanwhile, Trump continues to speak as though Zelensky were the one who ought to apologize for the war’s continuation.

On Oct. 11, Trump abruptly announced that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an energy ceasefire. Zelensky said Ukraine was prepared to honor such an arrangement but was still waiting for Moscow’s confirmation, the terms of the agreement, and credible guarantees.

At the time of Trump’s announcement, Russia had not publicly confirmed any such deal. Just hours later, a Russian drone struck a power plant in Kyiv, and Russian forces attacked the CHP-5 combined heat-and-power plant in Kharkiv.

In full view of the Russian public and the wider world, Putin once again humiliated Trump, demonstrating that the American president may proclaim as many ceasefires as he pleases, but Russian bombs will stop falling only when Putin gives the order. Putin’s promises deserve exactly the trust his record has earned them: next to none.

What pains me most about all of this is the endless expectation that Ukrainians must accommodate everyone else’s fears, interests, and political needs. They are expected to accommodate Putin’s territorial demands, Trump’s anxiety over diesel prices, Europe’s economic difficulties, and the exhaustion of Western publics after years of war.

How many of the politicians making these demands are prepared to give equal thought to the parent in Kharkiv waiting outside the wreckage of a school for word of a child, to the soldier at the front who has not seen his family in four years, or to the woman who has lost her husband and must explain to her children why their father will never come home? For too long, their suffering has entered diplomatic conversations as something to be mentioned in passing before the real business of territory, sanctions, and trade begins.

Zelensky has made mistakes during this war, as any leader facing an almost unbroken national catastrophe inevitably will. Ukrainians will decide how to judge his policies, decisions, and responsibilities. But today he possesses something that Trump, for all his power, money, and self-regard, seems less and less able to comprehend: a duty to a people who refuse to be bartered away.

Let us not forget the Ukrainians

Ukraine has endured far more than anyone could have anticipated in February 2022 because its citizens decided that some things remain worth fighting for, however terrible the price.

Trump can thank Putin, praise his alleged passion for peace, talk with him late into the night, and treat him as a partner in grand commercial ventures. He can demand Zelensky’s removal, threaten Ukrainians over strikes on Russian refineries, and try to portray resistance to aggression as the obstacle to a diplomatic breakthrough. These actions will be part of his political record. One day the American president will have to explain why he was so eager to defend Putin while Ukraine was fighting for its existence.

And Ukrainians will go on defending their country after presidents come and go, and after diplomats stop counting concessions. Their struggle has already proved that freedom is not merchandise with a price set by the powerful, nor a privilege a people may enjoy only when it elects a leader sufficiently obedient to be approved elsewhere.

Vladimir Putin will be remembered for the invasion, cities in ruins, war crimes, and Ukrainian children who never returned to their families. Donald Trump risks a place in the history of this war as the American president who thanked the aggressor and told the people under attack to replace their leader.

And when the history of Ukraine’s resistance is written, the question will not be why Zelensky refused to hand Putin territory the Russian army could not take by force. The harder question will be for those who demanded this of him while claiming to speak for the free world.

One day the war will end, and Ukraine will begin rebuilding its devastated cities. No reconstruction, however, will bring back the children killed by Russian missiles, the husbands who never returned from the front, or the years Putin has stolen from millions of lives. The history of this war will also record that the president of the United States publicly thanked the man who ordered the invasion, presented him as a sincere advocate of peace, and accused the president of the invaded country of standing in the way of an end to the fighting. Trump may seek refuge in talk of negotiations, fuel prices, and American interests. None of it can lessen the moral weight of words spoken while Ukrainians were burying their dead.

That is why I would like Donald Trump, one day, to travel to Ukraine and stand before a mother whose child was killed by a Russian missile, and repeat to her what he declared so confidently in front of the television cameras.

Let him explain that Putin sincerely wants peace, but that Zelensky, for reasons no one can quite fathom, refuses to accept it. Let Donald Trump look straight into the eyes of a mother whose child has been taken from her by Putin’s war and thank Vladimir Putin one more time.