Terry Glavin: The NATO penny has begun to drop. Trump’s on the other side

As a high-level strategic military paradigm, the NATO high command’s “theory of victory” certainly gives the impression of being a serious bit of warcraft, just by its title. It purports to be a theory that anticipates the measures required to achieve victory in the event of an attack on any of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 32 member states.

Adopted last month, an unclassified version of the elaborate war-gaming formulae was outlined on Monday by the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, at the Warsaw Security Forum. All the generals and the heads of state and defence ministers at the summit would have been well aware that the high command’s “theory of victory” might just as well be understood as a work of speculative fiction.

For one thing, Russia is not mentioned, although any discussion of the “theory of victory” inevitably turns to Russia and the scenario of an invasion of Poland and the Baltic states via Belarus and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. While the Warsaw conference was underway, 20,000 troops were engaged in a 10-day war game simulating a hypothetical invasion of 10,000 troops from the east. For another thing, the “victory” in the master plan envisions that Russian President Vladimir Putin would be left standing and Moscow would remain undisturbed. For even another thing, if a NATO country were to come under attack, nobody can be certain at the moment whose side the United States would be on.

The good news is that the penny has finally begun to drop. The protocols of diplomatic etiquette and European weakness, corruption and reliance on Russian fossil fuels are being faced squarely. Bipartisan opinion in the United States Congress is coalescing in unity. Even the few intelligent and genuinely patriotic Americans who have served in Trump’s inner circle cannot now help but admit it openly: In the matter of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the bloodiest war in Europe since the days of Hitler’s Nazis, President Donald Trump is on the side of the enemy.

That point was put well enough by Kurt Volker, the U.S. envoy to Ukraine during President Trump’s first term: “Outlining military plans is important,” Volker told the Wall Street Journal on Monday, “but it can’t be divorced from addressing what everyone is worried about: Trump’s outbursts, Russia’s war on Ukraine and threats to Europe, and questions on whether we’re pulling significant U.S. forces out of Europe.”

Back in 2019, Volker resigned his post in the scandal involving Trump’s enlistment of MAGA loyalist Rudy Giuliani in a scheme to strong-arm the Ukrainian government to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, who was vice-president at the time. Trump blocked $400 million in congressionally mandated military aid to Ukraine to coerce President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to play along.

Last week, Trump went off his rocker, to put it mildly, proposing to defy his own country’s sanctions laws and extend a multibillion-dollar lifeline to Russia in the form of sanctions exemptions allowing the sale of hundreds of millions of barrels of diesel oil — a move that would be barely discernible in its effect on sky-high fuel prices in the United States. Those soaring prices have nothing to do with Ukraine’s successes in hitting Russia oil refineries, and everything to do with the chaos in the Strait of Hormuz that was ignited by Trump’s ill-conceived and incompetently prosecuted war with Iran.

Trump was back to calling Zelenskyy a dictator who should be removed from office — a bizarre assertion Trump first made on Feb. 19 last year. At the time, Volker said: “The real dictator in the room here is Vladimir Putin, who has been in power for 25 years, not Zelenskyy, and it is Russia that launched this unprovoked invasion against Ukraine, not the other way around.”

Volker was succeeded as Trump’s Ukraine envoy by the sturdy Republican diplomat Keith Kellogg, chief of staff of the National Security Council. A retired lieutenant-general who had served as the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, Kellogg ended up being sidelined by Trump’s appointment of his friends, business associates and relatives — his son-in-law Jared Kushner, his golfing partner Steve Witkoff, the billionaire MAGA donor and investor Todd Boehly, and so on. The whole point was to shift Ukraine out of the way to strike lucrative bargains with the Russians.

Kellogg was livid with Trump’s shocking demands last week that Zelenskyy refrain from targeting Russia’s oil refineries.

“I’d burn down every one of the goddamn refineries that Russia has today,” Kellogg told the delegates in Warsaw. “Take them all out,” he said, adding that Vladimir Putin should not be permitted any military sanctuaries, and his oil refineries are legitimate Russian targets. Kellogg urged Ukraine to “make them pay the price” by targeting Russia’s oil and gas industry, while saying civilians, schools and hospitals should remain protected.

Between his first full day in office on Jan. 20 last year and the ugly spectacle of his live-television Oval Office ambush of President Zelenskyy five weeks later, on Feb. 28, Trump dropped all pretence of backing NATO’s efforts to help Ukraine defend itself against Russia’s invasion. By last April, all American aid to Ukraine was officially ended, leaving only the Trump presidency’s permission to U.S. arms manufacturers to sell arms to European countries, who then pass the hardware along to Ukraine. Even a residual commitment to intelligence-sharing from the Biden era seems to have been withheld in recent days, leaving Ukraine particularly vulnerable to attacks from Russian drones and ballistic missiles.

On Tuesday, a dozen U.S. senators, Democrat and Republican, wrote Trump to make clear that the Congress has enacted statutory authorities that would require the president to step away from his out-of-the blue, sanctions-defying agreement with Putin allowing Moscow to profit from the sale of diesel in the global market. “These authorities require you to apply economic pressure on Russia and the chief enablers of its war, in particular China,” the letter states. “For decades, America has stood as the bastion of freedom against tyranny, and American presidents have embodied our nation’s resistance to tyrants. Putin is a tyrant. Withdraw from this agreement … Maintain our legacy — and the duty America holds — as leader of the free world.”

The senators were relying specifically on the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, which Trump himself signed into law only last month. A separate bipartisan group noted that Trump’s side deal on diesel with Putin defies Congressional enactments banning Russian energy imports going all the way back to 2022. The point of the ban was to prevent American dollars from financing Putin’s war against Ukraine: “President Trump’s decision to allow Russian diesel imports to the U.S. runs directly counter to that law. … The United States should not provide Putin with a financial lifeline while Russia continues to kill Ukrainian civilians. The Administration must immediately reverse course.”

Along with Gen. Grynkewich, Kurt Volker, Keith Kellogg and the rest, there’s another figure in all of this who’s worth noticing.

Serhii Kuznietsov is a Ukrainian patriot and a former Ukrainian army officer charged with multiple brilliantly executed undersea explosions that knocked out Russia’s Nord Stream 1 and 2 natural gas pipelines at the bottom of the Baltic Sea on Sept. 26, 2022. He went on trial this week in Hamburg. By Kellogg’s righteous standard, the pipelines were legitimate military targets, carrying Russian gas to Germany. The pipelines constituted infrastructure that directly served the financing of Putin’s military machinery.

The authorities in Kyiv insist that Ukraine had no hand in the operation whatsoever. Absurdly, Kuznietsov is charged with war crimes, owing to the prosecution’s theory that the pipelines were civilian infrastructure. Kuznietsov’s lawyers note that Russia is the war criminal here, citing Russia’s targeting of Ukrainian civilian neighbourhoods, schools, hospitals, libraries and so on. The defence team is arguing on several grounds that Kuznietsov is not guilty.

In any case, if he is guilty in the upside-down world the Trump presidency has foisted on everyone, Serhii Kuznietsov is not a war criminal. He’s a war hero.

National Post