From the very beginning of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, Donald Trump’s sympathies have been with Moscow.
By Rafael Rojas (Confidencial)
HAVANA TIMES – In several of the simultaneous wars taking place around the world—the war in Gaza, the war in Iran, and the war that preceded both, in Ukraine—a similar phenomenon can be observed. Negotiations and peace are presented as the objectives, while war is portrayed as the means. History teaches us, however, that once wars become established as a means, they tend to turn into ends in themselves.
In just a few days, the war in Ukraine has exposed the fallacy of the energy truce announced by Donald Trump’s administration. Once again, the Russian offensive, which makes no distinction between military and civilian facilities, power plants, gas facilities, or gas stations, has shattered any protocol of understanding. The repeated resort to the fiction of an agreement once again reveals the Trump administration’s bias in favor of the Kremlin, as was evident in the diesel moratorium, which sought to provide Moscow with a financial lifeline.
From the very beginning of the conflict, when Joe Biden was in the White House, Donald Trump’s sympathies have been with Moscow. Trump has never acknowledged the true cause of this war: Vladimir Putin’s rejection of an independent Ukraine. He has also shown numerous signs of sharing Putin’s misgivings about an agreement—or at least a smooth relationship—between Kyiv and the European Union.
What prompted the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, was not attacks on the Russian-speaking population in the Donbas, nor Kyiv’s attempts to join the European Union or NATO. It was Putin’s deep-seated opposition to the existence of a sovereign Ukraine without a Kremlin puppet government, such as the one that emerged following the 2014 Maidan Revolution against Viktor Yanukovych.
Both the annexation of Crimea that year and the 2022 invasion were driven by the decision to prevent Ukraine from having a pro-European government—or even one that maintained equally good relations with Moscow and Brussels. As Giuliano da Empoli and Emmanuel Carrère have brilliantly depicted in the novel and film The Wizard of the Kremlin, since 2014 Putin has presented Ukrainians with a fatal choice, leaving no room for compromise: either with Russia or against Russia.
Trump’s support for Putin is rooted in the alignment between two empires seeking to control their respective spheres of influence. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin, Lavrov, and Peskov defended themselves against criticism from Joe Biden and European leaders such as Olaf Scholz and Emmanuel Macron by arguing that Russia was doing in Eastern Europe what the United States does in Mexico and Latin America.
And they were right—except that Russian imperial realism bears a much closer resemblance to the Donroe Doctrine than to the liberal or democratic internationalism of Biden, Merkel, or Macron. Indeed, it would not be surprising if Russia’s retreat in the face of the renewed U.S. hegemony in the Greater Caribbean—and specifically in Venezuela and Cuba—were rooted in Trump’s complicity with Putin over the issue of Ukraine.
Published in Spanish by Confidencial and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.