It takes twisted logic to blame the victim, but we’re in a new world now
Michael Koziol
Washington: If it wasn’t already clear that Donald Trump blames Ukraine at least as much as Russia for the war started by Vladimir Putin, he has now said the quiet part out loud while answering questions at his Mar-a-Lago mansion.
“Today I heard, ‘Oh, we weren’t invited’,” Trump said of Ukraine’s anger at being excluded from US-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia. “Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it, three years. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
He went on: “I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land, and no people would have been killed, and no city would have been demolished, and not one dome would have been knocked down. But they chose not to do it that way.”
It takes a peculiarly twisted logic to assert a sovereign nation, having been invaded (multiple times), is at fault for the ensuing war because it fought back rather than sacrificing its territory and cutting a deal. It’s appalling – and faintly childish – to suggest that means they “started it”.
Trump parroted more Putin talking points when he demanded Ukraine hold elections as part of a peace deal. Putin has painted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as illegitimate because his term would have ended last May if martial law hadn’t been declared in response to Russia’s invasion.
The US president heaped more lies upon Zelensky when he claimed – without evidence – that the Ukrainian president’s approval rating was 4 per cent. The latest polling, from December, put it at 52 per cent – which is, incidentally, higher than Trump’s popularity in recent surveys.
On CNN, Beth Sanner, a former deputy director of national intelligence in the first Trump administration, put her finger on the undertone of Trump’s comments. “What I hear is anger … anger towards Ukraine – the victim,” she said. “It’s not at all helpful in terms of the negotiation.”
Sanner pointed out there were things to like about Trump’s drive to end the conflict. It was probably good he and Putin were talking, she said. But for those who want justice for Ukraine, the vibes are off. “It’s the way all of this is going about. It’s the tone of it,” Sanner said.
Compare Trump’s tone on Ukraine and Zelensky with his tone on Russia and Putin. He expressed no such grudges towards the Russian autocrat in his latest remarks. Last week, he declared he trusted Putin on Ukraine, and said Putin wanted peace. And all language so far has been about concessions Ukraine will have to make, not Russia.
It’s a different story on Capitol Hill. While Republican legislators have signed up to Trump’s domestic agenda pretty well holus-bolus, there are strong reservations about his embrace of Putin.
Air Force veteran Roger Wicker, the senior Republican senator from Mississippi and chairman of the Senate’s Armed Services Committee, said this when asked if Putin could be trusted: “No. Putin is a war criminal, he should be in jail for the rest of his life, if not executed.”
Wicker was also critical when Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth went to Brussels last week and pre-empted negotiations by outlining what Ukraine would need to give up. He called it a “rookie mistake” and labelled Hegseth’s speech “something [Putin apologist] Tucker Carlson could have written”.
Along with Vice President J.D. Vance’s stunning lecture to European leaders on “the enemy within”, these pronouncements demonstrate what analyst Max Bergmann from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies think tank called “the deep degree of apathy felt toward Europe by the Trump administration”.
At a forum in Washington on Tuesday, CSIS senior fellow for Europe and Russia, Maria Snegovaya, said having the Kremlin sitting at the negotiating table as a somewhat equal partner of the US was “definitely a big win for them, something that Putin cares [about] a lot”.
She also said – as was reported by Bloomberg, quoting a Saudi source – that the Saudis wanted Ukraine to be represented at the Riyadh talks, but were rebuffed by the US and Russia.
Even if one were to accept the premise that Ukraine is complicit in the ongoing war by failing to strike a deal to end it, being an ally used to count for something. As did being an adversary. But as Europe is quickly discovering – and as American allies must all be realising – we are not in that world any more.
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