Has Vladimir Putin ever had a better few days in Washington? Donald Trump, just four weeks into his second term, has executed a breathtaking pivot toward Moscow, reversing course after years of ruptured relations between the U.S. and Russia that resulted from Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. First, Trump signed off on gutting the U.S. Agency for International Development, delighting the Russian government, whose spokeswoman called it “a machine for interfering” in other countries’ affairs. Also on the chopping block may soon be Radio Free Europe, a Cold War legacy project whose coverage of Putin’s Russia has long infuriated the Kremlin. “Yes, shut them down,” Trump’s billionaire buddy and sometimes Putin interlocutor Elon Musk tweeted over the weekend.
Then, on Wednesday, the U.S. Senate voted to confirm the former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s controversial nominee to become the director of National Intelligence. Gabbard has, like Trump himself, often amplified Russian talking points about the war in Ukraine—a key reason Mitch McConnell, the former Senate Republican leader, refused to vote for her. But he was the only holdout in a Senate Republican Conference that, as recently as Gabbard’s confirmation hearing last month, included a number of G.O.P. senators said to be queasy about her nomination. These were the stalwarts who once vowed to stand with Ukraine until it beat back Russia. Now they don’t even dare stand against a single Trump nominee.
That same day, Trump held his first formal phone call with Putin since returning to the White House. It could hardly have been more ominous for Ukraine—as clear a sign as possible that the American President who praised Russia’s war on its neighbor as an act of strategic “genius” now intends to force a ceasefire on Putin’s terms. The call, according to Trump’s report about it on his social-media feed, featured chummy references to the U.S. alliance with the Soviet Union during the Second World War and a decision to “immediately” launch peace talks. Only afterward did Trump call Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky. It was all too obvious which of the two combatants he favored.
“Do you view Ukraine as an equal member of this peace process?” Trump was later asked by a reporter in the Oval Office. “Umm,” he said, taking such a lengthy pause that the silence itself was answer enough. “It’s an interesting question,” he finally replied. “I think they have to make peace. Their people are being killed, and I think they have to make peace. I said that was not a good war to go into”—as if Ukraine had had a choice about an unprovoked attack by more than a hundred thousand Russian troops—“and I think they have to make peace.”
After Putin launched his invasion—three years ago this month—Joe Biden condemned the Russian leader as a killer and a thug, sent tens of billions of dollars in U.S. military assistance, and vowed to stand with Ukraine for “as long as it takes.” Whenever peace talks came up, Biden promised that the U.S. would undertake “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.” But Trump, on Wednesday, seemed to go out of his way to humiliate Ukraine, volunteering that he and Putin would “probably” meet soon, in Saudi Arabia, with Zelensky pointedly not invited. Trump even appeared to adopt the Kremlin’s bloody imperial theory of the case for why Russia should be able to keep territory illegally seized from Ukraine, since, after all, “they fought for that land.” No wonder gleeful pundits on Moscow state television were soon crowing about Russia’s “big success.”
For months, some of Trump’s more conventional Republican enablers have been gaslighting the American public, European allies, and embattled Ukraine by advancing the notion that Trump, once reinstalled in office, would be a sort of a second coming of Ronald Reagan, determined to stand tough against the Russians and to deliver a fair deal for Ukraine achieved by Reagan’s signature approach of “peace through strength.” You could almost hear Trump laughing as he made a mockery of those apologists in his Oval Office appearance. The man is who he is. He still admires Putin and still couldn’t care less about Ukraine. “The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must” might as well be Trump’s personal motto. Of course, he was always going to pressure Ukraine to trade land for peace, international law and national sovereignty be damned. As for American guarantees to secure Ukraine against future Russian incursions? Forget about it.
In case anyone was tempted to dismiss Trump’s words as a mere negotiating tactic, two of the President’s Cabinet secretaries were dispatched to Europe on errands that underscored the degree to which Trump had sided with Putin. In Brussels, Trump’s new Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, lectured European allies about how the U.S. can’t be worrying about their security anymore and effectively ruled out any chance for Ukraine to join NATO. By peremptorily shutting the door to Ukraine, Hegseth not only foreclosed the kind of arrangement that might secure Ukraine from future Russian aggression but also ceded a key point of leverage over Putin—before a single bargaining session. Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, meanwhile, was sent to Ukraine—not with additional aid but with a demand from Trump that the besieged government in Kyiv compensate the U.S. for its past assistance by agreeing to supply some five hundred billion dollars in rare-earth minerals. Biden used to frame America’s role in Ukraine as that of a bulwark in the global contest between autocracies and democracies. And Trump? He seems to be going for something more like a Mob shakedown: pay up, or we’ll let Putin eat you alive. This, too, is vintage Trump. In fact, his first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, made a famous outburst at the Pentagon, in 2017, when he called the President a “fucking moron,” that was prompted, in part, by his anger at Trump likening American soldiers to mercenaries who should fight only for countries that pay.
The timing of the decision to preëmptively rule out NATO membership for Ukraine, on the eve of the annual Munich Security Conference, seemed like one of those deliberate Trump trolls, practically inviting unfavorable comparisons to Neville Chamberlain’s disastrous Munich “peace in our time” deal with Hitler on the eve of the Second World War. As Carl Bildt, the veteran European diplomat and former Prime Minister of Sweden, commented, “It’s certainly an innovative approach to a negotiation to make very major concessions even before they have started. Not even Chamberlain went that low in 1938. That Munich ended very bad anyhow.”
The selling out of Ukraine was an inevitable consequence, no doubt, of America’s decision to reëlect Trump—the car crash that we’ve been watching unfold in slow motion since the evening of November 5th. For those who have been warning about Trump’s plans for Ukraine, Wednesday’s revelations felt like the crash had finally happened. John Bolton, the hawkish Republican who served as Trump’s national-security adviser and who has since publicly turned on him, said that his former boss had already “effectively surrendered to Putin” and appears prepared to force Ukraine to accede to “a settlement that could have been written in the Kremlin.”
The German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, quite possibly a lame duck given upcoming elections in which his party’s share in the polls has collapsed to around fifteen per cent, blustered about Europe refusing to accept a “dictated peace.” But, in reality, who’s going to stop Trump? On the campaign trail last year, he used to brag that he would solve the Ukraine war in twenty-four hours. He broke that promise, but in the twenty-four days since he’s returned to power he’s given a brazen indication of how he plans to do so. Christmas came early for Putin this year. ♦
