WASHNGTON DC – The vapour trails left by the jets carrying European leaders back to their respective capitals may still have been visible in the skies above the Atlantic when US President Donald Trump began taking steps to destabilise further his relationship with his recently departed visitors.
Rising early the next day, the President was the star guest on his favourite breakfast telecast. And he told Fox and Friends that if Volodymyr Zelensky, Sir Keir Starmer or the other leaders who descended on the White House on Monday thought they had succeeded in dragging the US leader out of Vladimir Putin’s orbit, they were entirely wrong.
The interview was a masterclass in revealing the extent to which the Russian leader’s outlook now dominates the American President’s viewpoint on Ukraine. He accused European leaders of “playing cute” during Monday’s talks in which they attempted to flatter and cajole Trump out of being beguiled by Putin. He then falsely claimed that Kyiv had started the war (“you don’t take on a nation that’s 10 times your size”), and invented his own version of the region’s history out of thin air.
Of course, only hours before, Russia had launched its biggest air assault in more than a month on Ukraine, with 270 drones and 10 missiles. More than 95 followed last night.
Not that any of this stopped Trump ploughing on with his own version of events. He falsely asserted that former President Barack Obama had approved the legal transfer of Crimea to Russian control in 2014. “Putin, he made a good deal. He got it from Obama”, claimed Trump, arguing – again falsely – that “Obama gave it away in one of the dumbest real estate deals I’ve ever seen”. In fact, to this day, even Trump’s government does not recognise Russian sovereignty over Crimea, despite the US President’s sympathetic contention in his Fox News interview that Russia has been “expanding everything… and spending a lot of money” since the peninsula’s illegal annexation by Russian forces.
Trump repeated the false narrative promoted by Putin that the Ukraine conflict has its roots in the expansion of Nato’s transatlantic alliance following the end of the Cold War. “Long before Putin, it was always a no-no,” insisted the President, falsely stating the history of Nato’s expanded architecture. In fact, as early as 1991, President Boris Yeltsin said that Russia hoped to join the alliance, and in June 2017, Putin discussed Russian membership of Nato with President Bill Clinton.
But Trump pressed on with his concocted version of events. “Russia said we don’t want the so-called opponent, or the enemy, let’s use that term, we don’t want them on our border… and then [Ukraine] went in with the United States said ‘put us into Nato’, and everybody knew you just can’t do that”. In fact, while preliminary relations between Ukraine and Nato date back to 1992, the country only sought membership of the alliance after the Russians seized Crimea in 2014.
Most worryingly of all for European leaders, Trump appeared to walk back any suggestion that he might make an imminent announcement regarding US involvement in providing security guarantees for postwar Ukraine. Asked on Fox whether he could promise his Maga followers that there will be no boots on the ground supporting any peacekeeping operations, he said “you have my assurance, you know I’m President”. Just hours earlier, The Washington Examiner – a newspaper popular with Trump’s supporters – reported that the President was flirting with the idea of a military presence in Ukraine. That dispatch may have sparked his rapid effort to shut the conversation down and head off any threat of revolt from the grassroots.
Trump told Fox he would lay on “some sort of security” to help Europeans keep any postwar peace, but offered no specificity regarding his willingness to provide the American “backstop” that Starmer has demanded as the price for UK forces to engage in the risky business of trying to prevent Russia from launching further attacks on Ukraine. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, suggested that US air support was “an option and a possibility”.
Trump also publicly indicated for the first time that he was sympathetic to Putin’s demand for the entire eastern region of Donbas to be ceded to Russia in any negotiations that begin. “Donbas, right now, as you know, is 79 per cent owned and controlled by Russia,” he told his Fox inquisitors. Zelensky and the Europeans, he said, “understand what that means”. Saying Ukraine needs to be “flexible” in any negotiations that ensue, any support for the surrender of Donbas would allow Russian forces to leapfrog over Ukraine’s existing defensive lines in the territory.
Trump’s entire interview on Tuesday morning was permeated by expressions of understanding, empathy and respect for Putin, despite the fact that the Kremlin leader remains sanctioned to the hilt by the US government and wanted for war crimes in Ukraine by the International Criminal Court.
Trump spoke especially fondly of his encounter last Friday with the Russian dictator in Alaska. “You saw, when he got off his plane, I got off my plane. There’s a warmth there… there’s a decent feeling”, he said.
