As reality television, the live broadcast of the humiliation of Volodymyr Zelenskiy at the hands of a thuggish Donald Trump and his vice-presidential attack dog, JD Vance, was compelling viewing.
“Just say thank you and shut up” was the message Trump and Vance pummelled into Zelenskiy, demanding expressions of gratitude for weapons that Joe Biden sent, whose value Trump grossly inflated, and whose transfer Trump delayed through the crucial winter of 2023/24.
One could almost hear Trump exclaiming “You’re fired!” – his signature soundbite from The Apprentice show which made him famous. Zelenskiy was ejected from the White House “like a garbage alley cat”, in the words of the Russian military analyst Igor Korotchenko.
It was, Trump declared at the end of the bust-up, “great television”.
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As geopolitics, it stank. In 16 gut-wrenching days from February 12th to 28th, the putative leader of the free world initiated a tete-a-tete with the Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin, over the fate of Ukraine in the absence of Europeans and Ukrainians. He called Zelenskiy, who won a landslide victory in 2019, “a dictator without elections”. Vance hectored Europeans for attempting to thwart Russian disinformation campaigns, telling them that liberal democrats – not Russian expansionism – constituted the greatest threat to world peace. Trump falsely accused Zelenskiy of having started the war. Then, on the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the US refused to name Russia as the aggressor and voted a blameless resolution with Russia and China in the UN Security Council.
The leaders of France and the UK toadied to Trump in the deluded hope that he would offer a US “backstop” to the deployment of an Anglo-French force of a few tens of thousands of soldiers to Ukraine. Trump eagerly accepted King Charles III’s invitation for a state visit but told UK prime minister Keir Starmer he could forget about a US backstop. Ukraine was the Europeans’ problem.
Opinions were divided on two points: was the White House ambush of Zelenskiy premeditated? And did it signal a final rupture between the US and Ukraine, the US and Europe?
[ Maureen Dowd: Trump parrots the Putin view in demented dream of strongmenOpens in new window ]
Vance’s interruption of Zelenskiy’s explanation for why Putin could not be trusted seemed to indicate the verbal assault was pre-planned. A correspondent from the Russian state news agency TASS was allowed into the Oval Office. The Associated Press and Reuters were not.
Women politicians best analysed the consequences of the train wreck. “Today it has become clear that the free world needs a new leader. It is up to us Europeans to rise to the challenge,” said Kaja Kallas, the Estonian European foreign policy chief. Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, issued a statement saying, “the unspeakable video from the White House” made “clear that a new age of ruthlessness has begun ... in which we have to defend the rules-based international order and the strength of the law more than ever against the might of the strong”.
Other politicians faulted Zelenskiy for talking back to Trump. The Ukrainian president “should find a way to restore his relations with President Trump”, said Nato secretary general Mark Rutte.
Few asked the obvious question: why has Trump aligned himself so closely with Putin? “With you,” then house speaker Nancy Pelosi said to Trump when they quarrelled during Trump’s first term, “all roads lead to Putin”.
At least five books have been published about Trump’s ties to Russia. On February 20th, a Kazakh former KGB officer called Alnur Mussayev posted the allegation on social media that the KGB recruited Trump under the code name Krasnov in 1987. No evidence was offered for the allegation, but a former CIA Russia expert and a former KGB spy deemed it credible.
In his 2017 book Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win, British journalist Luke Harding recounted how Trump’s friendship with the Soviet diplomat, Yuri Dubinin, led to an all-expenses-paid trip to Moscow and Leningrad for Trump and his then wife Ivana in 1987. On his return to the US, Trump published full-page newspaper ads questioning US support for Nato and developed presidential ambitions. Trump’s sons boasted in 2008 and 2014 that the Trump organisation was getting “all the money we need from Russia.”
Trump’s allusion to “the Russia hoax” in the Oval Office bust-up betrayed a deep personal grievance. Trump vehemently denies that he owed his 2016 election to Putin and is haunted by the conclusion of US special counsel Robert Mueller III that Putin ordered an intelligence operation to tilt the 2016 presidential election in Trump’s favour.
A joke going around Kyiv asks how it can be that 450 million Europeans expect 340 million Americans to protect them from 140 million Russians who are being held in check by 40 million Ukrainians.
This inverted pyramid was at the heart of the Lancaster House summit of European leaders, including Zelenskiy, on Sunday.
German and Danish intelligence services predict that Russia will attack an EU state by 2029, the French MEP Raphaël Glucksmann wrote in Le Monde. “The EU will be crushed and dismembered if it does not become within a few months the political, military, economic, sovereign and integrated power that it has not managed to become for decades.”
Europeans and Ukrainians must understand that their relationship with Washington has changed irrevocably. After three years of full-scale war on the European Continent, most governments are only beginning to step up defence spending. Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer and Germany’s next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, appear to have understood the urgency of the predicament.
As Russian troops surged across Ukraine’s borders and Russian bombs and missiles rained on Ukrainian cities before dawn on February 24th, 2022, Zelenskiy predicted that these were “the sound of a new Iron Curtain, which has come down and is closing Russia off from the civilised world”.
Putin has made significant progress in his quest to reverse the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”. Trump is aiding and abetting Putin, whose goal is not peace but victory, by which he means the subjugation of Ukraine.
