What could possess Donald Trump to victim-shame Ukraine’s president and endorse the actions of an indicted war criminal by backing Vladimir Putin? Personal hatred of Volodymyr Zelensky? A near-demented obsession with personal sleight? A radical strategic vision that’s upended world affairs? Something worse?
Probably.
Soon after the massacre in Sumy, where two Iskander missiles slammed into the provincial Ukrainian capital killing 35 people, including two children, Trump sloughed off the atrocity by claiming it had been a Russian mistake. Shocking, but not surprising, as Trump has consistently taken the Russian side at every opportunity this year.
Before most of the bodies could be collected from the city morgue, though, he had gone on the offensive by doubling down on his efforts to pin Ukraine’s suffering on its president.
“When you start a war, you got to know you can win,” he said of Ukraine’s leader.
Zelensky was not president when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. He was elected by a landslide in 2019. Russia launched its attempt to kill him, capture Kyiv, and colonise Ukraine in February 2022.
He didn’t start the war with Russia – and wasn’t president when Ukraine enshrined the goal of Nato membership in its 2018 constitution.
Zelensky did, however, earn Trump’s anger by being a disloyal recipient of America’s largesse, mostly financial aid, for failing to open an investigation into Hunter Biden’s business deals in Ukraine in July 2019. Joe Biden was the likely Democrat candidate in the election of 2020.
Back then, Trump was impeached by Congress over his alleged threat to withhold $400m in US military aid to Ukraine unless Zelensky helped with the campaign against Biden and other anti-Democrat operations.
Trump was cleared by the Senate but the damage had been done. He bears a deep grudge against Zelensky.
But Trump was already a Russian strategic partner. His relationship with Moscow goes back to 1987 when he made his first trip to the capital of the Soviet Union to scout for investment opportunities. He didn’t ever do any deals in Russia. But Russian bankers have backed some of his enterprises since.
Trump has always been sloppy with state secrets since his first term in office. His top intelligence staff have risked easy penetration by foreign spies because they’ve been using their personal phones for top-secret communications.
So it is reasonable to assume that America’s adversaries, like Russia, have deep knowledge and understanding of every aspect of the 47th president’s life – and have done so for decades.
He supports Russian G7/8 membership. He refused to put tariffs on Moscow this month. He has adopted every one of Russia’s initial negotiating principles as his own when it comes to Ukraine, and said he thought that the country may anyway “be Russian one day”. He wants to get back into doing business with Russia too.
