Donald Trump is peeved. His officials are starting to spin that his plans for almost instant peace in Ukraine may take a lot longer, while Vladimir Putin’s business envoy heads for the White House, supposedly to make amends.
Yet what it truly reveals is that the 47th President continues to be played by the Kremlin.
Trump has unleashed a trade war, shown colonial designs on two Nato members, scrambled Ukraine’s defensive war plans, shown public contempt for Europe and set about the pillars of American democracy with a sledgehammer.
Trump has shown a remarkable ability to interpret Moscow’s deepest desires and to deliver on them.
That the US president is now saying he is “pissed off” with Putin and is considering, considering, increasing tariffs and sanctions on Russia, is play acting.
The US-Russia trade account is worth about $3.5 billion. That’s nothing. The US doesn’t do enough trade with Russia to make sanctions or tariffs mean anything.
A meaningful threat, one that he has used and applied to Ukraine, would have been in the military realm.
To force Kyiv into agreeing a ceasefire, Trump cut military aid and then blinded Ukraine’s military intelligence feed from America at a time when the Russians were, surprise, surprise, launching a massive offensive to retake the Kursk region from Kyiv’s troops.
The 30-day ceasefire on the Black Sea and attacks against energy facilities is needed desperately by Moscow – not Kyiv. Kyiv now rules the Black Sea waves and its targeting of Russian energy systems is bringing the war back to Russia for the first time.
Cutting military aid and intelligence sharing meant that European nations, including the UK, have rushed to Ukraine’s aid and are frantically planning for a new world without the US security umbrella that has kept them safe for 80 years – and been mostly funded by the US taxpayer.
America’s global power and reach is waning by the day as a consequence of Trump’s assaults of the west and his slavish behaviour towards Moscow.
And yet the White House sees no need to reverse this.
Rather, in a series of meetings and calls over the weekend, officials inside the White House and state department acknowledged that Putin is “actively resisting Washington’s attempts to strike a lasting peace accord and discussed what, if any, economic or diplomatic punishments could push Russia closer to a deal,” Reuters reported.
Only a team that saw no problem with exploiting Russia’s invasion and mass murder in Ukraine to try to force a minerals deal by handing control of most of Ukraine’s resources forever to America (plus backpay on previous funding for its war plus interest) could have been blind to Russia’s agenda.
