Putin's Ventriloquist Doll
Trump echoes one Kremlin lie after another
It would be understandable for anyone who supports Ukraine’s defence efforts against Putin’s war of imperialist aggression to subjugate Ukraine to be in a despair over Donald Trump’s exclusion of Ukraine from the preliminary stages of negotiation for a ceasefire and peace agreement, and especially his recent comments about Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky.
Has he switched sides in the conflict, absolving the aggressor and blaming the victim? Based on these statements, it would seem so, as he regurgitated standard Russian talking points, to the point where he seemed like a ventriloquist’s doll manipulated by the murderous sociopath in the Kremlin.
Zelensky, he said, is a “dictator”. Zelensky, the outsider candidate who received 73 percent of the popular vote in Ukraine’s 2019 election, an election that was attested by international observers as free and fair, as were the elections for the Ukrainian Rada (parliament).
This claim is part of the Kremlin’s disinformation campaign to delegitimize Ukraine’s president in order to justify excluding him from peace negotiations. Zelensky has lost almost all public support, says Trump, with an approval rating of only 4 percent.
There is no credible poll—indeed any poll at all—that says anything of the kind. True, Zelensky’s approval has declined from the stellar levels at the start of the war, but when Trump made his statement his approval was still at 57 percent, and has risen significantly since Trump made this statement. Well above Trump’s own rating.
Where does Trump get this stuff? From Putin, during his 90-minute phone conversation? Or via Steve Witkoff, the real estate investor who displaced Lieutenant-General Keith Kellog (a strong Ukraine supporter) in Trump’s negotiation team, during the several hours Witkoff spent with Putin in the Kremlin?
After all, after Trump’s 2018 summit with Putin, he said he had more faith in Putin’s assessments than those of his own intelligence services.
Or maybe he just plucked the number out of thin air, as with his false claims that the US had provided $350 billion in aid to Ukraine, far exceeding the total contribution from European allies. The actual amount of US aid, both military and civil, comes to around $100 billion, and in monetary terms has been exceeded by Europe for the past 18 months.
There is a strangely postmodern quality to Trump’s attitude to truth. Like them, he seems uninterested in whether claims can be verified from reliable sources, preferring his own “truths”, derived from whatever source suits his purposes at any given time.
Given his illegitimacy, argues the Kremlin, for Zelensky to be included in negotiations he must first hold new elections, which in normal circumstances should have been called last year.
An election, while the country is in a state of war, with around 20 percent of its territory under hostile occupation, in contravention of the Ukrainian constitution that stipulates that an election cannot be held while the country is under martial law and can only be held six months after a state of war ends.
Britain did not hold an election from 1935 to 1945. Does that make Winston Churchill a dictator?
How about a free election in Russia, where opposition candidates are routinely banned, repressed and murdered, which has not held a genuine election in the 25 years of Putin’s rule— a personalist dictatorship that ticks all the boxes to be counted as genuinely fascist (indeed, Putin’s favourite nationalist ideologue, Ivan Ilyin, described himself as such).
The New York Post, considered to be the most pro-Trump newspaper in the country, decided to highlight the absurdity of this claim with the front page of its 21 February edition that appears at the top of this article.
Then there was the statement that Zelensky “started the war”, and that he should have “done a deal” to end it. This is Trump’s addled version of a recurring falsehood of Russian propaganda, regularly reiterated by Putin apologists in the West such as the “realist” Professor John J. Mearsheimer, that the war could have been terminated by negotiations in Istanbul in March-April 2022.
The standard version of this story is that negotiations had been pretty much concluded until Boris Johnson, acting at the behest of the US, showed up in Kyiv on 9 April and told the Ukrainians to “fight on”.
In reality, the talks failed because of Russia’s insistence on provisions in the peace agreement that would have denied Ukraine any credible safeguards against a resumption of Russian aggression in future, and would have rendered it effectively defenceless.
The draft agreement envisaged a group of guarantor nations, including Russia, that would act should in the event of any future violation of Ukrainian sovereignty. Toward the end of the negotiations, Russia insisted on a provision requiring unanimity of the guarantor countries before such action could be taken, effectively giving itself—the aggressor—a veto.
The Russians also insisted on strict limits on the size and capability of the Ukrainian armed forces at a level way below sufficiency to counter Russia. It was a farce, and the talks broke down before Johnson’s 9 April visit, as confirmed by Sergey Lavrov himself on 7 April.
But even if the Kremlin’s version were true, it would not change the undeniable reality that the war (or rather, the latest phase of it) began with Russia’s massive invasion on 24 February 2022.
Yet for Trump, and his circle, it has become unsayable to speak of Russia as the aggressor. In votes in the UN General Assembly and the Security Council, the US has for the first time lined up with Russia and other luminary states like Iran, North Korea, China, Belorussia and Nicaragua to vote against this obvious, undeniable truth.
In Europe, there is talk about a fundamental rupture between the US and its NATO allies. Questions have been raised about the viability of Article 5 of the NATO treaty, the provision that stipulates that “an attack on one is an attack on all”.
There has always been a question whether the US, or indeed other NATO allies, would in the end go to war to protect the tiny Baltic states, a prospect that those states see as real if Putin is able to prevail in Ukraine. The capacity of NATO to deter Russian aggression is crucially dependent on absolute solidarity by all NATO allies, and especially the US, on their commitment to Article 5.
And not just the Baltics—the concern about the possibility of war with Russia within the decade is being expressed by politicians, defence officials, and think-tanks in Germany, the Nordic states, as well as Poland.
The reaction from democratic Taiwan is telling. Here is an account from the New Times’ Chris Buckley and Amy Chang Chien:
In Taiwan, Mr. Trump’s stinging comments about Ukraine could feed a current of public opinion arguing that the island has been repeatedly abandoned by Washington and cannot trust its promises.
“The prospect of the United States trying to make a deal with Russia over Ukraine, without actually giving Ukraine a seat at the table, will reinforce the sense of American skepticism in Taiwan,” said Marcin Jerzewski, the head of the Taiwan office of the European Values Center for Security Policy, which tries to foster cooperation between European and Asian democracies.
Some anxiety has surfaced on social media, with a few Taiwanese commentators suggesting that if war between China and Taiwan should erupt, Mr. Trump might take a similarly transactional approach.
This all seems pretty bleak. NATO, arguably the most effective peace-keeping organization in modern history neutered. The entire democratic alliance system centred on the US potentially undermined, at a time when a coalition of revisionist autocratic states are mounting the most serious challenge to the democratic world since the Second World War.
Moreover there is a strain of conservative foreign policy thinking in America called sovereigntism that Professor Jennifer Mittelstadt of Rutgers University thinks is a close match for Trumpism.
Sovereigntism, which is said to be influential among the policy wonks who put the 2025 blueprint for the incoming Trump administration, favours disengagement from any international institutions that constrains American sovereignty. That includes the obvious examples like the UN and its agencies, but also ones like NATO that have played a key role in Western defence.
Mittelstadt stresses that sovereigntism is not the same as isolationism. Indeed, as Trump’s bizarre talk of taking over Greenland, Canada, Panama and Gaza make clear, it is about asserting American sovereignty wherever it seems advantageous, however unfeasible in practice.
Unlikely as these proposals are to come to anything, Trump’s assertions of them has driven a further nail into the coffin of one of the core tenets of the rules-based international order—the prohibition on using coercion to seize the sovereign territory of other nations.
Now for the good, or at least better news.
First, Trump is no ideologue. He will immediately eschew any ideologically based position that seems disadvantageous in electoral or any other terms. Recall how he ditched Project 2025 the instant some of its proposals became an embarrassment during the campaign. So we probably should not be concerned about some pointy-headed sovereigntist policy wonk persuading him of anything.
Second, Trump is famously, notoriously mercurial, and a bit of flattery will take you a long way. In 2018, during his first term, he was on the verge of pulling the US out of NATO, according to his former National Security Adviser John Bolton.
This followed an angry spat with other NATO leaders about their failure to spend adequately on defence, Trump complaining justifiably that the US was being expected to shoulder an excessive share of the burden of providing for European defence.
This looked like an existential crisis for the alliance. According to an account in Politico, the crisis was averted by a brilliant move by then prime minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, now Secretary-General of NATO, who argued that European defence spending had gone up and, crucially, gave Trump credit for it.
The crisis was averted:
Trump was mollified, “by the time Trump addressed the press later that day, he was ebullient, citing a ‘very amazing two-day period in Brussels’ during which he had achieved ‘tremendous progress’. The pin was back in the grenade”.
And insults and unfair attacks are part of Trump’s stock-in-trade. I recall watching three speakers at the Republican National Convention who spoke in succession: Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and Ted Cruz, who Trump had previously nicknamed “desanctimonious”, “bird-brain”, and “lyin’ Ted” respectively.
Hardly admirable, to be sure, but Zelensky should not take Trump’s lies and insults too much to heart.
And indeed, Zelensky has not, ploughing on with negotiations with Trump about a deal to exploit Ukraine’s extensive reserves of rare earths and other critical minerals including lithium and titanium, as well as oil and gas. Zelensky’s initial rejection of a draft deal handed to him by US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was the trigger for Trump’s abusive outburst.
The initial proposal was extortionate, requiring Ukraine to give up $500 billion worth of minerals by way of recoupment of US aid to Ukraine, vastly in excess of the amount of aid actually delivered. A Republican lawmaker who spoke with Zelensky on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference gave this account of the interaction:
Bessent pushed the paper across the table, demanding that Zelensky sign it, the Ukrainian president told the lawmaker. Zelensky took a quick look and said he would discuss it with his team. Bessent then pushed the paper closer to Zelensky.
“You really need to sign this,” the Treasury secretary said. Zelensky said he was told “people back in Washington” would be very upset if he didn’t. The Ukrainian leader said he took the document but didn’t commit to signing.
Zelensky wanted security guarantees as quid pro quo for the minerals, which were not forthcoming.
As of the time of writing (Friday, 28 February) a revised version of the minerals deal, more acceptable to Ukraine, has apparently been agreed to. Radio Free Europe has obtained a copy of the draft agreement, and summarized the key points as follows:
No Security Guarantees: The deal supports Ukraine’s pursuit of security assurances but doesn’t provide them
Resource Development: Ukraine and the U.S. will jointly develop Ukraine's natural resources, including critical minerals, oil, and gas
Reconstruction Fund: A joint fund will receive 50% of Ukraine’s state-owned resource revenues
Reinvestment: Fund profits will be reinvested "at least annually" for Ukraine’s economic recovery
Pending Details: Governance and ownership specifics will be negotiated later
It makes no mention of the $500 billion recoupment payment included in the original draft.
This calls to mind the famous quotation from Otto von Bismarck that “laws are like sausages. It is best not to see them being made”.
It is, of course, outrageous that the provision of assistance to a nation being subjected to a monstrous act of military aggression that has caused it hundreds of thousands of casualties and the best part of a trillion dollars in material damage, should be made conditional on financial compensation from the victim nation.
That said, there are definite advantages to Ukraine from signing.
Firstly on the security guarantees, as expected the US does not want to be the guarantor, insisting this is a European responsibility, but the agreement does state the US “supports Ukraine’s efforts to obtain security guarantees”, presumably involving some “coalition of the willing” of European states.
According to French finance minister Eric Lombard, the UK, Germany and France “are already willing” to put troops on the ground in Ukraine, and expects other EU members to contribute. It should be noted that Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has rejected any presence by European troops.
However, as argued by Mark Levin, a Fox News commentator and strong Trump supporter, the very presence of a US economic interest in Ukraine’s economic development could provide a disincentive to Russia restarting the conflict.
And, if it leads to an overt reconciliation between Trump and Zelensky, it should mean Trump is unlikely to object to Ukrainian purchases of US military equipment funded from other sources.
This is essential, since the US is the only provider of some critically important items of advanced equipment, including the Patriot anti-missile system—the only weapon capable of bringing down certain types of Russian ballistic missiles—and the HIMARS and ATACMS long-range precision rocket systems.