The pendulum that is U.S. President Donald Trump’s stance on the war in Ukraine has swung firmly back toward Russian President Vladimir Putin’s view of things.
Trump had over the past month triggered some speculation that he was prepared to take a harder line against the Kremlin’s war, and if not fully embrace the European Union’s position, at least cozy up alongside it.
But the remarks that first prompted such speculation — on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly — have proved to be less an actual change in policy and much more of a blip.
After dangling the prospect of supplying Ukraine with Tomahawk cruise missiles, Trump had a two-hour-plus phone call last Thursday with Putin at the Russian leader’s request.
The next day, during his meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House, Trump backed away from a missile deal and said repeatedly that he believes Putin wants peace.
Trump’s position should be no surprise to anyone given that he and his administration have stopped financial aid to Ukraine, refused to put any new direct sanctions on Russia and steadily pressured Zelenskyy to concede territory, says Phillips O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
U.S. President Donald Trump welcomed Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to the White House for high-stakes talks, but questions remain over whether the U.S. will supply Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles.
“Trump has constantly deceived people about his willingness to help Ukraine and hammer Russia,” wrote O’Brien in his Substack newsletter on the weekend.
Zelenskyy “had been deceived ahead of time into thinking that he might get Tomahawks [only] to meet a Trump who was all set to humiliate him again,” O’Brien added.
Putin’s ‘whisper’ in Trump’s ear
While Trump didn’t humiliate Zelenskyy in public during the White House meeting on Friday, that didn’t stop him from berating his Ukrainian counterpart in private, according to published reports.
Trump insisted — while shouting and cursing — that Zelenskyy must agree to Putin’s terms to end the war, including ceding territory, or face being destroyed by Russia, the Financial Times reported.
Trump pushed Zelenskyy to give up swaths of territory to Russia and resorted to profanity during the meeting, Reuters news agency reported.
Trump seems to have been swayed by his phone call with Putin, says Michael Bociurkiw, a global affairs analyst and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a non-partisan think-tank focused on international cooperation.
“Mr. Putin was able to whisper into Mr. Trump’s ear and convince him that providing Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine would be an escalation that is unacceptable,” Bociurkiw told CBC News in an interview from the Ukrainian port city of Odessa.
“He has this very difficult-to-explain spell over Trump,” Bociurkiw said.
In the days since, if any vestiges of hope remained of Trump leaning pro-Ukraine, he has crushed them.
Trump told reporters aboard Air Force Once on Sunday that the two sides should leave the frontline in Ukraine’s Donbas region “the way it is right now” — a move that would effectively reward Russia for its 2022 invasion.
Then on Monday at the White House, Trump gave a telling response to a reporter’s question about his September comments that Ukraine could win the war.
“I don’t think they will, but they could still win it. I never said they would win it,” Trump said at the White House. “Anything can happen. You know, war is a very strange thing. A lot of bad things happen, a lot of good things happen.“
U.S. President Donald Trump, who appeared alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House on Friday, said it’s ‘not an easy situation’ between Ukraine’s leader and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Rather than pushing for a just peace for Ukraine, a country that was invaded by its larger and more powerful neighbour, Trump is framing his intervention as a way to prevent deaths on the battlefield.
“It’s a bloodbath, it’s the worst since the Second World War,” he said Monday. “If we don’t make a deal, it will be a lot of people that will be paying a big price.”
This is the context in which a Trump-Putin summit could take place in Hungary in the coming weeks, roughly two months after the pair’s much-hyped Alaska meeting that failed to move the needle on a peace deal.
Zelenskyy has said he’ll go to Budapest if invited but isn’t thrilled with the location or the host, Hungarian PM Viktor Orban, arguably the most pro-Putin leader of any country in the EU.
“I do not believe that a prime minister who blocks Ukraine everywhere can do anything positive for Ukrainians or even provide a balanced contribution,” Zelenskyy told Bloomberg News on Sunday.
