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Donald Trump has been shown to be wrong, wrong and wrong again about Vladimir Putin. He was wrong again when he was asked if Ukraine’s “Spiderweb” drone strikes against Russian bombers had changed his view of the cards the Ukrainians have: “They gave Putin a reason to go and bomb the hell out of them,” he said.
This is the same logic to which President Trump has cleaved from the start: that the Ukrainian people provoked the full-scale invasion of their country by wanting to be an independent nation facing to the west.
It seemed that Mr Trump had been briefly disabused of the notion that Mr Putin wanted peace when the Russian president ignored several long telephone conversations with him and continued to bombard Ukraine, causing significant civilian casualties. “He has gone absolutely crazy,” Mr Trump said last month. “Needlessly killing a lot of people.”
But Mr Trump responded to this month’s Russian bombardment, described by the mayor of Kharkiv as the “most powerful attack since the start of the full-scale war”, by blaming the Ukrainians for giving Mr Putin a reason for intensifying the summer offensive.
Any other United States president would have recognised that Mr Putin is gearing up for the summer fighting season, as Sam Kiley, our world affairs editor, reports, and would be doing so even if he had not been humiliated by Ukraine’s audacious remote-control attacks on airfields thousands of miles away in different parts of Russia.
Any other US president would have congratulated Volodymyr Zelensky on the attacks, which will go down in the history of special operations warfare as a brilliantly executed surprise.
It turns out that when Mr Trump shamefully told Mr Zelensky in the Oval Office, “You don’t have the cards,” he was mistaken.
Mr Zelensky still has the support of most of the free world. European leaders have signalled their willingness to step up whether or not Mr Trump goes through with his threat to step back from America’s responsibility as a defender of freedom. The Ukrainian people remain united in their determination to defend themselves. Operation Spiderweb proved that they can take the fight deep into Russian territory, while having no territorial ambitions beyond seeking to preserve their own borders.
Mr Zelensky has also exposed Mr Putin for what he really is. The Ukrainian president has given the Russian leader every chance for peace. He has been prepared to compromise on territory and alliances in a way that no leader of a sovereign nation should be asked to do. And yet Mr Putin presses on, making it abundantly clear, even to Mr Trump, that it is the Kremlin that is the obstacle to peace.
Even if Mr Trump’s apparent taking of sides with Mr Putin against the Ukrainian people were a cunning plan to soothe the paranoid mystical nationalism of Mr Putin and his cronies, it has not worked. Mr Putin has made it clear that he will be satisfied by nothing less than the subjugation of the whole of Ukraine by force of arms.
In which case, he must be resisted. Mr Trump is right about one thing: that war is a terrible thing. But a peace built on surrender to an imperialist dictator would be no peace at all.
The Ukrainian people must continue to fight, and all the nations of the world that believe in freedom, democracy and national self-determination must continue to help to defend them.
English (US) ·