Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s in DC, and Trump says Putin will ‘keep his word.’ Sure he will | Opinion
Donald Trump’s flaws do not include credulity.
So why, do you think, has he expressed such unalloyed confidence that Vladimir Putin will observe the terms of any Russian peace deal with Ukraine, whose president will be in Washington on Friday?
Putin is not what I’d call a promise keeper. He has of course violated the deal that Ukraine made when it gave up its nuclear weapons in exchange for the guarantee of respect for its current borders. And he has no known history of honor or integrity.
He’s wanted by the International Criminal Court for Russia’s reported kidnapping of some 20,000 Ukrainian children. Naturally, Putin has said that never happened. He also made it a crime to call the war a war, and justified his unprovoked invasion with false claims that he is “denazifying” Ukraine by alleging a nonexistent “genocide” against ethnic Russians in a country led by a Jew who lost family members in the Holocaust.
Yet somehow, this is a man our president says he trusts. “I think he’ll keep his word,” Trump said on Thursday. “I’ve known him for a long time now.”
In the foxhole, to hear him tell it: “We had to go through the Russian hoax together. They had to put up with that, too. They put up with a lot.” They did? Like what?
He refers, of course, to the consensus of our own intelligence community — the one Trump is so busy dismantling — that Russia did attempt to meddle in our 2016 election in Trump’s favor. There is no proof that’s why he won.
But our president’s long history of defending the actual dictator with whom he feels he’s been through so much now has him falsely accusing Ukraine of starting the war and calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a dictator.
Oh, and then he pretended he never called him any such thing — “Did I say that?” Because it’s never too soon to rewrite history.
He has also said Ukraine “can forget about” joining NATO, and shamefully sided against our European allies, and against democracy itself, at the U.N. this week by refusing to denounce Russia aggression.
Zelenskyy will be in Washington to finalize a deal to share his country’s rare minerals revenue with the U.S. But without any security guarantees to stop Russia from invading all over again, why wouldn’t it do that? I guess since Trump has claimed Russia never invaded in the first place, he can easily claim that in the future no matter what happens.
Maybe Trump’s thinking is that if the U.S. has mineral interests to protect in Ukraine, his foxhole friend wouldn’t dare.
But virtually nothing that our president says about Ukraine or Russia is true. The $350 billion that he says we’ve kicked in to help Ukraine since February of 2022 is actually $120 billion, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. Europe’s aid was all in the form of loans, he says. That isn’t true, either.
Europe has contributed more than we have, just as French President Emmanuel Macron informed him on Monday: “No, in fact, to be frank, we paid,” Macron said, grabbing Trump’s wrist. “We paid 60% of the total effort. It was like the US – loans, guarantees, grants.”
I’ll be frank, too: I wish he even occasionally got this sort of fact-check from his fellow Republicans. Instead, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley reintroduced the “Inspector General for Ukraine Act,” which would establish a watchdog auditing “every penny” of the aid we sent our invaded ally.
Yes, even as this administration just fired at least a dozen nonpartisan inspectors general who oversee government agencies, because who needs to know how they work or spend our pennies here, I guess. If there are still pennies.
The morning after Trump’s election, I wrote that I was heartsick for all of us “in this American experiment together, no matter who you supported. And I’m shattered for Ukraine, which won’t survive the fact that Putin’s friend has been returned to power.”
I keep hoping to have been wrong on both counts, but so far see no reason to think that I was. Ukraine may well cease to exist this year, a Putin aide said in a recent interview with Pravda. He was responding to a question about concessions in the offing from Donald Trump.
