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How Donald Trump Is Making It Harder to End the War in Ukraine
President Volodmyr Zelenskyy.
One could easily argue that Donald Trump aided Vladimir Putin in a 'circuitous' fashion by temporarily withholding US Congressional defense funding for Ukraine, a nation at war with Putin's Russia.
Merely the impression of weak US presidential support strengthens Putin's position and weakens that of Zelenskyy. I believe Trump clearly understood this implication.
President Volodmyr Zelenskyy.
12/6/19
On Monday, in Paris, Volodymyr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin will meet, for the first time, for face-to-face peace talks on a five-year conflict in eastern Ukraine that has cost more than thirteen thousand lives (already transpired). Ending the war in the Donbass has been the primary policy goal for Zelensky since he took office last May. “I am focused on the Donbass, on ending this war,” he told me in Kyiv this summer, when I was reporting a profile of him for the magazine. Ukrainian voters had given him a “quota of trust,” as he put it, and it was time to bring the war to a close. Yet unlike on matters of, say, land-sale reform or anti-corruption legislation, that is not something that Zelensky, or any Ukrainian President, can will into being. Zelensky needs the acquiescence, or at least participation, of Putin, who provides the military firepower and diplomatic backing that props up the Donbas’s separatist enclaves. Making things even more complicated for Zelensky, and affecting both his and Putin’s calculations, are the impeachment hearings in Washington, where President Trump is accused of suborning U.S. policy toward Ukraine in the service of his own political bugbears. The hope in Kyiv was that Zelensky and Trump could meet as soon as possible, and that Zelensky could sell to Trump the idea of playing the “grand peacemaker” in Ukraine, Alyona Getmanchuk, the director of New Europe Center, a foreign-policy think-tank, told me. “Zelensky really hoped to get Trump involved, that the United States would take part in this process, and not just as an observer but an ally.” Trump would get the glory; and Ukraine, peace. This summer, I spoke to a Zelensky adviser for my profile, who seconded why the new Ukrainian President was so intent on arranging a visit to the White House: “It would be a signal to Russia, of course.”
But, as the impeachment hearings have shown, Trump has proved distrustful of Ukraine, viewing the country through the repeatedly disproven conspiracy theory that Ukraine, and not Russia, had tried to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election. To the extent that he cared about Ukraine at all, Trump paid more attention to the efforts of his lawyer Rudy Giuliani to dig up politically useful dirt on Joe Biden. Gordon Sondland, U.S. Ambassador to the E.U., relayed to a colleague of Ambassador Taylor at the Embassy in Kyiv that “Trump cares more about the investigations of Biden” than Ukraine itself. For most of the twenty-five years of Ukraine’s post-Soviet independence, it enjoyed consistent and bipartisan support in Washington—including, and most importantly, after 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and sparked war in the Donbas. In the age of Trump, that has eroded. Zelensky, then, is left in a perilous situation: He faces Putin at a time when U.S. backing for Ukraine has suddenly turned wobbly, but he can’t risk alienating Trump or Republicans any further, lest Ukraine be thrown to the wolves entirely. He knows he will be dealing with Trump for at least another year, perhaps another five. Since the Ukraine-related scandal erupted, Zelensky has been restrained and deflecting in his comments, obviously—and understandably—uninterested in making himself any more of a player in the ongoing impeachment battle than he already has become. Earlier this month, in an interview with Time and three European outlets, Zelensky went the farthest he has gone in expressing his frustration and disappointment with Trump. “We’re at war. If you’re our strategic partner, then you can’t go blocking anything for us,” he said, referring to the three hundred and twenty million dollars in aid that Trump ordered frozen in July. “I think that’s just about fairness. It’s not about a quid pro quo. It just goes without saying.” Going into the Paris talks, Putin is pressuring Zelensky as much as he can: he is aware of his eagerness to end the war, that the United States is absent, and that European leaders are pushing Zelensky to make a deal.
One could easily argue that Donald Trump aided Vladimir Putin in a 'circuitous' fashion by temporarily withholding US Congressional defense funding for Ukraine, a nation at war with Putin's Russia.
Merely the impression of weak US presidential support strengthens Putin's position and weakens that of Zelenskyy. I believe Trump clearly understood this implication.