The Ukrainian political scientist analyzes the language elements of the American leadership team. He shows their erroneous and contemptuous character, inspired by the Kremlin’s speech. For him, Trump’s submission to Putin and the adoption of his arguments endanger the entire European continent, targeted by Moscow, and even the entire world order. Faced with American cynicism, Volodymyr Zelensky and his European partners must speak from a position of strength.
Since Donald Trump’s call with Vladimir Putin and a series of other diplomatic moves aiming to kick off eventual Russia‐Ukraine peace talks, the war in Ukraine has become again a major topic in the international media. For outsiders who observe the war from a safe distance, like an increasingly monotonous and boring TV series, the plot has finally acquired a new turn, predictably boosting interest and evoking public debates.
For Ukrainians, however, all of Trump’s “peacemaking” initiatives have been another grave omen of their subaltern, “pawn” role in the geopolitical game. The signs have already been on the wall – after Trump’s ominous suggestion that Ukraine “may be Russian someday” (as a reason to take over Ukrainian rare earth minerals in advance), after Vice-President Vance’s insistence that “this war is between Russia and Ukraine” (and therefore U.S. military interference would not “advance American interests and security”), and after Defense Secretary Hegseth’s bold claim that Ukraine should abandon its NATO bid and its push to reclaim all Russian‐occupied territory.
To add insult to injury, the U.S. responded to President Zelensky’s earlier bid for support in exchange for privileged access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals with a virtually colonial demand to give almost everything for almost nothing. The Telegraph obtained a draft of the pre‐decisional contract and called it “a new Versailles”: “If this draft were accepted, Trump’s demands would amount to a higher share of Ukrainian GDP than reparations imposed on Germany at the Versailles Treaty… At the same time, he seems willing to let Russia off the hook entirely”. Normally, the paper averred, such terms are imposed on aggressor states defeated in war. “They are worse than the financial penalties imposed on Germany and Japan after their defeat in 1945”. And, besides the purely economic issues, there was a discomforting moral question: would it be “honorable to treat a victim nation in this fashion after it has held the battle line for the liberal democracies at enormous sacrifice for three years? Who really has a debt to whom, may one ask?”
The proposed U.S. contract seems to have been written by private lawyers rather than the U.S. departments of state or commerce. It requires, according to a leaked document, a $500bn “payback” from Ukraine that goes far beyond U.S. control over the country’s critical minerals but covers also ports, infrastructure, deposits of oil and gas, and other resources. It is very unlikely that Ukraine will be able to pay $500bn in the foreseeable future, but there is an even more daunting issue that the contract fails to address: the U.S. do not promise any security guarantees for Ukraine. This was the last straw that made President Zelensky put off the agreement, in spite of strong U.S. pressure bordering on blackmail.
Ukrainians’ concerns with security guarantees are hardly exaggerated. They have, on the one side, a rogue state that violates all possible rules and laws, and definitely cannot be trusted whatever its leaders may say or sign. And, on the other side, they have wavering Western partners with lofty ideals but ambiguous practices and very long records of avoidance, betrayal, and excuses instead of solutions. Ukrainians remember quite well that neither the United States nor the U.K. lived up to their obligations to protect Ukraine under the 1994 Budapest agreement signed when Ukraine gave up the Russian nuclear weapons on its territory. The expansiveness of the U.S. proposal, – The New York Times concludes, – and the tense negotiations around it, demonstrate the widening chasm between Kyiv and Washington over both continued U.S. support and a potential end to the war. For many, Trump’s offer reeks of colonialism, an era when Western countries exploited smaller or weaker nations for commodities.
Equally upsetting are Donald Trump’s manipulation of figures. “Every time Zelenskyy comes to the United States, he walks away with $100 billion. I think he’s the greatest salesman on Earth,” he said (in)famously last September, probably forgetting that his own party blocked for half a year in Congress a much smaller sum of aid endorsed to Ukraine by incumbent Joe Biden’s government. Now, he claims that the U.S. has spent $300bn on the war so far, and argues that it would be “stupid” to hand over any more. (Lately, at a news conference in Riyadh, he ballooned the sum to $350bn, again with no references to any reliable sources). In fact, experts maintain that the five packages agreed by Congress totaled $175bn, of which $70bn was spent in the U.S. on weapons production. Some of it is in the form of humanitarian grants, but much of it is lend‐lease money that must be repaid.
The Kiel Institute for the World Economy that runs a detailed database on all kinds of assistance provided by various countries to Ukraine (interactive “Ukraine Support Tracker”) provides even more poignant figures: the actual (already delivered) U.S. aid to Ukraine, by December 2024, reached 114.2bn versus 132.3bn delivered by European nations. The U.S. run really ahead of all other nations in terms of both military and financial and humanitarian allocations, but these allocations make up only 0.5% of American GDP (they are only 12th on the donors list in these terms), while quite a few European countries give more than one or even two per cent of their GDP to help Ukraine. And, notably, the effective cost to Europeans has in fact been far higher, since sanctions on Russia mattered far more to European economies than to the U.S. economy.
It is also worth noting, as Timothy Snyder does, that “most of the American military contribution to Ukraine stays in the United States, keeping factories running and paying American workers. In general, the weapons the U.S. has sent to Ukraine were obsolescent and would have been destroyed, at costs to the U.S. taxpayer, without ever being used… In resisting Russia, Ukraine has also provided tremendous economic and security benefits to the United States. What the United States has learned from Ukrainians about modern warfare – and that is just one of many benefits – easily justifies the costs, even in the most narrow security terms”.
It is hardly surprising that all of Trump’s “peacemaking” initiatives were met in Ukraine with a mixture of anger, despair, and black humor. Volodymyr Zelensky canceled his official visit to Saudi Arabia that was initially scheduled for February 20, two days after the Trump‐Putin meeting in Riyadh. He stated openly that he would not like to legitimize that meeting and its “decisions” by his own follow‐up appearance. The fact that he was neither invited to the talks nor even consulted by the American partners beforehand does not bode well for Ukraine’s eventual role in “big boys” conversations. As somebody scathingly commented on Ukraine’s prospects in Trump’s grand plan, “if you are not at the table then you are on the menu.”
While Volodymyr Zelensky still tries to keep a brave face in a bad game, Ukrainian media is overwhelmed with sarcastic remarks, animalistic metaphors (the copulation of a frog with a snake in Riyadh might be the most pictorial), and caustic cartoons, some of which – with Trump as a bride and Putin as a groom – strikingly resemble the 1939 European cartoons with just married Stalin and Hitler. Vitaly Portnikov, a leading Ukrainian publicist, put it straight: “It’s not Munich 2.0., as we feared. It’s more like a new Molotov‐Ribbentrop agreement”.
With all this emotional flurry, the real danger of Trump’s reckless cowboy diplomacy goes far beyond the particular fate of Ukraine (however grave it might be). His submissiveness to Putin and susceptibility to his arguments (partly because of ignorance, partly because of affinity) has put under threat the entire European continent targeted by Moscow, and endanger the whole global order undermined persistently by rogue states. After J. D. Vance’s recent programmatic speech in Munich and Trump’s arrogant and nonsensical statements at the news conference in Riyadh, Europeans seems to be waking up, trying to acquire a new geopolitical agency and responsibility that they have outsourced traditionally to American partners. How far, how decisively and effectively this motley club of thirty‐plus nations will move, remains to be seen. But, at least, this gives Ukrainians a chance to survive in the new environment, even though it would definitely require even more painful efforts – both diplomatic and military. So far, they seem not to blink – as both Zelensky’s and society’s reaction to mounting challenges indicate.
The only country that clearly benefits from Trump’s awkward “peacemaking” is Russia. Regardless of the ultimate results of these efforts, the very fact the U.S. leader shook the hand of an indicted war criminal, a dictator who kills and imprisons his political opponents and wages a genocidal war of aggression against a peaceful sovereign neighbor, conveys a huge symbolical meaning. It is hardly surprising that Trump’s curtsy to Putin was celebrated in Moscow like “Christmas, Easter, and New Year’s all rolled into one.” As Alexey Kovalev summed up his field observations,
“The Kremlin and its media machine have not been this ecstatic since the launch of Putin’s ‘special military operation’… Trump is now doing our job for us by ‘sawing’ Europe into pieces, Russian talk show host Evgeny Popov told his viewers. His giddy, smiling co‐host, Olga Skabeeva, described the turn of events as being ‘unimaginable’ and ‘unthinkable’. On another show, the pundit Sergey Mikheev was elated by another Hegseth remark that was widely interpreted to mean that Washington was reconsidering its security commitment to Europe. Mikheev concluded that Russia was finally free to strike Brussels, London, and Paris. Some pundits basked in the fact that it was Trump who reached out to Putin. “It’s as if Julius Ceasar himself telephoned a barbarian,” Mosfilm studio chief Karen Shakhnazarov commented on another show.”
While the latter comparison might not please Putin too much, he has certainly scored several victorious points with Trump, besides the paramount fact of putting an end to Russia’s international isolation. First, he learned, without any initial promises and concessions, that American troops will not be, in any case, sent to Ukraine – the same gift that Biden made him in December 2021, completely ignoring the importance of strategic uncertainty in geopolitical rivalry. Secondly, with no preconditions, Putin got a nod from the American president regarding his claim to occupied Ukrainian territories and to barring Ukraine from NATO. Thirdly, without any reciprocal concessions, he heard that not only would American sanctions be removed but also that Europeans should do the same. And finally, he conveyed the whole set of fraudulent Kremlin narratives to a gullible Trump, starting from the insolent claim that Ukraine and Russia (if not Ukraine alone) share equal responsibility for the ongoing war, to perfidiously questioning Zelensky’s legitimacy and provocative demand for war‐time elections, in spite of Ukraine’s constitutionals law that explicitly prohibits it.
One episode in this shameful campaign is highly revealing: to put forward the Kremlin narrative about Zelensky’s illegitimacy and to demand new elections, Trump pointed out at a decline of Zelensky’s popularity – to a paltry 4%. No responsible experts could provide him with such odd data except for Russians, of course. But he has a team that could have easily checked it. There are several national and international pollster companies that operate in Ukraine. None of them assessed Zelensky’s popularity below 50% by now. Popular trust in him declined indeed from 90% in May 2022 to 60% last year but firmly stays at 50+ points, as the latest poll (57% in early February) clearly indicates.
Ignorance about Ukraine and the region in general is the problem that Trump shares with most international politicians and intellectuals who were educated in the frames of Russian “imperial knowledge”, uncritically imported and normalized in both international academia and popular culture. A much bigger problem, however, is his mindset which has little to do with the rule of law and liberal democratic policies but a lot with Realpolitik favored by most dictators who are confident that might makes right and international politics is primarily about accumulation of power and wealth. Ignorance can be enlightened and mitigated, but a cynical authoritarian mindset is very unlikely to change. This means that moralistic discussions with Trump and his lieutenants will not help much Volodymyr Zelensky and his European partners. They should speak from a position of strength. This is perhaps the main if not the only point they may fully agree on with the American president.
Mykola Ryabchuk is a research director at the Institute of Political and Nationality Studies of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and a lecturer at the University of Warsaw. He has written extensively on civil society, nation-state building, national identity, and post-communist transition. One of his books has been translated into French: De la 'Petite-Russie' à l'Ukraine, published in Paris by L'Harmattan in 2003.
