Trump and Ukraine-Russia war: Look beyond the obvious

May 5, 2025
Posted by: Sreemoy Talukdar
Categories: Russia, Ukraine

History’s pivotal moments require time and space to reveal their true colours. When Bastille was stormed in 1789, the actors involved had little idea they were triggering the French Revolution. I suspect we are witnessing first-hand such an epochal moment that will end up reshaping the world’s geopolitical trajectory.

As always, one must separate the wheat from chaff, notes from noise, and insight from propaganda. Donald Trump’s overtures to Russia to end the Ukraine war is such a provocation for liberal moaners, professional handwringers and the MAGA faithful – two ends of the discourse spectrum – that any rational discussion has become almost impossible.

Western media is filled with obituaries of the trans-Atlantic relationship. Political leaders, journalists, commentariat, podcasters, academicians, policy wonks and the lot, especially from Europe, are going through the full range of emotions from froth, fury, fire and fatalism, firing daily darts at the ‘orange ogre’.

I chanced upon a Foreign Policy column by “nine thinkers” on “what’s next for Europe and Ukraine”. The Europeans appear convinced that Ukraine, that is losing the war despite significant infusion of funds and weapons from the US-led West over three years, will miraculously turn it around if the West continues to provide grist to the mill.

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The ’thinkers’ evidently didn’t think through how outcomes could be different if one keeps doing the same thing! Three years of a battle of attrition that has devastated Ukraine – draining it of its manpower, denuding it of a significant chunk of territory, and now drawing it into sharing 50 percent of its mineral reserves with the US – is apparently not enough.

Europeans would bravely deny battlefield realities down to the last Ukrainian, serving one delusional take after another so that the war’s meat grinder gets a daily diet of Ukrainians to satiate their righteous indignation, even if it doesn’t win their proxy war.

For the pampered priests of high morality who have sent their pragmatism on a collective vacation, Russia’s advantage can easily be wished away by incandescent eloquence and clever turn of phrases. Woe betide Trump for acknowledging the reality of Vladimir Putin’s upper hand and the efficiency of Russia’s war economy.

Apparently complaining about Trump may change the battlefield realities. For the European ‘thinkers’ in the piece who sadly reflect the collective brain rot of a paralysed Europe, the war is a morality play where Ukrainians must die en masse in a losing cause to provide catharsis.

Trump has caused the gravest sin in attempting to stop the war, and by deviating from an axiomatic ideological opposition to Putin. He has been accused of “abandoning Ukraine”, “rehabilitating Russia”, and stupidly “surrendering” all leverages to the Russian aggressor “without any tangible benefits”.

In this telling, “Putin could claim victory” not because Russia is winning, not because of the lack of any tangible pathway to Ukraine’s victory, but due to Trump administration’s actions and statements.

For the better part of the last three years, western legacy media has been claiming that Russia is losing, Russian economy is collapsing, ruble is a rubble, Russians are dying by an order of magnitude greater than Ukrainians, and Putin may even fall victim to a palace coup.

Now, apparently due to Trump’s actions, Putin may not only emerge victorious, but “would soon try do whatever it takes to get the rest of Ukraine under his control” and “next, he would wait for the right moment to attack a NATO country using conventional, hybrid, or other methods and move ahead with regime change and occupation.”

If only had Trump not tried to stop the war, Putin could have been “kicked out of Ukraine” leading to “a moment of soul-searching in Russia, weaken Putin’s rule, and open the possibility of change.” I have just quoted from Ulrich Speck’s column in Foreign Policy.

It is difficult to come to terms with such soul-crushing hallucinations.

Russia is about to set the terms because of a simple fact. It is winning. Winners do set the terms. The winning side in a war cannot be shamed into giving up its gains.

Is this, as Kishore Mahbubani says, the land of Metternich, Talleyrand or Kissinger? What has become of Europe? Where are its thinkers? Sadly, Europe’s strategic voices reflect the paradigm of delusion that European leaders reside in. It is evident that feeding on the peace dividend of the post Second World War order, protected by American security umbrella, benefitting from the unravelling of the USSR and getting used to arrogant moral hectoring, Europe has lost its stomach for a fight, and its ability to think strategically.

Like a kid whose candy has been taken away, Europe is throwing a royal tantrum to be taken seriously by Trump and demanding a seat at the table of negotiations. Except that’s not a viable strategy.

What Europeans, busy making a virtue-signal out of the brutal realities of war, have failed to grasp is that Putin or Trump are not incrementalists or status quoists. They care little about ideological frameworks, are unafraid of being unpopular with the self-righteous, seem prepared to take measures that go against elitist consensus, and take no interest in how history will treat them.

That makes them, in the eyes of ‘normative powers’, unpredictable and dangerous. For the status quoists in Europe, eager to preserve the ‘liberal international order’ that has delivered in spades towards their peace and prosperity, Trump and Putin are chaos agents who are here to destroy the world they know and inhabit. It strikes deep fear in their hearts.

Conversely, four years in the wilderness, surviving multiple assassination attempts, political witch hunt and relentless lawfare has imbibed Trump with a certain clarity of vision and steel, to go with his characteristic unpredictability. In his second coming, Trump’s cabinet picks give us a clue to his priorities. He wants to keep his campaign promise of ending the war that, he perceives, has been draining on American exchequer without tangible benefits, and is keen to stop the losses, recoup resources and focus on the pacing threat from China.

Trump has gone about his job with all the finesse of a bull in a China shop, but he is getting the message across. He suffers from none of the sentimentality associated with Ukraine’s ‘heroic’ defence against Russian ‘invasion’. This is not his war.

He sees a ‘big, beautiful ocean’ separating Europe from America, and refuses to suffer from a moral compunction to continue backing the Ukrainians unless American taxpayers get something in return.

As he said this week while commenting on the minerals deal with Ukraine, “We want to get that money back. We’re helping the country through a very, very big problem, a problem like very few people have had. Shouldn’t have had this problem, because it shouldn’t have happened, but it did happen, so we have to straighten it out, but the American taxpayer now is going to get their money back, plus.”

To do that, ‘dealmaker’ Trump first went about destroying the aura around Zelenskyy, calling him a ‘dictator’, pressing him to hold elections, and claiming that the Ukrainian president’s popularity rating has nosedived. Trump is trying to delegitimize Zelenskyy, pressure Europe to adopt greater accountability and financial responsibility, and strike a deal with Putin to end the war over Ukrainian territorial concessions.

His defence secretary Peter Hegseth took out the options that Europeans consider as ‘major leverages’, and Russia its ‘core concerns’. No NATO membership for Ukraine in a negotiated settlement, security guarantees the sole preserve of Europeans, and a return to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders “unrealistic.”

On Wednesday, speaking to reporters at White House post signing the deal with Ukraine, Trump repeated the talking points.

“I’m not going to make security guarantees… very much… We’re going to have Europe do that.” For Trump, US presence working on mineral extraction would amount to “automatic security because nobody’s going to be messing around with our people when we’re there.”

But he was quite clear on Ukraine’s NATO entry. “NATO, you can forget about it… I think that’s probably the reason the whole thing started.”

At this point, it’s worth summarizing Trump’s ideas. One, he considers Ukraine’s ‘heroism’ an exercise in futility and the war “a horrible, bloody mess”. Two, he believes (or at least is giving the impression) that Russia is the victim, not the aggressor. And three, he reckons ‘normative’ Europe as opportunists who have bled the US dry.

We shall dispense with performative liberal outrage and carefully consider his views.

By some estimates, Ukraine has lost potentially around “34% to 38% of their total military personnel”. Though Russians have lost more, they have significantly greater manpower and resources. Lack of manpower is weakening Ukraine’s air force, frequent desertions are starving its forces on the battlefield, conscripts are desperately unpopular, dealing a blow to Zelensky’s plans, and according to latest reports, Ukraine might be losing up to “20 sq km of territory per day” mostly in Donetsk and Kharkiv oblasts.

Europeans may consider a ceasefire on Russian terms sacrilegious, but unless they are ready to put their own boots on the frontlines (an eventuality French president Emmanuel Macron categorically denied while angling for ‘peacekeeping forces’ post meeting with Trump at the White House), egging Ukraine on is a perversion, not display of moral courage.

As of now, Ukraine can’t get back its territory, has lost thousands and thousands of men, just signed away half of its minerals and will never be a member of NATO. Trump is proposing that Ukraine cut its losses. Europeans and Zelenskyy should take heed. Over “ 50% of Ukrainians want to end the war”, and “52% of those who want a negotiated peace also support territorial concessions.”

Trump’s contention that Russia is the victim, not the aggressor, took the US to strange corners. Washington voted against a UN resolution condemning Russia for Ukraine invasion, finding itself in the company of Russia, North Korea and Sudan. It was more successful at the UN Security Council, the vote which really mattered, where its resolution not blaming Russia for starting the war was adopted with UK, France, Sloveni, Greece and Denmark abstaining, not opposing.

Still, it marked a tectonic shift. When Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff held that Russia was provoked into invading Ukraine, it goes against available evidence, but only if history starts on February 2022. NATO’s eastward expansion and incremental steps towards making Ukraine a ‘western bulwark’ on Russia’s border, US-backed overthrowing of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, and repeated crossing of Russian red lines are well documented.

The fact remains that William Burns, the former head of CIA, is on record sending a memo to US secretary of state Condi Rice as the then US ambassador to Moscow that “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite, not just Putin. In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”

Still, NATO went ahead and recognised Ukraine as “enhanced opportunities partner” in 2020, held ‘Sea Breeze’ military exercises along with Ukraine in Black Sea in 2021, and Biden ‘assured’ Zelensky in December 2021, couple of months before Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine, that “NATO membership is in Ukraine’s hands”.

Did the Russians say they were joking when they protested the repeated crossing of red lines? That argument has been settled for good.

Trump’s contention that Europe has misused America’s strategic altruism, skimmed American taxpayers’ money to finance their gargantuan welfare states while doing business with Russia on the sly, is an argument that cannot be airily dismissed.

As Walter Russell Mead writes in Wall Street Journal, “In the Trump view, European countries haven’t merely stiff-armed American requests to increase defense spending. Led by Germany, they have seized every opportunity to trade with Russia, even when that trade weakened European security and strengthened Moscow. The old American policy locked the US into the ridiculous posture of begging Berlin to stop undermining its own security by relying on Russian energy… Team Trump wants to flip this dynamic.”

Trump does not consider Russia a systemic challenger to Pax Americana, and sees no reason why a post-Cold War compact cannot be established with a great power that possesses the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.

Stripped of liberal indignation over Trump’s “shakedown or Europe” and “pandering of Russia”, Trump’s sharp pivot to end the war, begin diplomatic and economic cooperation with Russia is based on a hyper-realist understanding of realpolitik. This was always America’s proxy war against Russia, cheerled by Europe from the sidelines. Sans America’s funding and more importantly, military support, Russian tanks would be all over Kyiv by now.

There is no plausible reason why America, that perceives no threat from Russia, will jettison its entire relationship with a major power at the altar of Europe’s insecurity, more so when Brussels isn’t putting money and materiel where its mouth is.

Is this a complete dumping of the post-1945 global system and balance of power? Quite possibly. I shall tackle the question threadbare in my next piece.

This is part one of the two-part ‘Trump and Ukraine-Russia war’ series.

The writer is Deputy Executive Editor, Firstpost. He tweets as @sreemoytalukdar. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author.

Trump and Ukraine-Russia war: Look beyond the obvious

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