By Diane Francis
The contrast between Trump’s principled war with Israel against Iran and his fawning toward Russia’s Putin stands couldn’t be starker.
Tehran has been toppled, but on May 28, Trump imposed a two-week deadline on Russia to stop bombing Ukraine to see if Putin was serious about peace. He didn’t stop, and it has worsened since. Trump has said nothing and taken no action. By June 9, he dismissed Russia’s constant attacks, then commented that Ukraine’s audacious “Operation Spiderweb” attack on June 1, against Russian aircraft, “gave Putin a reason to go in and bomb the hell out of them.”
Then, on June 12, on Moscow’s national holiday, Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio released an official statement, which read: “On behalf of the American people, I want to congratulate the Russian people on Russia Day. The United States remains committed to supporting the Russian people as they continue to build on their aspirations for a brighter future.”
What “aspirations”? What “brighter future?” The “Russian people” do not, and cannot, build toward a brighter future because they are modern-day serfs, entrapped in a kleptocracy run by a mafia controlled by a delusional and homicidal dictator.
Trotting out such diplomatic drivel does not move the dial, and is as sincere as are phony claims by Russia that it seeks only peace. It does not. It “seeks” Kyiv, Odesa, and lands bordering the European Union’s eastern borders, as well as world dominance.
Still, Trump doubles down. On June 16, Trump attended the G7 gathering in Canada. He was clearly upset that Ukraine’s President had been invited to attend the following day (which is why he left before Zelensky arrived). But on day one, he scolded the leaders for expelling Russia from the G8 back in 2014.
“The G7 used to be the G8,” said Trump. He blamed the current war on this major snub, which was bizarre because Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine took place in 2014, and its second happened in 2022 and was a continuation of the war started in 2014.
Trump’s accusation didn’t surprise his former national security advisor, John Bolton, who later commented that Trump “never seemed to understand that Russia had been kicked out of the G8 for invading Ukraine or that the G7 membership consists of a group of like-minded industrial democracies.”
But Trump’s fibbing would have pleased his pal, Putin, to no end, as would his cold shoulder toward Zelensky and Ukraine.
Of course, it was nothing new. Trump never lets the facts about Putin and Russia get in the way of one of his Russian revisionist rants, a notably worrisome trait.
More importantly, he continues to broadcast Russian talking points that Ukraine is losing the war to Russia, which are untrue but designed to dampen support for Western military assistance to Ukraine and to demoralize Ukrainians.
Here are the facts, and Russia is not winning the war:
1. Russia is, militarily and economically, “bleeding out.” Since January 2024, its massive ground forces have seized less than 1% of Ukraine, an area slightly bigger than Rhode Island, according to the Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS). Ukraine is the largest country in Europe, apart from Russia, and the size of Texas.
2. The Russians advance 50 meters (164 feet) per day in their latest offensive in Kupyansk and 135 meters (443 feet) daily in Donetsk – a pace slower than the notoriously futile battles fought in The Sommes during World War I.
3. One million Russians were killed or wounded by June 20, when summer began.
4. Russia’s military supply chain has been disrupted and drained financially. Reports are that citizens whose loved ones have died as soldiers are forced to crowdfund and obtain charitable donations to buy body bags and hire transportation so that they can bring them home to bury them.
5. Ukraine’s technological superiority is shredding Russian conventional armed forces. The battlefield is drenched with Ukrainian drones that do most of the killing and wounding. This is intensifying.
6. Russia’s massive manpower losses are resulting in desertions and sabotage among the ranks, and forcing its military to offer huge signing bonuses to attract contract soldiers. The rate of attrition is skyhigh and so are the costs.
7. One-third of Russia’s navy was destroyed and the rest driven from Crimea and the Black Sea by Ukraine’s state-of-the-art sea drones.
8. The war is cratering Russia’s economy. Ukraine’s economy is doing okay because its government is prudent, its financial institutions are well run, and corruption is negligible. However, Russia hurtles toward economic catastrophe due to corruption, stagnation, brain drain, sanctions, labor shortages, capital flight, government debt, incompetence, and inflation.
The correlation between Trump’s accession to the Oval Office and Russia’s increasing attacks against Ukraine’s cities and civilians is established and disturbing.
Arguably, his praise and defense of Putin enables the slaughter: “With Trump so far failing to respond to Russia’s escalating drone strikes, the Kremlin has little incentive to stop. All signs point to Moscow’s defense industry only increasing its ability to launch ever-larger mass attacks,” observed The Kyiv Independent.
Why is Trump doing this? Some suspect that the president or his family is corrupt. This is unproven, but it is undoubtedly a result of impaired judgment, which consists of a brew of intellectual laziness, vanity, and a proclivity toward geopolitical “name-dropping.” Instead of calling out atrocities, Trump drops Putin’s name a lot.
“Putin speaks to me; he doesn’t speak to anybody else because he was very insulted when he got thrown out at the G8, as I would be, as you would be, as anybody would be,” he boasted to reporters at the G7.
Trump bragged that Putin gave him a painted portrait on his birthday, along with a birthday phone call, just before Trump hosted a massive parade of American troops and military hardware. It’s also curious that Trump’s love of tariffs does not include support for a clever tariff bill by Senator Lindsey Graham that would impose 500% tariffs on Russian oil customers – a levy that would help stop the war.
He has also refused to sign British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s massive new sanctions bill, designed to squeeze Russia’s energy revenues, which support his war. And Trump continues to badmouth Zelensky often, blames him for the war, and has mused about cutting off military aid to Ukrainians as a means of ending the war.
It is also apparent that Trump is naïve enough to believe he can pull off a rapprochement with the world’s most hated and treacherous leader, presumably so that the two can carve up the planet.
Another explanation for his lavish “Putinizing” is that he and Steve Bannon have long feared China and have an affinity for Russia because they believe in a “civilizational realignment.” Whatever the pathology, Trump is the guy who likes the guy who keeps committing genocide in Ukraine.
Fortunately, Trump fools no one, except himself, especially after he trotted out an example of false equivalency to justify doing nothing to stop Putin’s rampage. He said, “Sometimes you see two young children fighting like crazy,” Trump said in the Oval Office, with his German counterpart Friedrich Merz looking on silently. “They hate each other, and they’re fighting in a park, and you try to pull them apart. They don’t want to be pulled. Sometimes you’re better off letting them fight for a while and then pulling them apart.”
His analogy was erroneous. This is not about two young children fighting. Russia is ten times bigger than Ukraine and a giant bully who wants to destroy it, then murder the other “kids” in the neighborhood. It must be stopped; they cannot be allowed to “fight for a while.” This attitude puts Trump at odds with most Americans who support Ukraine and with the 91% who don’t trust and intensely dislike Putin and Russia.
Trump’s policies and pronouncements about this gigantic war in Europe are not aligned with the beliefs and wishes of the American people. But there’s no accounting for ignorance. France’s Voltaire said it best: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.”
· This article was first published in www.kyivpost.com
