Trump’s choice in Ukraine: make peace, or ‘crush the Russians’
With Russiagate no longer hindering diplomacy, US and Ukrainian officials recognize that Trump will have more leeway to end the Ukraine war.
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In public comments, President-elect Donald Trump is vowing to broker a peace deal to end the Russia-Ukraine war.
“We're going to have to settle up with Russia, Ukraine,” Trump said this week. “That's a disaster.” Trump also confirmed that he intends to sit down with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “He wants to meet, and we are setting it up. He has said that even publicly and we have to get that war over with.”
In advocating peace and pledging to meet Putin, Trump has already established a wide gulf with the outgoing White House. Repeating his stock line since the start of Russia’s invasion, Secretary of State Antony Blinken maintains that “we haven’t seen any signs that Russia has been genuinely prepared to engage,” as he said in a recent exit interview. Russia, Blinken insisted, is not motivated by security concerns but instead by “Putin’s imperial ambitions and the desire to recreate a greater Russia, to subsume Ukraine back into Russia.”
While the chief US diplomat’s aversion to diplomacy aligns with the current Washington consensus, Trump’s contrary position is not his only Beltway transgression.
In an unprecedented comment for a US leader, Trump named NATO expansion as a cause of the Ukraine war and voiced sympathy with Russia’s hostility to the military alliance’s encroachment.
“You know, a big part of the problem was Russia, for many years, long before Putin, said you could never have NATO involved with Ukraine,” Trump said. “That's been, like, written in stone and, somewhere along the line, Biden said, 'No, they should be able to join NATO.' Then Russia has somebody right on their doorstep. I could understand their [Russia's] feelings about that.”
Trump even appeared to endorse the view, backed by Ukrainian and NATO insiders, yet still off-limits in US establishment media, that the Biden administration undermined the Russia-Ukraine peace talks of spring 2022. “I believe that they had a deal and then Biden broke it. They had a deal which would have been a satisfactory deal to Ukraine and everybody else. But Biden, Trump said, insisted that Ukraine must “be able to join NATO.”
If Trump changes course from Biden, then it will be quite easy to test Blinken’s proposition that Russia’s “imperial ambitions” are the chief obstacle to peace.
According to the Financial Times, Russian insiders insist that “Putin’s main goal in any talks” is a new security deal that rules out NATO membership for Ukraine and the rollback of “some eastern deployments” by NATO. “He wants to change the rules of the international order so there are no threats to Russia,” a former senior Kremlin official said. In other words, Moscow would likely accept a scaled-down version of the December 2021 draft treaty that it offered to the US and NATO, which the Biden administration dismissed with contempt. While it was George W. Bush that first promised NATO membership to Ukraine, against the wishes of not only Russia but a majority of Ukrainians at the time, Trump is correct that Biden’s refusal to abandon that “open door” promise set the stage for Russia’s invasion.
For Trump to follow through on his pledge to end the war, he will not only have to break from his soon-to-be predecessor but his incoming aides. Trump’s designated Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg and national security advisor Mike Waltz have both endorsed Biden’s proxy war strategy of flooding Ukraine with weapons, and have even complained that it has not gone far enough.
Trump would also have to break from the record of his first term in office. While Democrats and allied media voices obsessed over his campaign’s fictional conspiracy with the Kremlin, Trump’s neoconservative-abundant administration increased the flow of weapons to Ukraine and tore up vital arms control treaties with Russia. As the New York Times belatedly acknowledged last year, the CIA under Trump “stepped up its operations against the Russians and expanded its intelligence partnerships with the Ukrainians.” One former senior official recalled the mission order handed down by then-CIA director and later Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as follows: “crush the Russians.”
US intelligence officials recognized that the Russiagate allegations surrounding Trump helped with their tasking to crush the Russians. From their perspective, the Times reported, “stories in the press about Mr. Trump’s seeming embrace of Mr. Putin and interest in improving relations with the Russians provided a convenient cover for what they were doing behind the scenes to counter Moscow.” (That Russiagate would incentivize both Trump to escalate tensions with Moscow and a collusion-crazed media establishment to ignore the resulting dangers was apparent from the start. Yet those of us who pointed out this narrative inconvenience were drowned out in the “Mueller Time” mania).
The Ukrainians recognize this as well. A source who helped Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky pitch his “victory plan” in the US acknowledged that Trump’s determination to dispel the Democrats’ pet conspiracy theory fueled his post-2016 willingness to arm Ukraine and confront Russia. “What we got from Trump in his first term was from someone who was trying to escape the allegations . . . of being a puppet of Russia. He wasn’t resistant to these allegations,” the source told the Financial Times. “Now if he is resistant to that, then we are in big trouble.”
With Russiagate having long collapsed, and Trump openly promoting diplomacy, the incoming president-elect does seem resistant to the “collusion” scam that consumed his first stint in office and killed any chance of rapprochement with the world’s other top nuclear power. Should he act on his pledges, and overcome the resistance even from his own advisors, then the proxy war that sacrifices Ukraine in a mission to crush the Russians is indeed in big trouble.