Chasing a ‘winner’, Trump fuels a Ukraine escalation he once opposed
Flattered by NATO, boosting weapons sales, and 'impressed' by Ukraine's strikes inside Russia, Trump embraces the proxy war.
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Shortly before returning to the White House for a second term, Donald Trump criticized the exiting president, Joe Biden, for letting Ukraine fire long-range US missiles into Russia. “Why are we doing that?” Trump complained. “We’re just escalating this war and making it worse.”
Just as his campaign pledge of “no new wars” gave way to a regime-change war on Iran, Trump’s professed aversion to a US-fueled escalation in Ukraine is no more. At this month’s NATO summit in Turkey, Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio endorsed Ukraine’s drone attacks deep inside Russia. With the Russians “finding it more difficult to defend their own airspace,” Rubio explained, this will “create the space now to negotiate the end of this war.” Added Trump: “It’s an escalation, but it’s also an escalation that could help lead to an end.”
In embracing his predecessor’s policy of escalation, Trump is also parroting its stated rationale. The Biden team repeatedly insisted that putting Ukraine in the “best possible position on the battlefield” would lead to its “best possible position at the negotiating table.” In reality, the administration took the position that the negotiating table was the worst outcome possible. The goal was to use Ukraine to “weaken” Russia, which is why the US and its UK junior partner undermined the Istanbul peace talks of April 2022 and pushed Ukraine deeper into the battlefield. This yielded a string of losses, including the failed Ukrainian counteroffensive of summer 2023 and the equally unsuccessful Kursk incursion one year later. All the while, Russia has taken control of about 20 percent of Ukrainian territory.
Despite taking office on a vow to end the war, Trump has offered more continuity. The White House spat with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was only an interregnum. One year ago last month, Trump secretly authorized the CIA and Pentagon to help design a Ukrainian campaign targeting Russian oil refineries. US intelligence estimated that the strikes would cost Russia’s economy up to $75 million a day. “We found something that is working,” one US official remarked. Then in October, Trump quietly resumed the Biden policy he had loudly decried: helping Ukraine fire long-range, US-made ATACMS into Russian territory. Trump’s peace plan, the product of last summer’s summit with Putin in Alaska, was rolled out in November only to quickly wither in the face of war hawk opposition, including from Rubio.
With diplomacy non-existent, Ukraine’s US-crafted drone war has caused an ongoing fuel crisis across Russia, including a major power outage in Crimea. Amid long lines at gas stations nationwide, the Kremlin has suspended the export of diesel and even moved to import fuel for the first time in decades. Russia’s energy woes are integral to a new narrative, echoed across NATO-led media outlets, that Moscow is suddenly losing. Yet as Russian journalist Leonid Ragozin, a critic of the invasion who lives in exile, notes: “Ukrainians are bracing for another horrific winter in unheated apartments, while Russians are merely at the stage of making an extra effort to fuel their cars.”
In a proxy war premised on having Ukraine “fight to the last person”, as the late Lindsey Graham described it four years ago this month, the plight of Ukrainians is incidental. Ukraine’s chief function is to sustain its patrons’ longstanding hope that Russian suffering will hasten Vladimir Putin’s downfall. Accordingly, Russia’s energy shortages have reportedly encouraged Trump, who is said to be “impressed” by the strikes’ effectiveness. “It’s relatively simple,” one NATO diplomat observed. “Trump likes winners. And Ukraine, recently, has started winning.”
To keep the mercurial head of the proxy war coalition on board, NATO has tried to make him the biggest winner of all. At the alliance’s 2025 summit in The Hague, member states caved to Trump’s longstanding demand for a commitment of 5 percent of GDP on military spending. The lone exception was Spain, which capped its pledge at 2.1 percent. Madrid’s resistance to the militarist surge drew the ire of Trump, who dismissed the Spaniards as a “wasted cause” and “terrible partner in NATO.”
One year after adopting Trump’s 5 percent pledge, Secretary General Mark Rutte used this month’s NATO summit in Turkey to convince the US president that the alliance is “delivering results.” As Trump landed in Ankara aboard a new $400 million Air Force One gifted by Qatar, NATO announced tens of billions of dollars in new weapons purchases. Ahead of the summit, Rutte presented Trump with a gold-lettered chart named “The Trump Trillion,” which showcased the $1.2 trillion in increased military spending since Trump first demanded it in 2017. NATO, Rutte explained, is “a power projection platform for the United States.”
As Trump takes in NATO’s obsequious praise, Russian forces continue to devastate eastern Ukrainian regions and press their slow advance. Meanwhile, a different conflict is escalating inside Ukraine – this time between the population and their government. Protests erupted this week over the firing of a popular defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, who had reportedly stood up to corruption in the ranks. In Lviv, an angry crowd confronted Ukrainian military recruiters who had detained several young men accused of failing to register for duty. In images that went viral across Ukraine, hundreds of protesters surrounded the officers’ vehicle and tipped it over. It was one of countless confrontations between ordinary Ukrainians, even in ultra-nationalist strongholds like Lviv, and the so-called “press gangs” deployed to snatch men off the street and send them to war. In the face of this growing resistance to forced conscription inside Ukraine, the European Union tightened its rules for arriving refugees by denying protections to Ukrainian men of military age. Forced mobilization, lamented former Zelensky spokesperson Iuliia Mendel, “has turned the war inward, pitting Ukrainian against Ukrainian, eroding the very society we claim to be defending.”
A military alliance ultimately serving Washington’s “power projection”, as the NATO chief says, is not concerned with defending Ukrainians. So long as arms makers can reap a continued windfall, all while bleeding a major adversary, even a former critic of the Ukraine proxy war like Trump is happy to fuel another escalation.