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Trump makes a deal with Putin while calling for Zelensky’s ousterAfter bleeding Russia with Ukrainian lives for years, Washington cuts a diesel deal with Moscow and tells Kyiv that its president’s time is up.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky hoped that this summer’s “40-Day Influence Campaign”, a wave of missile and drone attacks targeting Russia’s energy sites, would spark enough unrest to force Moscow into ending the war. By inflicting fresh pain on a rival nuclear power, it would also showcase Kyiv’s utility to its chief sponsor in Washington. Instead, Zelensky triggered a more punishing Russian missile campaign that his depleted military has been unable to stop. Now comes a second blow. On Friday, President Trump announced a deal with Vladimir Putin to ease sanctions on Russian diesel fuel and allow the export of millions of barrels. Zelensky, who has ignored Trump’s recent requests for an end to attacks on Russian energy sites, responded with fury, prompting an even more forceful rebuke. In his most hostile remarks to date in a tense relationship dating back to 2019, Trump called on Zelensky to leave office. “It’s time for Ukraine to get a new president,” Trump said. It is a sharp turnaround from just last month, when President Trump signed into law a measure that threatens secondary sanctions on the largest importers of Russian energy, namely India and China. The White House had already imposed 50% tariffs on many exports from India, a country Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro dismissed as “nothing but a laundromat for the Kremlin” handing over “blood money.” By trading with Moscow, former Trump national security advisor HR McMaster opined last year, China was not only “underwriting [its] war effort” in Ukraine, but arguably even “fighting a proxy war against Europe through the Russians.” Heading into the midterms amid high energy prices resulting from its war on Iran, the White House has suddenly decided to join a club it has long derided. The “terrible” deal, Zelensky complained, is “not fair and not honest,” and even amounts to “weakness” on Trump’s part. Kyiv so far claims to be undeterred. “We will burn [Russian] refineries,” one official said. Kyiv has grounds to feel betrayed. It was Trump’s CIA that helped design and implement the Ukrainian military’s drone campaign against Russian energy infrastructure, only to have the mercurial American president blame Kyiv when his war on Iran upended the global energy market. More broadly, Washington has repeatedly encouraged Ukraine to walk away from peace opportunities by luring it with the pledge of a NATO invitation it had no intention of fulfilling and a promise of military assistance “for as long as it takes.” Heading into a fifth straight winter at war, Ukraine faces its most perilous conditions to date. Along with the loss of territory and critical energy capacity, it is also undergoing a creeping deindustrialization: because of Russian missile strikes, Ukraine’s steel industry, a mainstay of the economy, is close to collapse. Europe also has standing to complain. After Russia’s invasion, Washington convinced NATO allies to cut off cheap Russian energy and deepen their reliance on the more expensive North American supply. Just to make sure no one got any second thoughts, the Nord Stream gas pipelines were destroyed in an act of industrial sabotage that also severed a major off-ramp to war. By the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion in February 2023, The Wall Street Journal noted that the first year of war was “revitalizing U.S. oil exports as a source of financial influence and geopolitical power.” US natural gas exports to Europe more than doubled. “America is back in the most predominant position it has been in world energy since the 1950s,” gushed one market analyst. “U.S. energy now is becoming one of the foundations of European energy security.” Europe, which banned Russian diesel at Washington’s urging, now watches Washington lift its own sanctions on the very product it told its allies to shun. The US energy industry has not been the only beneficiary. From the start of the Russian invasion, bipartisan cheerleaders have touted the war’s boon to the military industrial complex at home. “I think it is always good to remind everyone,” Senator Mitch McConnell observed in 2023, “that a good portion of the money allocated to Ukraine is being spent in this country to rebuild our industrial base.” Trump does not need any reminders that the Ukraine war has benefited major centers of US power. He has been happy to fuel the war with US weaponry and intelligence so long as Europe pays an increased share of the bill. A short-term energy deal with Russia, meant to hand an “October Surprise” to disaffected voters, is not likely to change this course. It does, however, underscore that Ukraine’s sovereignty and long-term future have been sacrificed in a proxy war aimed at strengthening US hegemony while bleeding a major adversary in Russia. For subordinating his country to US strategic objectives, most fatefully by walking away from peace terms that his own team negotiated in April 2022, Zelensky was rewarded with NATO adulation and tens of billions of dollars in weaponry. As the cold season approaches, Zelensky now faces the open contempt of his top sponsor in Washington and no solutions to a growing disaster. |