This is not the first time Trump has tried to break with Ukraine. After all, who can forget the Oval Office confrontation with Zelensky last February, when Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance forced him to give in to their demands for territorial concessions in Ukraine, with Trump bellowing: “You have no cards!”
But timing is everything, both in war and midterm elections, and this moment is particularly dangerous as Trump’s envoys are once again privately pressuring Kyiv to agree to a deal that looks more like surrender on Russia’s terms than compromise, and Russia has dramatically escalated its drone and missile attacks on Ukraine after failing to achieve battlefield victory despite causing an estimated 1.4 million casualties.
Daniel Fried, the former top U.S. diplomat in Europe, told me: “The most dangerous moment is right around the corner, in the near future.” He had just returned from meetings with security officials in Poland and Romania and was more worried than ever, not only about the situation in Ukraine but also about Russia’s accelerating and intensifying probing attacks against its European allies. “That bothers me: Putin knows this and he’s going to take advantage of this,” Fried said. “The short-term risks are here.”
One question is whether anyone in Washington can or will do anything about it, given Trump’s broad view of his own power and his indifference to what Congress thinks — even if Congress is controlled by his own party. Delaware Senator Chris Coons “This is a painful and powerful reminder that Trump’s worst instincts, who believe Putin and care about what he says, will only keep winning,” said Coons, who will be the next chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee if Democrats take the Senate as we speak Thursday, recalling his efforts to convince Trump to sign the How much effort goes into enacting a tough new Russia sanctions bill that was passed by a bipartisan congressional majority just a month ago and is named after the late Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator who was familiar with Trump and pushed for his support of Kyiv.
Now, Trump has effectively gutted his own Ukraine strategy, repeating a frustratingly familiar pattern over the past decade in which he will take some tentative steps to aid Kyiv, only to talk to Putin and revert to his default setting of tilting toward Moscow. “Can the rift between us and our European allies be repaired?” Coons asked me before answering his own question. “Not as long as Trump is president.” He expects weeks like this to continue as Trump enters the “lame duck” phase of his presidency. “The damage he could do over the next two years is underestimated,” he added.
Trump has turned to Putin many times before, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that he does so again. Back in 2016, I attended Trump’s first foreign policy speech at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, where the Russian ambassador sat in the front row and the candidate made “improving relations with Russia” one of his main goals. (Trump also said in that speech that the United States as a country should become more “unpredictable.” Keeping his promise!) Anyone who watched Trump’s 2018 Helsinki press conference or the president’s 2019 impeachment proceedings for trying to blackmail Zelensky could have predicted what happened this week. Since returning to office last year, he has tried intermittently to force Zelensky to accept “a settlement that could have been crafted in the Kremlin,” as his former national security adviser John Bolton once said. So, no, it’s not surprising.
But these crises that Trump has so frequently provoked always reveal something new, and this one is no exception, showing a president so politically troubled by the fallout from a war in the Middle East that he turned to Putin for help with less than three weeks until the midterm elections.