Who has insisted that Trump had the 2020 election stolen from him? And that, had he got his just deserts, Russia wouldn’t have invaded the Ukraine?
If your answer is ‘Trump’, you are only half-right. Yes, Trump did say those things, and more than once. Yet the other day Putin repeated those statements practically verbatim.
“I’ve always had a businesslike, pragmatic and even trusting relationship with the current president,” Putin said. “And I can’t help but agree that if his victory hadn’t been stolen in 2020, the crisis in Ukraine might not have emerged in 2022.”
Call me a Trump hater and report me to the MAGA police, but this kind of consonance bothers me, as it should bother anyone concerned with the advance of Russian fascism into Europe.
Suspicions of collusion between Trump and Putin have been floating about for years. A thorough investigation into the matter revealed no evidence to vindicate such suspicions, but, as Carl Sagan once said, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Absence of evidence may only mean the perpetrators were adept at hiding it. Considering that in this case one of the parties is a career KGB officer, the requisite skills were always on tap.
Still, even when there is no evidence to indict, there may be enough evidence to suspect, especially if the two parties constantly provide grounds for sound conjecture. Last week, Trump did just that by giving his (and Putin’s) version of the war.
Essentially, he apportioned the blame equally between Putin and Zelensky, an even-handedness that absolves the aggressor of a criminal violation of international law.
Trump magnanimously allowed that Putin was slightly rash when he set out to recolonise the Ukraine and stamp out her hard-won independence. However, “Zelensky… shouldn’t have allowed this to happen either. He’s no angel,” added Trump.
Fair enough, the last time I looked at Zelensky’s photographs I didn’t see a pair of wings attached to his back. But a victim doesn’t have to possess celestial qualities to be victimised. Raping a prostitute, for example, is still a felony.
The Polish leaders in 1939 were far from being cherubim too, and yet the world had no problem identifying Nazi Germany as the aggressor. Nor could Gen. Mannerheim and other Finnish leaders be readily confused with seraphim – and yet the League of Nations kicked the Soviet Union out for committing an act of blatant aggression against Finland later the same year.
Zelensky has his flaws, and so does his country. I’ve heard Putin fans accuse the Ukraine of corruption a thousand times if I’ve heard it once, and yes, there is plenty of corruption there. Not as much as in Russia but enough. So does that justify a brutal invasion, mass murder and indiscriminate bombardment of residential areas. Does that justify rampant rapes, torture, looting, kidnapping of children?
Anyone answering yes to these questions should push that magnetised iron bar away from his moral compass. It’s going haywire.
Getting from moral to practical matters, how does Trump think Zelensky could have not “allowed this to happen”? What should he have done on 24 February, 2022, when enemy armour crossed the Ukraine’s border and advanced on Kiev?
Simple. Zelensky should have surrendered immediately because Russia is so much stronger. But let’s not paraphrase Trump’s pronouncements; they speak for themselves:
“Zelensky was fighting a much bigger entity, much bigger, much more powerful,” Trump said. “He shouldn’t have done that, because we could have made a deal.”
Is that the royal ‘we’? Yes it is.
“I could have made that deal so easily, and Zelensky decided that ‘I want to fight’,” Trump continued. This is, mildly speaking, disingenuous on more levels that one finds in your average Trump Tower.
First, on that fateful date Trump was in no position to make any deals, other than those involving the construction of yet another Trump Tower. He was not the US president then, and neither did he have any official capacity to act for the administration.
So that’s just our typical MAGAlamania, but it’s also much worse than that. No ‘deal’ (and I think Trump’s use of that word should be rationed by an act of Congress) could have been struck at that stage – not by Trump, not by Biden, not by NATO, not even by God Almighty.
Putin declared that the objective of the invasion was to “de-Nazify and demilitarise” the Ukraine, which is to wipe out her sovereignty and reincorporate her into Russia. His timetable for that operation was short: three days to a week.
Unlike Trump’s defunct 24-hour deadline for ending the war, Putin’s plan was realistic. Had the Ukrainian army not put up resistance, Russian armour could have indeed covered the 400 miles from the border to Kiev in three days.
And then no deal could have been made any longer. Zelensky and his whole government would have been murdered, Putin’s stooge Yanukovych or another quisling would have been wheeled in, and the world would have been faced with a fait accompli.
An independent Ukraine would have sunk into oblivion, millions of Ukrainians would have been purged, more millions robbed, and the country would have been forced to become a Russian satrap. Yet there was that obstreperous Zelensky who “decided that ‘I want to fight’.”
The blame for the ensuing massacre is thus apportioned equally and, if anything, Zelensky is slightly more culpable. By taking on “a much bigger entity” he scuppered the chance of a deal, meaning he is neither “pragmatic” nor “businesslike”.
It’s from the wobbly platform of such understanding that Trump will start negotiating with Putin, possibly allowing Zelensky to sit in at the talks between the two grown-ups.
An essential part of that understanding is Trump’s certainty that the US has squandered too much money supporting the Ukraine. Yet the figures he has cited in support of that belief are as factual as the US taking credit for splitting the atom.
The US, he said, spent “200 billion dollars more than Europe” in support of the Ukraine. But hey, if facts stand in the way of a deal, then so much the worse for facts.
In reality, the US Congress has allocated (as distinct from delivered) about $170 billion to the Ukraine since the full-scale Russian invasion, $65 billion of it in military hardware. The corresponding number for the EU is $145 billion, plus another $15 billion contributed by Britain. I detect almost parity there, but let’s not quibble about numbers. It’s the thought that counts.
Moral and pragmatic often go their separate ways in politics, but this is one of those situations (which are more numerous than is commonly believed) where they coincide. The moral position on the war has to be unequivocal, but then so does the strategic need.
An evil regime has a self-declared aim of reconstructing the Soviet empire, understood in the broad sense as the whole of Eastern Europe. Ten of those countries are NATO members, as now is Finland, a neighbour of Russia.
By heroically holding the invaders at bay, the Ukraine is the West’s first line of defence, with her blood filling the moat separating absolute evil from relative good (Western countries aren’t angelic either, let’s concede this point). Allowing the aggressor to overrun the Ukraine is bound to have the same consequences as the appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s – but with a new twist.
Delivering a victory to Putin is tantamount to disassembling the system of collective security that has more or less kept Europe at peace for 80 years. A subsequent attack on a NATO country, most likely one of the Baltics, will put NATO before a stark choice. Either engage Russia in a full-blown, possibly nuclear, war or repudiate Article 5 of the NATO charter, leaving Europe at the mercy of Russian hordes.
I agree with Trump that Europe should invest much more in her defence and, unlike him, I also believe that both Europe and the US should remove all stops from their support of the Ukraine. This is the moral thing to do and it also happens to be the practical one.
Trump is also right when saying that the Ukraine “has had enough”, although I’d be tempted to add that so has Russia. Yes, the war must be ended, and the only way to do so is to bring the two countries to a negotiating table, with America perhaps overseeing the proceedings.
But starting the negotiations from the presumption of equal guilt means putting the Ukraine in an invidious losing position from kick-off. That’s why I see Trump and Putin singing in unison as a portent of gloom.
My advice to Trump is to find a spot somewhere between a deal and a holy crusade against evil, and use it as the starting point of any negotiations. Closer to the latter would be my preference, but then I too can be pragmatic in my expectations at times.