If French President Emmanuel Macron’s visit with President Donald Trump White House on Monday was a pop quiz about the United States’ longstanding geopolitical interests in Europe, Trump would have flunked the portion on Russia’s war on Ukraine.
As Macron stressed that peace in Ukraine must not mean surrender to Russian invaders, Trump repeated his false claim that the U.S. spent $350 billion on aid to Ukraine under the Biden administration and had “nothing to show for it,” compared to only $100 billion spent by European allies. The U.S. has delivered about $120 billion — including roughly $67 billion in military assistance and $3.5 billion in humanitarian aid — to Ukraine out of a total $183 billion allocated by Congress, and aid from European nations has outpaced U.S. aid for months.
During a press conference following their meeting, Macron interjected in English to correct Trump after the president falsely claimed that Europe is only supporting Ukraine with loans, meaning Europe would “get their money back” — a claim that fits into Trump’s overall narrative that the U.S. is losing a zero-sum game on military spending in Europe in his push to get European nations to spend 5 percent of their GDP on defense. “We provided real money, to be clear,” Macron said, reiterating that ideally Russia should pay the costs of restoring Ukraine as the aggressor in a war.
“If you believe that, it’s okay with me,” Trump responded.
Trump also refused to call Russian President Vladimir Putin a dictator when asked by a reporter, saying “I don’t use those words lightly.” Last week Trump called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “dictator” after Zelenskyy, a long-time U.S. ally, said Trump lives in a “disinformation space.” Zelenskyy was elected in 2019, but Ukraine is under martial law, and elections are suspended due to the war.
Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine on the first day of his presidency, and the U.S. has put mounting pressure on Zelenskyy to negotiate a hasty peace deal with Putin in recent weeks.
Meanwhile, that same day, the U.S. joined Russia in voting against a United Nations resolution marking the third anniversary of Putin’s blitzkrieg invasion of Ukraine by condemning Russia and demanding a complete withdrawal of its forces from occupied eastern Ukraine. The UN General Assembly of nations passed the resolution anyway with a 93-18 vote and 65 abstentions.
The U.S. had pressured Ukraine to support a failed UN measure that called for an end to the war without condemning Russia for its February 2022 invasion, echoing Trump’s false claims that have blamed the war on Ukraine and President Joe Biden. For years before the war formally began, long-simmering tensions broke out into occasional skirmishes between the two countries in eastern Ukraine. But in February 2022, it was Putin who pulled the trigger and ordered the invasion in a failed attempt to topple Kyiv.
The Trump administration marked the three-year anniversary of that invasion, which was famously rebuffed by scrappy units of defenders and volunteers armed with U.S. weapons, with this remarkable reversal of U.S. foreign policy at the UN. Over the past week, observers say Trump has effectively flipped the U.S. from its public stance backing Ukraine to supporting Putin, an autocrat who stands accused of war crimes tied to the invasion and ongoing occupation of eastern Ukraine.
Greta Uehling, a professor at the University of Michigan who has been interviewing Ukrainians of different backgrounds for her new book, Decolonizing Ukraine: The Indigenous People of Crimea and Pathways to Freedom, said the U.S. has betrayed Ukrainians.
“I think they feel that,” Uehling said in an interview. “I think there is a lot of anger, resentment and depression about that because western Europe can’t possibly step up fast enough or furiously enough” to defend Ukraine’s fledgling democracy.
Not only is supporting Ukraine’s defense against an authoritarian regime the right thing to do, Uehling said, it’s the cheapest and easiest way to prevent Putin’s imperial ambitions from gobbling up other smaller countries.
“Not holding Putin accountable will prove disastrous in other parts of the world,” Uehling said.
During his appearance with Macron, Trump focused his remarks on bashing President Joe Biden’s policies toward Ukraine and boasting about recent diplomatic efforts to reach out to Putin and begin peace talks — comments that infuriated Ukrainians, who refuse to be left out of discussions about their own future. However, Putin pushed back on Trump’s remarks on Monday, saying on state television that he and his diplomats have not discussed a peace deal with Trump’s team in detail.
With his grand proclamations about taking over Panama, Greenland and Gaza Strip, Trump appears to be in the mood for making sweeping geopolitical deals with little regard for the people who actually live in the places he negotiates over. In this way, Trump shares the same imperialist thinking as Putin, Uehling said.
“Russia’s approach of settler colonialism — resource extraction and population replacement — we see that in Trump’s rhetoric about taking over Panama and Greenland,” Uehling said.
The Trump administration is casting itself as a neutral peace negotiator, despite its complicated positioning in the conflict. Trump has been publicly supporting Russian demands, such as preventing Ukrainian membership in NATO, while rejecting Ukrainian demands for security guarantees in the event of a ceasefire, even as the U.S. sends billions in military assistance to Ukraine.
Trump has had a publicly strained relationship with Zelenskyy since he was caught attempting to blackmail the Ukrainian president during a 2019 phone call and subsequently impeached by House Democrats. Trump may see himself and Putin as fellow strongmen backed by big, wealthy nations at the bargaining table, while Zelenskyy and Ukraine are in a comparatively weak position and can be easily bullied.
This may explain the talk about an agreement that would give the U.S. future access to Ukraine’s “rare earth minerals” as repayment for aid. Reports suggest such “rare earth minerals” do not exist in Ukraine, at least not in the way Trump thinks, but valuable resources such as titanium could end up under Russian control.
Zelenskyy rebuffed an initial offer that demanded $500 billion worth of resource extraction from Ukraine and did not include real security guarantees. Reports suggest negotiations over the agreement may be more about “toddler management” of Trump’s ego than a meaningful deal, as the president is more likely to support Ukraine if he believes he is getting something out of it.
However, it is Trump who has already revealed his hand in any future peace negotiations, not Putin or Zelenskyy, who are both managing a fierce stalemate on the front lines as fighting that could determine the future of eastern Ukraine continues. Trump promised his base an end to the war on his first day in office and some sort of repayment deal with Zelenskyy, and he is now loudly pushing for a deliverable as his administration’s radical agenda runs into legal roadblocks at home.
As discussions about the deal continue, Ukrainians are calling for more principled solidarity. Kris Parker, a U.S.-based journalist in Ukraine and a member of the Ukraine Solidarity Network-US, said Ukrainians across the progressive political spectrum may have political differences but remain united in resisting Russian aggression.
“For three straight years the people of Ukraine have resisted a brutal war of aggression waged by a murderous and authoritarian right-wing regime in Russia,” Parker said in a statement. “And as new threats to a democratic future continue to emerge, perhaps now more than ever do the people of Ukraine need the continued support and solidarity of all principled internationalists.”
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