Former U.S. ambassador to Moscow: Americans must stand up and say no to Trump’s embrace of autocrat Vladimir Putin.
While campaigning for president, candidate Donald Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine in one day. Since taking office, however, it has become obvious that the president’s focus is not on peacemaking, but rather on building his relationship with and making deals to suit Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
I served as U.S. ambassador to Moscow a decade ago and lived there for years before, so I know from firsthand experience that Putin cannot be trusted. He is a cynical strongman whose priorities and policies are antithetical to American values and interests. And no matter how much U.S.-Russian relations might be repaired or restarted, there is no universe in which Putin is a U.S. ally or trustworthy partner. He seeks to weaken the United States, divide us from our allies and strengthen the autocratic world at the expense of the democratic one. A strongman who’s held an iron fist on power in Russia for a quarter-century, Putin has single-mindedly pursued these objectives for decades, dating back to his time in the Soviet-era KGB security agency.
Over the years, I have negotiated with the Russians many times and learned that if you give concessions to Putin’s Kremlin without asking for anything in return, they pocket those concessions and ask for more. I can tell you that our president is going about this the wrong way; he is giving away his “cards,” to use Trump’s favored metaphor, up front.
To begin with, Trump seems to be viewing the entire war through Putin’s distorted lens. Trump has blamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for starting the war and has called Zelenskyy the dictator in the equation – two false claims that Putin has made for years. The undeniable reality is that Putin invaded neighboring Ukraine in 2014 to seize the strategic peninsula of Crimea and occupy eastern Ukraine with Russian-backed militias. And it was Putin who launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 to seize more territory and attempt to depose Zelenskyy, a democratically elected leader, so he could install a puppet regime that’s friendly to Moscow.
Zelenskyy has tried to convey the truth about the war and Putin’s motivations, but Trump and Vice President JD Vance shouted Zelenskyy down in front of live cameras last Friday and canceled signing a minerals deal that Trump himself had demanded. In a fit of pique, Trump scrapped a deal for Ukraine’s valuable natural resources that would have been hugely lucrative for Washington – if lopsided and unfair to Ukraine.
Wars generally end in two ways: one side wins and dictates the terms of peace, or a stalemate forces both sides to agree to terms that fall short of their maximalist objectives. The war in Ukraine is closer to the second scenario, although Putin’s army is still making incremental gains on the battlefield. But after Trump humiliated and dismissed Zelenskyy in front of the world last Friday, Putin will be emboldened to keep fighting, knowing that Trump is ready to cut off military assistance to Ukraine.
The only way to get a real peace deal would be to convince Putin that he cannot conquer any more territory. That would entail the U.S. and our European partners giving Ukraine more weapons to create a stalemate on the battlefield.
Trump, however, has signaled the opposite. There are indications that Trump may even freeze the remaining $3.85 U.S. military aid to Ukraine already approved but not yet delivered.
Serious diplomacy involves trades, concessions from all sides and a commitment to the idea that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. And in any peace talks, a mediator tries to create the impression of neutrality.
After Trump was elected, there was hope among some Ukrainians that he would leverage his personal relationship with Putin to be a mediator trusted by both sides. Instead, Trump has signaled loyalty to Putin and has undermined and publicly berated Zelenskyy. In a shocking move on Feb. 24, the Trump administration voted against a United Nations resolution by our European allies condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, siding instead with Russia, Belarus, North Korea and other rogue autocracies.
It is all part of Trump’s moves to cozy up to Russia. Trump has proposed that Russia rejoin the G8, the group of great power nations that suspended Russia from its ranks following its seizure of Crimea from Ukraine. Without setting preconditions, Trump sent U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio to meet Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to revive diplomatic relations, while Trump deployed a much more junior official, Keith Kellogg, to meet with Zelenskyy. Trump has also cut off all U.S. assistance to independent and civil society organizations in Russia, another gift to Putin.
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