Trump’s Distortions Are a Low for America

Putin is the real dictator, and the aggressor is Russia. It is becoming increasingly clear that Trump wants to end the war by going over Ukraine’s head. Europe should not go along with it.

An American president adopting propaganda from the Kremlin is a new low, even if Donald Trump often talks nonsense. The real dictator is sitting in Moscow; there can be no doubt about that. Even with all the (political) restrictions that martial law has imposed on Ukrainians, their life is still significantly freer than Vladimir Putin’s surveillance society with his sham elections.

The aggressor was and remains Russia. Here, too, Trump is distorting facts in a way that dishonors the president of one of the world’s oldest democracies.

Agreement on Mineral Resources

However, Trump, who has always had an instrumental relationship with the truth, seems to be after something very concrete. As is his custom, he is trying to apply pressure by publicly discrediting people. In this case, he is demanding an agreement on mining mineral resources in Ukraine. Volodymyr Zelenskyy made the proposal himself but is now delaying signing off on it.

It can’t be held against him. Trump is demanding a lot and, until now, has offered Ukraine practically nothing in return — in particular, there are no security guarantees. On the contrary, Trump has already abandoned important Western and Ukrainian positions on the conflict.

That makes Europe’s main problem with Trump’s change of course clear: Trump can only end the war quickly if he makes concessions to Putin and goes over Ukraine’s head.

The Europeans should not go along with this plan. No one can force Trump to continue investing in this war, and he may think that he will gain strategic advantages over China by reaching an equilibrium with Russia.

But from a European perspective, it is not irrelevant how the war is ended. Europeans are not entirely powerless here, as British-French considerations about securing a cease-fire, for instance, demonstrate. If Trump is the “deal maker” that he considers himself to be, it is worth driving a hard bargain with him.