Trump reluctantly comes around to backing Ukraine. Will he stick with it?

Miami Herald

a day ago

(News Analysis)
Nearly six months after his inauguration, when President Donald Trump pledged he would measure his success by 'the wars we end' and 'the wars we never get into,' he is adopting an approach toward Russia that on the surface looks much like his predecessor's: arming the Ukrainians to fight off an invasion.
Trump came to this point in a circular fashion, and if these past few months are any indication, there is reason to doubt he will stick with it.
A first test may come Monday and Tuesday, when Trump meets at the White House with the secretary-general of NATO, Mark Rutte, and is expected to formally announce new plans to route U.S. arms to Ukraine through European allies. He also appears to be moving to embrace new sanctions European leaders are pushing to put more pressure on President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
The president is a late and very reluctant convert to the approach of trying to confront and isolate Putin.
During last year's presidential campaign, Trump vowed a quick resolution of the war because he said he alone had the stature to deal with the Russian leader. Once he took office, he blamed the Ukrainians themselves for Russia's invasion of their own country. Then he clashed with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in an extraordinary Oval Office display, telling him, 'You don't have the cards.' He gave Russia a pass on tariffs and praised Putin for his strength, and provided assurance that Ukraine would never join NATO.
Much of that is seemingly reversed, at least for now.
The president said last week he was 'very strongly' considering backing a bipartisan Senate bill that would impose a new sanctions bill that would allow -- but not require -- Trump to impose 500% tariffs on any country purchasing Russian oil or gas.
Trump also lifted a brief U.S. pause on delivering weapons to Ukraine. A plan hatched at the NATO summit in June to arm the Ukrainians by selling American weapons to the Europeans, who in turn would pass them on to Ukraine's beleaguered forces, is beginning to take shape. Speaking to reporters Sunday, the president said he planned to provide more Patriot missiles to Ukraine, stressing that the weaponry would be paid for, and that the nation was in 'desperate need' of it.
'Because Putin really surprised a lot of people,' Trump said. 'He talks nice and then he bombs everybody in the evening, but there's a little bit of a problem there. I don't like it.'
The president, who has also complained privately to several associates that he believes Putin has strung him along, declared the other day that 'we get a lot of (obscenity) thrown at us by Putin.' That was a point that the foreign policy advisers around former President Joe Biden say they made, repeatedly, to Trump's incoming team.
'It's a welcome change in rhetoric,' Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in an interview Saturday. 'He seems, at least in his recent comments, to recognize that he's finally getting this -- Vladimir Putin is playing him.'
'Whether that lasts very long,' she added, 'is not clear.'
Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, declined to respond to the idea that Trump's position now more closely mirrors Biden's, or address Trump's frustrations with an inability to sway Putin so far.
In a statement, she blamed Biden for not being able to halt Russia's invasion. 'Unlike Biden, President Trump is focused on stopping the killing, and thanks to his leadership, Russia and Ukraine are having direct talks for the first time in years,' she said.
Biden's approach to Ukraine came from a conviction that the invasion was both illegal and morally offensive, and that in the 21st century, nations do not violate others' borders. He declared, repeatedly, that stopping Russia from taking Ukraine was crucial if the West wanted to deter a Russian march deeper into Europe. To Biden, halting the aggression that has led to Europe's largest war since the defeat of Nazi Germany was essential to preserving the post-World War II order.
Trump has never had much use for those alliances, or the order they created for the past 80 years. Nor has he ever in the past decade condemned Putin with the same ferocity that Biden did. When television host Bill O'Reilly bluntly called Putin a 'killer' on Fox News while interviewing Trump in 2017, the newly elected president replied with moral relativism: 'There are a lot of killers,' he said. 'You think our country's so innocent?'
Trump never called the 2022 invasion illegal -- when it first began, he praised Putin for a 'smart,' if violent, land grab. He has approached the few, sporadic negotiations over a ceasefire and possible peace accord as a real estate transaction. The one he has envisioned would acknowledge that Putin will hold whatever lands he now controls in the south and east, and perhaps more. At the Justice and State departments, Trump has largely dismantled the offices gathering evidence for possible war crimes prosecutions against Russian officials.
But now, the president seems to be acting out of a sense of personal pique, and perhaps the discovery that his relationship with the Russian leader isn't what he once might have imagined. Trump has admired Putin's toughness, part of a pattern of praise by the U.S. president for authoritarian leaders. But he appeared to believe the sentiment was mutual.
In the past, Trump expressed skepticism about continuing to support Ukraine with military aid, a reversal of American strategy and a position that resonated not just with the president's fiercest supporters but some in the broader electorate who had come to see defending Ukraine as yet another lengthy foreign entanglement.
And Trump has talked with Putin a half-dozen times since taking office, though by his account with diminishing results. He sent his special envoy, Steve Witkoff, to visit Putin at the Kremlin, but he emerged with little to show for the discussions, which usually took place with no other U.S. officials, save for a translator.
Although Trump has said there would be no progress on Ukraine without a direct meeting between him and Putin, none has been scheduled. (Biden had only one face-to-face meeting with the Russian leader, in Geneva in June 2021, largely prompted by a major Russian ransomware attack on an American oil and gas pipeline provider.)
A phone conversation between Trump and Putin earlier this month was followed, within hours, by a massive Russian missile and drone attack on Kyiv and other major Ukrainian cities, a volley in one of the most extensive assaults on Ukraine since the war began. That has left Trump in the position he most hates: being embarrassed and, worse, appearing like a paper tiger.
When he claimed to have discovered after the fact that the Pentagon has paused the transfer of some defensive weapons to Ukraine, he told reporters he was ordering the shipments resumed. That sent Washington abuzz with speculation that the president may have finally gotten in sync with the strategy from which his NATO allies never wavered: to isolate Russia and arm Ukraine.
Still, little has substantively changed when it comes to U.S. support for Ukraine.
'The problem is that lifting the pause, while an important first step, only releases aid that was authorized during the Biden administration,' said David Shimer, who served as the director of Eastern Europe and Ukraine policy on Biden's National Security Council.
'But it will only restore the status quo of a week ago,' he said, 'which was of dwindling security assistance flows, authorized under the prior administration.' He added that 'now is the time for this administration to go further and adopt a sustained strategy to increase military aid for Ukraine, increase economic pressure on Russia, and push Putin to engage in meaningful negotiations to end this war.'
The approach Trump is taking seems designed to keep him at least one arm's length away from the conflict. By having the Europeans pay for and funnel the arms, Trump may hope that he is not regarded as a direct participant in the war. Of course, the United States is directly participating: It even hosts the intelligence center in Germany where British, U.S. and Ukrainian military officials sort through targets each day.
But Trump has not backed a new security assistance package from Congress, which he knows would inflame his base and run contrary to its demands -- often voiced by Vice President JD Vance -- to end the cycle of direct American support. He has not pressed Europe to seize the $300 billion in Russian assets that Moscow had in Western financial institutions when it mounted the invasion in 2022.
And while he appears to be vaguely supporting the bill now in the Senate -- backed by 85 senators by latest count -- that would call for sanctions against countries that are buying Russian energy products, including China and India, he has not said whether he would actually impose those sanctions.
Marshall Billingslea, who served in Trump's first term as arms control negotiator and in other diplomatic roles, noted recently in a social media post that Trump 'already has all the legal authority needed to do everything in that bill.' But Trump appears to want the cover of having Congress act first.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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