Ukraine Isn’t Ready for the Pro-Putin GOP
Trump’s worldview has more in common with Putin’s than with any democrat’s.
UKRAINIAN PRESIDENT VOLODYMYR ZELENSKY made a couple of unforced errors in the last few weeks. They were all small things, the kind of missteps we all make occasionally, and even on the world stage, they might have gone unnoticed. But the Ukrainian leader had no idea what he was up against—a Republican party determined to turn him and the global conflict in Ukraine into this cycle’s political football.
Zelensky and his team had been working for months to cultivate Donald Trump and his entourage. It wasn’t just, as Zelensky said in the letter he sent to Trump on Thursday, that he had always tried to show “respect” for the former president. Like other governments across Europe, the Ukrainians were well aware that Trump had at least an even chance of retaking the White House, and they were determined to establish a relationship. Some even hoped that Trump could be a friend—that unlike Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who have given Kyiv just enough help to hold off the Russian army but not enough to win, Trump might be more decisive, forcing a definitive outcome that might benefit Ukraine.
Kyiv worked tirelessly to forge ties to anyone who might have Trump’s ear—former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Sen. Lindsey Graham, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and others. Zelensky held his tongue no matter what Trump said about Ukraine or what foolish boasts he made about ending the war in 24 hours. The Ukrainian leader even called Trump after the first assassination attempt, and the two had what Trump reported was a “very good” conversation.
Zelensky’s recent pushback on policy proposals put forward by Trump and JD Vance was also respectful. Interviewed by the New Yorker before he left for the United States, the Ukrainian noted that ending the war might be harder than Trump grasped and also that Vance’s proposed peace plan—that Kyiv give up all the territory held by Russia and renounce joining NATO—was “too radical.” He immediately qualified both comments, noting that many world leaders, not just Trump, had initially failed to grasp the complexity of the situation in Ukraine and that, despite his concerns, he didn’t take Vance’s words “seriously.”
The implication: Surely both leaders were indulging in a bit of campaign rhetoric, and they would have a different approach once in office. But even these comments were too much for Trump, who called them out on the campaign trail on Wednesday, mocking Zelensky and mimicking his accent as he denounced him for making “little nasty aspersions toward your favorite president.”
Compounding the problem was Zelensky’s Sunday visit to Pennsylvania. His tour of an American factory that manufactures artillery shells for use in Ukraine would have been a brilliant communications tactic—emphasizing how U.S. support for Ukraine also benefits the U.S. economy—if only it hadn’t been in Biden’s hometown, Scranton. Sources in the Ukrainian foreign ministry say the advance team surely invited both Democrats and Republicans to join the tour—“That’s how we operate,” one insider said to me on the condition that he not be identified. But of course only Democrats, Gov. Josh Shapiro and Sen. Bob Casey, showed.
It was a minor slip. Indeed, as the White House pointed out four days later, Zelensky traveled to Utah in July and made a similar appearance with the Republican governor—no Democrats present. But once again, Zelensky’s misstep was clearly too much for Republicans, who saw a chance to double down on criticism of a foreign leader many have been vilifying for months, turning him into a bogeyman among MAGA voters. House Speaker Mike Johnson led the charge, starting a letter to Zelensky by peremptorily saying “I demand that you immediately fire” the Ukrainian ambassador to the United States, and then turning Zelensky’s own words against him as he accused the Ukrainian of “being ‘captured by American domestic politics,’ and ‘influencing the choices of the American people.’”
PERHAPS ALL OF THIS IS par for the course, political jockeying in a campaign season. And Republican friends of Ukraine are not wrong when they point out that in a closely divided Congress, Ukraine needs Republicans as much as Democrats. Far more troubling in the long run is what the controversy reveals about how some Republicans see the situation in Ukraine—how they perceive Vladimir Putin and what they believe is at stake in the war.
Vance’s mid-September interview with podcast host Shawn Ryan was indeed the most radical statement that the Trump camp has made to date. Not only did he demand that Ukraine effectively cede one-fifth of its territory and accept nonaligned status between East and West; he proposed to cement this deal by creating a “demilitarized zone” between Russia and Ukraine—without specifying which nations would police the zone or which nations’ lives would be on the line if Russia were to violate the understanding.
An op-ed in the Hill a few days later by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Donald Trump Jr. was equally cavalier about Russian intentions and Ukrainian neutrality. Why are we playing “nuclear chicken”?, the authors asked. Why not give Putin what he wants? “No vital American interests are at stake,” they scoffed, even as they blithely and baselessly dismissed fears that success in Ukraine will embolden Putin to push further into Europe. “Surely,” RFK Jr. and Trump Jr. argued, “[Harris] must know how absurd that is.”
On Wednesday, Trump weighed in on the campaign trail, summing up the case with a throwaway line. “Any deal—the worst deal—would’ve been better than what we have now,” he said. Ukraine, in other words, should do as Putin demands. What’s a little territory in exchange for peace? What’s wrong, the shocking implied argument goes, with nonaligned status—why does Ukraine need to join the West? Why should that matter to us?
The common thread running through these remarks is alarming: a stunning credulity in the face of history. Have none of these four men—the Trumps père et fils, Vance, or RFK Jr.—read anything about Russia’s centuries-old efforts to subjugate and dominate Ukraine? Or about Putin’s obsession with restoring the glory of the lost “Russian World”? Don’t they know that Moscow has violated deal after deal on Ukrainian sovereignty—thirty years’ worth of international agreements promising to protect Kyiv when it gave up its nuclear weapons in 1994 and agreed to ceasefires along what’s now its eastern front in 2014 and 2015?
More broadly, does the Trump camp not see the way the Kremlin is already threatening the rest of Europe with cyberattacks, industrial sabotage, and electoral interference, among other so-called “hybrid warfare” tactics? Heck, don’t they even know American history—don’t they remember the 75 American lives lost in Korea in 1966–69 when Communist forces breached the thirteen-year-old demilitarized zone in that divided country?
BUT THE PROBLEM ISN’T JUST the Trump team’s fanciful image of a rational, benevolent Putin. There’s another, arguably even more troubling line of argument that has come up again and again in recent weeks—a case about the minerals that could be extracted from Ukraine and Russia.
RFK Jr. and Trump Jr. mentioned the minerals in passing in their op-ed—something important but not important enough to risk nuclear war over. Lindsey Graham, a strong supporter of Ukraine but also someone who knows how Trump thinks, made a blunter case when he visited Kyiv earlier this month. The Ukrainians “are sitting on a trillion dollars of minerals that could be good to our economy,” he said. “So I want to keep helping [them].”
Mike Pompeo drove home the point when he met with Zelensky the same week. Any peace deal, he told Time magazine, is going to depend on “good old-fashioned greed.” And this week, Trump himself made the case: Hostility between the United States and Russia is bad for “business,” he said in Georgia. “We have to be able to get along with other nations. We have to be able to use the minerals and other things that they have. We have to make the proper deals.”
So there we have it—the new GOP foreign policy. It’s a step down by any standard—even if you don’t care about ideals. Never mind Ukrainians’ desire for a sovereign democratic state aligned with the West—for this crowd, that’s just sentimental folderol. But what about the strategic vision that animated Republicans from Dwight D. Eisenhower through Ronald Reagan and John McCain—a vision based on laws and boundaries and using American strength to deter lawless aggression? These traditional Republicans weren’t blind to U.S. commercial interests. That’s one reason we need order in the rest of the world—to keep the sea lanes open for business. But none would have countenanced Putin’s implicit view that might makes right and boundaries mean nothing.
In contrast, Trump and the Trump team shrug at the Russian leader’s lawlessness. Not only is it not a problem in their eyes—it’s admirable, even something to be emulated. Why let international norms and values or indeed domestic opposition get in your way? Such niceties can only be bad for business and, precisely because he eschews them, the Trump crew sees Putin as a man they can deal with.
As the week wound down, Trump and Zelensky met in New York, and the Ukrainian leader swallowed his pride, bending over backward to be respectful as the former president repeated his unsettling promise to work with “both sides” to resolve the conflict. This week’s spat was papered over, at least temporarily, and by then, for the most part, Americans had moved on to other news.
The only silver lining: Could the standoff this week provoke a broader debate among voters, including undecided voters and traditional Republicans who aren’t sure what to do in November? Is this really what America should stand for in the world—might makes right and anything goes when business is at stake?
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