We need to reimagine Donald Trump’s approach to ending Russia’s war in Ukraine by turning that proposition on its head. What he’s negotiating is a reset with Russia, making Kyiv and its future just the most valuable card that the US president has in his hand to trade.
Viewed from this perspective, there’s no reason to be shocked by the fact that Ukraine and Europe were absent at Tuesday’s high-level meeting between Putin and Trump administration officials, for this was about the relationship between the America and Russia, not Ukraine. Nor by the otherwise disgraceful way in which Trump is now trying to tar Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy as the obstacle to a settlement.
It also begins to make more sense that the master of “the art of the deal” would have begun — rather than ended — his campaign with phone calls to President Vladimir Putin, and promptly concede to most of Moscow’s Ukraine demands, before talks on the war have even begun. Those concessions already run from “no” to Ukraine joining NATO or getting its occupied territory back, to a call for wartime elections to get rid of Zelenskiy — a first step in the Kremlin’s demands for Kyiv’s so-called “denazification.”
This big-end-of-the-telescope view explains the presence in Riyadh of Kirill Dmitriev, the Russian sovereign wealth fund director who is also Putin’s point man on energy investments. The message that this US-educated former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker had for reporters in the Saudi capital was that Trump is a great problem solver, and the problem to solve is that the US lost $300 billion in Russian business due to the war.
As with Trump’s demand that Ukraine hand over $500 billion worth of imaginary rare-earth elements and other real resources, it matters less that this figure is accurate than that it’s big. Dmitriev said he saw US companies returning to Russia as soon as the second quarter of this year— even if some might find it a struggle to recover market share. In other words: How much must we pay the US to get our way on Ukraine?
According to the Yale School of Management’s CELI list of companies in Russia, there were 457 American firms doing business at the start of Putin’s February 2022 full-scale invasion. Of those, 23 are still working as usual; 100 — including the likes of Procter & Gamble Co — remain but have scaled back; and the rest have either suspended operations or withdrawn altogether. Among the last category are some big names like Exxon Mobil Corp, whose 30% stake in a far-eastern oil extraction project the Russian state expropriated in October 2022. Exxon valued the stake at around $4 billion, and no doubt Putin could, if he chose, give it back.
So there’s plenty to talk about, with lifting economic sanctions a significant piece of leverage at Trump’s disposal. This, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Tuesday, is a concession the US won’t make until there’s a final deal. But here again, the administration’s stance fits better with the negotiation of a Russian reset than the terms of a Ukrainian settlement. Otherwise, as Daniel Fried, a top former State Department official in both Republican and Democratic Party administrations, told Bloomberg News, lifting sanctions would be better held back as an incentive for Russia to keep to an eventual ceasefire.
The outcomes of Tuesday’s Riyadh meeting also fall into alignment when Ukraine is understood as a pawn in much wider talks, rather than their main subject. Rubio said the two sides had agreed to re-establish diplomatic and economic ties, and to form negotiating teams to start discussing Ukraine, in that order. He stressed the “incredible opportunities that exist to partner with the Russians, geopolitically on issues of common interest, and frankly economically” that ending the war would create.
Rubio certainly wasn’t talking about a jackpot for Ukrainians. While he was in Riyadh, Kyiv was under US pressure to accept Trump’s demand to sign over 50% of all revenue from the nation’s mineral resources, ports and other infrastructure in perpetuity, as recompense for US aid for Ukraine’s military effort to date, and with nothing offered in exchange. These are the kinds of terms that victors impose on defeated enemies as war reparations, and were no doubt designed to be rejected. That now sets the scene for Trump to portray Ukraine and Zelenskiy — whom he grotesquely now calls a dictator — as the problem.
If you don’t believe that stronger countries should have the right to invade smaller ones, devastate cities and slaughter and torture civilians in the process, then Trump reached a new nadir of amorality in his Mar-a-Lago press conference on Tuesday. Not only did he double down on mocking Zelenskiy’s diminished opinion poll support after three years of conflict as he called for Kyiv to hold elections, but he also accused him of starting the war.
It helps to recall that — as I wrote after Vice President JD Vance’s excoriation of Europe in Munich last week — Russia is by no means the enemy in Trump’s eyes, or those of like-minded ultra-nationalist political parties across the democratic West. Putin’s Russia is to them more a brother in arms in the fight against liberalism — domestic or international — that unites them all. Ukraine, meanwhile, has been championed as a fight for the liberal world order.
If all this makes Trump’s actions easier to follow, that has no bearing on the shameful and mendacious nature of his adopted Kremlin narratives. Ukraine didn’t start this war; Putin didn’t invade because he was threatened by NATO aggression, as I’ve argued in detail here; and elections under wartime martial law aren’t a democratic necessity for Ukraine, but would rather be unconstitutional, destabilizing and logistically improbable. Although Zelenskiy’s approval ratings have certainly plunged from their heading heights at the start of the war, Trump’s claim of 4% is nonsense. At 57% this month, the Ukrainian president’s numbers are still better than those of many heads of state, including Trump (at around 46%).
As for the US president’s claim that America needs $500 billion in compensation to pay for its support, here too the case made is based on pure disinformation. The US hasn’t given Ukraine $350 billion, as Trump posted on his social media site Truth Social on Wednesday. On paper, it has given half that, and in real, allocated money, just €114 billion ($119 billion) up to the end of 2024, according to Germany’s Kiel Institute for the World Economy, which meticulously tracks all support to Ukraine. Of that sum, fully €64 billion took the form of military support, the vast majority of which either came from storage or was paid to US arms manufacturers.
Nor has the US shouldered an especially heavy burden relative to other Ukraine allies, as Trump and his aides never tire of saying, let alone $200 billion more than Europe, as his post claimed. The US has consistently spent less than Europe, and as a proportion of gross domestic product ranks just 15th among Ukraine’s top 20 wartime donors.
Trump is nevertheless right about this: The US remains the critical player for Kyiv, both because of the classes of weapons it provides and its deterrent potential as the world’s largest military and nuclear power.
It’s conceivable that Trump will surprise all by extracting a fair deal for Ukraine as part of his reset. I genuinely hope he does. Nothing, however, that the leader of the free world has said or done to date gives any confidence that this will happen. More likely, and tragically for the people of Ukraine as well as for Europe’s future stability, we are seeing a deal unfold that will be cut at their expense by two supremely cynical leaders, both of whom see the weak as targets to exploit and the strong as the only people worth negotiating with.
Credit: Bloomberg
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