One indeed wonders why, all of a sudden, the United States developed this “just say ‘yes,’ that is good enough for us” attitude toward Russia. Well, maybe, in the long run, the nature of their bilateral relations would come to that point, but we are back again in the days of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s famous “trust but verify” narrative.
"Trust, but verify" ("doveryay no proveryay") is a Russian proverb, which became internationally known after Reagan used it on several occasions in the context of nuclear disarmament discussions with the Soviet Union.
U.S. President Donald Trump trusts Russian President Vladimir Putin so much that he chides the French president and the British prime minister and throws the Ukrainian leader out of the White House for not trusting Putin. I am sure that demeaning and humiliating treatment must have hurt Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy more than the Russian occupation of his country. European leaders rallied behind Zelenskyy after Trump took him down a peg, which, I assume, might have caused global concerns about U.S. efforts to end the war in Ukraine.
We know – but Trump doesn’t – that the war was started by Russia because NATO was adamant on enlarging its borders with Russia to Ukraine and Georgia. Thankfully, Georgia pulled itself together early to save itself from a full-fledged war with Russia. However, Mother Russia gobbled Georgia’s Abkhazia and South Ossetia provinces up, allowing the poor Georgians to taste what its ire would look like.
Ukrainians were not as sharp as Georgians or trusted Americans more than Georgians did; they were egged on and rose to the bait. Hence the Russian full-frontal assault; 1 million causalities in three short years; razed towns, ravaged apartment houses, marketplaces, hospitals and industrial areas. It has gotten pledges for $400 billion worth of aid since the invasion, including nearly $118 billion in direct military aid from individual countries, but how much it actually received is still not clear.
Zelenskyy claims they got $170 billion in three years, whereas Trump says they wired $500 billion. So, on top of all those casualties and destruction, the Ukrainian side has been accused of pocketing $330 billion! (When you are talking about others’ money, millions and billions do not make sense of real money. Do they? The same is true about the number of dead! One million dead Ukrainians may not inflict personal pain as Gene Hackman’s passing might have!)
So, you have been reading and watching how the U.S. president openly berated Zelenskyy for not being “thankful,” and “not being ready for peace” and having "disrespected" the U.S. in the “cherished Oval Office.” “Crude and arrogant statements,” but at least Trump was honest. This is a proxy war and the U.S. decides when it is over, not its proxies. Former President Joe Biden had even said, “It would go until there is no one left in Ukraine!” There was no single U.S. personnel in the war area, so the U.S. vowed to fight to the last Ukrainian.
Now, apparently, there are not many more Ukrainians left; the U.S. wants to wash its proverbial hands of Ukraine and leave! However, as Trump proudly said, before Vice President JD Vance curtly interrupted him, “His whole life is deals,” and he doesn’t like to go out empty-handed; he wanted to have all the rare-earth elements of Ukraine. There are 17 of them; the term “rare” refers to these rarely found minerals, which might pay back all the monies, aircraft (which were not flying) and tanks (not even moving from the transportation crafts to the front) and ammunition the U.S. provided.
Please don’t think that the U.S. is a selfish ally! It also wishes for its European partners to be compensated by Ukraine. French President Emmanuel Macron tried to correct Trump that Europeans donated that money to Ukraine, and he heard an earful from him: If you believe that Europeans do not want their money back, I have a bridge in Manhattan to sell.
Now, the Europeans know very well that the U.S. means business. During his previous presidency, Trump warned Europeans that unless they increase their defense expenditures to 3% of their national income, he would encourage Putin to do whatever the hell he wants to any NATO country that doesn't pay enough. Trump’s sympathy for Putin has not lessened since. As he demonstrated in that meeting, which has never happened with an American president before, he admires Putin more than before. When Zelenskyy tried to suggest that Trump and Vance were “insufficiently skeptical of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intentions,” Trump cut him off, saying: “You see the hatred (Zelenskyy has) got for Putin. It’s very tough for me to make a deal with that kind of hate; he’s got tremendous hatred.”
Zelenskyy and other Ukrainians, who thought that the Russian invasion of their six provinces and the whole Crimean Peninsula was something terrible, should now learn not to hate their enemy for that. If you hate your enemy, your friends cannot settle your dispute. There is a first time for everything; this is the Trumpian way of mediation. JD Vance taught Zelenskyy and us all that we should not be “thumping our chest unlike President Joe Biden did about Russia” but respectfully come to the Oval Office and lay our future to the able hands of Trump.
You should consider yourself lucky to have witnessed that once-in-a-lifetime scandal in the Oval Office. But then again, since Trump will occupy it for the next 1,706 days, we might witness several other such days of American infamy.
Oh, the lesson we learned from that episode in the White House: Give Trump (or whoever the current U.S. president is) an inch and he'll take a mile.
As we say in Türkiye, don’t dare go down a well with a rope if Americans hold the other end!
