Trump’s Zelensky Derangement Syndrome

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky cut a frustrated, downcast figure during a visit to Turkey on Tuesday. And no wonder. While he was holding talks with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, his own nation’s future was being tentatively determined some 2,500 kilometres away in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Not by Ukrainians. But by high-level diplomatic delegations from the US and Russia.

Zelensky’s anger was palpable, and rightly so. To sideline Ukraine in this way is an insult to a nation that has been resisting Russian aggression for nearly three years now. These talks are taking place ‘about Ukraine… without Ukraine’, he said, before announcing the cancellation of his trip to Saudi Arabia scheduled for the next day. He said he didn’t want to give the ‘false image’ that Ukraine accepted what had just happened in Riyadh.

Time will tell what Tuesday’s diplomatic rapprochement between the US and Russia means for Ukraine. Both sides, in their first act of face-to-face, high-level contact in over three years, emphasised the preliminary nature of the talks. They were there principally to re-establish communication channels and diplomatic relations, not to talk territory and security guarantees, they said.

Still, the subsequent noises from Washington in particular did not sound positive for Zelensky and Ukraine. To put it mildly. Afterwards, it emerged that the delegations had vaguely mooted the possibility of new elections in Ukraine ahead of any possible peace deal, ostensibly on the grounds that Zelensky’s five-year presidential term was up last year. The Russian government’s concern over Zelensky’s democratic legitimacy would be easier to take seriously if it were not run by an unabashed, election-rigging authoritarian.

Of course, Ukraine didn’t hold elections last year because it is currently at war, and parts of it are occupied by an invading power. Try holding a ballot amid gunfire, shelling and missile strikes. The talk of new elections is really little more than a half-baked Russian ruse to present Zelensky as an illegitimate despot, even though he still enjoys solid approval ratings.

Sadly, some in Trump’s orbit have fallen for it. Not least the president himself, if his comments in recent days are anything to go by.

First, there was his shameful response, in a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, to Zelensky’s complaint about Ukraine’s absence from the US-Russia negotiations. He effectively said Ukraine had its chance to end the war, stating ‘you could’ve made a deal’, as if Zelensky was buying a stake in a real-estate development, rather than fighting for his nation’s survival. Trump added that Ukraine ‘should’ve never started’ [the war] in the first place – which will come as news to anyone who remembers the Russian tanks and trucks rolling into Ukraine on 24 February 2022. To paint this embattled nation as anything other than a victim of Russia’s quasi-imperial aggression is for the birds. If any side ‘should’ve never started’ the war, it’s those who Trump’s diplomats were palling around with in Riyadh.

Worse still, after Zelensky shot back – accusing Trump of living in a ‘disinformation bubble’ – Trump doubled down, calling Zelensky a ‘dictator’ who had played the US ‘like a fiddle’.

Ukraine once again finds itself in an invidious position. Over several decades, an unreliable US and an impotent Europe dangled NATO membership before Ukraine, antagonising Russia, while never showing any serious intention of following through on its offers of support. Then, after Russia invaded Ukraine, Western leaders talked tough, while seemingly having no real idea of what to do. They’ve often been slow to offer military aid, and frequently failed to meet their own targets for delivering it.

Now, as the Trump administration seeks a prompt end to a war the West stoked and Russia started, convinced of various anti-Ukraine talking points, Ukraine could be about to be betrayed all over again, just in a more brusque, upfront fashion than before.

In the US, the war in Ukraine has been mangled into a crude culture war, and into pre-existing agendas.

On the one side, there are the proxy-war fanatics, dreaming of regime change in Russia. Those who view the war as a chance to strike a blow for the liberal order against autocracy. Those, that is, who frame Ukrainian resistance against Russian aggression as a war for their values and worldview, not Ukraine’s self-defence.

On the other side, there are those who have swung wildly in the other direction. Those who see Ukraine’s battle for survival as just another affluent liberal’s ‘good’ cause, ‘the current thing’, a woke meme, and mock it as such. Over the past three years, their animus towards Ukraine’s liberal, usually Democratic champions has effectively morphed into an animus towards Ukraine itself, replete with conspiracy theories. They say Zelensky is a dictator, or a leech, and that the war is one massive money-laundering exercise – as if the US is sending truckloads of cash to Ukraine rather than US-made weapons.

Parts of Trump world are keyed into this Very Online anti-Ukraine sentiment. Two years ago, Trump’s son, Don Jr, called Zelensky ‘an ungrateful international welfare queen’. They don’t just think Ukraine isn’t America’s problem, they see Ukraine as the villain of the piece. This is why you get, at times, an almost vindictive posture towards Ukraine, such as the Trump administration’s reported plan for a post-peace economic deal that would allow the US to extract from Ukraine a greater share of its GDP than the reparations imposed on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles.

Others among Trump’s top team hold a very different line. Not least secretary of state Marco Rubio, who has been leading the negotiations with Russia. As a senator, he consistently supported aid to Ukraine, called for Russia’s aggression to be punished and praised Ukrainians’ bravery and strength ‘in their stand against Russia’. Although he now believes both sides have fought themselves to a stalemate, it’s clear where his sympathies lie. It was notable that after Tuesday’s confab, he sought to reassure Ukraine that it was not being frozen out of peace negotiations. It’s also significant that Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, visited Kyiv on Wednesday and talked of ‘the importance of the sovereignty of this nation’.

But it is hard to see Ukraine’s standing in Mar-a-Lago improving, following the war of words in recent days.

This speaks to an unavoidable contradiction at the heart of Ukraine’s resistance to Russia. Its fight for independence has necessarily had to rely on support from the West, primarily the US, which was flaky and fractured even when Trump was out of the picture.

But contrary to those who paint Ukraine as the puppet of their Washington paymasters, it has never been a supplicant. Just as Ukraine refused to acquiesce to the Russian army in 2022, turning what Putin hoped would be a days-long conquest into a fierce three-year-long war, so it won’t simply accept whatever agreement is stitched up between America and Russia behind closed doors. As Zelensky put it on Wednesday, ‘We are not playing games… no backroom dealings’.

If this war is coming to a close, Ukraine will finish where it began – fighting for its independence, against all the odds.

Tim Black is a spiked columnist.