[OPEN LETTER] Trump - and Americans - are paying tribute to Putin. A war criminal.

Why does nobody - people or politicians - tell Trump that this is not OK? This is not about party politics, it is about decency and dignity v savagery. I expect Europe's leaders to school the fool.

On January 28, 2026, a photo of President Trump and the Russian dictator, accused of war crimes by the U.N., was put up in the White House.

BY MICHAEL ANDERSEN

Once again, their great leader has come up with yet another way of making Americans look ignorant and uncaring. And worse.

Dear Americans, your president just put up a photo in the White House of himself and the biggest war criminal of the 21st century, the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. It is ‘perfectly’ timed to mark that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is about to enter its fifth year.

Do you understand the feeling this provokes in Ukraine? In Europe? 10 million Ukrainians have been forced to run away from their homes, maybe 200,000 have been killed - and your country celebrates the monster responsible?

Do you understand?

Because your president sure as hell does. This was no mistake. People don’t hang photos on their walls by mistake. This was a signal:

The U.S. President is condoning Putin’s rape of Ukraine. And he wants the world to know. There can be no other interpretation.

Your president deliberately timed this act to coincide with a make-or-break point in Putin’s four-year-long war in Ukraine; For the past months, Russia has deliberately been targeting the power grid of Ukraine, robbing the Ukrainians of heating, electricity and water in the midst of the worst, coldest winter for decades. Putin’s strategy is to make Ukraine unliveable, and make the population flee, the Ukrainian society break down, and thereby win the war.

“There is not a single power plant in Ukraine that hasn't been hit by the enemy since the beginning of the war,” Ukraine’s Minister of Energy, Denys Shmyhal said recently. His deputy, Mykola Kolisnyk, told ABC News that “the enemy’s plan is social instability through total blackout.”

President Trump is well aware of the situation, indeed he has several times spoken about the vicious circle of winter-bombs-no heating-colder that Putin has caught the Ukrainians in.

In a recent brilliant but very bleak piece in the Guardian - called “The bleakest winter: Ukrainians face exhaustion and uncertainty as Trump demands concessions” - Sevgil Musaieva, editor-in-chief of the news outlet Ukrainska Pravda, explained the mood in Ukraine right now:

“This is one of the most difficult moments in our modern history, when every one of us is living on the edge between exhaustion and strength, between compromise and our principles.”

And it is that exact moment in history that your president chooses to openly demonstrate his sympathy for the man behind all this misery? And you let him?

No, let me rephrase that. Because this deserves to be fixated, cast in stone for future historians. The world ought to understand who Donald Trump is, and where he has taken the U.S. and the Americans. So here it goes:

After the Russian dictator has been waging his war in Ukraine,100% unprovoked, for four years, killing, raping, torturing, maiming hundreds of thousands of innocent people, when there is a real risk that the Ukrainians could break - at this time in history, the U.S. President decides to pay tribute to the Russian dictator. And does so with a photo placed inside the White House - the very building that is supposed to illustrate and represent the United States of America.

And still, there is no outcry, no demonstrations, no strikes, hardly a public peep?

Today, the Ukrainians already view the U.S. President as an enabler of Russia’s aggression. If the American population and politicians keep their mouths shut, they will - justifiably so - be seen as collaborators in the policy of exterminating Ukrainians. There is no other country in the West where this would be accepted by the people, the media, the politicians.

To ‘my own’ politicians here in Europe: you owe it - to the Ukrainians, to your voters and taxpayers, to simple common decency - to stand up in public and tell President Trump in no uncertain terms to take down that fcuking photo. No European leader can visit a White House with that photo on the wall.

And, sorry, nope, just because you shout loudly, “But I didn’t vote for him!”, does not exculpate you. You had many decades to come up with somebody who wasn’t a rapist, paedophile, felon, dumb, loud, crook, racist, corrupt dictator lover - in a country where elections are fair and free.

You chose not to = You own him.

In Europe, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has given rise to a debate about ‘are there any good Russians?’ My Ukrainian colleagues and friends point to the fact that polls in Russia consistently show that 70-80% of Russians support the invasion of Ukraine, and that we in four years have almost not been able to trace any opposition to the war, even among the so-called ‘Russian opposition’ in exile, criticism of the war and support for a free, independent Ukraine is limited and wrapped in ‘conditional’ language.

But, of course, in Russia you can easily lose your life from criticising the dictator.

What is your excuse, Americans?

‘Oh, get down from your high horse, you moralistic European intellectual,’ you will now tell me. Nope. Not this time.

Can you imagine any other Western leader hanging a photo of Putin in their offices? Can you imagine any other population taking it?

Where is your red line, Americans? So, a Putin photo in the White House is okay? How about one of Adolf Hitler? To celebrate what he ‘accomplished’ ?