Trump is now directly helping Russia kill Ukrainians (part 2)

Last week, European leaders sucked up to 'Daddy Donald'. Not least to keep him interested in Ukraine. But this week, the U.S. president blocked the delivery of vital US defense equipment to Kyiv.

BY MICHAEL ANDERSEN

Look, I am not the kind of guy who says ‘I said so’….

But. Tuesday evening, I published a piece criticizing Europe’s pathetic, humiliaiting sucking up to ‘Daddy Donald’ at the NATO Summit in The Hague.

More important than the humiliation - however painful it was to observe Europe’s leaders bowing down to a loud, orange buffoon - was the fact that the tactics of sucking up to a bully never works. Submission is simply not an efficient way of dealing with ‘Daddy Donald’. He is unpredictable, unreliable and untrustworthy. You bow down, he smiles, you smile, you all smile - and five minutes later, he nevertheless stabs you in the back.

Several people wrote to me that I was being too skeptical and too harsh on the European leaders with their noses up Trump’s….

But it only took ‘Daddy Donald’ a few hours to confirm my worst fears.

Literally two hours after I had published the critical piece, the news broke that the US Department of Defense is halting the remaining shipments to Ukraine of important air-defense equipment. This equipment was promised Ukraine by the Biden administration, and includes the crucial Patriot air defense systems.

The Patriots, the AIM-7s, Hellfire and the Stingers missiles are vital parts of Ukraine’s air-defense network. Put bluntly - without them, it will be easier for Russian missiles to reach the big cities and kill even more Ukrainians in their beds every night.

As one commentator puts it: “If Putin could write a wish list of the weapons he would want Trump to keep from Ukraine - this would be it.”

Some of the shipments of the weapons were, in fact, already in Poland on their way to Ukraine, but have been stopped. That’s how dedicated the Trump administration is to punish Ukraine.

Trump’s deceit is, to borrow his favorite word, ‘tremendous’. If you look at the timeline, it is highly likely - to say the least - that the decision to block this military aid to Ukraine had already been made and its implementation under way, as the European leaders were ‘daddying up’ to Trump at the NATO summit, and he was wallowing in their ‘love’.

In The Hague, one week ago, the U.S. President talked about the European leaders; how “these people really love their countries,” and how “they want to protect their country, and they need the United States…. It was really moving to see it.”

“I came here because it was something I’m supposed to be doing,” Daddy Donald concluded, “but I left here a little bit different.”

At the end of the summit, Trump also said that his government was trying to find Patriot air defense missiles to send to Ukraine:

“They [Ukraine] do want to have the anti-missile missiles - as they call them, the Patriots - and we’re going to see if we can make some available.”

CNN and other commentators called this “a win” for Ukraine. That quickly turned out to be a naive assessment.

Furthermore, Trump’s decision to weaken Ukraine’s defense comes at the same time as Russia’s summer offensive is gaining momentum, and its nightly bombing raids on Ukraine’s big cities have been intensified.

“Any delay or hesitation in supporting Ukraine’s defense capabilities only encourages the aggressor to continue the war and acts of terror, rather than seek peace,” a statement from a stunned Ukrainian government said Wednesday.

Wednesday night, I spoke to a long-term acquaintance in the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense: “Just one week ago you were all sucking up to and smiling with Trump, didn’t somebody even call him ‘Daddy’? But yesterday we were burying my wife’s aunt, she was killed in her bed by Putin’s bombs at night, an old, peaceful woman. And today I get a message at the ministry saying that Trump is weakening our defenses - on purpose. Please explain to me again exactly what the point of sucking up to Trump was?”

Let’s face it, Trump’s deceit of Ukraine, and thereby of his European allies sucking up to him on behalf of Kyiv, was so predictable that even I could predict it.

Why? Because this is a pattern here: The pattern is that Trump fucks Ukraine.

And as a result, Ukrainians die. The U.S. President is helping the Russian dictator kill innocent Ukrainians.

If I an American, I would ask you to share those lines, those facts, as widely as you can. History’s verdict on this part of U.S. foreign policy in the first half of 2025 will be very harsh. It should be. And frankly, it should also be very harsh on the ones who, full-knowing, choose not to speak up.

What is the pattern I am talking about?

Well, three weeks ago, I wrote a piece called “Trump is now directly helping Russia kill Ukrainians (part 1)”. In that piece, I identified three ways in which Trump actively supports Russia and helps Putin kill Ukrainians:

1) Trump ‘allows’ Russia to bomb Ukrainian residential neighborhoods.

As a result, every night 8-10-12 people are killed in their beds, and once a week or so, Russia throws ‘a big one’ and even more Russian drones and missiles get through the Ukrainian defenses (that now, with Trump’s latest decision, will be even weaker), and 30+ people die. All civilians.

Why do I say that Trump ‘allows’ these horrid attacks? Well, because the U.S. President often describes Ukrainian self-defense as attacks on Russia, giving the Kremlin all the right to respond militarily. As if it was Ukraine that had started the war.

Take, for example, the audacious Ukrainian ‘Spiderweb’ drone attack one month ago, on air bases far inside Russia, taking out important and expensive Russian bomber planes. The same planes that Putin uses to deliver the missiles that kill Ukrainians in their beds.

“I don't like it, I said don't do it, you shouldn't do it, you should stop it,” was Trump’s reaction to the Ukrainian operation. “They went deep into Russia and (Putin) actually told me we have no choice but to attack based on that, and it's probably not going to be pretty,” Trump said about his phone conversation with the Russian dictator after the Ukrainian strike.

Basically making it sound as if Ukraine ‘had started’ and now Russia simply had to retaliate. And ‘retaliate’ Russia did. Or, as the rest of us would call it: Continued its three-year-long bombing campaign, only even more intensively.

2) Trump is blocking sanctions against a dictator who has murdered 100,000+ Ukrainians.

True, there is a sanctions bill under way in the Senate, but the President has actively been trying to both postpone it and water it down. The bill was introduced on April 1 by Republican Lindsey Graham and Democrat Richard Blumenthal. It includes a 500% tariff on imports from countries that continue to buy Russian oil and raw materials, and could thus potentially really hurt Russia and its war economy.

However bizarre it sounds, Trump has even argued that potential sanctions should apply to both Russia and Ukraine - “it takes two to tango,” as the President poetically puts it. Using that kind of language, Trump ignores and tries to make us forget that this is a 100% black and white war: Russia invaded Ukraine, unprovoked, and presently occupies 20% of its territory, has forced 12-14 million to flee their homes and killed, injured, tortured hundreds of thousands.

No, Mr President, this is not a tango - this is rape.

Trump keeps repeating that he does not want to impose sanctions on Russia, because he feels that it could hurt the prospects of a peace or ceasefire deal. On May 29, the U.S. President once again repeated that he thought that a deal could be reached “within the next two weeks.” That is now almost five weeks ago.

3) Trump is on purpose weakening Ukraine’s defense

On June 4 - four days after the Ukrainian Spider Web operation - the Trump administration diverted 20,000 anti-drone missiles that President Biden had allocated to Ukraine - instead sending them to U.S. forces in the Middle East.

“Ukraine was counting on these missiles”, said Ukrainian President Zelensky, to defend its cities and people from Russian drone attacks, which often include the Iranian Shahed drones. Ever since then, Russia has every night sent record numbers of such drones at Ukraine, often 4-500 a night. Every night, 8-12 people are killed and 60-100 injured.

And now, one month later, we see the further blocking of military deliveries to Ukraine, promised by the Biden administration.

The official explanation from the Trump administration is that U.S. stockpiles are “too low” to continue helping Ukraine with these systems. Please, let’s not even waste time looking at that argument.

Among the weapons affected are interceptors for Patriot air defense systems, precision-guided artillery shells (Stinger, Hellfire) and missiles that can be launched by Ukraine’s F-16 jets.

The Financial Times quotes Viktor Kevlyuk, a military expert with the Kyiv-based Centre for Defence Strategies: “The absence of Patriot anti-aircraft missiles will lead to an increase in successful Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian cities, which will lead to an increase in civilian casualties.”

Unsurprisingly the Kremlin is delighted: “The less weaponry is supplied to Ukraine, the sooner the [invasion] will end,” Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said to Interfax.

So. Once again, we see that sucking up to a bully doesn’t work. In this case, the result will be that even more Ukrainians will die.