Ukraine policy, Trump-style: 'Putin could have been stopped with the right whatever'

Donald Trump promises to stop Russia's war in 24 hours. But The Donald doesn’t do specifics. We found a clue in the archives. (This would be funny if it wasn’t so true.)

Then-U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Michael Andersen writes:

If a presidential candidate doesn’t take anything seriously and ignores logic, never mind truth, what do we journalists and observers do? How can you analyze his policies?

We have reverted to the Kremlinology of the 1970s and 1980s, when we were second-guessing what horrors Leonid Brezhnev and Yuriy Andropov in the Kremlin were planning to bring down on us, by obsessively reading clues into Kremlin tea leaves: Did the incumbent Soviet Communist Party boss look like he was about to die during the last military parade on the Red Square? (And they did in rapid succession.) Who stood next to him at the parade, and which comrade had suddenly disappeared? What message could we interpret in a footnote on page 7 of a provincial newspaper from Siberia? But, in reality, we had precious little actual information. As a result, we were very often surprised and wrong-footed.

In 2024, we are reading Donald Trump’s tea leaves: Tweets from his son, testimonies from porn stars and ex-wives, or half-baked accounts from House Speaker Mike Johnson on their meeting in Mar-a-Lago, trying to game out what the likely next president of the United States might do on (to) Ukraine. Sadly, anybody interested in the survival of Ukraine has little choice but to do so.

This little piece is a follow-up to a podcast we ran last week here on Two Grumpy Old Men on Ukraine. We looked into what the reelection of Trump would mean for Ukraine. We conclude that a) we have no specifics, as Trump, by his own admission, isn’t really a man for details, and b) the little we know of his intentions does not bode well for Ukraine.

“If I were president, I would end that war in one day, it would take 24 hours,” Trump never tires of repeating. “I know (Volodymyr) Zelensky well, I know (Vladimir) Putin well… it would be easy. A lot of it has to do with the money we are giving, the military we are giving.”

Apart from that, we don’t really know anything. Luckily, the Hungarian leader Victor Orbán was helpful in interpreting Trump’s words for us, after their meeting last month in Mar-a-Lago. With a straight face, Orbán called Trump “a man of peace,” and explained that if reelected, Trump would cut off funding to Ukraine – “Trump will not give a penny to Ukraine…If the Americans don’t give money and weapons, along with the Europeans, the war is over.’’

Taking the wild leap to apply logic to Trump’s and Orbán’s words, this reads like Trump plans to push Ukraine to concessions or leave them to fight for themselves. As a result, Ukrainians would soon lose the war and/or be forced to sign off parts of their territory to Russia. We can safely assume that Trump was happy with Orbán’s interpretation, as he subsequently praised his mate Victor for being “smart” and “fantastic.”

But do we know anything more concretely about what Trump would do in Ukraine if he were back in power? I asked my fellow blogger Brian Bonner, who has been living in and covering Ukraine for 20+ years: “No. We don’t,” said Brian, “and I don’t think that he does either. He is unpredictable, but unpredictability is not a great foreign policy strategy, and it is nothing that the Ukrainians or its allies in Europe can bank on.”

Seeing as Trump is leading in many polls, it is urgent to try to establish more facts or at least some pointers about what Ukraine can expect from the beginning of 2025.

Fiona Hill is one of the world’s leading authorities on Russia. She worked in the U.S. National Security Council under Trump. In 2019, she fell out with the president and was a witness in the hearings when Trump was impeached. Recently, Hill was asked by the BBC what a Trump victory in November would mean: “It doesn’t bode well. When I was in the administration, Trump was always bragging about his ability to negotiate, to sit down with people and get them to do things that they usually did not want to do.

“When it comes to Ukraine, he has very little regard for it. He shares Putin’s view—that it is not a real country… that Crimea and the large parts of eastern Ukraine where they speak Russian, therefore, should be part of Russia. I would imagine that that would be his starting point (in negotiations).”

But again, there are few specifics from the horse’s mouth. So, I kept looking through the archives in search of clues. And Eureka!, finally, I found one. In 2019, at a press conference, Trump delivered his analysis of how Crimea ended up in Russian hands (Crimea was invaded and annexed by Russia in February-March 2014):

“Pure and simple, President Putin outsmarted President Obama, they took Crimea during his term. That was not a good thing,” sounded Trump’s analysis.

And then Trump proceeded to outline what in his world counts for policy descriptions, how he would have dealt with this crisis: “It could have been stopped, with the right … whatever. It could have been stopped. But President Obama could not stop it, and it is too bad.”

So, there you have it: After January 2025, if Trump is president, expect the U.S. to handle Putin and the war in Ukraine by employing a certain dose of … “the right whatever.”

Should we laugh or should we cry? I have the same reaction when I see Ukrainian gallows humor memes: that this would be very funny—if it weren’t so true, such as this one.