Around mid-day yesterday, as I was about to post the following article, reports began trickling in about President Zelensky’s just completed sulfurous confrontation with Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance at the White House.
The get-together, initially reported live, was supposed to confirm Zelensky’s extorted commitment to turn over many of his country’s precious mineral rights to the administration in exchange for past U.S. aid in combating Russian aggression — though without any new U.S. security guarantees thrown in.
As conceived by Trump, this scheme was nothing more than a mafia-like shakedown.
But what unfolded at the meeting itself makes even that obscenity pale by comparison.
Time and again Zelensky tried to convince his White House hosts that Putin could not be trusted to negotiate honestly with Ukraine. On twenty-five previous occasions, he said, Putin had welched on signed agreements to end the current conflict.
Trump, for his part, expressed unwavering faith in his old Russian buddy, who, he insisted, had never broken any agreement with him. He added for good measure that the two of them had been grievously and unjustly persecuted in the Trump-Russia investigations as if that conferred some sort of shared virtue on them.
During one particularly heated exchange, Vance chided Zelensky for not exhibiting enough public gratitude for U.S. aid and for trying to litigate the causes of the Ukraine conflict in this august gathering. Zelensky, taking the long view, warned that the U.S. itself might feel threatened by Putin one day.
That caused Trump to blow a gasket — or pretend to.
“Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel!” he shouted. “You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now.”
“I’m not playing cards,” Zelensky replied. “I’m very serious, Mr. President. I’m the president in a war.”
“You’re gambling with World War III,” Trump shot back. “And what you’re doing is very disrespectful to the country, this country, that’s backed you far more than a lot of people said they should have.”
And so it went, on and on, until Zelensky abruptly departed.
Afterwards in a post, Trump claimed to have “determined” that his visitor “is not ready for peace.”
“He disrespected the United States of America in its cherished Oval Office,” the President fumed. “He can come back when he is ready for Peace,”
Peter Baker of The New York Times described the painfully public confrontation as “unlike any seen between an American president and foreign leader in modern times… a remarkable display of anger and resentment toward the leader of a country that has been invaded by a larger power intent on eliminating it as an independent state.”
Times columnist Thomas Friedman likewise deemed the Oval Office ambush to be unprecedented “in the nearly 250-year history of this country” and summed it up this way: “In a major war in Europe, our president clearly sided with the aggressor, the dictator and the invader against the democrat, the freedom fighter and the invaded.”
I came away feeling ashamed to be an American and doubly convinced that recapping – and handicapping – various past efforts by Putin and Trump to impose “peace” on Ukraine could not be timelier.
The artlessness of the deals:
When U.S. and Russian officials huddled in Riyadh on February 18 to discuss ways to end the Ukraine war, the Ukrainians themselves were (infamously) nowhere to be seen. Trump later tried to justify keeping them sidelined by blaming them for the conflict.
Speaking to reporters at Mar a Lago but implicitly addressing President Zelensky himself, he declared, “You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
Public umbrage over these remarks has focused mainly on Trump’s perverse attempt to shift the aggressor’s guilt onto the victim. But hidden in his verbiage is fair warning of how he would warp future negotiations to Russia’s obliterating advantage.
The “tell” is in the word “deal.”
Interviewed by CNN a few days later, Steve Witkoff, the administration’s special envoy for Ukraine (and other crises), singled out the “Istanbul protocol agreement” as a possible “guidepost” for further discussion.
If that’s the “deal” Trump has in mind, Zelensky should pray for divine intervention.
Soon after Putin tried and failed to seize Kyiv itself in early 2022, Russian and Ukrainian officials launched frantic negotiations under Turkish prodding to try to hammer out some sort of ceasefire.
What they came up with, a possible negotiating formula, was a good fit for Putin but a potential hair shirt for Zelensky.
In one draft, as Politico has recently reminded us, “Moscow attempted to impose punitive concessions on Ukraine including a cap on the size and lethality of its armed forces” as preconditions to any cessation of fighting.
Ukraine in turn demanded a no-frills ceasefire up front, but that was a no-go for Putin.
“Russian negotiators also sought to insert a clause that would have made Russia one of Ukraine’s security guarantors — you read that right — potentially giving the Kremlin a veto over the efforts of other countries to come to its aid in the event of a future attack.” Politico added.
On top of all this, the proposed drafts, even ones favored by Ukraine, would have left the issue of Russian control of the easternmost provinces, where Pro-Putin separatists had long held sway, to be resolved in bilateral discussions later on.
The envisaged “peace” would thus have allowed Putin to place his boot on Ukraine’s backside in such a way that he would have been able, over time, to go wide and stomp the entire nation into submission.
“Had Ukraine done a deal based on the Istanbul communique, it would have essentially led to the country becoming a virtual province of Russia — led by a pro-Russian government and banned from seeking alliances with western countries,” writes Stephen Hall, an expert on the war at the University of Bath.
The flurry of communiques and spitballs that collectively made up the Istanbul “agreement” led nowhere fast. That’s partly because Putin’s invaders had already committed too many war crimes to forgive – and partly because the U.S. and Britain bridled at rewarding his aggression under any guise and figured sanctions would eventually force him to be reasonable.
Within a few weeks, the secret exchanges collapsed. Thereafter the two sides settled into a bloody slugfest in eastern Ukraine, sometimes spilling over into Russian territory, which continues inconclusively right down to the present.
It has been nothing to swoon about if you’re of Putin’s persuasion. According to the Economist magazine, the retreat of his forces from northern Ukraine in late spring of 2022 left them in control of a mere 19.6% of the country, with their own casualties (dead and wounded) tipping in at around 20,000. Today, the size of the Russan footprint hasn’t much changed but the casualty total now exceeds 800,000 and counting, and Russia’s economy is in shambles.
Except for Donald Trump, Putin would be begging for mercy.
Sadly, the Istanbul prototype isn’t the only potential “deal” available to those who would rescue Putin from his folly under the guise of peace-making.
During Trump’s first term in office, as you might remember, investigators for the Senate Intelligence Committee and Special Counsel Robert Mueller discovered that one-time Trump aide Paul Manafort and his sidekick, a Russian spy named Konstantin Kalimnik, had come up a secret scheme to deliver Ukraine to Russia with the President’s help and blessing.
The deal they conceived, as described by various sources, was intended as a quid quo pro for Putin’s past services, a way of repaying him for the influence operations he had waged covertly in 2016 to bolster Trump’s election prospects and undermine Hillary Clinton’s.
To square accounts, so the evidence suggested, Trump was expected as president to assist Putin in setting up a Russian protectorate in eastern Ukraine where his forces and sympathizers had been stirring up trouble since his seizure of Crimea three years before.
Ultimately, as Kilimnik himself imagined it, the protectorate was to be fronted by a Putin stooge and would eventually serve as a springboard for extending Russian control to the rest of Ukraine, through subversion or outright military conquest.
For various reasons, the Manafort-Kilimnik scheme never gelled during Trump 1.0. But since it anticipated part of the Istanbul formula (the part that would leave intact Russia-controlled eastern Ukraine) it’s not just a relic of the past, but thematically, a concept still very much in play.
Indeed, because it would normalize the Russian presence in the eastern borderlands, it fits existing facts on the ground which establish Putin’s occupying forces as the de facto sovereigns there.
Thus, it is conceivable that when Trump insisted to Zelensky on February 18 that he “could have made a deal” at the start of the war, he was thinking of the protectorate idea and the Manafort-Kilimnik blueprint.
It is also possible that he was signaling to Putin that he had not forgotten the debt enshrined in that blueprint, his obligation to repay the Russian dictator for favors secretly extended in the past.
Because of the importance of Manafort-Kilimnik story to understanding the current Ukraine crisis and Trump’s failure of nerve and morality in dealing with it, I offer a summary of it below.
Nothing on record so well explains Trump’s continued obeisance to the Kremlin thug.
If the broad facts are solid, Putin holds a Damocles sword over Trump’s head, one he could use to destroy this fatuous former reality-show star as a political force and credible human being by revealing how he has mortgaged American and Ukrainian interests to Russian ones for pure personal gain.
(Some of the material below is adapted from a two-parter I wrote for Spy Talk in early 2022, a composite piece posted to my own website and reprised in a podcast, and from a more recent online article of mine about Biden-Trump presidential debate.)
Origins of the Ukraine sellout – the Manafort-Kilimnik gambit:
Much of what we know about so-called Manafort-Kilimnik peace proposal comes from Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose separate Trump-Russia findings were published in 2019 and 2020 respectively.
Both reports gave exhaustive treatment to Manafort’s role in promoting the plan. But its true author, they discovered, was his pint-sized deputy, Kilimnik.
Mueller described Konstantin as having ties to Russian intelligence. The Senate panel pegged him outright as a Russian spy and found it likely that he had collaborated with the Putin hackers who broke into Democratic campaign computers in 2016.
According to the Senate investigators both Kilimnik and Manafort answered to Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch with extensive investments in Ukraine. The Senate report described him “as a proxy for the Russian state and intelligence services,” and cast him as a specialist in precisely the kind of cyber intrusion and disinformation initiatives that drove Russia’s assault on the U.S. electoral process in 2016.
Twelve years before, Deripaska had hired Manafort and Kilimnik to consult for his business ventures in Ukraine and elsewhere. He later had them do double duty as strategy advisers to pro-Russia politicians in Ukraine, including thuggish Viktor Yanukovych who, with their help and some ballot tampering won the Presidential election of 2010.
During the Euromaidan uprising four years later, Yanukovych got booted from office and fled to Russia.
His ouster and the surrounding chaos left Putin stunned. Obsessed as he was with restoring Russia to its past imperial glory, he could not abide the idea of once fully owned-and-operated Ukraine tilting westward — and promptly sought to rebalance the scales by seizing Crimea, then by restoking separatist fighters in the Russian-speaking Donbas region.
The following September, 2014, he put a happy face on his banditry by acceding to the so-called Minsk Protocol, which had been drawn up by Moscow and Kyiv, with international mediators looking on, and underwritten by representatives of the separatist regions in east Ukraine.
It was a premonition of the slapdash Istanbul agreement briefly essayed in early 2022.
While advertised as a ceasefire pact with ruffles, Minsk I effectively froze the violence-wracked status quo and conferred a crude legitimacy on Putin-bred fifth columnists in Donbas decked out as persecuted Russian-speaking locals.
To make sure they had every advantage, Putin soon flooded the region with the same “little green men” who had nabbed Crimea, Spetsnaz operatives with no insignia on their olive-drab fatigues but plenty of firepower at their disposal.
Hostilities re-ignited. Negotiations resumed amid heavy breathing from western capitals and in February 2015 Minsk II was born. It was mostly a reassertion of noble intent by endorsers of the original agreement.
One of the unintended consequences of Minsk II was a sudden scramble among freebooters and grifters who spied an opportunity to ingratiate themselves with Putin by helping him wage war on Ukraine by other means.
Enter Kilimnik and Manafort with their peace proposal.
The first reference to it in any of Kilimnik’s extant writings appears in an email he posted to the chief political officer at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv on May 21, 2015. Claiming to be keying off something overheard from third parties, he raised the prospect of mounting a new political movement in eastern Ukraine with Yanukovych as its figurehead.
A few weeks later, in the United States, another cog fell into place. In July 2015, during a GOP rally in Las Vegas, an “exchange student” from Siberia, Maria Butina, who would eventually admit to being a Russian agent, asked the dark horse at the podium if he supported sanctions against Russia.
Donald Trump responded: “[W]here we have the strength, I don’t think you’d need the sanctions.”
For Kalimnik and Manafort this was an invitation to dance. Here was a media-savvy mogul with financial ties to Russia and oversized (potentially blackmailable) appetites playing to Putin’s core obsession.
Could Ukraine bring them together?
The answer became increasingly apparent as Trump climbed up the popularity polls, dropping bons mots about Putin at every whistle stop, exuding limitless admiration for all things Russian and a commensurate distaste for NATO.
Manafort leapt to the opportunity. Through an old friend, political dirty trickster Roger Stone, and by capitalizing on his own past advisory services for Gerry Ford and Bush I, he thrust his way into Trump’s campaign and landed a job there as manager of the upcoming party convention.
For Manafort this was a hustler’s equivalent of killing two birds with one “stone.” Not only was he now positioned to manipulate the candidate himself; the political payoff he could deliver for Russia would also enable him to square accounts with his controller, Deripaska, to whom he had become indebted financially. Turning Trump into a tightly managed agent of influence for Putin would clear the ledger with Deripaska as nothing else would.
It wouldn’t hurt Manafort’s standing with Putin, either.
On April 11, 2016, according to the Mueller report, Manafort secretly discoursed with Kilimnik by email about possible ways of cashing in on his new access to Trump. He soon whetted appetites by forwarding campaign polling data to Kilimnik that would have been pure gold for anyone (e.g., Russian intel operatives) interested in microtargeting a dirty-leaks campaign against Hillary Clinton.
The following July Manafort nudged Candidate Trump in a highly visible pro-Putin direction on Ukraine by rejiggering the party platform to remove a stated commitment to lethal aid for Kyiv.
In early August, just after Trump had publicly invited Russian hackers to search for Hillary’s “hidden emails,” Kilimnik traveled to New York with a newly defined line of march.
He and Manafort met discreetly at a mid-town cigar bar to discuss mobilizing the candidate behind their ever-gestating Ukraine peace deal. But there was a new wrinkle. Yanukovych wouldn’t just head up an emergent pro-Putin political movement in the east. He would be “elected” to lead a new “autonomous republic” in the “more industrialized region of Donbas.”
Manafort would later acknowledge to Mueller’s investigators that this was simply a “backdoor” means for Putin to gain control eastern Ukraine.
The stage was set.
But later in the month Ukrainian reformers leaked word that Manafort had once received black funds, never reported to the IRS, from Yanukovych and his equally pro-Putin political cronies. The resulting furor forced Manafort off the campaign and into political limbo.
His co-conspirator, the ever-resourceful Kilimnik, remained unphased. On December 8, during the Obama-Trump transition period, he reminded Manafort, who was hovering on the fringes of the President-elect’s brat pack, that there was unfinished business to attend to – the peace deal they had concocted.
In an email, extensively referenced by Mueller and his Senate counterparts, Kilimnik explained to Manafort how the proposal was to be implemented and how Trump (referred to as “DT”) could tease things along.
“All that is required to start the process is a very minor wink (or slight push) from DT,” Kilimnik noted, “and a decision [by DT] to authorize you to be a special representative.”
Once that happened, he said, Manafort could be in Russia “within ten days and could count on Yanukovych’s full support.
Yanukovych “guarantees your reception at the very top level,” he assured his friend. He also described the stooge-in-waiting as being confident “DT could have peace in Ukraine basically within a few months after inauguration.”
Elaborate though this preamble was, there was no immediate follow-through on any of it. The “why” remains elusive. Perhaps it was because of intensifying FBI interest in the Trump-Russia relationship and growing public unease about the same.
Also, as a newcomer to Washington, Trump had neither the savvy nor the staff to address even the most uncomplicated policy issues.
But cutting bait was not an option for Manafort and Kilimnik. They had convinced Deripaska, Yanukovych and possibly Putin himself of Trump’s exploitability and knew there would be no forgiveness if the prize slipped away.
So, they kept on plugging.
According to the Senate’s investigators, Manafort, Kalimnik and one or two close associates conferred secretly about the proposed deal in January and February. Kilimnik himself went public about it, giving an interview to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in which he spoke of the “Mariupol plan,” his name for the evolving concept, and his own efforts to promote it.
A related article, circulated by RFE/RL under the headline “Who is Paul Manafort’s Man in Kyiv?” received respectable internet exposure.
Given this history, it is difficult to believe the proposal went unnoticed at the CIA, the State Department and White House. It is equally difficult to credit Trump’s later attempts to deny any knowledge of it.
The following August, with Trump barely a half year in office, Kilimnik began expanding on the existing draft.
Anyone interested can flip to page 123 of the Senate report and find a copy.
It is a three-page update of Kilimnik’s original draft from two years before, now slugged, “A New Initiative to Settle the Conflict in South-East of Ukraine.”
Senate investigators wrote that it was designed “to gain Trump’s support,” though they didn’t explain how that would work.
On February 21, 2018, Manafort posted the document to Trump’s official pollster Tony Fabrizio, an old friend of Manafort’s from Ukraine. Based on the Senate findings, Fabrizio was under instruction to use it in preparing a public opinion survey to determine how Ukrainian citizens might respond to Yanukovych’s return to the political scene.
It is not clear whether the survey was ever conducted. But Yanukovych’s popularity or lack of it would not have mattered. The plan in this latest iteration called on Putin and President Trump to raise up a new political entity in eastern Ukraine, impose Yanukovych on it, and force the rest of the country to treat it as an equal partner and eventual merger candidate.
The proposal or something like it would fit snugly into any initiative Steve Witkoff might take to realize Trump’s current vision for Ukraine, except that someone other than the shopworn Yanukovych would likely be cast as the Putin stooge.
Kilimnik’s passion – nay, his obsessiveness — resonates through his final draft. Far from being a neutral explicator of dry political precepts, he rages and thunders like Moses newly arrived from the Mount.
Citing increased violence in the eastern borderlands, he accuses (then) Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko of having brushed aside the Minsk agreements and the ceasefire they prescribed. The only way to restore law and order is thus for Trump and Putin to wade arm-in-arm into this mess and get the new semi-republic up and running.
If everything goes as planned (i.e. as dictated by Kilimnik), the new “Autonomous Region of Donbas” (ARD) would have its own Parliament and Prime Minister (Yanukovych) and sufficient backing from the U.S. and Russia to hold its own against Kyiv in negotiating a permanent peace.
Collaboration between Trump and Putin would be the “key driver,” as Kilimnik explains it, in bringing the ARD to life and ensuring the involvement of “Mr. Yanukovych in the peaceful settlement process.” While promising cryptically “a fair and democratic decision with respect to Mr. Yanukovych,” Kilimnik stipulates that Trump and Putin would join in persuading the ARD’s parliament to install “Yanu” as its PM.
Trump, acting on his own, would then be expected to make a “practical effort” to convince Ukraine’s president to accept this new entity.
As for the final follow-though, Kilimnik would leave it to Kyiv’s parliament to “determine the legal status and timeframe of incremental reintegration of the ARD into Ukraine.” He speaks vaguely of President Trump’s “personal participation” in “returning political balance and stability in Ukraine [and] creating a stable. and effective pro-European legislative majority, [cap]able of implementing effective reforms.”
But until then, the ARD’s Prime Minister would serve, in Kilimnik’s reckoning, as “a legitimate and plenipotentiary representative of the ARD in talks with international structures within the framework of programs to rebuild the economy and overcome the consequences of the armed conflict.”
“Election of Mr. Yanukovych as head of the ARD with consent of the United States and Russia will significantly increase chances of peaceful settlement of the conflict,” Kilimnik concludes. “Implementation of the plan.… can in fact become a starting point for [a] return of peace to Ukraine, where the United States should play a leading role in restoring peace and territorial integrity of Ukraine.”
Sounds sweet, doesn’t it? But any way you read it, this is simply a crudely disguised prescription for cramming a pro-Putin “peace” down Ukrainian throats.
That this formula ultimately went bust owed to series of events that later arose from the Mueller investigation and developments in Ukraine.
Indeed, the writing was on the wall even as Kilimnik was finalizing his “New Initiative” in late 2017.
Manafort took the first hit when a federal grand jury indicted him in October for alleged financial misdeeds in Ukraine, based largely on evidence provided by whistleblowers there.
Then came an overheated reaction from Trump. Feeling increasingly threatened himself, he began pressuring Ukrainian President Poroshenko to shut down all internal investigations related to Manafort and to stop sharing the outtakes with Mueller’s prosecutors. To lend heft to this “request,” he froze delivery of a pending a U.S. military aid package for Ukraine, a tranche of 211 Javelin missiles, and raised doubts about whether there would ever be any follow-through at all.
Poroshenko got the message and ordered his prosecutors to lay off Manafort. On Christmas Day, 2017, the Pentagon reconfirmed the missile deliveries.
Quid pro quo, anybody?
By April 2018, the Ukraine-to-Mueller data flow had ceased entirely
But that proved to be small comfort to Manafort or Kilimnik.
The following June, a federal Grand Jury charged them both with obstructing Justice and manipulating witnesses in the Mueller probe.
Kilimnik figured the jig was up and slipped into hiding, ultimately in Russia.
Two months later, after a trial in Federal Court, Manafort was found guilty of eight felony counts of money laundering, tax avoidance and bank fraud.
With more charges in the works, he quickly struck a plea deal with Mueller, pledging to confess all in exchange for leniency.
Almost as quickly, he pulled a U-Turn.
With Kilimnik on the run and Ukrainian sources shut down, Manafort guessed rightly that Mueller’s investigators were suffering blind spots. Under cross examination he tried to psych out that they knew, and what they didn’t, and become increasingly cagey in his responses. During November his interrogators caught him out in “multiple discernible lies,” as they later explained to the court, and decided he had forfeited his right to a stay-out-of-jail card.
According to documents later leaked to the press, Manafort’s tendency to fudge and obfuscate was never so pronounced as when he was questioned about the secret peace plan for Ukraine.
Mueller’s lead prosecutor. Andrew Weissmann concluded that the defendant’s evasiveness about it was a token of its significance. In his judgment, the peace plan, or more precisely Trump’s implementation of it, was likely the long elusive quid pro quo at the heart of the Trump-Russia collusion issue — the price Trump was expected to pay for Putin’s help in winning the 2016 election.
In a statement to the judge handling the plea deal, Weissmann provided a teasing glimpse of his theory. Recalling the Manafort-Kilimnik cigar-bar meeting of August 2, 2016, he surmised that what had been discussed there – an early draft of the peace deal –“goes, I think, very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating.”
In a later book about the Mueller investigation, aptly titled Where The Law Ends, Weissmann elaborated on his point.
“The facts we’d established even amid Manafort’s attempts to muddy them were staggering,” he wrote. “On August 2, if not earlier, Russia had clearly revealed to Manafort – and by extension, to the Trump campaign – what it wanted out of the United States: a ‘wink,’ a nod of approval from President Trump, as it took over Ukraine’s richest region.
“It was a tremendous thing for Russia to ask for,” he continued. “It would seem to require significant audacity – or else leverage – for another nation to even put such a request to a presidential candidate.
“This made what we didn’t know, and still don’t to this day, feel monumentally disconcerting; namely why would Trump ever agree to this? Why would Trump ever agree to a Russian proposal, if the candidate were not getting something from Russia in return? Both Manafort and Trump were too transactional to give away something for nothing.”
Think about that statement. Here’s the quintessentially sober Andrew Weissmann positing a possible quid pro quo explanation for the slavishly pro-Russia peace formula for Ukraine originally espoused by Trump acolytes.
To the extent that any elements of it find echoes in any future proposals, does the quid pro quo still apply? Does the debt owed to Putin on the previous package carry over to any subsequent one?
Putin’s consolation prize:
As Manafort went down for the count, so did final hopes for the peace deal he and Kilimnik had been lobbying for.
Trump, when questioned about their activities by Mueller’s team, professed total ignorance. In a highly lawyered written response, he claimed “not [to] remember Manafort communicating with him any particular positions that Ukraine or Russia would want the United States to support.”
Mueller later confirmed that he’d been unable to “uncover any evidence of Manafort passing along information about Ukrainian peace plans to the candidate or anyone else in the campaign or the Administration.”
And yet, years later, ex-president Trump hinted that he’d known far more about Putin’s Ukraine-related machinations than he had ever let on publicly. He also intimated that he had finally been obliged to push back.
“I was with Putin a lot,” he told a friendly audience on February 26, 2022, as Russian forces were closing in on Kyiv. “Someday, I’ll tell you exactly what we talked about. And he did have an affinity — there’s no question about it — for Ukraine. I said, ‘Never let it happen, better not let it happen’.”
His phrase, “better not let it happen” suggests that at some point during his latter days in office Trump had decided that delivering Ukraine to Putin outright or even under some flimsy pretense wasn’t politically tenable.
There is no context for his remarks, but we know that over a period of four years he and Putin conducted more than 16 private discussions, mostly by phone, and met secretly on three occasions, including at the infamous Helsinki summit in July 2018.
The Helsinki get-together came shortly after the grand jury indictment of Kilimnik and Manafort and marked a quickening of the Mueller investigation. It may well be that Trump let Putin know privately during the Summit that this wasn’t the right moment for him to mount a bold new initiative against Ukraine, political or military, with all the blowback potential — “better not let it happen.”
If this was Trump’s message, his behavior at the follow-up joint press conference, where he fawned all over Putin and trashed US intelligence reporting on Russian election tampering, begins to make sense.
In respect it looks like a crude act of penance, an effort to compensate Putin for being stiffed.
Sycophancy had always been Trump’s default position with the Kremlin leader, and his performance at Helsinki was surely his piece de resistance. But if he was trying to mollify Putin with consolation prizes, the best was yet to come.
As it happened, the evolving political situation in Ukraine offered him new opportunities to do some favors for Putin while advancing his own special interests.
In early 2019 the presidential sweepstakes there were entering their final phase.
Incumbent Poroshenko tried to catch the latest wave of pro-western domestic sentiment by hopping aboard a newly enacted constitutional amendment calling for Ukraine’s eventual membership in NATO and the EU. Knowing what Putin’s reaction would be, Poroshenko also did everything possible to stay in Trump’s good graces. including hiring Manafort as a backchannel emissary to the White House and conferring frequently with Trump’s itinerant lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who was nosing around Kyiv, trying to dig up dirty on Joe Biden’s son.
Trump was pleased, and in an effort to catch some gravy for Putin, he began pressing Poroshenko to come up with a scapegoat to take the heat for Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections.
It looked like a win-win for everybody – provided Poroshenko could stay in office and continue to play every faction against every other.
One of his strongest challengers was Volodymyr Zelensky, a media star who had amassed a Trump-size fan base by playing a fictional Ukrainian president in a long-running, wildly popular TV comedy. To compensate, Poroshenko warned voters that anyone so green so Zelensky could be outfoxed by the Russians.
It didn’t work. Zelensky scored big in the eventual two-man runoff.
The upset blew Trump away, rendering moot everything he, Manafort, Giuliani – and Putin had done to set Ukraine up for the kill
Now they had to start all over again.
Reverting to the blunt instrument approach that had once worked with Poroshenko, Trump turned a “perfect” call to Zelensky on July 25, 2019 into a thuggish squeeze play, threatening to withhold crucial aid deliveries unless the new President of Ukraine did him “a favor or two.” These included smearing Hunter Biden and finding a local fall guy to be blamed for Putin’s own influence operations in 2016.
Zelensky, who hadn’t been an actor for nothing, fended off Trump’s arm twisting, and a CIA officer who had helped monitor the call, later blew the whistle on Trump’s antics.
An impeachment proceeding commenced. Trump, with Republican help, weathered it. Even so, severe damage had done to Ukraine’s own interests, just as surely as if the President had succeeded in roping Zelensky into a bogus peace treaty on Putin’s terms.
Zelensky himself had been relegated – permanently– to Trump’s blacklist. America’s credibility as an ally had been savaged. Kyiv’s ability to gird itself rationally against threatened aggression had slipped several notches. And Putin had been given one more reason to believe America’s commitment to Ukraine was purely transactional.
Six months after Joe Biden had denied Trump re-election and launched a more enlightened administration, Putin began building up an invasion force on the Russia-Ukraine border. The following February, he pulled the trigger.
Colonel Alexander Vindman, who had handled the Ukraine portfolio for Trump’s National Security Council, told Vice News that his former boss was largely to blame for the Putin blitzkrieg.
Through the cynical manipulation of U.S. aid commitments, he said, Trump had “arrested what should have been a very, very robust relationship with Ukraine” and had imposed a cost in terms of lost opportunities that had crimped Kyiv’s capabilities and slowed “ramp-up” efforts by the Biden administration.
“It is because of Trump’s corruption that we have a less capable, less prepared Ukraine,” Vindman concluded.
President Biden worked valiantly to rebalance the scales. Under his prodding Congress bolstered Ukraine’s fighting capabilities by appropriating historic sums in war-related aid (though not as much as Trump now seeks to condemn). Some of it immediately benefitted the U.S. economy it through purchases of American-made arms and materiel. Dozens of other countries, including most members of NATO and the European Union, pored large amounts into the same aid coffers and joined the U.S. in imposing crippling sanctions on Russia.
This united front helped to contain Putin’s forces and make the war astronomically expensive for them in terns killed and wounded.
But now that Trump has returned to the White House, he clearly is determined to complete the demolition of Ukraine he started in his first term, and to deliver the remains, perhaps for the most corrupt reasons, certainty for no moral ones, to Vladimir Putin who seems to own him.