To add insult to injury, Mr Trump blamed Mr Zelenskyy, a democratically elected leader, for not holding elections even as his country is under attack daily from Russia
Is the US President Donald Trump ready to throw Volodymyr Zelenskyy under the bus as he pushes on with his peace plan with Russia that is likely to be heavily slanted against Ukraine? Loss of Russian-occupied territory, perhaps as much as 65,000 square kilometres, is not the only thing that Ukraine will lose if the indications of Mr Trump’s plans for ending the war are anything to go by.
Mr Trump doubled down on his criticism of Mr Zelenskyy as a “dictator without elections” and a “clown” while blaming him as the aggressor who started the Ukraine war leaving his own Republican Party members and European leaders aghast at such misrepresentation of Ukraine as the country that went to war. The world knows Vladimir Putin ordered his troops into Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
To add insult to injury, Mr Trump blamed Mr Zelenskyy, a democratically elected leader, for not holding elections even as his country is under attack daily from Russia. It is clear from Mr Trump’s fulminations as to whose side he is on in his avowed role of peacemaker, which is more akin to that of a dealmaker prepared to go all out to please Mr Putin as he shapes what he believes is going to be the new world order.
There was little correlation between fact and fiction as Mr Trump levelled charges at Ukraine, accusing it of burning the cash that the US gave as aid, besides weapons and ammunition. The US President even exaggerated the aid given by a good 100 per cent while hinting at Mr Zelenskyy wasting about $175 billion that the US gave to support Ukraine in the war. The US President seemed to have been responding thus to Mr Zelenskyy’s charge that he was living under “this (Russian) disinformation space”.
It does not seem to bother Mr Trump that in pushing his agenda for settlement of the Ukraine war he is shattering the Trans-Atlantic alliance with Europe that has shaped the world order post-World War II and was instrumental for much of the peace and prosperity of the modern era. The Europeans had stood by Ukraine in the three years since the invasion and Mr Trump seems prepared to risk such unity as he cosies up to the Russians at the expense of all European allies, excluding them as well as Ukraine in talks in Riyadh avowedly to bring an end to the war.
Thus far it is only posturing by Mr Trump, but it does appear that the US administration is working to undermine democracy at home as well as in Europe, as critics are freely pointing to. If he does switch sides and drops the sanctions imposed on Russia for starting the Ukraine war, the US President will be contributing liberally to destroying the rules-based world order that has brought relative peace to the world, even as cooperation helped end the Covid pandemic.
Emboldened by Mr Trump’s comments on Mr Zelenskyy, Mr Putin may well declare victory over Ukraine and Nato on the third anniversary of the war that falls on Monday, signifying that he had defeated the West itself. The change in regime in Washington may be to blame for this but that might hardly rattle Mr Trump who has upended the world in just a month in office.
