Bloody Amputation: Trump’s “Peace” for Ukraine

David Finkel

THE TRAJECTORY WAS always clear to anyone who was paying attention, and knew how to filter out the noise of Donald Trump’s empty threats of “severe sanctions to destroy Russia’s economy,” let alone 500% tariffs on Russia’s oil customers, if there weren’t an “immediate cease-fire” in the Ukraine war.

When Trump met Vladimir Putin at the Munich-in-Anchorage summit, the agenda was the betrayal of Ukraine. This was ordained from the moment of the Trump-Vance ambush of president Zelensky in their infamous February White House encounter, if not even earlier.

It was always Trump’s view, along with the Christian-nationalist far-right sector of the MAGA cult, that the war was Ukraine’s fault from the beginning and that its only option is to surrender on whatever terms Russia’s superior power imposes.

So Trump flew to Alaska blathering cease-fire, while Putin arrived with the proposition for working out a “permanent solution addressing the root causes of the conflict.” That sounds statesmanlike, except for the detail that for Putin’s Russia, the basic “root cause” is Ukraine’s existence as an independent country with the capacity to set its own course and defend itself.

That independent Ukraine is what needs to be eliminated, beginning with the amputation of a fifth of its territory and continuing on to impose a vassal regime. That’s Moscow’s “comprehensive peace” — and Trump of course folded like the cheap empty suit he really is when facing a situation he can’t dominate.

As a bonus, according to Trump, Putin advised him that getting rid of mail-in voting is necessary to guarantee “free elections,” an area in which the Russian president-for-life is a leading expert.

Meanwhile, every day in Gaza dozens of people die of starvation — soon to be hundreds at least — as unrestricted U.S. weapons, not available to Ukraine, flow to Israel’s genocidal slaughter.

European Rescue?

Following the Alaska debacle, European leaders scrambled to Washington to protect the Ukrainian president from a repeat of the February catastrophe.  They came deploying the mixture of flattery that Trump requires, with proclamations of solidarity with president Zelensky and phrases of “security guarantees” for Ukraine.

It’s entirely unclear what these hypothetical commitments might mean. Putin immediately responded with 270 drones and missiles hitting Ukrainian civilian and energy infrastructure targets. As The Economist online (August 18) explains:

“What Russia cannot get by fighting it is demanding to be given on a plate through the pressure that Donald Trump can put on Ukraine and on America’s European allies. At the top of Vladimir Putin’s shopping-list is the western part of Donetsk province, which is still firmly in Ukrainian hands. But it is not just the symbolism that is important to him. The real prize is to force Ukraine to abandon its strategically critical “fortress belt,” a 30-mile (50km) line that comprises four cities and several towns, which stands in the way not only of Russia’s goal of gaining the whole of Donbas, but also of its ability to threaten other regions.”

Not a problem for Trump, evidently. But how then can he get away with perpetrating this treachery?

Truthfully, in the final analysis the fate of Ukraine — like that of Palestine —is not of first-rate importance for the strategic interests of U.S. imperialism. Trump’s buffoonery in the face of a sharp operator like Putin is an American embarrassment, but nothing fatal.

What about the Russian threat? Three years of war have actually demonstrated its relative weakness. If it could not overrun Ukraine, much less could it challenge a middle-rank military state like Poland. What happens to Donetsk, Luhansk and the rest of eastern Ukraine is hugely important for that country and the region, but not for Washington so long as there is no threat of a Europe-wide war.

Since Russia’s all-out invasion in 2022 the United States, first under Biden and now Trump, gave Ukraine’s heroic resistance the weapons and crucial intelligence to prevent Ukraine’s defeat but not to win the war (which would also have been a terminal crisis for the Putin regime).

Today, the greatest dangers for Ukraine and its people appear to be exhaustion and demographic crisis, as the current population of 39 million is sharply down from 52 million at the point of independence in 1991.

For Trump’s family and cronies, Putin’s Russia now appears to present opportunities for business deals and enrichment — on far grander scales than his previous absurdist Mar-a-Gaza resort fantasy.

Meanwhile the genocider Netanyahu has given Trump the gift of a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. Little chance of that (unless the peace prize committee can be bought), but perhaps a special “Neville Chamberlain Peace in Our Time” medal could be struck in the president’s honor.

The small consolation in this episode is that Donald Trump, with all his bullying of people without the power to fight back, is exposed as a blustering fool on the world stage when there’s even a second-tier adversary. To some limited extent, U.S. “world leadership” is also weakened. These are good things, but not worth the sacrifice of Ukraine on the altar of cynicism and expediency.

[The Ukraine Solidarity Network (U.S.) is raising funds for urgently needed medical diagnostic equipment needed by front-line nurses.]