When Donald Trump pledged to end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of re-entering the White House last year, no one with any depth of insight into the conflict believed him. But Mr Trump took his own words seriously enough to feel the lack of a ceasefire as an affront to his self-image as a master dealmaker. After a period when it seemed that Kyiv’s European allies had steered the US president away from pro‑Kremlin partisanship, he has reverted to the grotesque view that Ukrainian capitulation is a necessary precondition for peace.
These are the perilous circumstances in which President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met Andy Burnham on Wednesday in Downing Street. In recent days, the US president has called for a change of government in Ukraine. He claimed that a partial ceasefire had been agreed, while Russia escalated its bombardments. According to Mr Zelenskyy, the latest missile strikes have come without the intelligence warnings from the US that have, in the past, facilitated self-defence. There have been reports of Ukrainian soldiers losing access to the Starlink satellite network, controlled by Elon Musk, the US tech oligarch. This raises suspicion of coordinated pressure to tip the scales in Russia’s favour after many months when Mr Putin’s forces have failed to deliver significant advances and his country’s economy has been suffering from the effect of Ukrainian missile and drone counterstrikes.
Mr Trump is unhappy with Ukraine targeting Russian oil refineries. He claims that this is the cause of high energy prices afflicting American consumers and threatening Republican prospects in next month’s midterm elections. The domestic imperative to keep pump prices down led Mr Trump to do a grubby deal to import diesel from Russia, in flagrant breach of international sanctions.
The real driver of global energy prices is not Ukraine defending itself from Russian attack, but Mr Trump’s failing war against Iran. However, the US president is incapable of admitting any fault. Blaming Mr Zelenskyy enables him to deny his own culpability and, with malevolent encouragement from Mr Putin, to revive the preposterous notion that Ukrainian intransigence rather than Russian aggression is the reason why his promise to broker a peace deal remains unfulfilled.
Disrupting Mr Trump’s pro-Russian delusions is not easy, but it has been done before. It is not a gratifying diplomatic task to indulge the monstrous vanity of the US president by trying to impress upon him a view of his country’s national interest, that Mr Putin is not an ally of his country or his personal friend, which is self-evident to any rational observer.
Mr Burnham rightly resists invitations to denounce the US president in public. He recognises that Ukraine’s cause and, by extension, also the cause of European democracy more widely, is better served by making the case in private. The best response to Mr Trump’s perfidy is for Mr Zelenskyy’s friends to reaffirm their support, as Mr Burnham has done, thereby signalling that Ukraine will not be beaten by deals between the Kremlin and the White House.
Russia is failing to achieve its war aims because the invasion was conceived in delusional hatred for the very idea of independent Ukrainian nationhood, which routinely underestimates that country’s will to resist. That is a flaw in Mr Putin’s plans that no amount of collusion with Mr Trump can fix.
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