Trump Reluctantly Comes Around to Backing Ukraine. Will He Stick With It?
President Trump is formalizing a new plan to sell American weapons to European allies, who would pass them onto Kyiv. But he made it clear this wasn’t his war.
Nearly six months after his inauguration, when President Trump pledged he would measure his success by “the wars we end” and “the wars we never get into,” he has now adopted an approach toward Russia that, at least on the surface, looks very much like his predecessor’s: arming the Ukrainians to fight off an invasion.
For Mr. Trump, the decision to sell more arms to Ukraine — albeit through European nations that will foot the bill — and threaten Russia with deep sanctions on energy exports in 50 days if it does not negotiate a peace marks a complete reversal of the approach he took in his first months in office. But he got to this point in a most circular fashion.
And if these past few months are any indication, there is reason to doubt he will stick with it. Even his statements of support for Ukraine on Monday, as he sat in the Oval Office with Mark Rutte, the secretary general of NATO, made clear that Mr. Trump planned to keep his distance from direct ownership of what might come next unless it is a peace agreement. “This is not Trump’s war,” he told reporters. “This is a Biden war, this is a Democrat war.”
Moreover, the president was clearly sensitive to the charge that in his first half-year in office, he was deceived by President Vladimir V. Putin, hoping that the Russian leader would reciprocate for the fact that Mr. Trump was agreeing, pre-emptively, to many of Mr. Putin’s demands. “He fooled Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden — he didn’t fool me,” Mr. Trump insisted.
If so, the president is a late and very reluctant convert to the approach of trying to confront and isolate Mr. Putin. It wasn’t long ago he was in a very different place.
During last year’s presidential campaign, Mr. Trump vowed a quick resolution of the war because he said he alone had the stature to deal with the Russian leader. Once he took office, he blamed the Ukrainians for Russia’s invasion of their own country. Then he clashed with President Volodymyr Zelensky in an extraordinary Oval Office display, telling him, “You don’t have the cards.” He gave Russia a pass on tariffs and praised Mr. Putin for his strength, and provided assurance that Ukraine would never join NATO.