Helter-Skelter Week
Less than a month in Trump’s second term, this Helter-Skelter week for Ukraine policy has indicated a deviation from the Pro-Ukraine agenda of former President Joe Biden, impressive experienced observers.
The president has sent Hegyseth, vice president JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the special envoy of Ukraine Keith Kellogg to Europe for a series of high -level meetings. On Friday they will attend the Security Conference of Munich, an international defense summit.
All the time, Trump has been making comments apparently out of the habit in Washington, telling Fox News on Monday that Ukrainians “can be Russians someday, or may not be Russians someday.”
This was warmly received by the Kremlin.
“A large part of Ukraine wants to be, and in fact it has already become, a part of Russia,” said spokesman Dmitry Peskov to journalists on Tuesday. “Then this corresponds to Trump’s words.”
This type of riffing erodes the very real support base Trump still enjoys in Ukraine. More than half of the Ukrainians now favor a rapid end for the fight, according to a Gallup survey in November, a radical development from the beginning of the war when such a talk was taboo.
In that sense, the message against the Trump war has given hope to many Ukrainians, 44% of which say they trust the president, according to a December survey of the New Europe Center, a Ukrainian non -governmental organization whose investigation promotes the Standards and practices of the European Union. Ukraine.
“I think President Putin wants peace and President Zelenskyy wants peace, and I want peace,” Trump said Wednesday. “I just want to see people stop being murdered.”
Similarly, Putin has always affirmed that he wants the end of a war that began unilaterally, and that he killed or has hurt more than 1 million people on both sides, according to NATO, including hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers.
Another 10 million Ukrainians, a quarter of the population, have fled violence, which eliminated 30% of the country’s economy in its first year.
“Russia is still ready for negotiations,” Peskov told NBC News last week when asked what would be needed to finish the war. “An agreement should come as a result.”
Although Putin has denied torture the detainees, state media and government officials have reported about accusations of abuse by both parties, such as a recent report by the UN Agency for refugees.
‘World in flames’
The Trump administration and its supporters respond to critics pointing out what they say are the failed policies that produced the current crisis.
“We inherit a world on fire thanks to a generation of called experts from the establishment of foreign policy,” said Brian Hughes, spokesman for the National Security Council, in a statement sent by email to NBC News. “President Trump is quickly reversing his terrible errors, and the United States is once again the dominant force for peace and stability.”
Where Trump sees a world on fire, Biden and his kind saw an urgent need to save Ukraine.
The country can track its roots as an independent entity for the Middle Ages. But Putin has used ahistoric revisionism to argue that Ukraine is not a legitimate country, Annexa Crimea in 2014 and launched a large -scale invasion in February 2022.
Western nations supported Ukraine with about $ 130 billion of humanitarian and military aid, with much, the largest portion, $ 88 billion, from the Biden administration.
That helped the first and impressive setback of Ukraine of the Russian forces that attack kyiv. However, the hopes of Total Victoria have faded since then, with Zelenskyy balancing gratitude for military support with frequent statements that it has been too little already often too late.
In recent months, Russia has made advances in the battlefield and continues nighttime missile attacks against civilians and energy infrastructure.
The realities of the impulse of Putin, along with the Volte face of Washington, have led to a clear change of humor in kyiv.
Zelenskyy now says that the territory of Ukraine could recover diplomatically instead of militarily, a retreat from the first days of the war.
“Ukraine and Russia are irreconcilable, so, of course, there will have to be some reasonable compensations,” said Yuriy Sak, an advisor to the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine. “We need to be realistic.”
Even so, many Ukrainians remain deeply opposite to make an agreement.
“There will be losses to maintain peace: territory, people’s life, destinations of people,” said Baklazhov, the Ukrainian tortured who is now a deputy in the Kherson Regional Council.
“Do we need that peace plan, is the question?” asked. “We should fight until the end.”
Daryna Mayer reported from kyiv and Alexander Smith in London.
