Trump’s social-media attacks on Zelensky say out loud truths about the war, Ukraine and Russia that our rulers would rather have kept quiet, argues Chris Bambery

This week saw something happen of which I have simply never seen the likes. A serving US President has said something approximating to the truth about the proxy war the USA has been fighting with Russia in Ukraine.

You do not have to like Donald Trump or support him in any way to realise his statements in recent days are not just startling – that’s his style – but are unprecedented. On Wednesday, in a post on his social-media platform, Truth Social, Trump wrote that Zelensky, a ‘moderately successful comedian’, has ‘talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won, that never had to start.’ 

Trump added that Zelensky ‘refuses to have Elections, is very low in Ukrainian Polls, and the only thing he was good at was playing Biden “like a fiddle”.’ He said Zelensky had done a ‘terrible job’ as the leader of Ukraine, deeming him ‘A Dictator without Elections’. 

‘In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the War with Russia, something all admit only “TRUMP”, and the Trump Administration, can do. Biden never tried, Europe has failed to bring Peace, and Zelenskyy probably wants to keep the “gravy train” going.’ 

Trump also said Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky had ‘no cards’ in peace negotiations, adding: ‘I don’t think he’s very important to be in meetings.’ 

‘I’ve been watching this man for years now as his cities get demolished, as his people get killed, as his soldiers get decimated. 

‘I’ve been watching him negotiate with no cards. He has no cards, and you get sick of it. You just get sick of it, and I’ve had it.’

He insisted several times that Zelensky was to blame for failing to prevent the war, saying that Russia could have been ‘talked out’ of invading Ukraine. Asked about Ukraine’s absence from peace talks in Saudi Arabia this week, Trump said that Russia ‘found it impossible to make a deal with Zelensky.’ He said he believed that Russia sincerely wanted a deal to end the war, but that President Vladimir Putin ‘doesn’t have to make a deal’. These statements have enraged sections of the US state apparatus, Zelensky, of course, and various European leaders, notably Starmer, Macron and Scholz.

Imperial admissions

But the rabbit is out of the hat. Here is a US President saying this war was avoidable; it resulted from a US-backed colour-coded revolution in Ukraine; the Maidan Uprising or Orange revolution. It installed a US and European Union-backed regime committed to Ukraine joining Nato and the EU. In response, Russia annexed Crimea and took over the Donbas, four oblasts (counties) in eastern Ukraine, where the majority of the population were Russian speakers. 

That in itself was a consequence of Moscow’s growing dread of the relentless expansion of Nato into the former satellites of the USSR in eastern Europe and former Soviet Republics such as the three Baltic states, despite verbal promises made by Washington to the last ruler of the Soviet Union, Mikhael Gorbachev. 

George Kennan, the man behind much of America’s ‘containment’ policy during the cold war, said in a May 1998 New York Times interview about Nato’s first round of expansion: ‘I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.’

Robert Gates, was US Deputy National Security Adviser from 1989 to 1991 (and later Secretary of Defense). He warned in 2000: ‘If you don’t get it right with Russia and China, none of the rest matters. And at a time of a special humiliation and difficulty for Russia, pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward … I think probably has not only aggravated the relationship between the United States and Russia but made it much more difficult to do constructive business with them.’

Russia’s eventual response, its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, was criminal but predictable. One just has to imagine what would happen if, say, China was to install a puppet regime in Mexico with which it signed a military alliance.

Trump’s references to Zelensky not wanting a peace deal is a reference to a deal agreed by both Ukraine and Russia in Istanbul in the Spring of 2022 whereby in exchange for Ukraine agreeing not to join Nato and becoming a neutral state, Russia would withdraw to the pre-invasion border.

It was a far better deal than anything Ukraine will get now. But none other than Boris Johnson, then British prime minister, arrived in Kyiv to get Zelensky to scrap it. Johnson was clearly Washington’s spokesperson. If that deal had been stuck, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian casualties would have been avoided.

An unwinnable war

As for Trump’s rather petulant attacks on Zelensky, behind the usual rhetoric, there is some truth. Zelensky was elected in 2019 on a ticket of peace with Russia. However, his term in office has expired and he refuses to call an election.

British Defence Secretary, John Healey, in a rush of blood to his head, responded to Trump by claiming: ‘He’s the elected leader of Ukraine, and he’s done what Winston Churchill did in Britain in the Second World War, suspended elections while at war.’

Leaving aside the ludicrous comparison (you don’t have to like the old British imperialist war dog to grasp he is in a different league from Zelensky), it’s inaccurate. There were constant by-elections during the war, many won by critics of Churchill, and a general election was held in 1945, while the war with Japan still raged. 

Zelensky has admitted that money supplied to Ukraine by the US has gone ‘missing’. It has not gone missing, it has gone into the pockets of corrupt Ukrainian officials. 

Last July Foreign Policy noted: ‘Top judges, politicians, and officials have faced corruption charges, and the Ministry of Defense has been at the heart of many corruption scandals, such as procuring overpriced eggs and winter jackets, buying 100,000 mortar shells that were never delivered, or accepting bribes from men who wanted to escape conscription.’ 

Last month, Ukraine detained the army’s chief psychiatrist for alleged ‘illegal enrichment’ charges related to earnings of more than $1m (£813,000) accrued since the start of Russia’s invasion. In a statement, the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said the man sat on a commission deciding whether individuals were fit for military service.

Trump is dumping Ukraine and Zelensky because he wants to pull the plug on that war and shift the resources Washington spends on it east to face China. In doing so, he hopes to win over Moscow from Beijing. I don’t see that happening.

This is also a realisation that Ukraine cannot win this war and is losing it. Ukraine has run out of troops (thousands of young Ukrainians are avoiding the draft), and without US supplies, it will run out of weaponry in a dreadful war of attrition where it is being pushed ever westwards. Mainstream media lies when it tells us that ‘plucky little Ukraine’ is winning or can win. It cannot.

The idea that Putin is the new Stalin intent on re-conquering Eastern Europe, or that he somehow wants to overrun all of Europe, is garbage too. Russia is a regional power, a sub-imperialism, with its own unpleasant interests, like all such states, but its priority is ensuring its own security.

Lastly, spare a thought for the European political elite. Macron summoned them to Paris having talked about creating a European army faced with Trump’s hints of a US withdrawal from Europe and from Nato. Starmer promised to send British troops to Ukraine as ‘peace makers’, an idea immediately rejected by Moscow. However, the others, having heard Trump say European troops in Ukraine would not be under a US security umbrella, ran away from the idea.

The idea Britain could intervene militarily in any way in Ukraine is laughable. The British Army currently has 213 in-service Challenger 2 tanks. That is not going to scare Russia in any way. The European states together do not have the military resources to match Russia, whose economy is in a far better state than Germany’s or France’s. The idea that Russia faces economic collapse is another lie fed us by mainstream media and our political elite. 

Trump is an unpleasant man whose policies are going to inflict damage on the population of the US. However, he has revealed something of historic importance: the people of the USA (and Europe) were lied to as to why their governments were waging a proxy war. As that sinks in, it will, hopefully, be remembered the next time the masters of war call us to arms.