Via NBC News: Trump says Ukraine ‘should have never started’ war in Ukraine.
President Donald Trump suggested Tuesday that Ukraine was responsible for Russia’s invasion of the country three years ago, arguing Kyiv could have made a deal to avoid the conflict.
“You should have never started it,” Trump said of Ukraine while criticizing President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who had expressed concern that his country was not included in talks between the U.S. and Russia in Saudi Arabia.
“I think I have the power to end this war, and I think it’s going very well. But today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort. “You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
This is a stunningly stupid, enragingly awful, historically grotesque comment.
And we can add in delusional.
Trump went on to say: “I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land, everything, almost all of the land, and no people would have been killed, and no city would have been demolished, and not one dome would have been knocked down. But they chose not to do it that way.”
Trump’s obsession with “deals” is not only silly and juvenile but rather substantially undercut by his multiple bankruptcies and the fact that his vaunted tome, The Art of the Deal, was ghostwritten.
But let’s recall that Russia invaded Ukraine. Blaming Ukraine for the invasion is like saying (to borrow from a friend on FB), “If you saw what Ukraine was wearing, you know she asked for it.”
And for all the people who continue to insist that any hint that Trump and his minions aren’t influenced by the Russians, please note Moscow’s reaction.
Meanwhile, the reaction in Moscow to the change in direction of U.S. foreign policy has been more upbeat.
The U.S. president is “the first, and so far, apparently, the only Western leader who has publicly and loudly said that one of the root causes of the Ukrainian situation was the brazen path of the previous administration to draw Ukraine into NATO,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in a speech to Russian lawmakers Wednesday. “No Western leader has ever said this,”
“This is already a signal that he understands our position,” Lavrov added in a speech that covered the broader second Trump administration rather than the president’s specific remarks Tuesday.
As the AP reports: Ukraine’s Zelenskyy says Trump is living in a Russian-made ‘disinformation space’.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday of living in a Russian-made “disinformation space,” pointed comments that risked further souring relations with Washington as the American leader pushes for an end to the war.
Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he would like to meet with Trump, a day after senior American and Russian officials held talks that were partially aimed at preparing just such a summit.
Zelenskyy said he “would like Trump’s team to be more truthful” in his first response to a series of striking claims the U.S. president made the previous day, including suggesting that Kyiv was to blame for the war, which enters its fourth year next week.
Russia’s army crossed the border on Feb. 24, 2022, in an all-out invasion that Putin sought to justify by saying it was needed to protect civilians in eastern Ukraine and prevent the country from joining NATO. Ukraine and its allies denounced it as an unprovoked act of aggression.
As I noted earlier in the week, the Trump administration is treating the Ukrainians like children, which is wildly inappropriate. And it is currently siding with its invader.
I am trying to think of a bigger betrayal of an ally by a US president, but I am at a loss. I do expect that whatever “deal” Trump hammers out will be at the top of the list.
