Russian Propaganda and its Case for the West to Abandon Ukraine

Donald Trump used the occasion of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s U.S. visit to repeat his boasts that he can end the war in Ukraine within days if he wins the November presidential election.

Hours before Zelensky addressed the U.N. General Assembly earlier this week, Trump stoked his loyal followers at a North Carolina campaign rally by declaring Ukraine “demolished” and praised Russia’s invasion as part of its imperial history because wars “are what they do.”

The Republican nominee in the race for the U.S. presidency is probably right that he can end Ukraine’s war if he gains control of the White House. He would be empowered to feed the defenders of Ukrainian sovereignty into the maw of Vladimir Putin’s voracious quest for an expanded Russian Empire by cutting all support – financial, military and moral – clearing the way for Russian victors to execute Ukrainians resistant to installation of a Moscow puppet government.

That was the plan when Putin’s invasion began 2½ years ago. It failed because the Kremlin had envisioned toppling Ukraine in a handful of days.

Trump’s plans for orchestrating Russian victory in a war in which Putin has struggled to gain territory beyond his first invasion a decade ago would erase the independent state of Ukraine and terrorize other countries Putin considers his rightful domain. Those include NATO member states Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, as well as parts or other countries spanning the Baltic to the Black Sea.

Zelensky met with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday. He was assured by both White House leaders that they were committed to supporting Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s bloody war and to the long-term success of Ukraine, including paths to eventual membership in NATO and the European Union.

“I have been proud to stand with Ukraine. I will continue to stand with Ukraine, and I will work to ensure Ukraine prevails in this war, to be safe, secure and prosperous,” Harris said after receiving Zelensky. “The United States must continue to fulfill our longstanding role of global leadership.”

Harris noted that “other would-be aggressors around the world are watching to see what happens in Ukraine. If Putin is allowed to win, they will become emboldened….History is so clear in reminding us the United States cannot and should not isolate ourselves from the rest of the world. Isolation is not insulation.”

Harris criticized Trump and allied pro-Russia Republicans in Congress calling for Ukraine to cede territory to Russia to end the war. “These proposals are the same as those of Putin,” she agreed with Zelensky.

In his later meeting with Biden, Zelensky thanked him for U.S. leadership in supporting Ukraine and for $7.9 billion in aid announced by the White House ahead of his visit.

Zelensky told a writer for The New Yorker earlier this month that Trump had no ability to execute a “just peace.”

“My feeling is that Trump doesn’t really know how to stop the war even if he might think he knows how,” Zelensky said.

In his speech to the UNGA earlier in the week, Biden said the West must keep up its resolve to fight Russian expansionism. 

“We cannot grow weary,” Biden warned. “We cannot look away, and we will not let up on our support for Ukraine.”

Trump declined to meet with Zelensky on Thursday but teased a possible contact on the eve of Zelensky’s intended departure.

“The president of Ukraine is in our country, and he’s making little nasty aspersions toward your favorite president, me,” Trump said Wednesday in North Carolina. “Ukraine is gone. It’s not Ukraine anymore.”

Trump, a notorious grudge-holder, has disdain for Zelensky who famously resisted his pressure to have Ukrainian justice officials dig up dirt on Hunter Biden, the son of his 2020 opponent Joe Biden. The U.S. House impeached Trump in 2019 after his call became public disclosing his threat to hold up a sale of missiles to Kyiv.

U.S. abandonment of Ukraine would be the death blow to NATO, a military alliance founded in 1949 that had kept the peace in Europe through the end of the Cold War. Under Article 5 of the bloc’s charter, all member nations are committed to come to the aid of any other allied country that comes under attack.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 so spooked the Nordic nations of Sweden and Finland that they applied for and received NATO membership, breaking centuries-old neutrality and enhancing alliance strength with their powerful military forces.

Trump’s four years as president signaled a troubling lack of commitment to Western allies in NATO, the European Union and North American neighbors. His harping on NATO-member states not committing at least 2% of their annual GDP to their own defense soured the U.S. relationship with Europe, especially after he broke with the Paris Climate Accord and the hard-fought Iran Nuclear Pact that had traded sanctions relief for Tehran’s verified reduction of uranium enrichment suitable for producing nuclear weapons.

Trump’s behavior at a Helsinki summit with Putin in 2018 further alarmed allies — and Americans. Asked at a press appearance with Putin whether he believed U.S. intelligence reports that Russia had interfered in the U.S. election that brought him to the White House, Trump asked Putin if he’d interfered, then said he took the Kremlin leader’s word over his own national security officials.

U.S. intelligence and cybersecurity experts are warning of Kremlin trolls and propagandists ramping up interference in this year’s presidential election.

The predominantly Kremlin-backed meddlers (Iran and China have their own disinformation operations) are planting false narratives aimed at undermining Western support for Ukraine and denigrating Kamala Harris to boost prospects for Trump’s re-election.

Trump’s campaign has been aided by Russian and other foreign adversaries through an expansive network of pro-Russia propaganda. FBI Director Christopher Wray, a Republican appointed by Trump in 2017, warned earlier this month that Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election is infused with anti-Ukraine.

Wray revealed how covert funding from the Russian government to U.S. collaborators is fueling division and undermining trust in elections. Influential Americans aligned with Trump, like billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, have promoted fabricated stories on their platforms, spreading Russian disinformation to hundreds of millions of followers.

Former Special Counsel Robert Mueller who investigated Russian interference in 2016 warns in a just-published book that Americans are even less prepared to combat Russian election meddling this year than in 2016.

“We were not prepared then and, despite many efforts of dedicated people across the government, we are not prepared now. This threat deserves the attention of every American. Russia attacked us before and will do so again,” Mueller tells the authors of Interference: The Inside Story of Trump, Russia and the Mueller Investigation by prosecutors Aaron Zebley, James Quarles and Andrew Goldstein.

“As we detailed in our (2019) report, the evidence was clear that the Russian government engaged in multiple, systematic attacks designed to undermine our democracy and favor one candidate over the other,” Mueller writes. “That candidate was Trump.”

A report last week by Microsoft Corporation’s intelligence unit warns Russia has been accelerating covert influence against Harris. Among the staged videos cited was a now-debunked claim that Harris was involved in a hit-and-run accident that left the woman posing as a victim paralyzed. The fake story was viewed more than two million times before the security team determined it was a product of Kremlin-financed disinformation.

The report by Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center (MTAC) read to Congress last week identified Russian election interference as aimed at “degrading public support for Ukraine and eroding confidence in American democracy in general.”

The threat of “Ukraine fatigue” appears to be mostly limited to Trump’s U.S. voter base and a handful of less significant countries whose nationalist leaders also embrace Putin’s strategy of divide and conquer. Trump had only to whisper to MAGA acolytes in the U.S. House of Representatives to delay by more than six months the Biden administration’s $61 billion military aid package for Ukraine last year while Russia intensified attacks and Ukraine troops ran out of ammunition.

The vast majority of U.N. member states have supported Ukraine in its resistance to Putin’s aggression, voting 143 to 5 on the world body’s resolution condemning Russia’s invasion at the General Assembly two years ago. The five no votes were cast by Belarus, North Korea, Nicaragua, Syria and Russia, a rogue’s gallery of dictators that Trump apparently wants to join.

The outgoing president of the UNGA, Dennis Francis, has assured the world’s media that the global body will continue to stand with Ukraine regardless of who wins the U.S. presidency in November.

In his meeting with Biden on Thursday, Zelensky presented his “victory plan” and appealed for more military aid and diplomatic efforts to force Putin to accept a just peace and accountability.

Ukraine has been pleading for months for Western allies to lift restraints on the use of long-range missiles they have donated to strike Russian bases from which bombing raids over Ukrainian territory are launched.

Putin has warned that a U.S. or NATO green light to attack military targets inside Russia would escalate the war. He frequently reminds Western leaders standing with Ukraine that Russia is a nuclear-armed power and ready to deploy that advantage.

Ukraine became the world’s third-largest nuclear power after the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union, one of only four Soviet republics where the Kremlin’s nuclear missiles and warheads were based. Three years after independence, Ukraine agreed to surrender those nuclear weapons to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty, in exchange for assurances from Russia, the United States and Britain that Ukrainian sovereignty and independence would be respected in existing borders.

Zelensky’s appeal for the United States to lift restraints on long-range missile attacks inside Russia is destined to land on deaf ears if and when he lays it out for Trump. The Republican nominee has repeatedly told pro-MAGA media that as president he will cut off all support for Ukraine to ensure its defeat by Russia.

It is unclear what quid pro quo Trump gets in return for sacrificing Ukraine to Russia. Most countries and territories Putin eyes for his stumbling expansion were parts of other empires conquered during the rapacious reign of Peter the Great or annexed by Josef Stalin under the secret Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939. Trump easily succumbs to the flattery of dictators, from Hungary’s Viktor Orban to North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un.

Putin’s threats against ex-Soviet republics and former Warsaw Pact countries are motivated by his objection to those independent states joining Western democratic alliances. He views the expansion of NATO as predatory and refuses to recognize the right of independent countries to choose their own allies.

Much of the Kremlin anti-Ukraine and anti-Harris propaganda is motivated by Putin’s struggling invasion of Ukraine. He needs Trump in the White House to derail Kyiv’s most powerful ally.

Russia’s population of 141 million is almost four times Ukraine’s remaining 36 million. That disparity has allowed Putin to throw hundreds of thousands of young Russian lives into the meat grinder of a war against a nation fiercely committed to saving independence.

According to the latest British Defense Ministry assessment of war casualties, Russia’s daily battlefield losses in Ukraine rose to their highest levels over the past three months. Daily tallies of the killed and injured were less than 400 in the first months after Russia’s invasion. Those tolls have steadily climbed, peaking at 1,262 casualties a day in May and leveling off to more than 1,100 a day through August and forecast to continue to top 1,000 a day.

Russia’s superiority in human cannon fodder explains why its casualties are a multiple more than Ukraine’s. Russian forces are not just depleted but demoralized. This can be seen in the faces of terrified Russian soldiers waving white flags at the surge of Ukrainian fighters who crossed into Russia’s Kursk region last month and now occupy about 500 square miles of Russian territory.

The cross-border strikes in Kursk, a deadly massacre by Tajik militants at a Moscow area music venue in March and occasional Ukrainian drones penetrating Russia’s air defenses have rattled the Russian public. Government control of media have shielded the population from the reality of war but Russians are increasingly aware of the instability they have provoked.

Successive mobilizations have enlisted at least 300,000 new fighters in this third year of Putin’s war, the first having sent a million draft-age men fleeing the country. Putin’s recent announcement of another call-up of 180,000 troops is expected to spur another mass exodus of young men.

Sanctions-busting states have kept the Russian economy afloat. Profits from trade of dual-use technology and sales of Russian oil, natural gas, gold, diamonds and other valuable commodities have been poured into the military-industrial complex producing weapons and ammunition and providing good-paying jobs to those not pulled into military service.

Most Russians remain disengaged from the war their president wages with little regard for its social destruction in the homeland. There is little chance of another internal rebellion like the one staged by Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin a year ago. A former ally of Putin, Prigozhin turned back his armored column’s march to oust incompetent Kremlin war leaders but nevertheless paid with his life when his private plane was blown out of the sky in August 2023.

“Ukraine fatigue” in rising in Russia as well as among some Western conservatives. But those closest to the stagnant war – more than a dozen states that are NATO members – understand that abandoning Ukraine to Putin’s imperialist pipedream is reminiscent of the appeasement strategy in late 1930s Europe that allowed Hitler and Stalin to seize much of Northern Europe a year before the outbreak of World War II.

Trump’s willingness to abandon Ukraine as a conflict of little consequence to U.S. security evokes the folly of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who dismissed Adolf Hitler’s seizure of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland in 1938 as “a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing” — an ominous prelude to full-scale world war a year later.