The Western world is reeling from President Donald Trump’s sea-change in U.S. diplomacy in his first global norm-busting month in office.
In one fell swoop Trump rehabilitated ostracized Russia with a Feb. 12 phone call to dictator Vladimir Putin to discuss strategy for forcing an end to the war in Ukraine.
A day later, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced to NATO allies that the negotiations Trump has in mind would not end with Ukraine recovering its Russian-occupied territory or a path for its membership in NATO – outcomes for Kyiv the president now deems “unrealistic.”
Those envisioned Ukrainian concessions to Ukriane’s Kremlin aggressors were announced ahead of the start of “peace talks” between the United States and Russia that began in Saudi Arabia on Feb. 18 with neither embattled Ukraine nor its European allies offered a seat at the table.
Trump’s deviation from decades of U.S. rejection of Soviet and Russian aggression against sovereign neighbors—from Afghanistan to Georgia to Ukraine—shocked the world body of the United Nations on Monday when the U.S. delegate cast a “no” vote against a resolution condemning Russia’s brutal invasion three years ago. The 93-18 vote, with dozens abstaining, demanded Russia withdraw its forces from Ukraine. Trump’s envoy cast its vote to reject alongside Russia, North Korea, Iran and a rogues’ gallery of other autocracies against the free world.
The United States was also shamed by its absence from the show of democratic solidarity with Ukraine on Monday’s third anniversary of the Russian invasion. European and NATO leaders rolled into Kyiv on a train to show they stand with Ukraine in its valiant struggle to thwart Russia’s attempt to conquer its sovereign ex-Soviet neighbor. No senior U.S. official participated.
Trump surrogates, meanwhile, boasted of an imminent deal to strong-arm Zelensky into signing over Ukraine’s wealth of rare earth minerals and other natural resources.
What’s in it for Trump to upend longstanding alliances with the peaceful democracies of NATO and the European Union? A deal Zelensky is being strong-armed into signing by Trump envoys that would hand over $500 billion worth of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals and other natural resources as “reimbursement” for defense and humanitarian aid provided Ukraine during the Biden administration.
Zelensky refused to sign the contract presented by Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent earlier this month. Bessent argued on Fox News on Sunday that the de facto bill for previous U.S. aid would serve as “implicit” security for Ukraine as the presence of U.S. assets in the country could be expected to deter further Russian aggression.
“I’m not signing something that will have to be repaid by generations and generations of Ukrainians,” Zelensky told reporters at a press conference in Kyiv Sunday, on the eve of the Russian invasion’s third anniversary.
Zelensky said he was prepared to discuss the resources deal with Trump but only one that included reliable security guarantees to ensure a halt to the war doesn’t just freeze the status quo of Russia occupying 20 percent of Ukrainian territory and allow Putin to rearm and launch a fresh offensive in a matter of months.
“Every day, our people are resisting aerial terror,” Zelensky said at the news conference, noting that a recent overnight barrage of nearly 300 drones across Ukraine was “the largest attack since Iranian drones started hitting Ukrainian cities and villages” more than a year ago.
The Ukrainian president reiterated that he would not agree to any ceasefire or settlement of the war that did not include Ukraine in the negotiations. Trump’s special envoy on Ukraine and Russia, retired Gen. Keith Kellogg, told journalists during the Russia-U.S. meeting in Riyadh that Ukraine would be included in future negotiations but likely not European states, which have contributed nearly as much aid and weaponry to Ukraine as has the United States.
When Zelensky refused to sign the minerals deal on the spot earlier this month, Trump publicly branded the Ukrainian leader a “dictator” with a 4 percent approval rating and accused him of having started the war. Zelensky’s approval rating surpasses 50% and now exceeds Trump’s as his short honeymoon period of a second term in the White House has abruptly ended. Trump and his unelected sidekick Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, have hacked away at the federal government, taking down whole agencies and endangering public services like air-traffic control, infectious disease prevention, food safety and life-saving foreign aid.
While Putin and Trump colluded over their plan to force Ukraine to cease defending its sovereignty, Vice President J.D. Vance was busy chastising European allies at the Munich Security Conference, accusing host nation Germany of anti-democratic actions for suppressing neo-Nazi rhetoric and failing to curb immigration. Vance deemed the greatest threat facing Europe to be “from within,” not from aggressive adversaries Russia or China.
The Trump administration’s abandonment of Ukraine and accusations that Zelensky started the war have shaken European allies who are now worried about U.S. commitment to the core principle of NATO, that an attack on any member state obliges all 32 countries to come to its defense.
Ukraine is not the only former Soviet republic or allied state that Putin covets. Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were also constituent republics within the USSR before its 1991 collapse. Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and then-Czechoslovakia – all now members of NATO — gained independence from the Kremlin when the Warsaw Pact alliance disbanded months before the Soviet Union did.
In an ominous sign of Putin’s intentions toward those lost pieces of the former Kremlin empire, the British newspaper Financial Times reported Friday that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov proposed during the talks in Saudi Arabia that NATO withdraw from some of those Western allies previously under the Soviet yoke. The Kremlin denied making such a proposal.
Trump has stood by his concession to Putin that Ukraine not be allowed to join NATO, despite an “irreversible” promise by the alliance to admit it once the war is over and a functioning democracy is restored.
“They’ve been saying that for a long time that Ukraine cannot go into NATO,” Trump said of Russia. “And I’m OK with that.”
After 80 years of post-World War II U.S. alliance with democracies worldwide, Trump has thrown U.S. commitment to those partners in doubt and stirred discord in their politics and governance by promoting far-right forces over democratic leaders.
Sunday’s parliamentary election in Germany produced the fractured result feared by Western allies, with the center-right Christian Democratic Union polling only 28 percent and facing tough coalition talks to cobble together a majority in the 630-seat Bundestag. The far-right, neo-fascist Alliance for Germany (AfD) polled nearly 21 percent, with the more mainstream Social Democrats and Greens earning 16.5 percent and 11.7 percent respectively.
All mainstream parties whose election results cleared the 5% threshold for seats in the Bundestag have vowed to exclude the AfD from a governing coalition. Refusing to legitimize politicians glorifying the fascist forces responsible for World War II and the Holocaust is a tenet of modern Germany’s atonement for its wartime crimes. But with 21 percent of the parliament embracing neo-Nazi ideology the prospects for contentious legislating has increased dramatically and enhanced political tensions already riling Europe.
Vance and Musk both promoted the AfD in the weeks before Sunday’s election, angering mainstream party politicians and drawing accusations that the United States was interfering in a foreign election.
Alarm bells have been sounding on U.S. commitment to its post-World War II allies since Trump launched his first campaign for the presidency almost a decade ago. He has long denounced NATO, history’s most successful security forum, as a drain on U.S. defense resources and a European “con job.”
Trump’s first-term warnings of a U.S. pullout unless the allies spent more on their own militaries spurred many of the member states to boost their defense budgets. The number of states meeting or surpassing the 2 percent of GDP annual investment goal has risen to 23 of the 32 member states, up from just six at the start of the Biden administration in 2021.
French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Kier Starmer are visiting Washington this week and expected to push Trump to rethink what they see as a catastrophic realignment of Western interests in his enabling of Putin.
“I’m going to say to him, basically, ‘You can’t be weak against President Putin. It’s not you. It’s not your trademark. It’s not in your interest,’” Macron told a social media forum last week on how he planned to appeal to Trump’s fear of being seen as a loser.
Starmer is due in the White House on Thursday for a visit set weeks before Trump’s resurrection of Putin after almost a decade of diplomatic isolation following his first invasion of Ukraine in 2014. British foreign policy officials have suggested the prime minister will propose UK troops for a potential European ceasefire monitoring force in the event a halt to the war is agreed in the coming weeks.
Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy for the Middle East, appeared on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday and echoed Putin’s talking point that the war in Ukraine resulted from a “provocation” by Kyiv in discussing potential membership in NATO. He described the U.S.-Russia discussions of the Ukraine war last week as “positive” and “upbeat” and defended Trump’s insistence that “we have to end the carnage,” without any pledge to orchestrate a just peace.
Witkoff predicted that Zelensky will sign “this week” the deal to deliver half of Ukraine’s mineral and natural resource wealth to the United States.
Zelensky disputed that expectation. “To end the war this week, it won’t happen. It is not possible without guarantees for Ukraine. At the very least, I do not know how this can be done without meeting with us.”
It is unclear why Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, is absent from the administration’s diplomatic foray. Neither is U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in any visible leading role in the talks about Ukraine without Ukraine. Rubio, who has long been among the Russia hawks in U.S. leadership, has been overshadowed by Trump’s new appointees getting the message out to the public that the president is hellbent on ending the war he has long claimed he could resolve in 24 hours.
Michael McFaul, who served as U.S. ambassador to Russia during Putin’s first invasion of its sovereign neighbor, reiterated his concerns about Trump’s affinity for dictatorial strongmen and the danger of reintegrating a Russian leader indicted for war crimes into the community of law-abiding nations.
“President Trump has admired Vladimir Putin for many, many years,” McFaul said in an interview with Ukrainian national public radio over the weekend. “He’s calling President Zelensky a dictator and never criticizing Putin.”
McFaul warned that “all we’ve heard about is Ukrainian concessions, that Ukraine must give up territory, that Ukraine cannot join NATO, that Ukraine needs to give up its natural resources,” he said of the misguided White House strategy for bringing any lasting peace to Ukraine. “If you give Putin everything he wants he’s just going to ask for more.”
