By Rich Lowry
Friday, February 21, 2025
Ukraine got invaded by Russia. According to
President Trump, it should never make that mistake again.
Miffed that Ukraine is miffed that it has been excluded
from the early stages of negotiations over the war, Trump has blasted the embattled country for sticking up for its
interests after being brutalized by Vladimir Putin for three years.
“Today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well,
you’ve been there for three years,” Trump said the other day. “You should have
ended it — three years. You should have never started it. You could have made a
deal.”
This would be a fair charge to lodge against Ukraine if
it had attempted to seize by force Russia’s Rostov and Belgorod Oblasts and
gotten bogged down in a costly war of attrition with no clear exit plan.
In reality, as we all know, Russia first invaded Ukraine
in 2014 (after the Maidan Revolution toppled a pro-Putin president) and then
followed up in 2022 with a more far-reaching attempt to decapitate Ukraine and
render it a Russian satellite state.
Ukraine’s offense is to have been victimized by an
expansionist Russia, a quality it has historically in common with Poland,
Finland, and the Baltic states, among others.
If Ukraine had shown better judgment than to be located
next door to a much larger, perpetually aggrieved and autocratic neighbor, with
which it shares a complicated history, perhaps this never would have happened.
Skeptics of the Ukraine war want to say that Russia was
provoked into invading Ukraine — missiling its cities, blowing up its
hospitals, destroying its electricity grid — by NATO’s assurances that Ukraine
was on the path to joining the alliance.
This wasn’t in the offing anytime in the foreseeable
future, though, and even if it had eventually happened, the idea that NATO
would have used Ukraine as a launching pad for an invasion of Russia is
phantasmagoric.
Vladimir Putin has set out his views on Ukraine at
length, and they amount to the belief that Ukraine doesn’t have a legitimate
national identity separate from Russia. This is at the bottom of the conflict,
as well as Putin’s coveting of Ukrainian land and resources and his fear of a
successful Slavic democracy next door giving his own people ideas.
When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky clapped back
at Trump, the U.S. president responded with a contemptuous salvo on Truth
Social. Trump deemed him a “moderately successful comedian” (Zelensky used to
have a career in entertainment) and, more significantly, a “Dictator without
Elections.”
It is true that Ukraine has been under martial law since
it (foolishly) got invaded by Russia. Yet Zelensky’s popularity has held up,
and he has much more democratic credibility than his adversary, a Vladimir
Putin who poisons and imprisons his political opponents.
Another Trump count against Zelensky is that he talked us
into supporting Ukraine in the war. If it hadn’t been for this scam artist,
Trump implies, a bipartisan majority in the U.S. — and our European allies —
wouldn’t have believed we should stop a nation hostile to the West from
installing a puppet government in a neighboring sovereign state.
All that said, Ukraine isn’t going to succeed in
re-establishing its pre-2014 or even pre-2022 borders, and any plausible
cessation of hostilities will involve painful concessions by Kyiv.
This doesn’t justify adopting an ahistorical perspective
on the war and blaming Ukraine for its plight. Realpolitik is one thing;
needlessly insulting an ally and condemning it in perversely moralizing terms
is another.
Perhaps Trump’s blunderbuss attacks on Ukraine will
soften it up to accept an unsatisfactory but unavoidable deal. Still, the
Kremlin is surely taking note that the president of the United States can’t
disguise his bitterness toward the weaker, hard-pressed country that Putin
wants to humiliate and dismember.
It used to be said that a liberal is too broad-minded to
take his own side in a fight. Trump is too consumed with pursuing a deal to
acknowledge Ukraine is on our side.
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