The decision couldn’t have come as a surprise to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. And if it did, then his capacity to read the room is even worse than imagined.
Last night, the Trump administration paused all US military aid to Ukraine. The move came after an extremely tumultuous few weeks, which started on February 19 when Zelensky claimed that Trump was living in a Kremlin-orchestrated disinformation bubble. Trump wasted no time howling back by calling Zelensky a dictator because he canceled elections during a time of war. The spat accelerated on Friday, when the two men, egged on by Vice President J.D. Vance, had a rhetorical MMA-style showdown in the Oval Office, with the Ukrainian president pleading with the Americans for security guarantees and Trump blasting Zelensky for not being as eager to strike a peace deal as he is. If that wasn’t enough, Trump hit Zelensky again yesterday, warning him that Washington wasn’t going to put up with him much longer.
The Ukrainians are understandably dismayed by the Trump administration’s latest decision, as is much of the foreign policy commentariat in the United States. They just can’t seem to fathom that an American president, the so-called defender of the free world, would pressure Kyiv, the victim in this war, at a time when Russian glide-bombs still drop on top of Ukrainian cities and hundreds of thousands of Russian troops try to inch forward for more ground. What on earth is Trump thinking?
While it’s always a risk to try to contemplate where Trump’s head is at, I get the sense that this case is pretty straightforward: Trump is tired of Zelensky’s haranguing , doesn’t believe the Ukrainians have the capability to win the war militarily and is convinced that a longer war will ultimately result in a weaker hand for Kyiv when negotiations do happen. There’s also a fair amount of ego and legacy at play here as well; to the extent that Trump had anything to say about foreign policy during the campaign, it was about getting Zelensky and Putin into the room to hammer out a peace deal that would end a war that has killed upwards of a million people. He clearly aims to follow those words with action. Whether the motivation is to save people’s lives or to get himself a Nobel Peace Prize, the intent is the same: bring Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War Two to a close.
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