Last year, thanks to U.S. weaponry, Russia made no military gains on the ground while Ukraine succeeded in wiping out nearly one-third of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. But as aid has stalled in Congress, Ukrainian fighters have been forced to ration artillery, allowing Russia to start taking territory again and launching new offensives on five different lines of attack.
Why would pro-Trump Republicans want him to inherit a dire military situation? They should be helping put Trump in the strongest position to negotiate a peace agreement when he takes office. If Republicans cut off weapons for Kyiv, and Russia makes major battlefield advances over the coming months, it will be impossible for Trump to negotiate that stable, lasting peace. Without U.S. arms, Vladimir Putin’s forces could break through Ukraine’s defenses, march on Kyiv again, and potentially reach NATO’s borders. Ukraine could be so weak in 11 months time that Putin wouldn’t see any need to negotiate.
Setting aside the Trumpian bluster of “24 hours,” it’s worth doing something the former president’s reflexive critics so often fail to do — look closely at what he has actually said. Far from seeking to appease Putin, Trump’s message has been: Stop your aggression and agree to peace, or he will help Ukraine win the war. In fact, Trump has threatened to increase U.S. aid. “I would tell Putin: If you don’t make a deal, we’re going to give [the Ukrainians] a lot. We’re going to give them more than they ever got, if we have to,” told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo last July.
But that threat will be empty if Putin has already all but won on the battlefield by the time Trump takes office. For Trump’s warning to be credible, Ukraine needs to hold on to the territory it has taken back since Russia’s full-scale invasion two years ago. Even better if Ukraine is on the offensive.
Trump does not share the hostility that some on the anti-Ukraine right maintain toward President Volodymyr Zelensky and his country. Quite the opposite. During a 2022 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump called Putin’s invasion appalling. “It’s an outrage,” he said, “and an atrocity that should never have been allowed to occur.” He called Zelensky “a brave man.” During a CNN town hall event last May, he said, “I have a very good relationship with President Zelensky because, as you know, he backed me up … with the phony impeachment … when he said the president didn’t do anything wrong. And Trump told Bartiromo in July: “I know Zelensky very well. I felt he was very honorable because when they asked him about the perfect phone call that I made, he said it was indeed, he said it was.”
Unlike the anti-interventionist right, Trump has shown that he will flex American muscle against Russia. During a 2019 Oval Office interview, he told me that he ordered U.S. military forces to kill hundreds of Russian Wagner Group fighters in a February 2018 firefight in eastern Syria, and authorized a covert cyberattack against Russia’s Internet Research Agency, the St. Petersburg-based troll farm that spearheaded Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. He imposed crippling sanctions that halted construction of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 natural-gas pipeline with Germany — until Joe Biden took office and greenlighted the project to please Berlin.
And don’t forget: Trump provided Ukraine with lethal aid while he was in office. “I sent a massive number of antitank busters,” he told me. “I sent them military equipment and [President Barack] Obama sent them nothing” but nonlethal aid. He’s right. After Putin’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, the Obama-Biden administration refused Ukraine’s request for weapons, instead sending blankets, Humvees and night-visions goggle. (“One cannot win a war with blankets,” Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko complained to Congress at the time.) In December 2017, however, Trump approved the transfer of $47 million in Javelin antitank missiles. Those weapons might have saved Ukraine when Russia invaded again on Biden’s watch, helping Zelensky stave off Putin’s attempt to march on Kyiv in 2022.
Now, some Republicans want to cut military aid to Ukraine, which would allow Putin to finish that march on Kyiv. “He’s going for the big one, he’s going for all of Ukraine, not a little piece,” Trump said on Tuesday night. Republicans have the power to stop that from happening — and in so doing set Trump up for a major foreign policy victory.
To be clear, I’d like to see the United States do everything in its power to help the people of Ukraine, and it doesn’t matter who gets the credit. But House Republicans might consider the narrative Trump will have if he successfully negotiates a peace deal, as he has vowed to do: Russia would have never invaded if Trump had been reelected in 2020. It was Biden’s weakness on the world stage (including his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan) that emboldened Putin to try to take Ukraine. Biden then slow-rolled weapons to Ukraine, with no strategy for victory, allowing Putin to run roughshod over the country — until Trump potentially returns to the White House to set things straight. It would be a diplomatic triumph and foreign policy vindication.
But for that to happen, the GOP needs to give Ukraine weapons now. If they don’t, they — not Biden — will own Ukraine’s military collapse, and they would leave Trump with a weak hand if he retakes the Oval Office.
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