The border between Ukraine’s Dnipro and Donetsk regions on Oct. 25. It has become a memorial for brigades fighting in the country’s east.
Photographer: Christopher Occhicone/BloombergTrump Doesn’t Have to Be Bad News for Ukraine
His “peace-in-a-day” is ludicrous, but if he does the groundwork he can avoid capitulation and engineer a win.
Donald Trump says he can end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in a day, and he’ll soon be in the White House to prove it. It isn’t impossible, it just depends on which day. But short of capitulating to Moscow, the dramatic resolution he wants is conceivable only if he starts laying groundwork now and drops his fanboy approach to Vladimir Putin.
Trump had Elon Musk sit in on a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy last week, and has now ruled out inviting one of the few people in his orbit with foreign policy experience — former secretary of state Michael Pompeo — into his cabinet. According to the Washington Post, they talked about issues of territory in a phone call with the Russian President. None of these are good signs.
Trump and his team need to rethink what winning and losing in Ukraine would mean — and they have time if they’re willing to use it. Because to give Moscow what it wants out of ignorance would represent an historic failure that stores up deep trouble for Europe, the US and likely Taiwan, let alone Ukraine.