Trumpiades: “Russia is behaving decently toward Ukraine” - this is how he betrays Europe and Ukraine

On Monday, outside the White House, US President Donald Trump told reporters that Russia “is actually behaving pretty decently with Ukraine” and “not doing too much.” On the very same day, a Russian drone struck a park in the Kharkiv region in broad daylight, killing six people, including two children, according to a report by the Kyiv Independent. The night before, Russia had attacked Kyiv with more than a dozen ballistic missiles and targeted nearly thirty critical energy facilities across the country, while on Saturday Russian attacks in various parts of the country killed ten people and wounded 73. The American president had not a word to say about any of this, but he did praise Vladimir Putin for, in his view, showing restraint both in Ukraine and in Iran.

Trump was responding to a question about whether he was open to a trilateral meeting with Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping. According to the Wall Street Journal, Putin would use such a summit - held without Zelensky - precisely to extract a peace deal favorable to Moscow, although Trump claimed the meeting would mainly be about nuclear disarmament, not Ukraine, since Russia is “behaving decently” there anyway. Of Xi Jinping he said he had been “very fair with Ukraine,” because he hadn't really gotten involved, “and the same is true of Russia,” adding:

“They were far from what they could have been, and I appreciate that.”

It was impossible to tell whether he meant China's support for Moscow or Russia's conduct of the war in Ukraine. He said all this about a war in which, according to the Ukrainian General Staff, Russia has lost more than a million and a half soldiers, and in which, just last week alone, it deployed nearly 2,700 strike drones, 1,700 guided air bombs and 66 ballistic missiles against Ukraine.

But according to Trump, Putin is “leaving Iran alone,” and that's “very positive,” because the United States is “hitting Iran hard, economically and militarily, and Russia hasn't done anything there that we can see.” The facts, of course, tell a different story: Russia is a close ally of Iran, has promised to help Tehran in its war against the United States, and several outlets have reported on Russian arms shipments, assistance with missile development, and intelligence that allowed Iran to strike American bases in the Middle East. On April 30, General Dan Caine himself, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed that Russia is supporting Iran, and Putin promised Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian that he would provide all “necessary goods” - meanwhile, Ukraine sent experts to the Gulf states to help shoot down Iranian drones.

Yet, based on his Monday statements, Trump regards Putin, not Zelensky, as his real ally. He was no kinder to the Ukrainian president this time either, saying that Ukraine should consider sending someone else to negotiate, and adding: “We've given Ukraine a lot, and they've given us nothing.” He defended the diesel deal with Putin and the suspension of sanctions on Russia by saying that Washington was negotiating with the Kremlin over the release of a high-profile hostage. The United States announced on October 9 that it would buy Russian diesel despite the sanctions, while Trump called on Ukraine to stop attacking Russian oil refineries. According to lawmakers and critics from both parties, however, global oil prices are being driven up primarily by the war against Iran, and the deal rewards Moscow precisely at a time when it is continuously bombing Ukrainian cities and the energy grid.

The explanation lies in the November 3 midterm elections. Trump wants cheaper fuel for his voters, and for that he needs the Kremlin, so he is increasingly untroubled by what the Kremlin is doing in Ukraine. On the scale of “decent behavior” sit a park in Kharkiv where two children died, a ballistic missile attack on a capital city, and thirty energy facilities bombed before winter. Trump either doesn't know about any of this, or doesn't want to know - and if he calls that “not too much,” there's little point asking him what he would consider a lot, because Ukraine gets the answer to that every single night.

Trump is essentially just continuing the anti-Ukrainian offensive he launched a few days ago. In a post on Truth Social on Sunday, he more or less recited Kremlin propaganda, accusing Ukraine of not wanting peace. Yes, Ukraine could even capitulate - indeed, millions of Ukrainians could commit mass suicide - just to please the old orange-haired demon. In the same post he also demonstrated his geographical confidence, declaring that Ukraine has already lost its oceans - plural - and its seas - also plural. If I were in Volodymyr Zelensky's or the Ukrainian presidential office's shoes, I'd get that in writing right now, meaning I'd have the American president put it on paper that this is indeed what happened, because after a victorious war Kyiv could cite the American president and demand back for itself the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean, plus a few seas besides. Unfortunately, the only way to deal with this is with humor, otherwise we'd go mad.

When Trump talks about America having given and Ukraine having given nothing in return, it's worth stating plainly: Ukraine isn't even getting the Patriot missiles it already paid for, because Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth refuses to deliver them to Kyiv. At the NATO summit, Trump had promised Ukraine it would get the Patriot blueprints so it could manufacture them itself, but then he backed down on that too. The most shameful part of all comes from American arms manufacturers themselves: they grew worried that Ukraine would produce the missiles faster and cheaper, and - in the innovative fury the world has come to know well - might even improve on the Patriot, putting America at a disadvantage. And so Russian ballistic missiles, which kill civilians every single day, can now fly freely through Ukrainian skies. The icing on the cake is Musk's sabotage of Starlink, which plays a key role in defense against drones, and the cutoff of intelligence sharing that used to warn of ballistic missile launches. Ukrainians have even been robbed of those three to five minutes that are just enough time to duck for cover from an incoming missile if there's no time left to reach a shelter.

Meanwhile Trump and his administration just keep wrecking things, one after another. They launched a war against Iran without even informing their allies, and then, once they got bogged down, they complained about why no one was helping them. They squandered their Patriots on Iranian drones, even though Zelensky had told them he had cards to play: Ukraine is good at drone defense, and above all, cheap. Trump didn't want to hear it. The Saudis, on the other hand, kept their wits about them, listened to Zelensky, and struck a deal with him. Tehran closed the Strait of Hormuz, draining a significant share of the world's energy supply at a time when that's more sensitive than usual and hits harder than usual. For a while Trump tried to drag things out a little longer, threatened to bomb Iran into oblivion, and struck a deal with Iran roughly a dozen times. Too bad Tehran doesn't know about any of it, and the Strait of Hormuz has reopened quite a few times already - at least inside Trump's head.

Trump's main domestic political weapon used to be that he handled the economy relatively well in his first term, while his second term has turned out to be an outright catastrophe. Even though thousands of experts said tariffs wouldn't save America, the orange-haired idiot didn't listen to them. Trade began to stall, and suppliers duly passed the cost of the tariffs straight on to consumers. It's important to remember this, so we understand that American inflation began much earlier than today's analyses suggest - the war with Iran simply piled on top of it. The back-and-forth, the contradictory statements and moves, may have still achieved the desired effect in the first months of his second term - if there even was a desired effect: making the American president unpredictable, so that everyone would rush to cut a deal with him as quickly as possible. That effect - let's call it a spell instead - has worn off, because Trump simply doesn't have the mental capacity that this kind of performance requires, at a minimum.

His promises, too, seem like nothing more than words shouted into the wind. He has already attacked Europe for buying Russian crude oil, which was true only insofar as Hungary did - and still does - this; Europe as a whole had already bid farewell to Russian fossil fuels before Trump even took office. Yet now the American president himself wants to buy diesel from Moscow, and is lifting sanctions. So Trump is an idiot, but that's the lesser problem. The bigger one is that he has now also become a war criminal, and has turned against the West - or more precisely, against Europe. That is something we now have to treat as fact.

It's no accident that he attaches so much importance to the midterm elections. If the Republicans suffer a defeat - as now looks very likely - losing their congressional majority will be the smaller of his problems. The bigger one is that the Grand Old Party itself may turn against him, since 2028 isn't all that far off anymore, and the Republican senators and representatives who will have to fight for their seats in two years may well realize that there's no winning with Trump - and here he could even be facing prison, and no, not because of Ukraine, but because of his domestic corruption; just think of his suspicious crypto dealings, or the suspicions of stock-market manipulation surrounding him.

The outlook isn't great

A Republican defeat is expected in the midterms, but we don't know how big it will be. If the Democrats manage to take both the House and the Senate, there may be some chance that America won't be lost for good - though there's less chance that Trump will start behaving differently. A long struggle will begin, lasting roughly until 2028, between the White House and the Capitol, and it's precisely in foreign policy that the president will retain the most room to maneuver. There, Trump will run wild out of sheer spite: he'll drag it out all the way to Moscow if need be, even to Magadan - and we'll have to get through these two years while still keeping up support for Ukraine. That will be a hard task for Europe. In Paris, Le Pen is coming, and she's not exactly Kyiv's best friend - and that's putting it mildly. In Germany, the AfD is already gearing up, and is in talks with key players in the Russian energy industry. The European public hasn't risen to the occasion either: what matters to them is cheapness - money, sex, food, parties, fizzy drinks - and if anything's left over after the weekend party, it gets sent to Ukraine, but that's never first in line. I've been writing for years that the failure to act against Europe's Putin-sympathizers would push all of us toward the abyss, and here we are: by every indication so far, the European Union's two strongest states, France and Germany, are about to fall. France is a special case on top of that, since Macron's departure could spell the end of the European French nuclear deterrent meant to substitute for the American protective umbrella. Le Pen already declared back in 2024 that she would not share that with Europe.

Of course we can hope that Trump's brain will somehow sort itself out one day, but hope eats into the time we need to prepare for a life without America, and we can no longer afford to put that off. That's exactly the point of cognitive warfare: it makes you believe there's no real trouble, that everything can still be fixed and solved, that there's still time. We've been playing this “there's still time” game since 2022, and we refuse to learn that whatever we don't do today, there will be no time left for tomorrow - and it will never get done at all.

Anna Karczag