I don’t say this often, but let’s give Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt.
During Trump’s instantly infamous Oval Office meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week, the Ukrainian president was determined to make one point above all: that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not to be trusted. Again and again, Zelenskyy noted that Putin has a long record of breaking promises. “Twenty-five times he broken his own signature,” Zelenskyy explained in clunky English. “Twenty-five times he broken cease-fire.”
Zelenskyy kept returning to this point because he knows Putin’s paper promises are worthless. Putin has made it very clear that he wants to reclaim as much of the old Soviet empire as he can get away with, which is why he invaded Georgia in 2008, turned Belarus into a vassal state, refused to remove troops from Moldova, annexed Crimea in 2014 and launched a full-blown invasion of Ukraine in 2022. As Putin once put it, “Russia’s borders do not end anywhere.”
Trump’s response to Zelenskyy? Putin didn’t break any promises while Trump was president.
This is the key to Trump’s entire understanding of the war. If he were president, he always says, the war never would have happened.