With his pivot on Ukraine, Trump may be washing his hands of the war

Eight months into his second term, US President Donald Trump has made a declaration about Ukraine that sounded vaguely like the ones his predecessor Joe Biden used to make.

With the right mix of courage, ingenuity and weapons from Nato, he asserted on Sept 23, Ukraine could force Russia to retreat from the territory it has seized in 3½ years of brutal war.

But scratch the surface, and a deeper desire seemed buried in Mr Trump’s reversal of position during the United Nations meetings in New York this week.

Mr Trump appears to want to wash his hands of the Ukraine conflict, after having no success bringing Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table, and a dwindling chance of acting as mediator between the two warring parties.

Like many policy declarations by Mr Trump, it is hard to divine his true beliefs, and impossible to assure he will not change position again. He is nothing if not mercurial.

His foreign policy views, former aides say, are more often driven by pique and a sense that he has been disrespected than by strategic analysis.

And his own key advisers seemed taken by surprise by his sudden conclusion that Ukraine, after years of struggle, is suddenly capable of winning back the one-fifth of the country that Mr Putin’s troops now occupy.

On the same afternoon that Mr Trump issued his conclusion on Ukraine, Secretary of State Marco Rubio – who is also acting as national security adviser – repeated the administration’s old maxim that the war in Ukraine “cannot end militarily”, predicting that “it will end at a negotiating table”.

The White House, asked to clarify the contradictions between the two statements, did not immediately respond to a series of e-mailed questions.

It is possible, said several experts who have followed the President’s search for tactical advantage in dealing with Russia and Ukraine, that nothing much has changed here at all.

“The reversal is one of analysis and not policy,” said Mr Richard Fontaine, chief executive of the Centre for a New American Security and a former aide to the late Senator John McCain.

“Trump is oscillating between extreme views of the situation – previously, Ukraine couldn’t win because Kyiv didn’t have cards to play, and now it can win all of its territory back because Russia is merely ‘a paper tiger’.

“Either view seems to minimise America’s role in the war,” concluded Mr Fontaine, who has written extensively about strategies to help Ukraine.

“He suggests no change in US policy. There is no new call for a ceasefire or peace agreement, no new sanctions, no new deadlines and no new military support for Ukraine, beyond the weapons Nato buys from the United States.”

For those reasons, US allies at the UN seemed unimpressed.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer noted during a news conference with Mr Trump in Britain a week ago that Mr Putin responded only to heavy pressure led by the US; Mr Trump’s suggestion that he would stand on the sidelines, one senior British official said, did not seem likely to change the status quo.

Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, the former Senate majority leader who has been a long-time supporter of Ukraine, issued a statement after Mr Trump’s announcement that first welcomed the President’s seeming support for Ukraine – and then accused his own administration of undermining that support.

“The President has identified Russia as the aggressor,” he wrote, adding that “his administration should act accordingly”.

“If senior Department of Defence officials continue to blame Nato allies for provoking Russia, freeze or limit security assistance to Ukraine, or oppose further investments in security cooperation with Ukraine and vulnerable Nato allies, in defiance of the support expressed overwhelmingly by House Republicans last week, they are undermining President Trump’s efforts to end the war,” he said.

Mr McConnell added: “The commander in chief should not tolerate such freelance policymaking that weakens his leverage and undercuts investments in peace through strength.”

While the senator was careful not to be too specific, he appeared to be referring to announcements by Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth and his top aides about reductions in military training and other help to vulnerable nations sharing a border with Russia.

That has led some experts to urge a focus on what the administration spends, rather than what the President says, in order to measure American support for Ukraine.

Ms Laura Cooper, a former senior official in the Pentagon during the Biden administration who was responsible for Russia and Ukraine, noted on Sept 24 that during the first three years of the war, there was “a roughly 50-50 split in US and European security assistance to Ukraine”, both to fight the war and to build a military force that could deter Russia in the future.

“Today, the US share of assistance has vanished. The Europeans alone can help keep the Ukrainians in the fight, but it’s unclear how they can actually help them win the peace without US aid.”

Mr Putin, she noted, “is always watching US support for Ukraine in materiel, not just rhetorical terms. No other country deters Russia like the United States”.

For his part, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky did his best to sound enthusiastic about the President’s rhetorical shift, which he called a “game changer”.

Mr Zelensky had some reason to celebrate: His long-running effort to get back into Mr Trump’s good graces, after their famous confrontation in the Oval Office in February, has paid off.

Mr Trump was no longer pressuring him to give up land for peace, which could be politically suicidal for the wartime President.

Moreover, Mr Trump, openly annoyed at Mr Putin, may have been pressuring the Russian leader to make concessions, rather than Mr Zelensky.

If so, the Kremlin sounded unimpressed: Mr Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said dismissively, “The assertion that Ukraine can win back something by fighting is mistaken”.

Then he told a Russian radio station that “Russia is in no way a tiger. It’s more associated with a bear. And there is no such thing as a paper bear.”

But after Mr Trump left New York, it was clear that Mr Zelensky was back where he had always been: in severe need of money, technology, intelligence, fresh troops and support for a war that has lasted almost as long as the US’ involvement in World War II.

In his speech to the UN on Sept 24, Mr Zelensky told the representatives of the member nations that he had learnt a few things. The conflict with Russia was worsened by the “collapse of international law and the weakness of international institutions”, a seeming reference to the world body itself.

Security, he said, comes not from laws and resolutions, but “friends and weapons”.

“Ukraine is only the first, and now Russian drones are already flying across Europe, and Russian operations are already spreading across countries,” Mr Zelensky said, a reference to incidents in September in which Russian drones flew over Poland and Russian fighter jets lingered in Estonian airspace for 12 minutes, testing North Atlantic Treaty Organisation defences.

Mr Zelensky has always known that his most powerful argument is that, if successful in Ukraine, Mr Putin will not halt there.

“Stopping Russia now is cheaper than wondering who will be the first to create a simple drone carrying a nuclear weapon,” he said. NYTIMES