The real underlying battle between Trump and Zelinsky
The kerfuffle last week between the United States and the Ukraine, instigated by the unprecedented ugly end to the press conference that concluded the visit of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to the White House, is actually quite understandable if one is willing to consider the perspective of both sides. Unfortunately, I have seen little such analysis anywhere. Instead we get emotional attacks. On the left Trump is a vicious politician who wants to carve the Ukraine up for the benefit of Russia. On the right Zelensky is a corrupt barbarian who simply wants the war to continue forever so that he can steal as much U.S. foreign aid as possible for his own private benefit.
Neither of these conclusions are very helpful. Nor do they provide any insight to what is really going on.
So, what are the different perspectives that caused this confrontation?
Trump’s position:
For original maps, created by the the Institute
for the Study of War (ISW), go here and here.
His focus is entirely on what is best for the interests of the United States. From the U.S. perspective, Russia’s invasion in 2022 is very wrong and should be stopped, but it is very clear now three years later that this is essentially a regional conflict with almost no chance of expanding elsewhere, unless we make bad decisions that encourage its spread.
Based on this, Trump wants the conflict to end as quickly as possible. He has no interest in helping the Ukraine recover its lost territories, no matter how wrong it was for Russia to take them. The last three years have proven what I concluded two years ago, that this war has devolved into trench warfare with little prospect of either side winning decisively in the near future. The two maps to the right illustrate this. Though Russia has made small gains in the past three years, those gains have been obtained in grinding agony and cost. To win the rest of the Ukraine will likely take years — if it is even possible for Russia to do so — as all signs suggest that the Ukrainian people strongly oppose being ruled by Moscow again, and will fight hard to prevent it. Russia meanwhile is draining its economy and prosperity as the war drags on.
Trump therefore is working to end the war now, by any means, not only to lower the risk of it expanding in the future and threaten America directly, but to demonstrate his own personal ability to make things happen. Getting a ceasefire would cement his legacy as a great president.
Failing to do so however for Trump means it is time to get out. The U.S. gains nothing by doing anything that will allow this war to continue forever.
Zelensky’s position
Regardless of the strong evidence that he has skimmed off a lot of the foreign aid given his country for his own personal benefit, he very clearly and sincerely is focused on winning this war against Russia and regaining all of the Ukraine’s lost territories. He knows that’s what his people want. He also knows that any ceasefire deal that requires him to permanently cede those captured territories to Russia and Putin would be the equivalent of one of Israel’s many ceasefire deals with Hamas. As soon as things quiet down enough, he fully expects Putin to renew the attack.
In fact, this was exactly what instigated the ugly argument between Zelensky, Trump, and Vance at that diplomatic photo-op last week. Trump and Vance were once again trying to get Zelensky to accept their insistence on a ceasefire soon — and all costs — and Zelensky was trying to explain that he had already signed a ceasefire with Putin back in 2014, ending that first invasion, only to have Putin attempt a more aggressive invasion in 2022, when he thought he could take the whole country in one fell swoop.
In other words, Zelensky and the Ukraine have no reason to trust Putin and Russia, ever. Any peace deal for them has got to include some real security for them, and that would include recovery of some of their territory in order to establish more secure borders. (For example, Russia has established very extensive fortifications several miles back all along the present line of conflict. To give the Ukraine some security in any ceasefire it would be reasonable to at least move the territorial line to those fortifications, making it hard for either side to push forward.)
A fundamental conflict
Thus, the two perspectives of Trump and Zelensky are in fundamental conflict, and we should not be surprised therefore by Trump’s very hostile response to Zelensky’s unwillingness to compromise much to gain a ceasefire. Trump wants the war to end now to reduce the risk to the U.S., and Zelensky cannot agree to any ceasefire that leaves the Ukraine in a vulnerable position.
Zelensky’s long post on X today, attempt to restart diplomatic negotiations, only confirms these conclusions. Nothing in his statement contradicts them. He is willing to negotiate a prisoner exchange and a truce in all air and sea operations, but he does not offer to stop the ground-fighting at the trenches. Instead, he expresses hope this first agreement could lead to others.
Trump’s decision to pause all aid to the Ukraine after their public dispute also matches these conclusions. If there is no chance of a ceasefire deal, then there is no reason for the U.S. to be sending more of its increasingly scant resources into this black hole. Let them fight it out among themselves. And if Europe decides it is in its interest to sustain the Ukraine, then let it do so. This war remains a regional one that does not involve the U.S.
By understanding these two perspectives it makes everything that has happened in the past week make sense. It also tells us the framework in which both sides must base future negotiations.
What will come if cooler heads
don’t take charge
Unfortunately, it seems to me that almost no one has made any effort to do so. Among the leftist globalist community there are screams that Trump is a barbarian who wants everyone in the Ukraine to die. On the right there have been similar screams, accusing Zelensky of being an ungrateful barbarian who simply wants to continually feed from the American trough.
Few on both sides — including Trump and Zelensky — seem interested in stepping back from all the emotional diatribes and look at the situation with some objective detachment. Instead, it seems to me that everyone — including Trump and Zelensky — have acted like petulant children rather than powerful political leaders whose job requires great responsibility.
Hopefully both sides will begin to cool down and begin talk again, if only to lower the political temperature.
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Related: THE MIND OF TRUMP: UKRAINE, GLOBALISTS AND BREAKING PARADIGMS
“I spoke with a Trump Derangement Syndrome suffering customer the other day and they reminded me that I said that I supported the funding and supplying the Ukraine during it being invaded by the Russians. Which I generally did agree with at the time, push back hard on Putin and stop his advance, show strength. And that was exactly 3 years ago now (Putin thought it would be 2 or 3 weeks at the most). My customer’s position was that “We should not be involved with the Ukraine, its none of our business”. OK.
In the Ukraine timeline we had Obama sending Ukraine blankets and the Russians took Crimea. Then we had Trump who sent hundreds of Javelin anti-tank missiles as Putin tested Trump. And the Russians stopped their advance. Then we had good old Joe Biden, the weak political meat puppet president of the radical “progressive” Left and the Globalists who sent open ended funds and piece meal munitions as Putin amassed 190,000 troops and invaded Ukraine at will. Do you see the pattern here?
Mr. Putin fears and respects Trump and has no respect whatsoever for the weak Leftists in the world and certainly not the Democrats and wackadoodle “progressives” in America who weaken it.
I then said to my TDS suffering customer: So, you are a strong Trump supporter then. Trump wants to end the situation in Ukraine, just like you never wanted to even be there. So, you are in lock step and agree with Trump then? No, no, no they protested! Again, do you see the pattern here? The wackadoodle Liberal Leftist and “progressives” apply convenient logic when it suits them, but they reveal themselves as being uninformed and really childish in their thought process. You cannot have it both ways.
And what exactly is Trump endeavoring to do? What does he see that makes his calculation so disruptive? And let’s remember, Trump is transactional and results oriented, he is a businessman and an American patriot and when all is said and done things must make structural and financial sense. That is how his brain unconditionally operates.
This is what Trump sees: The leviathan government bureaucracy has grown exponentially over the past 50 years at the hands of the Liberals and RINO’s and has become a parasitic draw on the American taxpayers and the American business model and will in time destroy it. And this rotting parasitic financial condition has been recognized by the Liberals, Leftists, “progressives” and Globalists in the country and the world who seek to tear down America in order to rebuild it in the “proper” manner that serves their Socialist agenda of authoritarian power and uni-party U.N. / E.U., “you must take your experimental mRNA shot or lose your job” feckless control.
So, Trumps calculation in the big picture: If this Ukraine situation remains financially open ended as established by the weak leadership of Biden and continues to bleed primarily America this will destroy our country and possibly set of World War 3. Not to mention the open ended wild corrupt and parasitic spending that is being revealed by the D.O.G.E. operation and the $35 TRILLION dollars in U.S. debt spending.
Trump is disrupting and destroying the existing Washington D.C. paradigm that threatens to destroy us all and he endeavors to create a new readjusted American based world leadership paradigm foundation. No Globalists need apply.
Now you in simple terms understand why Ukraine and Zelenski who was dismissed from the White House because of his resistance to what in the end will be: Ukraine will be making an accommodation regarding the Russians and their invasion. Unless that is if Britain, Canada and the E.U. get their SHT together and fund, arm and force the Russians back to where they started. You know, after their big hug fest at 10 Downing Street the other day.
UKRAINE: DEMOCRATS ARE OUTRAGED (must be doing something right)
And that I can assure is highly unlikely to happen given that the group of them are an assembly of paper tigers without any true leadership because they are ALL Liberal, Leftist, “progressive” Socialists in the process of destroying their countries in service to the Globalist authoritarian agenda. And they as a feckless group are unable to do much of anything without the true leadership of the strong American president and government.
The minds of naive children playing checkers all while 3D international existential chess goes on all around them. If the American Democrats and the Leftists around the world are outraged, you must be doing something right!
Who are you betting on?”
Follow on X / Twitter: https://x.com/IocSigma371445/status/1896959906454155588
Are you paying attention yet America? JGL 3/4/25
https://www.sigma3ioc.com/post/the-mind-of-trump-ukraine-globalists-and-breaking-paradigms
I agree with much of what Stephen Cohen wrote
Bob, you are such a NPC. This always has been a deep state operation to launder billions of dollars and euros through Ukraine back into the pockets of the US and EU Oligarcs, NGO’s and polititions. Both Zelensky and Biden are puppets of said deep state and not in charge. I can’t wait for the audit by Doge. Ukraine was convenient with its own Nazi army ready to deploy. I believe, hope, Trump and his team see this. Zelensky is just an actor reading a script handed to him by his maters.
Shallow minded reader: Heh. Starting any debate with an insult is surely not the best way to persuade anyone of anything. Just discredits you in everyone else’s eyes. But that’s what you do.
As for the substance of your comment, there certainly is some truth to it, except that you paint everyone so much like cartoon characters it also makes your argument less convincing.
I am very worried the Trump presidency will turn into a disaster.
Trump campaigned on the promise to end the UKR war. If it ends now, it ends with a division of UKR. Which is bad for the West in that a division of the country means more conflict in years to come. Western countries will want to continue sanctions on Russia, denying Russia a path to integrate with the West. Also, factions in Western UKR are then encouraged to take their territory back, at some point, when Russia appears weak.
The better solution is actually for RU to control the UKR government. The critical point being to keep the country whole and legally sovereign. RU has controlled UKR for hundreds of years. The people of the country go about their lives. With the fighting stopped, even if RU controls the government, the country returns to being governed by politics and negotiations. The international community and the people of UKR demand elections. Once Putin exits as ruler of RU there is a good chance UKR can become an actual independent and undivided country.
Democrat-liberals voted to allow guys to play women’s sports. Well, actually, they voted against a bill that disallowed men from playing women’s sports. Dems are adamant that they prefer fraud, incompetence and hidden-spending to audits by those bad guys in DOGE. They believe their stance to be supportive of America. Wrong on all counts. Not enough folks have seen the Dems for the incredible wrongness of their philosophy.
They believe that there can never be enough third-worlders in this country. And that Trump is a poopy-head. Trump’s team can’t wait any longer until they charge a number of former officeholders with crimes, even treason. Take no prisoners. That way, at least they’ll have to use other than govt. money for the attorneys they hire.
Missing from this analysis is the fact USA cannot mediate a conflict it is supporting. Trump must first detach USA from Ukraine as a basic show of good faith to Putin. Putin has learned from Minsk-I and Minsk-II that words & agreements with Americans & Europeans are totally worthless. Only actions are believable at this point.
Maybe a USA-Russia agreement will be signed in a few years AFTER USA undoes all the anti-Russia measures.
P.S. In the meantime maybe Putin should announce they are going to support Mexican drug cartels as long as USA supports Ukraine neo-Nazis. Fair is fair.
Robert wrote: “The U.S. gains nothing by doing anything that will allow this war to continue forever.”
Considering that the money the U.S. has already spent in three years on this war is 1% of our national debt (accumulated over half a century), this is a money pit. Each American now is on the hook for around $1,000 plus interest due to this war. We may have a nice ocean between us and the war, but it affects us materially. It gets worse if we consider only the taxpayers, each of whom will be charged around $2,000 plus interest.
I, too, believe that if Putin retains territory, he will be back for more. Next time, however, he will be smarter about capturing Kiev and thus the rest of Ukraine with it.
Putin started this war because the world let him take Georgia and Crimea. He also has his eyes set on other former Soviet territories. This is a man set on conquest as his legacy. Putin needs to be stopped. The real question is whether Europe has the balls to stop him, because Putin is their neighbor, not ours. We are once again expending precious treasure and risking our economy for ungrateful people across a nice ocean.
Did we win the Cold War just so that we could lose the peace?
Edward wrote: “Putin started this war because the world let him take Georgia and Crimea.”
Maybe the world will stop Russia when it summons the courage to stop the USA. Compare the military presence of the USA around the world with that of Russia.
There is one empire attempting to dominate the world and it’s not Russia.
David Parsons,
You’re right. It’s China.
This mess has been over thirty years in the making.
We are dealing with, in Vladimir Putin, a man willing to expand totalitarian rule beyond his borders. Such men in history do not stop their expansion unless confronted, either with the exhaustion of resources or the credible threat of force against them. I would love nothing more than to see him driven back within his borders with his tail between his legs, to deter such behavior.
And I can’t affirm the equation of today’s Ukraine with the corrupt, oligarchic, Biden-buying Ukraine circa 2014 that so many assume is true in their conspiracy theorizing. The actions of their President could be the actions of a corrupt man trying to keep his gravy train going – or the actions of a desperate man trying to get the resources he needs for his people to prevail against impossible odds.
But I also understand this, the rest of the story … the American people, for over thirty years, have seen – along with Putin – the ineptitude, avarice, and arrogance of the Western societal elite and their leadership inside and outside government, and – along with Putin – no longer trust the judgment and motivations of that elite with respect to confronting totalitarian expansionism.
What should have been done to avoid this, starting right after the USSR fell, is insisting – as the price of admission to global civilization and its associated economic arrangements – that the nations that formerly made up the USSR reformulate their governments so that they could be relied upon to respect the unalienable rights of their own people. Historically, such nations do not revert to totalitarian expansionism because of that conscious focus upon respect for the individual. And not only would there have been no need to expand NATO – if it expanded anyway, such nations would not perceive it as a threat to them as long as NATO lived up to its stated ideals of respect for life, liberty, and sovereignty.
But instead – just as we did with Afghanistan and Iraq – we engaged in the cargo-cult approach to reforming such nations now referred to as “nation-building”, that focuses upon implementing the economic and social appearances of a rights-respecting society … while leaving out the uncomfortable-but-necessary part of establishing that respect for individual rights and the rule of law. We made deals, IIRC some of which smacked of exploitation of the vanquished for fun and profit in the days before Putin rose to power. Those were not forgotten by a lot of Russians.
Their former satellites in Eastern Europe embraced that respect to a far greater degree, because they had lived under the boot of the USSR and therefore were more attuned towards respect for liberty.
But the former USSR did not learn the necessity of that respect- in large part, because we never insisted upon it.
In fact, some of our actions ran counter to it … the behind-the-scenes fomenting of “color revolutions” in places like Egypt and yes, Ukraine; most noticeably in Libya, where NATO members perpetrated a revolution against Muammar Gaddafi, who had given up his terroristic ways and trusted the West – but was threatening the interests of European oil companies – so some of those members, including the USA with Obama and Hillary in the key roles – attacked Libya with the ulterior motive of protecting the interests of those companies.
Add to that the cultural degradation of the West, which was perceived as a threat to the cultures of other nations.
That does not excuse Putin, in that same time frame, moving away from rights-respecting governance and its rule of law, into oligarchy. But those thirty years gave him no reason to trust us like Gaddafi did and take the risk to push back on oligarchy. Like Stalin after WWII, he had motivations other than tyranny to establish buffers between him and the West.
There is plenty of blame to go around– both Putin, and the Western societal elite, need to lose. But don’t hold your breath for that.
This is the quagmire we are stuck in. It is not going to be resolved by “starting the bombing in five minutes” to kick Putin out at the risk of a nuclear exchange, or by keeping Ukraine on a subsistence diet of Western arms and NATO membership in the hopes they will wear the Russians out.
The most plausible way to stop it, is to deny Putin the resources to prosecute this war. This is most likely achievable through re-establishing American energy independence and driving world oil prices down so that not even China will keep buying from him. Other measures, like the mineral-rights deal proposed, would help as well by giving Americans some payback for our involvement – and give us some skin in the game more substantial than world-policeman status.
But the plausible end of this conflict will satisfy no one totally.
(Especially if we think we can just retreat into a Fortress America and ignore it – the world is too small these days for us to get away with that.)