An Analysis Of The Trump/Zelensky Feud.

Some Important Takeaways From The Recent Trump/Zelensky Blowup

Pictured Above: The tense exchange between Trump and Zelensky.

Everyone not living under a rock has already seen the tense exchange between U.S. President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

In the now infamous exchange, Trump and J.D. Vance lambasted Zelensky for not accepting a proposed peace deal to end the war, with Vance telling him that “right now you guys are going around and forcing conscripts to the front line because you have manpower problems.”

Vance also said it was “disrespectful” for Zelensky to attack the Trump administration for “trying to prevent the destruction of your country”. ‘

Trump’s comments were even harsher, telling Zelensky “we’re trying to solve a problem, don’t tell us what we’re gonna feel, you are in no position to dictate that”.

He also told Zelensky that he was “gambling with world war three” and “gambling with the lives of millions of people”.

Some Harsh But True Statements

In my view, this discussion should have happened in private. As the Quincy Institute noted :

The sort of clash that occurred between President Trump and Vice President Vance and President Zelensky is common enough between leaders in private. As a public spectacle however it is almost unprecedented, and certainly in the surroundings of the White House.

Trump and Vance are also dicks, which is not a great way to find diplomatic solutions.

With that being said, much of what they said was a much needed wake up call for Zelensky.

A top Zelensky aide told Time magazine that the Ukrainian president “deludes himself”. The aide said that he knew Ukraine was “out of options” and “not winning” but that Zelensky refused to acknowledge this fact.

The reality is that much of the Ukrainian public wants an end to this war. In October of last year, a poll found that 52 percent of Ukrainians favor peace talks with Russia, and 38% are in favor of conceding territory if it would end the war.

Because of this problem, Ukraine has implemented a brutal draft of young men to keep sending fighters to the front line.

As the Daily Mail noted in November of last year

Episodes of unsuspecting Ukrainian men being press-ganged are becoming more frequent as Russian forces continue to grind down defensive lines in Eastern Ukraine and seize more territory in Donetsk.

They also noted that there has been “a torrent of videos emerging of civilians being brutally beaten and forced into vans by mobs of soldiers.”

At the same time, there is no real benefit for Ukraine to continue this war. Journalist Simon Shuster in Time Magazine wrote recently that “When Russia invaded Ukraine nearly three years ago, President Joe Biden set three objectives for the U.S. response. Ukraine’s victory was never among them.”(emphasis: mine)

Shuster spoke to Eric Green from Biden’s National Security Council who admitted that “We were deliberately not talking about the territorial parameters” and that “ (regaining territory) was not going to be a success story ultimately.”

Schuster noted that “The U.S., in other words, made no promise to help Ukraine recover all of the land Russia had occupied, and certainly not the vast territories in eastern Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula taken in its initial invasion in 2014.”

He wrote that Green told him “in the White House’s view, doing so was beyond Ukraine’s ability, even with robust help from the West.”

To summarize, continuing the Ukraine war would mean forcing young men from a war-weary population into conscription to fight for territory they have no chance of getting back in the first place.

Trump Rips The Mask Off Empire.

Many are acting shocked that Trump is so brazenly dictating what his ostensible proxy (Zelesnky) can and will do.

But Trump is just doing it out in the open, what the United States has done in Ukraine since 2014.

When Ukraine’s democratically elected president Victor Yanukovych got too close to Russia for the U.S.’s liking, they funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars through USAID to the think tank “New Citizen” which then organized protests against him.

Many of the protestors who came out in the 2014 “Maidan” protests were people with genuine anger over the corruption from the Yanukovych administration, but it was used to overthrow him in a coup.

The protests were soon overtaken by far-right paramilitary groups, some of whom U.S. politicians like John McCain and Chris Murphy actively stood with while they called to overthrow the Yanukovych government.

After returning from Ukraine, and after Yannkovitch was overthrown, U.S. senator Chris Murphy admitted on C-SPAN, that “With respect to Ukraine we (the U.S. government) have been very much involved, we have members of the senate who have been there, members of the State Department who have been on the square.”

Murphy also admitted that “the (Obama) administration passed sanctions, the Senate was prepared to pass its own set of sanctions” and that this along with “the clear position of the United States” is what “has helped lead to this change in regime”.

Before the overthrow of Yannakovitch, then assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland was caught on tape deciding who will be in and out of the replacement government, eventually deciding that “Yats is the guy”.

Yats was a reference to the Ukrainian opposition politician Arseniy Yatseniuk, who became the interim prime minister after Yannakovitch was overthrown.

As Forbes Magazine noted at the time, the reason for this was because “Yanukovych resisted the International Monetary Fund's demand to raise taxes and devalue the currency” while “Yatsenyuk doesn’t mind”.

Furthermore, there have been many instances where the West has dictated what deals Ukraine can and cannot take.

One example is the Minsk Accords.

For context, the Minsk accords were a peace resolution, which would have ended an ongoing conflict in Eastern Ukraine between pro-Russian and pro-Western Ukrainians that was taking place in Ukraine’s Donbas region.

The deal was unanimously endorsed by the UN security council in 2015.

When Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine in 2019, one of his campaign pledges was to fully implement this plan and end the war in Eastern Ukraine.

However, once Zelensky was elected president, he was threatened by far-right elements in Ukraine against ending the war. The Finnish human rights NGO “Finnish Peace Defenders” reported in 2019 that he was unable to withdraw Ukrainian troops from Eastern Ukraine “due to the open threats and blackmail by far-right military circles in Ukraine, including the National Corps led by Andrii Biletski.”

The outlet also reported that Zelensky “went to a frontline in Donbas to personally convince far right military formation members, reportedly from the neo-Nazi-led Azov regiment, to stop blocking implementation of the Minsk agreement to withdraw troops along with the militants of the self-proclaimed entities” who again threatened him.

As the Ukrainian-Canadian professor of political science Ivan Katchanovsk noted at the time “This shows that a few thousand neo-Nazis not only have power to block the crucial agreement towards peace in Donbas but that the president has no power and will to disband and arrest them and has to plead with them in person.”

Instead of siding with the elected president of Ukraine, the United States instead stood with the far-right groups. As the late professor of Russian studies, Stephen F. Cohen noted at the time:

Zelensky cannot go forward as I’ve explained. I mean, his life is being threatened literally by a quasi-fascist movement in Ukraine, he can’t go forward with full peace negotiations with Russia, with Putin, unless America has his back. Maybe that won’t be enough, but unless the White House encourages this diplomacy, Zelensky has no chance of negotiating an end to the war, so the stakes are enormously high.

The U.S. did not back Zelensky up and instead chose to side with far-right groups in continuing the war.

Perhaps the most blatant example of the U.S. forcing Ukraine’s hand is when they, along with the UK and “collective west” blocked the peace proceedings that took place in Istanbul between Russia and Ukraine in April of 2022.

The Ukrainian news outlet Pravda reported at the time that:

According to Ukrainska Pravda sources close to Zelenskyy, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Boris Johnson, who appeared in the capital almost without warning, brought two simple messages.

The first is that Putin is a war criminal, he should be pressured, not negotiated with.

And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not.

Johnson’s position was that the collective West, which back in February had suggested Zelenskyy should surrender and flee, now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined, and that there was a chance to "press him."

Three days after Johnson left for Britain, Putin went public and said talks with Ukraine "had turned into a dead end".

The former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett, who took part in the negotiations, confirmed this story, telling a podcast that he “was under the impression that both sides very much wanted a ceasefire” but the West “stopped it”.

The Ukrainian diplomat Oleksandr Chalyi, who took part in the Istanbul negotiations, also confirmed that “we were very close” to stopping “our war with some peaceful settlement” and that Putin “tried to do everything possible to conclude an agreement with Ukraine” and “really wanted to reach some peaceful settlement”.

The lead Ukrainian negotiator at these talks, David Arakhamia, also confirmed that

Russia's goal was to put pressure on us so that we would take neutrality. This was the main thing for them: they were ready to end the war if we accepted neutrality, as Finland once did. And we will give a commitment that we will not join NATO. This is the main thing

and that

Boris Johnson then came to Kyiv and said that he did not want to sign anything with the Russians and (said) "let's just fight."

This is an example of the West actively stopping a serious peace negotiation between Ukraine and Russia for their own geopolitical goal of using Ukraine to fight Russia.

Furthermore, many are lambasting Trump for making Ukraine take a bad deal, but the reality is that the West always knew this war would end in failure for Ukraine.

Boris Johnson told Ukraine that the “collective West” thought “that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined, and that there was a chance to press him.”

However, in reality, as noted above, the Biden administration knew the entire time that Ukraine’s victory was never something they thought was possible.

The West always knew that the Istanbul peace deal was better for Ukraine than anything that could come out of continuing the proxy war.

As the former Zelensky adviser Oleksii Arestovych put it :

The Russian side still insisted on peace initiatives. And the Istanbul peace initiatives were very good, an intermediary document... Now 200-300 thousand would be alive, probably, and half of Ukraine would not be destroyed and mined... They agreed to political discussions on Crimea... We made concessions, but the amount of their concessions was greater. This will never happen again, it won’t, they will push more and more

Furthermore, the West was never serious about any of the promises they made to Ukraine, such as NATO membership.

In a recent testimony to the European parliament, the influential economist Jeffery Sachs revealed that he “had an hour-long call with National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in the White House, begging” him to “avoid the war” by declaring that “NATO will not enlarge Ukraine.”

Sachs testified that Sullivan told him “Oh, NATO’s not going to enlarge Ukraine. Don’t worry about it.”

The harsh reality is that the U.S. and the West never gave a single shit about Ukraine and always saw them as a pawn to be eventually thrown to the wolves once they had achieved the West’s geo-political goal of weakening Russia.

The independent Ukrainian outlet Stranaua put it best when they wrote

But Biden and his key advisers, Nuland and Blinken, apparently imagined themselves to be great "geopolitical combinators" and decided to play a "cunning game", actually pushing Putin to invade, hoping that it would lead to his collapse.

But if there was such a calculation, then in the summer and autumn of 2023 it collapsed - the offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine ended in failure, the initiative at the front was seized by the Russian army, Prigozhin's rebellion failed, and he himself died, Putin's power within the Russian Federation is currently stable, Russia has become even closer to China, the anti-Western and anti-American alliance in the world has become even stronger.

And Ukraine is drenched in blood.

Revenge For Russiagate

Trump and Vance’s anger towards Zelensky and opposition to the Ukraine proxy war is not simply geopolitical.

A large aspect of it goes back to the Russiagate hoax of 2016-2020.

Going back to 2016, a Ukrainian former journalist and member of parliament named Serhiy Leshchenko leaked material to the press that tried to connect Trump’s then campaign manager Paul Manafort to Russia, thus trying to undermine his campaign and generate the conspiracy theory that Trump was tied to Moscow.

The Russia connection was total nonsense. The leak showed that Paul Manafort got millions of dollars when he worked as a consultant for the former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych before he was overthrown.

In reality, when he worked for Yanukovych, Manafort was actually pushing for him to “integrate with the EU(European Union)” and “encourage EU integration with Ukraine”, the exact opposite of what Putin wanted him to do (Putin inferrably preferred that he aligned closer with Moskow than the EU).

Nonetheless, this played a major role in the Clinton campaign hoax that Trump had a connection to Russia.

Clinton played a part in this too, the Ukrainian journalist Lev Golinkin noted that Leshchenko was heavily funded by the Ukrainian billionaire Victor Pinchuk, who is one of the largest foreign donors to the Clinton foundation.

Golinkin noted that this amounted to “Clinton’s biggest foreign donor sending his pet journalist to come up with bullshit that in turn hurt Trump”.

This entire thing comes full circle because Serhiy Leshchenko, the Ukrainian who helped launch Russiagate on behalf of the Clintons, also happens to be an advisor to the head of Zelensky’s office.

Ukraine also played a role in the 2019 impeachment attempt against Trump.

At the time, Trump attempted to copy the Clinton strategy of using Ukraine to dig up dirt on their political opponents by trying to get the newly elected Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden’s corruption in Ukraine, such as the fact that he got his troubled son Hunter a high paying job at the Ukrainian gas company Burisma, after the U.S. backed coup in 2014.

This soon turned into an attempted impeachment against Trump, after Trump was accused of temporarily freezing arms to Ukraine as leverage for the Biden administration. Just one year earlier in 2018, the Democratic Representative Ro Khanna noted that some of these arms were going “to the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion fighting in Ukraine”.

Hawkish Democrats such as Adam Schiff used the impeachment to lecture about the importance of arming Ukraine, making comments such as “The United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there and we don’t have to fight them over here”.

Trump and Vance already have an aversion to Ukraine and Zelensky because they associate anything related to Ukraine with the endless hoaxes and psy-ops that subsumed the first Trump presidency.

Zelensky likely inflamed this anger even farther when he accused Trump of “living in a Russian-made disinformation space”.

This is the same USAID funded think tank language that is used to promote U.S. foreign policy in Ukraine and target domestic movements in the U.S. that aren’t in line with neo-liberal interests.

For example, Nina Jankowitz, the “disinformation expert” Joe Biden chose to lead his short-lived “disinformation governance board” previously worked for a USAID funded think tank in Ukraine called “stop fake” where she accused anyone critical of the far-right groups “Aidar, Dnipro-1, Donbas, and Azov.” of spreading “Kremlin disinformation”.

Likewise USAID connected think tanks such as the neocon “Hamilton 68” often wrongly accused Trump supporters, or anyone else outside of the neo-liberal mainstream of being Russian bots or spreading Russian disinformation.

Furthermore, Trump sees the Ukraine proxy war as a Democrat war and therefore is intent on ending it.

This came through in multiple moments of the Trump blow up.

J.D. Vance said to Zelensky that “you went to Pennsylvania and campaigned for the opposition in October” referring to Zelensky’s visit to an ammunition plant in Pennsylvania where Vance alleges he campaigned for the Democrats.

Trump made it even clearer that much of his anger was a reaction to the Russigate hoax.

Trump in the press conference said

let me tell you Putin went through a lot with me, he went through a phony witch hunt, where they used him and Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, you ever hear of that deal, that was a phony Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, scam, Hillary Clinton, shifty Adam Schiff, it was a Democrat scam.

Note: For a more in-depth explanation of this, I would recommend this recent episode of the always smart and informative “Radio War Nerd” podcast.

The End Of An Era

This seemingly marks the end of the American new cold war with Russia. The deep-seated neo-conservative elements in Washington that brought NATO expansion, the Maidan coup, the Syria proxy war, the proxy war in the Donbas, the Ukraine proxy war, and psy-op after psy-op- all in the name of fighting Russia- have now lost their influence.

This does not mean that it is the end of the American empire in any way.

As many have noted, Trump would never give the tough talk he gave to Zelensky to Netanyahu who is currently trying to do his best to “force the failure” of the ceasefire in Gaza with the backing of Trump.

As I noted in my last article, Trump is calling to increase the starvation sanctions on Venezuela.

The Trump administration also seems far more open to a new cold war with China/

However, it seems, for now, that the American warmongering towards Russia has come to an end.

---

Note to readers: The Dissident is a reader-supported outlet. If you liked this article, consider becoming a paid subscriber.