Analysis
Trump says Ukraine is ready for a deal – it’s up to Putin
At Davos, Trump claims Russia waited for Biden to start the war in Ukraine and that Putin wants to denuclearize. He also wants NATO members to increase defense spending to 5 percent of GDP.
Donald Trump, speaking via video link to the World Economic Forum in Davos, went as close as one could get to blaming the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Joe Biden.
“I knew that [Ukraine] was the apple of President Putin’s eye, but I also knew that there was no way he was going in, and he wasn’t going to go in. And then, when I was out [of office], bad things happened, bad things were said, a lot of stupidity all around, and you end up with what you have. Now you have all these bombed-out cities — they look like demolition sites — with many people killed.”
According to the tycoon, the war was avoidable and, of course, he would have prevented it. Indeed, Trump seemed to suggest he had some kind of irresistible pull on the Kremlin, to the point that Putin would not have dared to take the first step had Trump been in charge.
With a change of tone, his voice more pained and his brow somewhat furrowed, Trump then claimed his focus was on the human costs: “I really would like to be able to meet with President Putin soon and get that war ended, and that’s not from the standpoint of economy or anything else. It’s from the standpoint of millions of lives are being wasted. … I’ve seen pictures of what’s taken place. It’s a carnage.”
He did not miss an opportunity to indulge in the basic shape of all conspiracy theories, whose dialectical approach the new U.S. president shows he has adopted to the letter: “far more people have died than is being reported” in the war, he claimed.
“When you look at a city that’s become a demolition site, where big buildings have been collapsed by missiles hitting them and everything else, and they say, ‘One person was slightly injured.’ No, no, many people were killed,” he said, adding that “I think you’re going to find that there were many more people killed in Ukraine and the Ukraine war than anybody has any idea.” In other words, there are some things that your government and the media don't want you to see – a necessary ideological premise for any kind of conspiracy theory, but luckily the savior on duty is here to reveal the truth to us. Namely, that many more have died in the war than governments are admitting: no less than “millions of Russians and millions of Ukrainians, and nobody's seen anything like it since World War Two.”
Pushing such blatant absurdities as if they were some great revelation might seem less bizarre if we recall that this is the same man who recently invited Canada to join the United States in order to avoid tariffs. Moreover, to support his initial claim of the great relationship he’d had with Putin during his presidency, Trump also claimed that four years ago, Vladimir Putin had wanted to reach a joint agreement with Washington on “denuclearization.”
“We were talking about denuclearization of our two countries … I will tell you that President Putin really liked the idea of cutting way back on nuclear. And I think the rest of the world, we would have gotten them to follow. And China would have come along too. China also liked it.” His evident assumption is that the U.S. has much greater nuclear power than anyone else (especially Beijing), and that it would cost the two adversaries a lot to equip themselves with enough weapons to compete with the Pentagon. So, better to strike a deal to save everyone “tremendous amounts of money” and keep the status quo based on Washington's overwhelming power – which, incidentally, “would have been an unbelievable thing for the planet.”
He said Beijing could also have “a very good relationship” with the U.S. if only “a fair relationship” and “a level playing field” could be established at the economic level. “I like President Xi very much. I’ve always liked him. We always had a very good relationship. It was very strained with COVID coming out of Wuhan.” The newly-installed U.S. president would like to go back to how things were before, for economic reasons: the U.S. deficit depends largely on the trade deficit with China. He also said he hoped Xi Jinping would “work together” with him to stop the war in Ukraine, as China “has a great deal of power over that situation.”
He was asked directly by one of the panelists if Russia and Ukraine will reach a peace agreement within a year. “Well, you’re going to have to ask Russia,” was Trump’s non-committal answer. “Ukraine is ready to make a deal.” His answer seemed to say approval from Kyiv was a given, which suggests (or is intended to suggest) that the contacts between Trump's camp and the Ukrainians may have been more extensive than what we know. Meanwhile, Moscow said just before the speech in Davos (and Trump’s threat of new sanctions if Putin is unwilling to come to an agreement) that it was “very closely monitoring all the rhetoric, all the statements” of the U.S. president, and “carefully recording all the nuances.” In any case, Russia claims it “remains ready for equal dialogue.”
But the real goal for Trump with his remarks on Thursday was to frighten Europe, and one can hardly say that he missed the mark: “I'm also going to ask all NATO nations to increase defense spending to 5% of GDP, which is what it should have been years ago,” reiterating that he will not settle for the mere 2 percent target reiterated last year by Stoltenberg before he handed over NATO leadership to Rutte. On Thursday morning, the latter had already aligned himself with the new U.S. status quo, saying that Trump “is right, of course, that the problem is not the U.S. and the problem is Europe.”
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/kiev-e-pronta-allaccordo-la-pace-dipende-da-putin on 2025-01-24