Russia is happy to wait while Trump flails and fails on Ukraine peace | Opinion
The Washington Donald Trump has created is a hall of carnival mirrors where up is down and you never know just how much reality — and what was once America’s basic morality — are being distorted.
While Trump was in the White House being repeatedly thanked by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for selling out the country’s position based on the naive belief that Russia’s Vladimir Putin “wants to make a deal for” Trump, Utah’s MAGA Sen. Mike Lee was on X staking out a position even more immoral and extreme than Trump’s. “No security guarantees or additional aid to Ukraine,” he wrote. “If Zelensky asks, he should offer to send in the Democratic National Committee cavalry.” The tweet was completed with a picture of two young women riding broomstick horses.
Even Trump can’t stay ahead of the insanity now espoused by a member of the once prestigious and thoughtful Senate Foreign Affairs Committee.
It was into this baleific maelstrom that a troop of European leaders marched Monday in hopes of dragging something, anything useful out of the Trump White House that remains enamoured with ex-KGB agent who targets missiles and armed drones by the hundreds at civilians every night.
It is not clear that they got any assurances from Trump worth the trip. Trump offered only security guarantees “coordinated” with Europeans, and he offered them without the full backing of the MAGA hierarchy he has created.
The Kremlin quickly demanded that those guarantees include only paper promises rather than peacekeeping troops on the ground intended to stop Russia from restarting the war at its convenience. Of course, Russia has no principled opposition to foreigners on Ukrainian soil. Putin was happy to have North Korean troops bolster his ranks.
People in Kiev, the kind who enshrined in their Constitution the principle that they will not give land to Russia, know that promises are worth nothing. Such vaporous words were in the documents signed as part of Ukraine’s globally applauded deal in December 1994 to give up its nuclear weapons. Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom signed those documents.
Russia simply ignored its promises when it took Crimea while the U.S. and U.K. did little of substance to back their promises with action. Kiev quite reasonably isn’t going to fall for that again if it has any choice.
So we’re left with the prospect of a potential meeting between Putin and Zelensky to be followed by a “trilat” adding Trump to the mix. Trump says that word “trilat” like a man impressed with himself because he just learned a wonky foreign policy term for three leaders meeting. He doesn’t seem to have an actual plan on what will happen there.
Meanwhile, the violence where one million Russian soldiers have been killed and wounded, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians killed and thousands of Ukrainian children kidnapped and sent to Russia continues.
And we get to wait for the next steps still unclear without official Russian responses to Trump’s plans.
Every day we wait is a win for Putin. Going into the Alaska summit, he was faced with an urgent need for diplomacy under the gun of Trump’s sanctions threats. That threat appears to be off the table, so the Russian leader can play for time while his troops inch further into Ukraine at a great bloody cost he doesn’t care about.
Ukraine does not have time. It needs the arms that the Trump administration is withholding while it grasps at a Nobel Peace Prize for Trump instead of justice for the people of Ukraine. The longer Putin keeps hopes alive but progresses slowly on peace, the more desperate the Ukrainian position gets.
We went into the weekend with some faint hope that Trump would help the situation in Ukraine, but now it is crystal clear that even all the prime ministers of Europe cannot lead him or his backers to sanity. At this point, the DNC cavalry’s contribution would be an improvement over Trump’s failing, flailing peacemaking.
David Mastio is a national columnist for McClatchy and the Kansas City Star.
This story was originally published August 20, 2025 at 6:03 AM with the headline "Russia is happy to wait while Trump flails and fails on Ukraine peace | Opinion."
