What did Donald Trump do today?

He said that Ukraine should not have resisted Russia's attempt to invade the country and destroy its government.

In an interview released today, Trump said the following on the subject of Ukraine:

Zelenskyy, I will say, he wants to settle now. He's had enough. He shouldn't have allowed this to happen either. He's no angel. He shouldn't have allowed this war to happen. First of all, he’s fighting a much bigger entity, okay, much bigger. …Zelensky was fighting a much bigger entity, much bigger, much more powerful. He shouldn’t have done that, because we could have made a deal, and it would have been a deal that would have been, it would have been a nothing deal. I coulda made that deal so easily. And Zelenskyy decided that 'I want to fight.' You know… They have 30,000 army tanks. Russia has 30,000 army tanks. Zelenskyy had none, practically. You don't fight—those. Now then we started pouring equipment, pouring pouring pouring, and they had the bravery to use the equipment, but in the end—that's a war has to be settled.

In other words, taking Trump's words at face value, he believes that a country that suffered a surprise invasion by a superior military force was at fault for "allowing this war to happen."

In reality, Russia invaded eastern Ukraine in February 2022 and nearly seized control of the capital, Kyiv. It currently occupies 20% of the territory of Ukraine. The Putin regime's initial war plan was to occupy the entire country and decapitate its government. In the areas it controls, Russia is committing human rights violations, and has forced mass evacuations which have led to the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II. Experts estimate that more than 12,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed, and 14,000 taken prisoner. At least 60,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed.

As of this evening, neither Trump nor his staff have elaborated on his claim that a sovereign nation being invaded should not have tried to defend itself. 

Trump has also not explained how he could have negotiated a deal for "nothing" to end the invasion when the Putin regime has been willing to trade hundreds of thousands of its own troops' lives and wreck its own economy just for a fraction of the full-scale occupation it had hoped for.

Trump is not a neutral third party in Russia-Ukraine war. He was impeached for the first time over his attempt to force Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to create a fake investigation that would smear Trump's likely rival for the presidency, Joe Biden. Trump also demanded that Zelenskyy falsely admit that Ukrainian actors (and not Russia) had interfered in the 2016 election. As part of the pressure campaign to force Zelenskyy to comply, Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine, which was already pushing back Russian incursions into its territory.

As a report released by the Republican-controlled Senate in 2020 made clear, Russian interfered in the 2016 election on Trump's behalf by committing acts of espionage and cybercrimes, promoting disinformation on social media, and collaborating with Trump campaign officials. Trump himself specifically asked the Putin regime for help on live TV, and Russian state actors launched a cyberattack against the Hillary Clinton campaign the next day. 

Before turning to politics, Trump was financially dependent on Russian oligarchs to keep his real estate businesses afloat. More recently, he forced Congressional Republicans to oust the chair of the House Intelligence Committee because he was too critical of the Putin regime. 

Why does this matter?

• If Trump actually believes that an ally of the United States should surrender to a hostile foreign power without firing a shot, he's not fit to command the United States military forces.

• It's a problem for the entire world to have the President of the United States beholden to a regime that is hostile to the United States.