How the Trump presidency paved the way for Putin's invasion of Ukraine
(Photo by Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
There’s little doubt that the invasion of Ukraine was years in the making, but that doesn’t mean Putin hasn’t received help along the way from familiar faces in the American political scene.
One can only imagine what Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine would look like under a second Trump administration. Just three years ago, the American president was willing to thwart a military agreement with Ukraine. Trump’s actions could not only have compromised Ukraine’s military defense, but also Zelenskyy’s presidency. In many ways, Trump’s attempted quid pro quo with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy helped pave the way for the invasion of Ukraine.
In 2019, Trump—alongside personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and then-Attorney General William Barr—sought out international help in their ongoing effort to spread propaganda about the man who would later defeat Trump at the polls—Joe Biden.
While touting baseless conspiracies about Ukraine interfering in the 2016 U.S. election, behind closed doors, Trump was attempting to strong-arm Zelenskyy by temporarily withholding a $400 million military aid package to Ukraine passed by Congress.
Trump—the same man who called for China to investigate his Democratic opponent—held back the military aid, vowing to release the funds on the condition that Zelenskyy publicly announced investigations into both the Biden family and interference in the 2016 election.
Part of Trump’s rationale for withholding military aid to Ukraine was the debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine framed Russia for hacking into the DNC server during the 2016 election, as noted in the transcript of his “perfect call.”
It’s hard not to see in hindsight that the former American President was doing Putin’s dirty work, even inadvertently, on his behalf.
Paul Manafort and Rudy Giuliani key players in weakening Ukraine sovereignty
It’s been widely covered—both in the media and in courtrooms—that Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort, spent more than a decade and made millions aiding efforts to undermine NATO on behalf of the pro-Russian political party—Viktor Yanukoyvch’s Party of Regions.
NBC News wrote of the party backed by Russian-leaning oligarchs in 2017: “The party opposed NATO membership and spouted anti-Western rhetoric that once helped fuel violence against American marines. Its reign ended when Yanukovych fled to Russia after bloody street protests against his personal corruption and pro-Moscow actions.”
As the chief political strategist to the soon-to-be president of Ukraine—when he wasn’t skinny dipping with him—Manafort was known to have “a whole separate shadow government structure [in Ukraine], with his colleague Rick Gates noting, “in every ministry, he has a guy.”
The Atlantic wrote that just as Manafort began to work for the pro-Russian oligarch in 2004, “Viktor Yanukovych was facing allegations that he had tried to rig the 2004 presidential election with fraud and intimidation, and possibly by poisoning his opponent with dioxin.”
A Mar. 1 article from ProPublica noted that after Trump won in 2016, Manafort worked closely with Konstanin Kilimnik—who was indicted as part of the Mueller probe, before being tied to the promotion of misleading or unsubstantiated narratives about Joe Biden to benefit Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign—to create an “Autonomous Republic of Donbas in separatist-run southwest Ukraine, on the Russian border.”
By 2018, ProPublica noted that Giuliani became Trump’s right-hand man when it came to Ukraine, after Manafort was convicted in the Special Counsel Investigation. Manafort would be pardoned by Trump two years later.
“Giuliani ended up working with a pair of émigré business partners, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, to make contacts in Ukraine with corrupt and questionable prosecutors, in an effort to turn up “dirt” on Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, who had served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company,” the article reads.
Even while the impeachment inquiry into Trump was underway in Dec. 2019, ProPublica reported that “Giuliani flew to Ukraine and met with a member of Ukraine’s parliament, Andrii Derkach, in an apparent effort to discredit the investigation of Trump’s actions.”
Trump and a 40 year opposition to NATO
As Craig Unger writes for The New Republic, Trump had been cultivated as an asset by the KGB for more than 40 years, noting that Trump had been ardently opposed to NATO for decades.
In the summer of 1987, Trump took out full-page advertisements in the Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and The New York Times with the headline, “There’s Nothing Wrong With America’s Foreign Defense Policy That a Little Backbone Can’t Cure.”
The ad read: “The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help. It’s time for us to end our vast deficits by making Japan, and others who can afford it, pay. Our world protection is worth hundreds of billions of dollars to these countries, and their stake in their protection is far greater than ours.”
Unger also noted that the Trump campaign weakened support for Ukraine on the Republican platform, “removing language that called for ‘providing lethal defensive weapons’ and replacing it with the phrase ‘appropriate assistance.’”
As NRP reported this week, Trump “even called for the U.S. to attack Russia but make it look like it was actually China—by flying American planes with a Chinese flag on the side.”
In a Mar. 2 letter issued to NBC News and Lester Holt, Trump denied pushing his attorney general to get Ukraine to investigate his fiercest political opponent ahead of the 2020 presidential election.
‘With respect to prosecuting political rivals, it was just the opposite,” Trump lied in the statement, going on to make unfounded accusations against the Biden family. “I did not push Barr to go after them … I thought it would be inappropriate for me to get personally involved.”