Trump’s Moral Blindness Should Disqualify Him as a Peacemaker
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The Ukrainian wasn’t seeking peace at any price—no responsible leader would. But he came to the White House despite Trump’s taunts that he was a “dictator” with no popular support. He had swallowed his better judgment and bent to Trump’s will, agreeing to the one-sided minerals deal the White House had insisted on—a deal that would give Trump the unparalleled access he craves while ignoring Zelensky’s plea for reciprocity, most importantly, an American presence to guarantee peace in Ukraine after a ceasefire.
As the full video of the conversation shows, Zelensky laid out a reasoned case backed by painstaking evidence. He brought photographs of Ukrainian POWs before and after their captivity—proof of shocking torture and brutality in Russian prisons. He tried to explain the existential stakes for Ukraine and why the country needs security guarantees. He recited a brief history—distressing though far from complete—of Putin’s past readiness to break promises and violate agreements with other nations. Trump’s scornful reaction: that Zelensky was filled with “hatred”—as if anyone in his shoes could feel any other emotion after three long years of unprovoked aggression that has flattened more than a half dozen Ukrainian cities and killed 45,000 of his countrymen.
Meanwhile, as usual, Trump played fast and loose with the facts. He maintained that Zelensky doesn’t want a ceasefire. He repeated his fanciful, inflated claim that Joe Biden squandered $350 billion to support Kyiv. (According to the authoritative Kiel Institute for the World Economy, the U.S. has contributed $120 billion , while Europe spent $139 billion.)
Trump also painted a grossly oversimplified picture of who is winning the war—Putin has “all the cards,” he insisted, and Zelensky has none. The truth is that Moscow has a narrow edge in the trench warfare on the eastern front, although even there, its advances have been slow and costly—some 1,600 square miles through 2024, an area about the size of Rhode Island, at the cost of 420,000 soldiers killed and wounded. And the picture looks very different at sea, where Ukraine has destroyed or disabled one-third of Russia’s vaunted Black Sea fleet, all but pushing the enemy out of the Black Sea and reopening a channel to export nearly the full volume of grain and vegetable oil Ukraine was selling before the war.
The Ukrainian economy has largely recovered from the shock of the invasion, growing by 18 percent since 2022, when it shrank dramatically. Unemployment and inflation are now down by half. Ukraine still holds nearly 200 square miles of territory in Russia’s Kursk province, and the Ukrainian defense industry, close to nonexistent before the war, supplies some 40 percent of the weaponry deployed on the battlefield. In a fiercely competitive technology race, Ukraine keeps up with and frequently surpasses Russia.
If Russia appears to have all the cards, it’s only because the U.S. is tilting toward Moscow, abandoning a democratic ally in favor of a tyrant and a self-declared opponent of the West. Ukrainians are tired of fighting and eager to see the war end, but they are not desperate or defeated, as Trump seems to believe, and a peace based on that erroneous assumption would be monstrously unfair.
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