Zelensky deserves credit for his miraculous leadership, not Maga scorn

Yahoo

19-02-2025

Is Donald Trump preparing a sordid betrayal of Ukraine that hands the Kremlin victory and rewards Putin's aggression?
If you count victory as getting away with stealing another country's land, then yes – Putin is set to retain control of the 22 per cent of Ukraine that he has already occupied, expanding the territory of the Russian Federation by less than half a percent. But in every other sense, Putin's war on Ukraine has turned out to be a humiliating defeat.
Putin invaded to bring Ukraine under his heel and prevent Kyiv's inexorable Westward drift. In this, he has totally failed. Ukrainians – including Russian-speaking Ukrainians like Zelensky – hate Putin with a passion and are strongly committed to becoming a prosperous European democracy. Putin has won Donbas and Crimea, but lost Ukraine at vast cost in blood and treasure.
Compared to that strategic defeat the land is unimportant, however obnoxiously Putin will crow over it. The Soviet-style victory march that he will inevitably stage will be a sickening sight. But the pomp of the Kremlin's bluster will be an attempt to disguise the humiliating truth that Russia has been proved to be very much not the great power of Putin's fantasies. Small Ukraine fought an aggressor with four times its population, twenty times its economy and nuclear weapons to boot to a standstill. As the Ukrainians joke, 'we used to think that Russia was the second army in the world – but now we know it's the second army in Ukraine.'
In the meantime Russia has become an economic vassal of China, has lost its strategic control of Europe's gas markets, a million of Russia's brightest and best have emigrated, and it has blown up any possibility of foreign investment by robbing foreigners foolish enough not to flee from their businesses. Putin has totally lost his soft power over his Central Asian neighbours and his pseudo-colony in Syria. His only remaining true allies are the Taliban, the Iranians and North Koreans. The BBC's brilliant Moscow correspondent Steve Rosenberg put his finger on it last December when he asked Putin whether he had done a good job of preserving Russia. The truth is that he's diminished and weakened it.
As for betrayal of Ukraine, I have never met anybody in the Presidential administration on Bankova Street in Kyiv, nor any official in Washington who ever seriously thought that Ukraine would actually get their lost land back. That was a necessary fiction of the kind that needs to be told in wars. The minute Zelensky starts to talk about compromise, the troops in the trenches lose their motivation to fight on.
Trump's naked grab for Ukraine's supposedly great rare earth assets is undoubtedly distasteful (though it was in fact the Ukrainians themselves who began this narrative last November). Even more obnoxious is Trump's suggestion that Zelensky was somehow to blame for starting the war – which Trump crassly described as a 'conflict' rather than an unprovoked Russian invasion.
But the Trump team is at least chucking out some foolish, empty pieties. NATO membership for Ukraine? Was never going to happen – not politically, not militarily, not even legally. Reconquest? You want it, you are going to have to take it. And Europeans – please spare us your histrionics about Chamberlain in Munich. If Europe had been serious about sanctioning Russia, they would have stopped buying Russian gas – which even now still accounts for 20 per cent of the EU's supply, and growing. Anyone still talking about fighting on and pushing out the Kremlin's troops is merely virtue signalling and writing cheques in someone else's blood. As Ukrainian military intelligence chief Kyrillo Budanov recently warned a closed session of parliament, there is a very real chance of a military collapse as Kyiv runs out of manpower. For all his rancour and ignorance, Trump has the best chance of bringing the war to an end – and in the process saving Ukraine from an even worse defeat.
What Ukraine has achieved in the field is not a defeat but a major military miracle. Like the Finns in the Winter War of 1939-40, they have emerged from a death struggle with Moscow with their independence and pride intact. Both Finland and Ukraine lost around a quarter of their territory to Russian invaders. But as long as Ukraine remains free and firmly in the Western camp, it will be they who won and Putin who lost.
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