Ukraine was betrayed years ago. Cutting aid is just a final insult
America has supported Ukraine with military aid transfers since the beginning of the war. No longer: Trump has prevented Biden-era defence authorisations from being fulfilled, cutting off Kyiv from the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative which allows Ukraine to purchase hundreds of millions of dollars of weaponry from US defence companies. Barring a reversal predicated on humiliating grovelling from Zelensky, America's underwriting of the war effort has ended.
Understandably, Ukraine views Trump's devastating cut-off of military assistance as an act of betrayal. Oleksandr Merezhko, the chair of Ukraine's Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee, claimed that Trump was trying to force Ukraine to capitulate to Russia, warning the cut-off was an even worse foreign policy disaster than the 1938 Munich Agreement, as no-one then claimed that Czechoslovakia was the aggressor against Nazi Germany.
While Ukrainians have every right to be outraged by Trump's decision, America's abandonment of Ukraine was set into motion long ago: indeed, it was baked in from the first days of the invasion. For years, the West has given Ukraine enough military equipment to avoid defeat but not the tools that it needed to win the war. A succession of half-measures created countless missed opportunities for Ukraine and enabled a potential ceasefire on President Vladimir Putin's terms.
The most striking manifestation of the West's half-hearted support for Ukraine transpired during the fall of 2022. In five days in September 2022, Ukraine's counter-offensive in Kharkiv forced Russian troops to ignominiously withdraw from all positions west of the Oskil River.
Ukraine capitalised on this success with victories in Izyum, Lyman and Kherson. Russia's manpower shortages forced Putin to announce a chaotic 'partial mobilisation' drive and war materiel deficits necessitated imports of Iranian drones. A severe rift was also festering between the Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Russian Ministry of Defence.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine was on the verge of implosion, but how did the West respond? With weakness and indecisiveness. While Ukraine lobbied for airtight sanctions against Putin's war machine, Europe continued to purchase Russian gas and the US left nuclear energy giant Rosatom off the sanctions list. Zelensky urged the West to supply Ukraine with Nato-class tanks, long-range missiles to strike Russian targets and F-16 fighter jets. We refused to accede to these urgent requests and caved to Putin's nuclear bluffs.
Although the West eventually provided all these technologies to Ukraine, it was too little, too late. By the time Ukraine's counter-offensive began in earnest in June 2023, Russia had built impenetrable fortifications in Zaporizhzhya, conscripted hundreds of thousands of soldiers and sanctions-proofed its military supply chains. Ukraine's dreams of victory were chimeric and by late 2023, Ukraine's soon-to-be-ousted Armed Forces chief Valery Zaluzhnyi was forced to concede that the war had become a stalemate.
Even as Russia made incremental gains at a staggering human cost in 2024, the West refused to change tack. According to a recent Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air report, Europe spent more on Russian energy (21.9 billion euros) than on financial aid to Ukraine ($18.7 billion euros). Biden waited until the final days of his presidency to greenlight Ukrainian ATACM strikes on Russia's Kursk region and even the arrival of North Korean forces on the frontlines did not lead to Ukraine securing long-range cruise missiles.
The US and Europe favoured a long-term attritional war that would gradually weaken Russia's economy and military capabilities. Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin admitted this in April 2022 when he claimed that 'We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can't do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.'
While Trump has dealt a potentially terminal blow to Ukraine's resistance to Russian aggression, the meat-grinder stalemate we see today was of the West's creation.
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