They’re celebrating in Moscow today. They can barely believe their good fortune.
“The Trump administration no longer wants to feed the Nazi mutt in Kiev.”
That’s how Vladimir Putin’s lifelong ally Dmitry Medvedev boasted about U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision Monday to shut down all American support for Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy. In response to European leaders’ frantic scramble to redouble their contributions to Ukraine’s defences now that Trump has thrown in his lot with Russia and twisted the knife deeper into Zelenskyy’s back, Medvedev, deputy chair of Putin’s Security Council, was no less sanguine.
“The flea-ridden dog was picked up by a decrepit Europe, joyfully exclaiming ‘my doggie’! It’s no use, the mad parasitic dog is dangerous. So, better to put it down quietly, without any suffering.”
Europe and Canada do not appear to be willing to take Moscow’s advice. The EU member states are at long last finally considering the seizure of roughly $350 billion in frozen Russian assets to invest it in Ukraine’s defence, rather than just doling out bits of the interest it’s been accruing. It’s a disgrace that the funds have just been sitting there all this time.
Trump has calculated the American contribution to date at $350 billion, which is roughly three times the true amount — about $120 billion, roughly half of one per cent of the American gross domestic product. And that amount is significantly less than the funds the Europeans and Canada have contributed. Which always comes as a shock for Americans to learn.
A dangerous, mad parasitic dog is not quite how Trump has chosen to depict Zelenskyy in recent days, but close enough: Zelenskyy is a dictator and an ingrate who started the war with Russia and does not care about his people’s suffering, and only wants more war. It is a telltale sign of the dementia that has enfeebled American political culture that most Republicans appear to genuinely believe Trump’s insistence that he’s a peacemaker, a mediator, that he cares only about Ukraine’s children. Among Democrats, there is a significant cohort that seems wholly incapable of grasping the enormity of what is happening here, as though Trump was simply going about diplomacy the wrong way.
Even among Canadian politicians there persists a body of opinion that if we paid closer attention to cross-border gang activity and adopted such comical American nomenclature as “fentanyl czar,” Trump might be disabused of his belligerence. That’s proved quite the folly. It was a misapprehension as fanciful as the case that Zelenskyy was insufficiently obsequious during his audience last Friday with Trump and vice-president, JD Vance.
The idea is that it was Zelenskyy’s fault that the White House issued this terse statement on Monday: “We are pausing and reviewing our aid to ensure that it is contributing to a solution.”
This paused aid is from the last tranche of the monies that were allocated by the U.S. Congress during the dying days of Joe Biden’s administration. Trump’s Republicans have still offered Ukraine nothing except the hope that if Ukraine hands over half its mineral resources to American interests and agrees to never join NATO, Moscow might be cut in on the deal, thus ensuring “peace.” Except that in this peace, Ukraine’s sovereignty would be fatally circumscribed, the country would still be at least partly occupied by Russian soldiers, the Americans would continue to refuse anything resembling a security backstop, and Putin could pounce again the moment he felt like it.
Besides, the funds now paused had already been held up for several months until last April, at Trump’s back-alley instruction to House Republicans. Even when the Congressional logjam broke back then, Vance voted against Ukraine getting its allotment. And yet it was Vance who browbeat Zelenskyy most loudly last Friday for having failed to say “thank you.”
What is there to be thankful for?
Trump has up-ended 76 years of NATO solidarity, closing the book on the Trans-Atlantic alliance. He has explicitly declared his intention to realign Washington with Moscow and to throw America’s doors wide open to the world’s kleptocrats. He’s even offering to sell “gold card” American citizenship to Russian oligarchs — “Hey, I know some Russian oligarchs that are very nice people” — at $5 million a pop — and he says he hopes to visit Putin in Moscow in the coming months to discuss business opportunities.
Trump has further abdicated from the rules of the World Trade Organization and binned the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the free-trade deal he himself demanded during his first term, calling it “the best and most important trade deal ever” when he signed it, yet only a couple of weeks ago he was asking, out loud: “Who would ever sign a thing like this?”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was quite right Tuesday when he said the purpose of Trump’s tariff war appears to be the destruction of the Canadian economy in order to force this country’s annexation, which Trump threatens almost daily, because a sovereign Canada is not a “viable” country. It’s no coincidence that this is exactly the way Putin talks about Ukraine, which he says is “not a real nation.” Even so, we’ve been wasting time persuading Trump that we’re working hard to address his alleged concerns about fentanyl. And now we’re looking at tinkering with Employment Insurance regulations to staunch the bleeding we can all look forward to now that Trump’s tariff war has been officially declared.
“So today the U.S. launched a trade war against Canada, their closest partner and ally, their closest friend,” Trudeau said Tuesday. “At the same time, they’re talking about working positively with Russia, appeasing Vladimir Putin, a lying, murderous dictator.”
Well, which is it then? Friend or mortal enemy?
For the time being, Ukraine can struggle on without America’s help. The Russians have been badly bloodied, their economy is on the verge of collapse, a lot of their military hardware is broken or it’s been blown up, Ukraine has been perfecting the art of drone warfare and Russian soldiers are being dispatched to the front lines on the backs of donkeys. It’s going to be horrible, but Ukraine is still a free country.
While Canadians have been obsessing over how many pipelines we might build to extricate ourselves from the chains of the “American security umbrella,” Trump is working feverishly not only to resuscitate Russia from its self-inflicted predicament. With the help of multibillionaire Elon Musk, all the American guardrails against oligarchy are being stripped away.
It’s not just funding for Ukraine that has been “paused.” All investigations and enforcement operations under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which outlaws the paying of bribes to foreign officials, have been suspended. Trump’s Justice Department has gutted the enforcement capabilities under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The Foreign Influence Task Force has been dismantled, and the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section has been similarly hobbled. The Department of Justice has eliminated its National Security Division’s corporate enforcement unit.
Also gone: the Justice Department’s kleptocracy initiative, which has ferreted out billions of dollars in laundered and hidden money, mostly in mansions, yachts and airplanes owned by Putin’s corrupt cronies over the past 15 years.
In Canada, we’re entering what may soon begin to feel a bit like a time of war. In America, it’s the springtime of the oligarchs.
National Post