President Donald Trump has a lot of reasons to be upset in the final stretch before the midterm elections: voters angry at rising prices, reasonable predictions that the GOP will lose the House — and maybe the Senate — and a stagnant war in Iran.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is not on the list of things making voters angry — and yet over the past week, he has been catching strays from a frustrated Trump. Because Trump is incapable of blaming himself for anything, including Republicans’ current political predicament, Trump and his misguided sense of victimhood are once again targeting Ukraine.
After the United States launched a war against Iran in late February, energy prices surged worldwide. Americans have grudgingly shelled out more at gas stations and the price of diesel has hit farmers particularly hard. Trump announced earlier this month that he’d struck a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to import Russian diesel fuel to the U.S. to bring down prices.
Experts say this is a bum deal for the U.S, as it gives several billion dollars to Moscow to continue its war against Kyiv and is unlikely to affect global fuel prices. The diesel Russia would send is still needed by, well, Russians, which would keep demand — and prices — high. Zelenskyy rightly criticized the Trump-Putin diesel deal, which prompted Trump to lash out at him for Ukraine’s attacks on Russian oil refineries. He blamed Kyiv’s attacks for the high price of diesel.
“I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal, because he could have made many deals, and for some reason, he never does,” Trump told reporters on Oct. 10. He added, “I think it’s time for Ukraine to get a new president.” The next day, he announced that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an “energy ceasefire” — but both countries quickly denied it. Zelenskyy, much to Trump’s ire, soon resumed retaliatory attacks on Russia’s energy infrastructure. (Moscow had bombarded the Ukrainian electrical grid for months.)
The Trump administration has since taken several worrying actions that seem intent on punishing Ukraine, and Zelenskyy specifically, for a problem of Trump’s making.
Ukraine’s access to Starshield, SpaceX’s military-grade satellite internet service, was interrupted last week. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said any decision to shut off service came from the U.S. government, not his company. Reuters reported that the order came from inside the White House, though the administration pointedly denied that the president made the decision.
On Friday, Trump delayed implementation of a new round of sanctions against Russia. The executive order pausing the sanctions said this was “in the national interests of the United States,” but as of Monday evening, the White House had yet to clarify exactly how. Much like the Starshield disruption, the executive order prompted bipartisan outrage, but Trump has given no signal that he’s wavering.
All of the above is bad, but much more troubling is that none of it makes strategic sense to anyone but Trump, who has long demonstrated a willingness to use Ukraine as a political punching bag. Indeed, for the past decade, Trump has shown an outsized level of enmity toward Kyiv during periods of personal political stress.
Not long after the 2016 election swept Trump into the White House, the U.S. intelligence community determined that Russia had attempted to influence American voters in a wide-ranging operation. Investigations into Trump’s potential ties to that plot frustrated him to no end, leading him to embrace a conspiracy theory shifting the blame to Ukraine. In this debunked narrative, Ukraine framed Russia for hacking the Democratic National Committee’s email server and took one of the breached servers to hide the evidence.
This belief factored into the president’s first big scheme to rig the 2020 election on his own behalf. Trump had billions of dollars in military aid held back from Ukraine to try to force the newly elected Zelenskyy to find the supposed missing server and launch a bogus corruption investigation into Joe Biden, then the former vice president, and his son. The scandal led to Trump’s first impeachment.
Even after Ukraine’s bravery and resilience in the face of Russia’s aggression, Trump still sees Zelenskyy and his country as targets for his bullying
Since his return to the White House, Trump’s relationship with Zelenskyy has at times been lukewarm but has more often been frigid. Vice President JD Vance helped publicly berate Zelenskyy in the Oval Office last year. That was a lowlight in what was already a fraught dynamic. Meanwhile, Trump continues to slam Zelenskyy for refusing to make a deal with its invader Russia, but Putin is the greatest impediment to peace.
Even after Ukraine’s bravery and resilience in the face of Russia’s aggression, Trump still sees Zelenskyy and his country as targets for his bullying. He’s dropped more than 10 years of misplaced anger on the shoulders of a country struggling to survive an attempted imperial conquest.
But for all of Trump’s efforts to shift blame for his own ineptitude onto a country fighting for survival more than 5,000 miles away, very few Americans seem to be buying his spin. In hopes of improving his own domestic standing, Trump is once again exacerbating Ukrainian hardship and strife. It doesn’t seem to be working this time, either.
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