As president, Donald Trump “made it very clear” that he thought Ukraine “must be part of Russia”, his former adviser Fiona Hill says in a new book about US national security under threat from Russia and China.
“Trump made it very clear that he thought, you know, that Ukraine, and certainly Crimea, must be part of Russia,” Hill, senior director for European and Russian affairs on the US national security council between 2017 and 2019, tells David Sanger, a New York Times reporter and author of New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West.
“He really could not get his head around the idea that Ukraine was an independent state.”
This, Sanger writes, meant Trump’s view of Ukraine was “essentially identical” to that of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president who would order an invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a year after Trump left office.
Vlad was hoping Trump would get re-elected, and further isolate Ukraine from Western support. When Trump lost to Biden, Putin rolled the dice with his failed headshot attempt.
Now he’s moved on from relying on Trump, to relying on various congresspeople to deteriorate US support for Ukraine. Since he’s got a bunch of them in his pocket, spouting his propaganda, he doesn’t even need Trump to be president, and he can still kill US aid to Ukraine (and do it without Trump’s clumsy extortion attempts on a recorded phone call).