Trump is failing to end the Ukraine war but he's right about one thing
Like it or not, Donald Trump is calling the war for what it is: a destructive stalemate with the clock ticking against Kyiv.
There are momentous weeks, then there are momentous weeks and then there are weeks that are even momentous amongst momentous weeks. We are just about to start one that could become of the latter. What indicates that above all else is that Donald Trump’s showing up at Pope Francis’s funeral in a fairly bright blue suit and an equally fairly bright blue tie despite the dress code having been strictly ordered, another classic case of Trumpian “FU2”*, barely even made the headlines. The world has significantly larger fish to fry and in this topsy-turvy world in which we find ourselves maybe time to review some of those fish.
Not that the Canadian parliamentary elections should be overlooked, nor the local elections here in the UK, both of which are set to reveal just how volatile the Western political backdrop has become and not least of all thanks to the one in the blue suit. But first there was the meeting between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky in Rome of which we have seen pictures but of which we were provided with no sound recording and there was further evidence that Vlad the Invader’s position towards Ukraine remains as clear as Donald Trump’s failure to end the war on Day One. We are also very close to the US President's 100 day mark – what’s so important about that? – and of all Trump’s disruptions, it is in influencing this conflict that he has achieved least.
I take us back to January 2022 when Russian troops were beginning to concentrate along the Russo-Ukrainian border. Many of us, maybe even most of us – self included – believed Putin to be sabre-rattling and could not countenance the thought of an actual territorial war breaking out in Europe. How wrong we were. On 24 February 24, the Russians invaded, and we were all wrong again when we believed that within days and without much of a fight Kyiv would fall and Ukraine would be occupied, even annexed, by the Russians. When the invasion began to falter, bogged down in logistical mayhem, our screens were full of sanctimonious TV journalists in Moscow reporting on supposedly huge anti-war demonstrations and predicting Putin’s imminent defenestration. How little they all understood the Russian psyche as well as the Kremlin’s ability to leverage the people’s tolerance for forbearance in the name of the Mother Country.
Two and a quarter years, countless tens of thousands of lives and billions of dollars and roubles later, the gridlock is beginning to break down and not the way the West would have wanted to see. Trump has upset the apple cart by grabbing not Putin but Zelensky by the balls and squeezing them. He is not wrong. Ukraine might fight to the last man but, irrespective of how one looks at the situation, the probability of Ukraine ever militarily regaining the lost territory without Western boots on the ground is as good as zero. They are not going to be forthcoming. So, in bond market parlance, “How’re ya left shag?”
Did we drop the ball in 2014 when Putin seized Crimea? Way back then I already noted that Crimea is neither Russia nor Ukraine, having been acquired in 1782 by Count Potemkin for the Russian Empire and Catherine the Great in an act of diplomatic deception. It had not been assigned to Ukraine until 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev undertook an administrative reshuffle of the Soviet SSRs. Strictly speaking, if either of the two countries were to have a claim over Crimea, it would have to be Russia over Ukraine. It was of course not the what but the how that was not right - but who in what Putin saw as a decadent West, obsessed with LGBTQ+ rights and progressively more dependent on Russian energy supplies, was ever going to do anything about it? He was not entirely wrong. Even if the West has had the moral backbone to strike back, it barely had the military capacity.
We must never forget the monstrous mess the Ukrainians themselves had made of the borderlands between Ukraine and Russia, the Donbas. All of European history is littered with border conflicts over areas where the natural geographic divide and the cultural one fail to coincide. Whether South Tyrol, which lies on Italian side of the Alps but is German speaking and culturally bound to Austria, or the Alsace, which is on the Western side of the Rhine but is culturally a lot more German than French, there are endless cases across the entire continent. The fluidity of borders in Eastern Europe where great powers have risen before sinking into obscurity – think the once mighty Grand Duchy of Lithuania – is a challenge that will never go away and, as far as I can tell from here, Kyiv made a complete pig’s ear of governing the borderlands by trying to force cultural Russians to become Ukrainian, the very thing of which Kyiv is now accusing Russia of doing in reverse. The civil war that had been raging in Donetsk and Luhansk for nearly a decade is in the West conveniently forgotten. Yes, we are just as susceptible to massaged narratives as are Ivan and Olga.
Failing to push back against Hitler, first in the Rhineland, then the Anschluss and eventually in the German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia – commonly referred to as the Sudetenland – did nothing other than to embolden the man and “lessons should have been learnt”. They weren’t after Crimea which was anyhow difficult given Kyiv’s already tenuous claim over the peninsula. The war with Russia is one which Ukraine cannot win – the disastrous summer offensive of 2022 against a then still wobbly Russian army is a case in point – but which it can also not afford to lose. Like it or not, Donald Trump is calling the war for what it is, a destructive stalemate with the clock ticking against Ukraine. As in the Great War, Germany was never going to win, it was only a matter of how long it would take it to lose and at what cost. Is Trump, 86 years later, about to do a Chamberlain? “Peace for our time…..”
At US$ 63.38 at the time of writing, the oil price is at its lowest since the day on which Russia invaded Ukraine and with that Putin will find financing his war progressively more difficult. On Friday, the Central Bank of Russia maintained its key rate at 20%. No economy can thrive with rates at that level. The rouble has enjoyed respite since Trump was elected although it has nevertheless in the meantime been up and down like the whore’s unmentionables. It was Rub 87.80/US$ at the time of the election. It has since then fallen as far as Rub 113.50 at the end of last year and is now at Rub 82.85. The expectation that Washington is about to offer Moscow a get out of jail free card is not going unnoticed by markets. That said, however, the wide-ranging decline in both hydrocarbon and base metal prices will not be making Putin’s life easier and I wonder whether Zelensky, the man who is according to Trump is holding no cards, might have been pointing out that Vlad the Invader’s hand isn’t all that strong either.
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