One hundred days of surviving Trump

Ukraine already had to worry about Putin. Then his American apparatchik returned to the White House.

A section of a memorial wall honoring fallen Ukrainian soldiers outside St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery in Kyiv. (c. Martin Kuz)

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Donald Trump sounded like the last to know. Flying back to the United States from Rome after attending the funeral of Pope Francis on Saturday, the president mused on social media that perhaps his Russian counterpart has never intended to end his slaughter of Ukrainians.

“There was no reason for Putin to be shooting missiles into civilian areas, cities, and towns over the last few days,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. He was referring to a series of massive attacks across Ukraine that killed at least 66 people and wounded hundreds more. “It makes me think that maybe he doesn't want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along, and has to be dealt with differently, through ‘Banking’ or ‘Secondary Sanctions?’ Too many people are dying!!!”

Trump’s speculation that maybe Putin preferred to continue his genocidal invasion rather than negotiate a legitimate ceasefire registered as disturbing on at least two levels. On the surface, the post suggested that the American commander in chief had failed to ever consider the idea of Putin’s duplicity until last week’s attacks. In that analysis, Trump disregarded the previous 13,000 civilian deaths in Ukraine since the full-scale war began in 2022, blinded by his credulous, dimwitted trust in the Russian dictator’s willingness to broker a peace deal.

Beneath that unsettling possibility lies what I view as the darker reality: Trump grasps Putin’s mendacity — game recognizes game, so to speak — and cares as little about Ukraine’s fate and the death of innocents as when he took office 100 days ago. Between the lines of his gentle admonition of Putin — a sharp contrast to his verbal mugging of Volodymyr Zelensky when the Ukrainian president visited the Oval Office in February — lurked something closer to a plea, one laden with an apparatchik’s quivering fealty. “You have to stop this now,” Trump seemed to say, “or I won’t be able to give you everything I’ve promised. People will start to whisper.”

Nobody living outside MAGA world and the poisoned air of its enclosed media ecosystem believes that Trump has awakened only in the past week to Putin’s bad faith. That’s because Trump, too, has negotiated in bad faith. Or perhaps capitulated is the better word. He has engaged in preemptive appeasement, offering Putin territorial concessions and sanctions relief while floating nebulous security guarantees for Ukraine and telling Zelensky that the country must surrender its NATO ambitions and hand over its rare mineral reserves to America.

Putin has responded to the overtures by dangling a variety of bait, including the prospect of building a 150-story Trump Tower in Moscow. The performative gestures on both sides have deepened Trump’s delusion that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize — even as he and Republicans in Congress, adamant in their refusal to further aid Ukraine, allow Putin to terrorize its people day after bloody day without consequence.

Trump’s slight shift in tone toward Moscow occurred after an impromptu 15-minute meeting with Zelensky at the pope’s funeral. The episode displayed Trump’s prowess as a human macaw that reflexively repeats the words of the last person to talk to him. Still, there’s a good chance his Truth Social post surprised Putin less than Zelensky, who for the past 100 days has had to contend with an unstable authoritarian across the ocean in addition to the one next door.

As he finds himself squeezed by Trump and Putin, Zelensky has watched domestic political foes start to circle in Kyiv, most notably Petro Poroshenko, his predecessor and the billionaire founder of the Roshen confectionary empire. In the 2019 election, Poroshenko endured a crushing defeat to Zelensky, who won all of Ukraine’s 24 regions except Lviv, where voters proved skeptical of the political novice and TV celebrity.

The western region of 2.5 million people shares the name of its biggest city, and in the invasion’s first days, I traveled there from Kyiv to witness the largest refugee exodus in Europe since World War II. For a story about Zelensky’s overnight evolution into a global icon, I spoke to more than a dozen people, a mix of residents and evacuees. By chance, every single one had voted for Poroshenko in 2019, unconvinced that Zelensky could fend off Putin’s ceaseless coercion and guide the country closer to Western Europe. Now each of them supported him for his defiance of Russia.

Yuriy Polovyy, a retiree and violinist in a string ensemble, voted for Volodymyr Zelensky’s opponent in the 2019 presidential election. Days into Russia’s full-scale invasion, the Lviv resident said of Zelensky, “He has made Ukraine proud.” (c. Martin Kuz)

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I encountered Yuriy Polovyy as he walked home across the city’s central square carrying a takeout bag loaded with warm cabbage rolls and containers of borsch. A retiree and violinist in a string ensemble, he wore a black wool cap adorned with a patch of the country’s coat of arms, and he explained in simple terms his newfound admiration for Zelensky. “He has made Ukraine proud,” Yuriy said. “He is our president — the president for all Ukrainians.”

Zelensky’s approval ratings had ebbed from a high-water mark above 90 percent at the war’s outset to under 60 percent by the time Trump returned to the White House in January. The U.S. pressure campaign on Ukraine has since partially reversed that drop in public trust. Ukrainians appear to appreciate that Zelensky, if too slow to mobilize more young adults for the military and too inclined to consolidate power in the president’s office, has refused to genuflect toward either Washington or Moscow. He remains committed to territorial sovereignty, individual liberty and other democratic ideals that Trump has abandoned in his feverish pursuit of Putinism.

The Russian president on Monday unilaterally declared a three-day ceasefire that would begin May 8 as Moscow marks the 80th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Germany in WWII. Hours later, waves of Russian drones struck across Ukraine, killing a 12-year-old girl. In his nightly address to the nation, Zelensky said, “For some reason, everyone is supposed to wait for May 8 and only then have a ceasefire to ensure calm for Putin… We believe that the world believes that there is no reason to wait for May 8. And the ceasefire should be not for a few days only to resume the killing afterward.”

Last week Trump posted, “There was no reason for Putin to be shooting missiles into civilian areas, cities, and towns over the last few days.” Someone should tell President Macaw that it hasn’t been the last few days or the last 100 days. Putin has bombed Ukrainians for 1,161 days and counting.

But, right — maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war.

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Etc.

— Last fall, in a story about a mass grave from the Soviet era that helps explain Ukraine’s reluctance to negotiate with Putin, I mentioned journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna, who had disappeared a year earlier while reporting in Ukraine’s occupied eastern region. The Washington Post has published a harrowing account of her detention and death and her brave work to expose Russia’s constellation of prisons on Ukrainian territory. (Try this link if you hit the paywall.)

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