Three years ago today, Vladimir Putin launched his unprovoked and horrific Blitzkrieg invasion of Ukraine. His army failed to reach and capture the capital Kyiv, suffering losses and embarrassment along the way. This is reminiscent of the German invasion of neutral Belgium on 3 August 1914. Germany’s plan called for a 40-day all out sprint through Belgium to capture Paris and defeat France before the French could mobilize their defenses. Although the Germans made it to within 90 miles of Paris, they never got any nearer to the city, and following an August filled with German atrocities, the arrival of the British to join the slaughter, French counterattacks, and the refusal of America to become involved, everyone settled in for four years of trench warfare, where millions of rounds of artillery shelling bracketed wave after wave of soldiers insanely charging across “no man’s land” to capture a few feet of ground they would lose the next day.
It wasn’t until 1917 when the discovery of the Zimmermann Telegram¹ gave President Woodrow Wilson the excuse he needed to bring America into the war that the tide began to turn leading to Germany’s surrender in November, 1918. The Versailles Treaty that followed completely changed the world’s political geography and furnished the political ammunition that led to Adolph Hitler and the Second World War.
Three years following Russia’s failed Blitzkrieg, the battlefields in Ukraine resemble those of World War I. But in this case, Ukrainians, and Ukrainians alone, have been fighting to repel the Russian invaders. The rest of Europe and the U.S. have helped, but, to prevent what many fear would be the impetus for a third World War, no other country has offered to add troops to the Ukrainian defensive effort. Despite this, North Korean troops now fight side by side with Russians.
Since the invasion began, the U.S. Congress has approved five bills to support Ukraine’s government in defending itself. The total budget authority under these bills is $182.8 billion.
Thus far, $83.2 billion of these funds have been disbursed, while funds available, but not yet obligated, total $39.6 billion, and funding obligated, but not yet disbursed equal $57 billion. The historic sums are helping a broad set of Ukrainian people and institutions, including refugees, law enforcement, independent radio broadcasters, and the legions of maintenance crews trying to keep the lights on and the water flowing after Russian cruise missiles regularly blow things apart. Despite this, most of the aid has been military-related.
Of the total authorization, $69.2 billion has been disbursed for weapons, equipment and other military support. Eighty percent, or about $56 billion, of the military equipment support was made in U.S. factories by U.S. workers, an inconvenient fact never mentioned by Republican politicians wanting to shut off aid at the urging of their MAGA base.
It only took Donald Trump and his new administration three weeks to undo all of this and betray Ukraine. The method of betrayal — the U.S. and Russia carving up Ukraine’s territory and the U.S. giving in to Russia’s primary demands without negotiation — reminds me of a secret pact made in 1939 between Nazi Germany and Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Let me explain.
1939
Sometime in early May 1939, at Berghof, Hitler’s holiday home near Berchtesgaden, German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop showed Hitler a film of Josef Stalin viewing his military in a Red Square parade. Hitler became intrigued with the idea of allying with the Soviets, and Ribbentrop recalled Hitler saying that Stalin “looked like a man he could do business with.” Ribbentrop was then given the nod to pursue negotiations toward an alliance with Moscow.
On 24 August 1939, to the astonishment of the rest of the world, Germany and the Soviet Union announced they had concluded the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, officially known as the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
There were two parts to this Treaty, one public, the other secret. The public part was a ten-year non-aggression pact containing provisions that included consultation, arbitration if either party disagreed, neutrality if either went to war against a third power and no membership in a group “which is directly or indirectly aimed at the other.”
The secret part of the Treaty, which was unknown to the world until the Nuremburg Trials of 1945,² carved up the land and countries lying geographically between the parties into “spheres of influence,” much as the U.S. and Russia are about to carve up eastern Ukraine. Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland were to be divided between the two. Poland, especially, was important to Hitler, because of his desire for “living space” for German expansion. In the Pact with Stalin, Germany was to get all of western Poland.
The day after Germany and the USSR announced the Treaty’s signing, Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, fearing a German invasion of Poland, and unwilling to sell out Poland as he had Czechoslovakia a year earlier, sent a letter to Hitler assuring him Britain would stand by Poland no matter what the pact contained.
One week after the Treaty was signed, Germany invaded Poland. Two days later, on 1 September 1939, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, and World War II began.
Less than two years later, Hitler invaded Russia, shattering the 1939 Treaty. Operation Barbarossa was launched — from Poland.
2025
The Trump Administration’s betrayal comes in two parts, one, economic; the other, capitulation to Russia’s demands.
Ukraine is rich with rare earth minerals, which are a group of heavy metals found in the Earth’s crust used for making electronics and other high-tech devices.
Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy had offered an economic deal to allow the U.S. to assist in developing the country’s vast natural resources. The idea was also part of Ukraine’s “victory plan,” a list of economic and security policies aimed at securing a just peace with Russia, which Zelenskyy presented to the country’s allies last year. It went nowhere at the time.
Last week, Trump demanded that Ukraine give 50% of all its rare earth metals to the U.S as a condition for help in negotiating peace. Not sell, but give — as repayment for all the help the U.S. has given during the last three years. Trump valued the payback at $500 billion, a ridiculous number.
As reported by CNN’s Seb Starcevic:
In the second part of an interview with Fox News that aired late Monday, the Republican [Trump] said the U.S. should get a slice of Ukraine’s vast natural resources as compensation for the hundreds of billions it has spent on helping Kyiv resist Russia’s full-scale invasion.
“I told them [Ukraine] that I want the equivalent like $500B worth of rare earth. And they’ve essentially agreed to do that so at least we don’t feel stupid,” Trump said.
Trump’s demand was absurd, and Zelenskyy promptly rejected it. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, slammed Trump’s transactional foreign policy style as “very egotistic, very self-centered.”
Which brings us to Starlink.
Ukraine is dependent on Elon Musk’s Starlink service. Starlink uses a constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit to furnish satellite internet service that provides broadband internet, especially to remote areas. When Russia destroyed Ukraine’s internet early in the war, Musk gave Starlink to the country, a magnanimous and generous gesture. However, as Musk went deeper and deeper down Donald Trump’s rabbit hole, his magnanimity toward Ukraine faded. Now, according to Andrea Shalal and Joey Roulette, writing for Reuters, the Trump team is threatening to pull Starlink access if President Zelenskyy does not accede to Trump’s demand for the rare earth minerals. This would be a massive blow to Ukraine.
In Criminology 101, we call this extortion.
The second part of the U.S. betrayal is capitulation to Putin’s demands, and we are already part way down that road. Brand new Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made that clear when he went to Brussels and, on behalf of the art-of-the-deal World’s Greatest Negotiator, pushed all of Ukraine’s negotiation chips into the pot before the cards were dealt. No NATO membership for Ukraine. Russia will keep all the land it stole.³
Then, Hegseth launched into the next chapter of Trump’s years-long critique of defense spending by NATO countries, using Poland as an example of how it should be done. He said,
“We see Poland as the model ally, willing to invest not just in their defense, but in our shared defense and the defense of the continent. Words are cheap, but in deed and in actions, Poland leads by example, on a lot of things, including defense spending, building up Polish military readiness. Poland is spending 5% of GDP on defense already, which is a model for the continent.”
And why has Poland done this? Because, since the 17th century, Poland has been invaded and occupied five times by Russia. This is a fact the newly-minted Defense Secretary chose not to mention in his speech.
Poland was critical to Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, and it is critical to Vladimir Putin’s designs on Ukraine and the rest of Europe. Look at this map, and you’ll see what I mean:
Look at the position of Belarus. Led by strongman and President-since-1994 Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus, like Ukraine a former Soviet Republic, is a close ally of Putin’s Russian regime. In 2022, one year after the stalled Russian invasion of Ukraine, US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield said Russia had moved nearly 5,000 troops into Belarus, along with short-range ballistic missiles, special forces, and anti-aircraft batteries, with the intention of massing more than 30,000 troops near that country’s border with Ukraine.
Shortly thereafter, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg confirmed that Moscow’s deployment into Belarus was the biggest since the Cold War, with “an expected 30,000 combat troops, Spetsnaz special operation forces, fighter jets including SU-35, Iskander dual-capable missiles and S-400 air defense systems.”
Belarus is an ideal jumping off point for Russian troops to move into Ukraine — or Poland. The Poles know they could be Russia’s next target — once again — which makes Hegseth’s capitulation on behalf of Trump so disingenuous and worrying.
This was made even more troubling when Vice President Vance made it abundantly clear Europe was no longer a priority for the Trump Administration in a speech in Munich a few days after Hegseth dropped the first shoe.
In response to this sellout, and writing for Foreign Policy, Alexey Kovalev said, “The Kremlin and its media machine have not been this ecstatic since the launch of Putin’s “special military operation.”
“Trump is now doing our job for us” by “sawing” Europe into pieces, Russian talk show host Evgeny Popov told his viewers. His giddy, smiling co-host, Olga Skabeeva, described the turn of events as having been “unimaginable” and “unthinkable” before. On another show, the pundit Sergey Mikheev was elated by another Hegseth remark that was widely interpreted to mean that Washington was reconsidering its security commitment to Europe. Mikheev concluded that Russia was finally free to strike Brussels, London, and Paris. Some pundits basked in the fact that it was Trump who reached out to Putin. “It’s as if Julius Ceasar himself telephoned a barbarian,” Mosfilm studio chief Karen Shakhnazarov commented on another show.
In addition to angering the Ukrainian government and further demoralizing its battle-weary troops on the front lines, the Trump Administration is delivering Christmas for Vladimir Putin. His stocking is full and shiny presents await opening under the tree. For example, Trump is now talking about lifting sanctions on Russia — and by gutting the parts of the government that enforce them, he has given a massive gift to Putin. What has happened and what is about to happen to Ukraine is immeasurably tragic.
Writing in the Dispatch on Friday, Jonah Goldberg said Trump…
is simply siding with Putin. Trump pretends that he cares—wrongly—that Zelensky is an illegitimate “dictator,” but he doesn’t care an iota that Putin is an actual dictator. He says that Ukraine “started the war” and that since Russia has fought for the Ukrainian territory it stole at gunpoint, it should keep it.
Our national honor is disappearing like soup through a sieve. Our allies see this. They see us becoming unreliable, which means they will find reliability elsewhere.
I’m astonished this is all happening so fast.
Meanwhile, despite Trump’s dishonor, we are faced with the undeniable fact that three years on nearly a fifth of Ukraine is now occupied illegally, immorally, and barbarically by a country led by a tyrannical dictator who targets children’s hospitals and sanctions rape, child abductions, and mass slaughter by his troops.
And Donald Trump admires him.
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¹ In January 1917, British cryptographers deciphered a telegram from German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann to the German Minister to Mexico, Heinrich von Eckhardt, offering United States territory to Mexico after the war was won in return for joining the German cause.
² Although The Guardian’s foreign correspondent did scoop the secret part of the Treaty, no one paid any attention.
³ According to the Institute for the Study of War, a US-based conflict monitor, Russia currently occupies about 99% of the Luhansk region, 70% of the Donetsk region, roughly 75% of both the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, and all of Crimea.
