Trump in lockstep with Putin: How he is destroying Europe's peace order

t-online Trump in lockstep with Putin: How he is destroying Europe's peace order Bastian Brauns • 7 hours • 6 minutes reading time Trump's Ukraine statement Now Europe must expect anything US President Donald Trump in Mar-a-Lago: "You should never have started the war." Donald Trump is breaking a geopolitical taboo, joining forces with Vladimir Putin. In doing so, he is not only endangering Ukraine, but the entire European security order. A wake-up call. Bastian Brauns reports from Washington On a sunny afternoon in Mar-a-Lago, at a pleasant 24 degrees Celsius, Donald Trump has once again left the world stunned. At his luxurious estate in Florida, near which the US President also likes to hit golf balls across the perfectly manicured lawn, he said things that have the potential not only to shake the world's geopolitical security order, but to destroy it. Ukraine should never have started the war, Trump claimed. They could have simply exchanged land beforehand. The president responded with a mocking tirade against Ukraine because it had previously demanded that it sit at the negotiating table with the Americans and Russians. After all, Zelenskyj has been "there for three years" and has ultimately achieved nothing, Trump said caustically. What Trump said in Mar-a-Lago is a declaration of moral bankruptcy - and an open breach of international law. He did not condemn Putin's war, which has been devastating the country not just for three years, but in fact since 2014 - even during Trump's first presidency. Russian aggression has now claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and forced millions to flee. It is a war that Vladimir Putin started without any justification and officially condemned by the vast majority of the United Nations. The fact that the 47th President of the United States is now blaming Ukraine for this is not only a perversion of the facts, but a dangerous capitulation to Putin's policy of violence. There has not been such a capitulation to an aggressive superpower since the Second World War. While Trump was sneering at Ukraine and its desperate fight for survival in Florida, in Odessa, 10,000 kilometers away, it was not golf balls but Russian missiles that were flying at civilians. Unlike in Mar-a-Lago, the temperature in Eastern Europe is freezing cold. At minus 12 degrees Celsius, Putin's Russian army, supposedly ready for peace, has taken the small town of Fyholivka in the Kharkiv region. The fact that Trump is demanding that Ukraine simply "exchange" its land at this very moment only shows how unscrupulous and unscrupulous this American president is. It also fails to recognize that Putin did not just want a few areas, but has the whole country in his sights. Mar-a-Lago: President Trump greets right-wing extremist Enrique Tarrio. Trump pardoned the convicted Proud Boys leader. With his unprecedented distortion of reality, Trump is publicly reversing the roles of perpetrator and victim - a cynicism that is only surpassed in its consequential cruelty by the Russian ruler Putin. If this radical reversal of US foreign policy really prevails, it would be nothing less than an invitation to all autocrats in the world to invade their neighbors and then demand inhumane "deals" on land swaps. One might be tempted to dismiss Trump's words as another of his notorious gaffes. But that would be fatal. Because they fit into a clear, new foreign policy strategy: to bring Russia out of isolation and instead work against Ukraine and its European allies. The recent meeting between US diplomats and Russian representatives in Saudi Arabia, to which Ukraine was not even invited, speaks volumes. Trump's Secretary of State Rubio has already brought up the possibility of easing the hard-won sanctions against Russia. Trump went even further in his statements: He is now even openly calling for new elections in Ukraine - entirely in line with Moscow's wishes. This is a stab in the back of Zelensky. With the hackneyed argument that the Ukrainian president's term of office has expired, Trump is adopting Russian propaganda almost word for word. The fact that regular elections can hardly be held in a country that is at war seems irrelevant to Trump. He also brazenly claims that Zelensky's popularity is only four percent. A lie that is easily refuted: According to a survey, six out of ten Ukrainians were still satisfied with Zelensky's work in August 2024.