Ukraine Deserves Better Than Trump and Zelensky

Image by Glib Albovsky.

It was the imperial bitch fest heard round the world. Two of Babylon’s finest Frankenstein monsters dueling it out on live tv over a mythic peace deal that neither creature seemed to prioritize over their respective egos. In one corner of the Oval Office, we had Volodymyr Zelensky, sulking and rolling his eyes in an ill-fitting black muscle shirt like a sullen teen caught masturbating in the family gym. In the other corner, we had Donald Trump and his almost deliriously sycophantic toady, JD Vance, taking turns blowing each other for saving the world.

It was supposed to be a photo-op, a press conference celebrating a supposedly agreed upon deal for Ukraine to fork over half of their embattled nation’s rare mineral rights as a thank you to the United States for talking them in and out of World War 3. How this strange colonial tax was supposed to lead to lasting peace is beyond me, but Zelensky clearly wasn’t interested in bootlicking for the cameras that day.

He came out swinging with a barely coherent diatribe about the evils of diplomacy that included the usual CNN approved revisionist history of Putin’s invasion that carefully deleted all the NATO provocations that inspired it. Donald Trump and his Wall Street rent boy responded exactly the way Zelensky probably hoped they would, by lecturing the Ukrainian strongman like the help caught pocketing the silver, browbeating another world leader for over ten minutes for disrespecting his imperial masters with the inconvenience of a dissenting opinion and just generally making complete and total asses of themselves.

By the time this embarrassing shitshow was finally over, Volodymyr Zelensky was being hurled out of the White House like a common hooligan and Donald Trump was badmouthing him on social media like a scorned middle school debutante. Apparently, this is American diplomacy in 2025. Somehow, I’m less than shocked that I’m less than shocked.

The really fucked up thing here is that the ceasefire itself was actually a really good idea for everyone regardless of how the war in Ukraine started. Its continuation in perpetuity solves nothing for the legions of young conscripts dying daily on both sides over a quarter mile of bloody trenches and bombed out ruins. Donald Trump ended up leaving this episode stinking like a soiled conquistador with Tourette’s syndrome but most of his criticisms of Volodymyr Zelensky were more true than false.

This handsome kid isn’t the Joan of Arc of liberal democracy that the progressive universe sells him as. He is an increasingly authoritarian kleptocrat who hasn’t just held off elections indefinitely under martial law but has banned most of his nation’s formidable opposition parties and essentially nationalized Ukraine’s media under a single heavily censored government conglomeration. The real reason this asshole is allergic to the peace table is that he knows that without a war and the torrential slush fund of dissent crushing weaponry that comes with it he won’t last a week before being overthrown by his own goddamn generals.

But peace was never the real motivation here. It very rarely is with Trump. As if his demand for a bounty of shiny things weren’t suspect enough, Trump made this fact even more obscenely clear right in the middle of his screaming match with Zelensky when he jumped from warning about the dangers of World War 3 to bragging about initiating it by sending Ukraine Javelin missiles at a time when even Barack Obama felt this was going too far. These were the first offensive weapons shipped to Kiev, $47 million dollars of them to be exact, and it wasn’t the only assistance Trump provided to provoking the war he suddenly wants to end either.

The Donald also dutifully approved the continued build-up of NATO forces on Russia’s borders started by Obama after his Maiden coup led to the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. This included the Cuban-Missile-style Navy patrols on the Black Sea using battleships capable of carrying nuclear warheads. Trump spent 82 days off Russia’s shores in 2020 alone, provocatively buzzing Sevastopol’s Black Sea Fleet like a teenage greaser playing chicken with doomsday.

Trump further highlighted his less than peaceful motives in this region by endorsing the UK’s recent insane suggestion of putting British troops on the ground in Ukraine and has even flirted with the possibility of sending in US troops as well to secure his precious goddamn minerals which is what he’s really after here. Donald Trump may put on a big show of aping like Pat Buchanan with dick jokes, but his foul-mouthed isolationism usually amounts to little more than a hustle. The fucker is basically just against any war that he can’t personally profit from, and Trump’s ties aren’t made in sweatshops in Kharkiv.

What Trump really wants to do is to strip Ukraine of the copper wiring before he shifts the American Empire towards consolidating its flagging control over the Western Hemisphere with a new Monroe Doctrine on Drug-War steroids then launching his own world war against Russia’s sponsors in China.

His Fox approved Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, has said as much: “Stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe… the US is prioritizing deterring war with China in the Pacific, reorganizing the reality of scarcity and making the resourcing trade-offs.”

But not all of the Donald’s fellow imperialists agree. Many are heavily invested in turning the war in Ukraine into an endless gauntlet of grotesque horrors simply so they can justify handing forklifts full of American tax dollars over to their friends in Raytheon while they keep churning out more toys that blow up the moment they land on Ukrainian soil.

Volodymyr Zelensky has become the figure head of this deeply sick set, a sexy Semitic action figure regurgitating neoliberal talking points in roguish broken English while he sells one generation of Ukrainians after another into forced military prostitution. The man has become a monster but unlike Trump he didn’t start out that way.

The biggest lie Donald Trump barked at Zelensky was the absurd notion that he started this war. Russia didn’t even start this war, America did. We started it by promising Ukraine NATO membership in 2008 before using romper-stomping skinheads to overthrow the country’s democratically elected government in 2014. This is when the Donbass, whose citizens had overwhelmingly voted for that government, seceded and the US encouraged their puppets in Kiev to launch a glorified race war to root out the regions ethnic Russians with a driving rain of indiscriminate artillery fire.

Zelensky was actually elected specifically on the promise to end this madness by granting the Donbass autonomy and reigning in the neo-Nazi battalions reenacting Operation Barbarossa on Russia’s borders. Zelensky would chicken out on the frontlines of this civil war before Russia invaded but returned to reason during negotiations held by Israel and Turkey in Istanbul a few months into that disastrous imperial excursion.

Volodymyr had essentially signed off on the outline of an agreement that would have seen Russia withdraw back to the Donbass in exchange for Ukraine’s neutrality. It was the United States and the United Kingdom that convinced him to rip it up. Trump’s old buddy, then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson actually travelled to Kiev in person during these talks in April 2022 to tell Zelensky himself that he couldn’t expect western support if he signed on to the ceasefire, but he would receive an endless allowance of Atlantic artillery if he kept the war burning indefinitely.

The result was Zelensky taking the momentum from his victory against Putin’s initial invasion of Ukraine and investing it into his own invasion of the same regions in the Donbass that he was elected to let go of, and the result of this insane crusade within a crusade was the seemingly impossible feat of Russia successfully annexing nearly every other Russian speaking region of Ukraine over the last two years, the same regions that ferociously resisted Russia’s initial rapacious advances and helped Zelensky, a man they overwhelmingly voted for, to humiliate the nearly undefeated Putin the Terrible without a single goddamn ATACMS.

Now the entirety of those border-fluid bloodlands face certain conquest regardless of who wins, or which deal does or doesn’t get signed. If Donald Trump’s heavily televised flogging of Volodymyr Zelensky doesn’t convince the Ukrainian people that NATO is a glorified protection racket on a good day, then I don’t know what will. It’s also increasingly impossible to ignore the fact that regardless of his initial intentions, the longer Zelensky rules the more like Putin he becomes. So, how can peace be a solution when it’s being decided by such despicable despots?

This isn’t to say that all is lost for Ukraine and the Donbass, but I believe that the quickest way out of World War 3 might actually be the kind of mutinies that helped bring an end to World War 1. People forget that the Bolsheviks came to power on a promise to end Russia’s involvement in that imperial shitshow and that the German Empire was dissolved almost simultaneously by a conspiracy of “soldier’s councils” formed to resist their own officers. Both of these bold campaigns would end tragically in capitulation and another world war, but Ukraine was always the last region to fall in line.

These are the Wild Steppes after all. The home of the Zaporizhian Sich, a stateless polity of renegade Cossack mercenaries and escaped serfs who challenged the authority of every other state in the neighborhood for centuries and ruled like honorable thieves on the high seas of an ungovernable wasteland. So why should world wars be the only chapters of history to repeat themselves?

Both Ukraine and the Donbass deserve better than to be the follies of a nest of lecherous hoodlums wrestling over borders and minerals. My only advice as a shit-talking armchair anarchist is to stop shooting each other and turn your guns against the real enemies in the wheelhouse. Kill the captain, save the ship. The Sich lives when the bitch dies, and we all know who the bitch is.

The post Ukraine Deserves Better Than Trump and Zelensky appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Nicky Reid.

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