Trump’s cruel about-turn on the Patriots. The ocean is the measure of indifference

Russia has stepped up its attacks on Ukrainian civilians, said a journalist addressing Donald Trump during a meeting in the Oval Office. Does this concern you? “We’re not involved; we’re separated by an ocean,” said the US president. “But I hate to see 25,000 young people being killed every month between Russia and Ukraine.” We’re working on it, “but it’s a very violent war; there’s a lot of hatred in this war, a lot of hatred between the two leaders,” Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky. A year and a half ago, during the first, disastrous meeting at the White House between Trump and the Ukrainian president, it was precisely the issue of the ocean – raised by Zelensky, who was saying: ‘You don’t understand what this war is like; you have an ocean between you’ – that infuriated Trump, prompting him to retort: ‘How dare you speak to me like that? You’re out of your depth.’ Today, the ocean – the measure of Trump’s indifference – is one of the reasons why the American president does not feel obliged to defend his Ukrainian ally.

Another question for Trump: Zelensky says the Ukrainians are in desperate need of Patriot interceptors; do you plan to give them some? Answer: “We need them too.”

The reason, according to Trump, is certainly not that in the war against Iran (in which, incidentally, there is an ocean in between) many American weapons were wasted due to the lack of a strategy, but also because Ukraine’s offer of help was not accepted – Ukraine knows how to shoot down Iranian drones without spending millions of dollars and depleting the arsenal. No, for Trump, the blame lies with Joe Biden, who “gave 300 billion dollars’ worth of ammunition to Ukraine. When I left office (after my first term), the arsenal was full, and Biden gave away a lot of it, and I am now rebuilding it”. The US military fired around 1,300 tactical ballistic missiles during the war in Iran, according to figures provided by a Trump administration official to the Washington Post, and if just a tenth of these had been given to Ukraine three years ago, the course of the war would have been different.

A month ago, at the NATO summit in Ankara, the only announcement made at the end of a brief meeting punctuated by Trump’s tirades against his allies was the granting of licences to Ukraine to produce Patriot interceptors. The decision was subsequently confirmed by Trump himself on several occasions, but then the US president began to throw in a few "we’ll see"s, and finally changed his mind. Meanwhile, Putin – who has been in a tight spot for months because the Ukrainians have brought the war to his doorstep – has identified the weak point precisely in the defence against ballistic missiles and has started launching them by the dozens at Ukrainian cities. And so Trump – who claims to have ended eight wars, who thinks that even in this conflict some progress will be made sooner or later but that, after all, there’s the ocean in between, so what does it matter to America? – continues to prolong the conflict: he refuses to provide Ukraine with anti-ballistic defences, so Putin becomes convinced he can carry on with his missile barrage; yet he does nothing on the negotiating front either. And a year on from the meeting in Alaska with Putin – the man who spices up the Russian bluff with the so-called ‘spirit of Anchorage’ – all that remains is Trump’s indifference and fickleness, Putin’s ferocity, and Zelensky’s defenceless skies.