Trump has made his Ukrainian ally his scapegoat and is behaving like Putin in the run-up to the mid-term elections.

Donald Trump has turned his Ukrainian ally into a scapegoat for his mistakes in the war against Iran and for his lacklustre performance in the election polls, and now that the mid-term elections are just around the corner, he is behaving like Vladimir Putin. The night of 26–27 October provided the latest demonstration of the American president’s tragic about-turn – though, in truth, any night could serve as an example: on the other side of the ocean, Trump rants on his social media platform Truth; on this side of the ocean, in the Ukrainian capital and in many other Ukrainian cities and regions, Putin unleashes hundreds of drones and dozens of ballistic missiles that Kyiv’s air defences cannot intercept, whilst the city waits in vain for American-made Patriot interceptors. On this sleepless night, a bridge in Kyiv linking the two parts of the city across the Dnipro River, a university campus and the surrounding areas were struck. Deaths, injuries, damage: Putin’s escalation – fuelled by Washington’s hostile strategy towards Ukraine – is relentlessly targeting civilian sites and the country’s energy and logistics infrastructure.

Trump, in his afternoon and evening rants—both live and on social media—has offered a million dollars to anyone who reports electoral fraud against the Republican Party that took place in the last election and in the upcoming one, provided that those responsible for the fraud are arrested and convicted (a Patriot interceptor costs around 4 million dollars, just to give an idea of the US president’s priorities). The Trump administration is putting considerable pressure on state electoral commissions and those managing electoral registers, arguing that public trust in the electoral process must be rebuilt – the very trust that its constant falsehoods, from 2020 onwards, have helped to destroy. The problem for the Ukrainians is that the course of this election campaign has heavily influenced their relationship with Trump, culminating in the breakdown that began on 9 October with the US decision to lift sanctions on Russian diesel, and continued with the suspension of other sanctions, the disruption of intelligence-sharing, on the front line and in the cities, the demand for the resignation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the sabotage of the PURL arms procurement programme (where Europeans pay for American weapons to be supplied to the Ukrainians) and various other business proposals to the Kremlin.

For nineteen days now, Trump has been telling Americans that Ukraine is to blame for high prices – particularly fuel prices – and for the depleted stockpiles that are complicating military operations in the Middle East. It is unclear whether voters are believing him: for ten years now, Trumpism has defied the polls. What is known is that, according to data reported by Reuters and several research institutes, diesel production at Russian refineries reached around 180,000 tonnes per day in the second half of October, compared with 160,000 tonnes in the first half of the month, whilst domestic consumption fell to 140,000 tonnes, thus leaving around one million tonnes of diesel per month available for export. According to shipping data from LSGE and Kpler, a Maltese-flagged cargo ship carrying 40,000 tonnes of diesel arrived in New York, but this is a derisory amount: the United States requires 500,000 tonnes of diesel per day, so a month’s worth of Russian production would last only a few days, and the cargo ship that arrived covers just two hours’ worth of US demand. According to multiple sources, at least three other ships loaded with diesel are en route to the United States; however, according to Zelensky’s own statements, Russia’s contribution to diesel demand amounts to just two per cent of the total: this is why the price of diesel is not falling significantly, as Trump would have liked.

In the meantime, however, the US president’s electoral manoeuvre has meant that far more Russian missile strikes have hit their targets – that is, killed people and destroyed civilian targets – in Ukraine; that Russian revenues, which fuel Putin’s war machine, have increased; and that the Russian president, basking in an unexpected surge of renewed impunity, to resume his diplomatic manoeuvring over peace negotiations for a peace he neither seeks nor wants; that the Pentagon should allow itself not to authorise the dispatch of urgent and essential defensive weapons for Kyiv – some of which have already been paid for by the Europeans; and that Elon Musk should slow down his satellite services, including those paid for by the Europeans (Starshield). Trump is pre-emptively denouncing electoral fraud against him, luring whistleblowers with huge rewards, and touting the ceasefire announced by his wife Melania in Oleshky as proof of the success of his dialogue with Putin: It appears that those evacuated from the town will be sent to Russian-controlled Crimea, not to Ukraine as Zelensky is demanding – in short, yet another deportation, under the smug gaze of an American president who wants to win the mid-term elections.