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LAST UPDATE | 8 Mar
THE DEBACLE IN the Oval Office last week dramatically clarified the interests and preferences of the US administration, which align closely with the Kremlin and against the EU.
Ultimately, Trump doesn’t care whether Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia are in Ukraine or Russia, and he’s already described the annexation of Crimea as “so smart”.
His hostility for Zelenskyy is ill-concealed. The Ukrainian president is dismissed as a dictator, while Putin is spared these blandishments. On the issue of Ukraine’s fate, the US now aligns with Russia, Belarus and North Korea at the United Nations and in opposition to its ostensible European allies.
Trump could potentially exert substantial leverage over Putin. The Russian economy, which is 14 times smaller than that of the US, is under considerable strain. Russia hasn’t been able to eliminate the Ukrainian occupation in Kursk, let alone subdue Ukraine and install a puppet government as initially planned. Indeed, the Kremlin couldn’t even save the regime of its ally Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
The US president has, however, decided to apply all pressure on Ukraine, and the Kremlin can’t believe its luck. His decision to end intelligence sharing with Kyiv will cost civilian lives as Russian missiles can reach their targets more easily without detection. An example of the parallel universe Trump inhabits is his assertion that Russia should rejoin the G7 because it would never have invaded Ukraine had it remained part of the group. However, Russia was expelled from the group in 2014 for the very reason that it invaded Ukraine.
Moscow has made clear that it doesn’t plan to negotiate in any meaningful sense. Instead, Russia seeks approval for its occupation and ethnic cleansing. No accountability for war crimes is envisaged. Russia will take Ukrainian land and people while the US will profit from Ukraine’s mineral resources. President Zelenskyy is depicted as a troublemaker because he won’t sign up for what would constitute capitulation without any effective security guarantees.
For Moscow, neighbouring countries are neither equals nor fully sovereign states with independent interests. Russia’s declared sphere of influence extends across all former Soviet republics, but Putin also challenges the geopolitical orientation of nations once part of the Warsaw Pact or the tsarist empire.
The Russian political elite believes that even if Europe has the will, it doesn’t have the means to defend Ukraine or its neighbours from invasion. State TV anchor Dmitry Kiselyov scorned the idea of European peacekeepers in Ukraine. Referring to the British Army’s dwindling numbers, estimated to be little more than 70,000 personnel, Kiselyov said “You could fit the whole British army into Wembley Stadium, and you’d still have room for some of the French army.”
During their recent meeting at the Oval Office, Trump jokingly asked Keir Starmer if the UK could defend itself from Russia. Starmar knew better than to answer. Last year, a senior British General admitted to a parliamentary committee that the UK’s military “couldn’t fight (Russia) for more than a couple of months because we don’t have the ammunition and reserves of equipment to do it”. Needless to say, if the UK and other European states don’t have the resources to defend themselves, they will struggle to provide Ukraine with what it needs. North Korea, an impoverished dictatorship that can’t feed its people, has supplied Russia with more ammunition than the EU has given to Ukraine.
The Kremlin says that the United States’ foreign policy now “largely aligns with our vision”. One prominent newspaper gloated that “the Western system is crashing like a house of cards” while Russian state television proclaimed a new world order: “Now everything is being decided inside a big triangle: Russia, China and the US. Within this, the new construction of the world will come to fruition. The EU as a united political force no longer exists…”
There’s no doubt that Europe’s security architecture is under threat. In the face of the Russian armed aggression Sweden abandoned overnight more than two centuries of neutrality. Neighbouring Finland also reversed its long-standing policy of military non-alignment. But many small states wonder whether NATO membership guarantees safety any longer.
Estonia’s population, for example, is smaller than that of greater Dublin and NATO is all that protects them from Ukraine’s fate. Thus, President Michael D. Higgins’s recent criticism of NATO prompted a rebuke from Estonia’s former president Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who emphasised Ireland’s privileged geographical position and “implicit” NATO protection.
Trump has openly questioned NATO’s utility from an American perspective. Noting Estonia’s proximity to Russia, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich has said “I’m not sure I would risk nuclear war over some place that is a suburb of St Petersburg”.
Another acutely vulnerable country is Moldova. Less than half the size and population of Ireland, Moldova has been a candidate for EU membership since 2022, applying to join a week after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Unlike Estonia, it is militarily non-aligned; indeed, neutrality is enshrined in Moldova’s constitution, and it has never expressed a wish to join NATO. Despite this, Moscow has devoted substantial efforts to undermining Moldova, weaponising trade and energy and exploiting proxies in a relentless campaign to dislodge the government.
Moldova’s recently revised national security strategy acknowledges that the country’s fate is inextricably linked with Ukraine’s. Russia, it says, is “aiming to destroy Ukrainian statehood and the nation to expand its territorial possessions” in multiple directions, including Moldova. Moscow’s ambition to create a military land corridor through Ukraine to Moldova would “set the stage for an immediate violent change of the constitutional order and the liquidation of our statehood”.
Had Ukraine not pushed back the Russians in Kherson, the next target would have been Odesa. The Kremlin’s political leadership frequently describes Odesa as Russian, and the strategic port city came under sustained attack during the early stages of the war. With Odesa taken, Russian forces would control the entire Ukrainian coastline and could easily cross the border to reach the Moldovan capital, Chișinău. Moldova’s tiny army could not offer effective resistance. “I don’t believe they would have stopped at the border”, Moldova’s President Maia Sandu later reflected, “We are only safe today thanks to Ukraine”.
Imperial domination is at the heart of Russia’s self-conception, and the invasion of Ukraine is its latest manifestation. Russia holds less Ukrainian territory today than it did in April 2022, but Kyiv is being pressured to capitulate in order to consolidate Putin’s land grab.
The promise of “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine” and “whatever it takes for as long it takes” ring hollow now. Ukraine is being cornered into becoming the modern-day version of 1930s Czechoslovakia, sacrificed to a dictatorship in the hope it can be assuaged.
However, imperial appetites tend to grow with the eating, and the problem with appeasement is that eventually, you run out of other people’s countries to sacrifice. If Ukrainians aren’t safe, nobody in Russia’s neighbourhood is.
Donnacha Ó Beacháin is Professor of Politics at Dublin City University and author of the forthcoming book Unfinished Empire: Russian Imperialism in Ukraine and the Near Abroad.
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