The Russian Invasion of Ukraine: Trump, Putin, and Zelensky

Although Trump has significantly corrected his attitude towards the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there are several things that people should know about Trump’s record on that issue. 

First is the fact that in general he is very deferential to Russian President Vladimir Putin. This has taken the form of Trump siding (for example) in July 2018 with Putin over his own intelligence community when it came to the allegation that Russia interfered with the 2016 election hoping to help Trump get elected. Trump’s initial response to the February 2022 full-fledged Russian invasion of Ukraine was that Putin was “smart.” In the Spring, Summer and Fall of 2025 Trump would occasionally express a negative opinion of Putin’s behavior in relation to the war but continued to occasionally act as if Putin was a partner for peace (i.e. at the August 2025 Summit between the two leaders).

Why is Trump so deferential to Putin? In addition to reading a huge number of relevant articles at CNN, Politico, the BBC and some miscellaneous sources, I read the 2018 book “Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump” by David Corn and Michael Isikoff. They don’t analyze hardly anything AFTER the 2016 election, but there’s plenty of material about how Trump admires Putin and is connected to him in a few ways. There’s some small possibility that Putin has a compromising video of Trump.

More generally we know that Trump likes strongman leaders (including El Salvador's Nayib Bukele, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, and many others). Although this will not be a lengthy description of Russia’s democratic deficit, Putin is widely seen as a strongman. Some bases for this includes the legal shackling of pro-democracy foreign NGOs, the extreme suppression of gay rights and information about homosexuality itself, and the muzzling of any anti-war voices in the last four years. In Trump’s first administration Mike Pompeo was for one year Director of the CIA and then spent three years as Secretary of State. Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, Pompeo said that Putin, with his KGB background, knows how to “use power” and should therefore be respected.             

It’s also possible that Trump is friendlier to Putin than Ukraine’s President Zelensky partly because the latter is socially liberal. Although Trump makes it difficult to say that he hates the LGB in LGBTQ+, he is certainly on the HOMOPHOBIC half of the spectrum between HOMOPHOBIC and ANTI-HOMOPHOBIC, while Zelensky has expressed support for gay marriage. Zelensky is also against anti-Muslim bigotry. And as far as I can tell, Zelensky has also lobbied non-white nations for support without referring to them as “shit-hole countries.” (On a brief, related note, between this paragraph and the fact that Zelensky is partly Jewish, Putin’s propaganda when the war started, that there was a serious Nazi problem in Ukraine, was nonsense)

Although it is almost ancient history at this point, we need to take a closer look at the February 2025 meeting in the Oval Office where Trump and VP Vance attacked Zelensky. There’s a lot of details about the amount of aid sent Ukraine’s way that I won’t go into here but which undermine Trump’s idea that Zelensky was an ungrateful brat. There’s one thing about that which seems to have been barely mentioned in the mainstream media. When Zelensky came to the White House that day he brought a special gift for Trump. Trump is at least moderately if not seriously into martial arts and Zelenksy brought Oleksandr Usyk's 2024 undisputed heavyweight world boxing championship belt as a gift for Trump. He made a small mis-step and postponed presenting it to Trump- after Trump and Vance ambushed him he left the Oval Office and almost nothing has been heard about the belt since then.

There are three more aspects of Trump’s failure to support the VICTIM of the invasion, and one is that he briefly pushed the idea that UKRAINE was the aggressor in the war. Trump was probably saying it because he’s pro-Putin, but it also reminds me of what a lot of American progressives believe about the war. Whether it’s coming from Trump or the Left, it should be understood that Ukraine is definitely the victim- the Russian military crossed the border, it wasn’t the other way. Some progressives believe that Ukraine’s desire to join NATO justified the invasion. I have no idea how people who are usually driven by a strong opposition to state aggression believe that WANTING to join a military alliance which MIGHT be a threat to Russia is worse than ACTUALLY INVADING Ukraine. If Ukraine had invaded Russia that would be as bad as what Russia actually did. Ukraine was nowhere near invading Russia and they are clearly the smaller, weaker state which had already been militarily violated twice by Russia. It’s Orwellian. 

(Trump leans towards supporting Russia not because he thinks the invasion is legally a good cause, but partially for the same reason that he recognized Israel’s claim to sovereignty over the Golan Heights- he agrees with his Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller who said “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power”)

Trump has some times suggested that Zelensky is an illegitimate President because elections haven’t taken place since the invasion. This is nonsense. Because of the war martial-law has been declared and elections held under those conditions would be illegitimate. No one has said that the United Kingdom (outside of Northern Ireland) was no democracy during WWII even though they suspended normal politics and did so when practically ZERO parts of the Union were occupied by a foreign power and when there was a barrier (the sea) between them and their enemies.

The very last thing I’ll talk about is the main thing that inspired me to write this- it’s something that I don’t think anyone has said in defense of Zelensky. Part of the rationale for the Oval Office ambush of Zelensky was that he dressed very casually for a meeting IN THE OVAL OFFICE WITH THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT. At the beginning of the war Zelensky decided that he would dress in a military style to express that he was symbolically with Ukraine’s soldiers in harms way. He wore that outfit all the time, including meeting with other governments. Apparently Trump and his supporters decided that was dis-respectful of Trump. The thing is, Trump loves the idea of being some kind of “war-time president.” During the first several months of the Pandemic he tried that, apparently thinking that leading during a major health crisis was similar enough to leading during armed conflict with a foreign nation. In Aug 2025 he declared that he was a “war hero” (apparently because he decided that Netanyahu was a “war hero” and Trump was supporting Netanyahu or maybe Trump just felt left out and so declared that he and Netanyahu were “war heroes”) The thing is, Zelensky was a war-time leader for real, in a conflict where a decent chunk of his country was either occupied or made up the front lines, where initially a massive effort was made to seize the Ukrainian capitol and where the invasion involved tanks, soldiers armed with powerful fully automatic rifles etc. Zelensky’s status as a war-time leader is twice as legitimate as George W. Bush’s was, and Trump has ZERO claim to being a war-time leader. Although this can be taken too far and I’m not sure if I can be totally non-political about this, tweaking some of the rules of statehood to accommodate a real War-Time leader seems appropriate, especially in this case (in the movie “Iron Jawed Angels” when suffragettes continue protesting the President after America entered World War I they were severely criticized for protesting a war-time President but they shouldn’t have been).

Trump is on the side of aggression, land-grabs, social conservatism, and is in no position to be criticizing political leaders when it comes to how democratic they are. Although the cause of Ukraine is not something that energizes me as a socialist, it is an important cause and I’m glad to say that most Saturdays when I protest Trump with local progressives near a Tesla dealership in Superior (CO), there’s usually one or two Ukrainian flags held by the protestors.

 

An earlier post on the war is here. 

Star Trek: SNW Reviews F

I am now starting to do “reviews” of episodes of the new Star Trek series “Strange New Worlds.” Unlike earlier ST review posts this time I’ll be doing, at least MOST of the time, one relatively long essay for a single episode that merits some significant commentary (I wouldn’t be surprised if out of a final total of 46 episodes I’ll do one or two posts that are very brief). I’ll be focusing almost exclusively on the political aspects of the episodes but will usually not comment on the pervasive multiculturalism and gender equality of ST.

“The Broken Circle” Episode One, Season Two. See this for a plot summary.

There is some good dialogue about the need to avoid war. There is some talk about the Enterprise’s second-in-command being prosecuted for lying about her species and the fact that she was genetically engineered, something I go into here. And there is an incident of a StarFleet officer, a main character on this show, engaging in torture.

War and Profits

The main story is that a mining syndicate on a planet that had benefitted financially from the Klingon-Federation War of a few years earlier was determined to get the war started again in order to make massive profits again. I think that sort of thing happens fairly often in reality. One thing I want to highlight is that in this case it isn’t a BANK that wants war, it’s a MINING COMPANY. I think that sometimes the role of banks in capitalism is exaggerated by some people who oppose capitalism and the role of banks in war is exaggerated by some people who oppose war (I also believe that some socialists, as tempting as this is, exaggerate the role economic forces play in the development of wars) . Although banks might be somewhere between important and key to capitalism, they are/were part of social democracy and Soviet communism and in capitalism are often not on the front lines of the class war- corporations are not puppets whose strings are pulled by banks- corporations that bust unions do it for there benefit, not because banks want them to. Arms manufacturers are thinking more of their profits when they push for militarism than they are thinking of whether or not they can get a loan. Believing that banks are key to capitalist efforts to push nations into war for their own financial reasons is a good fit for anti-Semitism, considering the untrue stereotype of Jewish people and bankers.

Torture and Star Trek

There is one scene where a StarFleet officer very briefly engages in what is basically torture- about 60 seconds of questions and physical assault. Star Trek and it’s fictional creation the Federation are generally against torture, but there was a tiny bit on Voyager, a bit more on Enterprise, and now on this series (and maybe one more on Discovery and/or Picard that I can’t remember). On Voyager, the second-in-command objects when Captain Janeway tortures and I wrote the following in a review of VOY episode “Equinox”:

“There is one bit of politics. At one point Janeway engages in what is basically torture and is stopped by Chakotay. She ends up suspending him but shortly after she re-instates him, she says something which could be acknowledged as admitting that she was wrong (she says that Chaoktay might have been justified if he had taken control of Voyager in response to what the Captain was doing).”

On Enterprise the torture was also limited to 1-3 incidents and I wrote the following in a review of the ENT episode “Home”:

In the last post (while discussing the episode “Zero Hour”) I talked about how Archer did some things that were immoral during the mission to find the Xindi weapon. I basically said that although he shouldn’t be tossed in jail or even tossed out of StarFleet, he should get some punishment, to make other officers understand that there are consequences for breaking or bending the rules, even for hero Captains, and they should only do so when very necessary. There is nothing about him getting in any trouble in this episode, nor the three after it (I sometimes do reviews at a slower pace than I watch the episodes at). At the end of his de-briefing, the Vulcan ambassador says that he (Archer) did some immoral things, but says they were necessary for his mission to succeed.

It turns out that in some ways, Archer is doing what needed to be done about his immoral tactics. Mountain climbing with a fellow Captain (Erika Hernandez), Archer explains why he wanted to go climbing.

Archer: I figured this was the last place I’d run into anyone who’d want to shake my hand or take my picture or tell me I’m an inspiration to their children. If they knew what I’d done...

Hernandez: You did what any Captain would have done.

Archer: Does that include torture or marooning a ship full of innocent people- Cause I don’t remember reading those chapters in the handbook.


I’m still disappointed that he didn’t receive some kind of punishment, but that exchange is better than nothing.

In this episode, the StarFleet officer is trying to stop something that could easily re-start the war and he is very familiar with what war is like. It might also be relevant that he injected himself with some kind of sci-fi version of the spinach that Popeye the Sailor ate, which might possibly have had some effect on his brain.

Some of the writers, etc. behind the show and many people in America might say that it’s just realistic to have them torture once in a while. The problem is that, in addition to torture being amoral and illegal, the idea that it is effective is what’s UNREALISTIC. Something like most of the time, or at least a lot of the time and maybe all the time, people being tortured for information will say whatever they think will end the torture- if they DO NOT KNOW WHAT THEIR TORTURER THINKS THEY KNOW, THEY WILL MAKE SOMETHING UP. This is well illustrated in the 2007 movie “Rendition.” People acting on information gathered through torture might not realize it’s bad intel until they do something horrible and/or unjustified, and/or unhelpful, and/or dangerous to those acting on the bad intel.