Trump wants you to think he doesn't own Ukraine...Don't buy the bullshit
The world is still experiencing the aftermath of Trump's first term in dealing with Kyiv
U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House today that he will be providing Ukraine with Patriot missiles again and gave Russia a 50-day deadline to end the war before he floods Kyiv with weapons and imposes new sanctions on Russia.
The key theme of his meeting in the White House with Mark Rutte, NATO’s head, who called him “daddy,” was that this is not his war.
“This is not Trump’s war. We’re here to get it finished and stopped,” he said.
Unfortunately for the president, that is factually wrong.
Trump owns Ukraine.
Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson gave credit to Trump in an interview with CNN back in 2024 because he said he understood that the former president (at the time) explained to congressional leaders that the massive war spending bill was a “sensible thing to do.”
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CNN reported that “almost immediately” after House Speaker Mike Johnson secured the speaker’s gavel, “he began to hear directly from critical Republican national security voices – including Donald Trump’s former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, who impressed upon him the urgent need to approve assistance for Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion.”
Michael Kimmage, a professor of history at Catholic University who held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio on the policy planning staff at the U.S. State Department from 2014 to 2016, wrote in The Wall Street Journal at the time that “a second Trump term would likely follow one of two scenarios: The war could simply go on as it did before, or the U.S. could become much more deeply involved.”
Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector, told Judge Andrew Napolitano’s “Judging Freedom” in May that Trump has presented the Ukraine War as a mess he inherited from the Biden administration, but he owns the war.
Napolitano asked Ritter if it was accurate to say that Trump pumped up the Ukrainian military during his first term.
“More than that, judge,” Ritter said. “This is Donald Trump's war; he's trying to call it Joe Biden's war,” which is “a straight-up lie.”
Ritter said the policies that Trump signed off on during his first term were “supportive of the very policies that Joe Biden inherited from him and then expanded upon.”
“Joe Biden did not invent the policies that led us to the conflict with Russia in Ukraine. Donald Trump is the one that took Barack Obama’s policies, which were defensive only — defensive only — and Donald Trump turned them into offensive training, offensive weaponry because the Ukrainians said, ‘We want to invade the Donbas.’ And the United States, under Donald Trump, said, ‘We’ll get you ready to invade the Donbas.’ Donald Trump is the man who created the concept of ‘strategic defeat of Russia’” and underwrote 20 CIA bases operating on Ukrainian soil.
“This is about operators, paramilitary guys training people to go into Russia to spy, carry out unconventional warfare, to target assassinations, all the things necessary to bring down a government,” he said.
Ritter said Biden picked up where Trump left off and “actually had to tone down some of the things that Trump was trying to do with the paramilitary guys.”