Ahead of the Trump-Putin summit, don’t forget what we owe Ukraine

On Friday, on American soil, President Donald Trump will entertain a brutal war criminal whose critics are poisoned, imprisoned or dropped from high-story windows. As Russian President Vladimir Putin continues reducing Ukraine to rubble, Trump will generate international headlines with no grasp of the underlying history at issue.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to the formation of 15 newly independent post-Soviet states, including Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. In the process, Ukraine was left with an outsize stockpile of nuclear weapons, including 1,700 nuclear warheads, 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles and 44 strategic bombers, which put the nation in possession of the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world.

Three years later, in exchange for Ukraine’s agreement to disarm and move its weapons into Russia, the U.S., U.K. and Russia agreed, jointly and severally, to protect Ukraine and to secure its borders. The Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances was consistent with America’s global efforts to control nuclear proliferation through diplomatic, legal and operational channels. In return for Ukraine’s cooperation in becoming a non-nuclear state and joining the Nuclear Non-Proliferation pact, the three countries gave Ukraine security assurances.

To its peril, Ukraine kept up its end of the deal — but Russia did not.

Because we effectively disarmed Ukraine three decades ago, the U.S. has a continuing obligation to help defend it against Russian aggression. But more crucially, American military aid is prophylactic. Before Trump, the U.S. government upheld democratic values and international order, including respect for sovereignty and existing borders, as a matter of self-preservation. Last year the Department of Defense described Ukraine’s fate as a battle between freedom and tyranny, and a defense of the rules-based international order. American officials shared the E.U.’s belief that supporting Ukraine advanced global stability, and U.S. national security, by strengthening NATO, and perhaps most importantly, by deterring future Russian aggression.

Enter Donald Trump, who promised to end the Russian-Ukraine war on “day one” of his second term, a promise he now calls “sarcasm.” Rejecting NATO’s interests, and dismissing military alliances that have kept America safe since World War II, the president has instead consistently advanced Putin’s interests. Since Trump returned to the White House in January, Russia has more than doubled the number of drones and missiles fired at Ukraine; recorded aerial attacks from Moscow have now reached their highest levels since the invasion began in February 2022.

Trump has paved Putin’s way on several fronts. In the wake of Russia’s invasion, he publicly praised and failed to condemn Putin’s brutality in Ukraine, calling the Russian president a “genius” and “savvy” for his attacks. Since then, Trump has publicly blamed Ukraine for Russia’s invasion, bizarrely stating in February that Ukraine “should have never started” the war. Echoing Putin’s propaganda campaign, Trump has labeled Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “a dictator without elections.” Trump has repeatedly criticized the amount of military aid provided to Ukraine. Following the public humiliation of Zelenskyy in the Oval Office in February, when Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance insulted the Ukrainian president in a made-for-Fox-News-and-Putin televised takedown, Trump directed his administration to halt military aid.

There’s little doubt that Trump has nursed deep, personal animus toward Zelenskyy ever since the American president was caught in 2019 trying to condition military aid on an “investigation” into then-former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, which Zelenskyy never did. There’s also little doubt that Trump is openly protecting Putin’s interests. The question is: Why?

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There has long been speculation, but no hard evidence, that Putin possesses kompromat or career-ending evidence about Trump. Perhaps Putin is holding proof of steps he took to assure Trump’s electoral wins, and is threatening to go public if Trump crosses him. Perhaps Trump really is a Russian asset, as some have speculated. (“Regardless of why, he’s acting exactly like a Russian asset would,” observed Edward Lucas, a nonresident fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, in a Foreign Policy essay published in March.) Or perhaps Trump is neck-deep in Russian money laundering schemes, including the financing of Trump Tower, going back to the 1990s.

The only thing that’s certain at this point is that the president’s on-again, off-again efforts to look like he’s “pressuring” Putin somehow never materialize. Last week, Trump “declared” that peace between Russia and Ukraine would involve “some swapping of territories,” which parrots Russia’s demands for territorial concessions from Ukraine. He then invited Putin to a personal Ukraine “summit” in Alaska, as if carving up nations after a meal were a game of Monopoly.

By inviting Putin to meet on American soil, Trump is conferring legitimacy on a mass murderer who is credibly accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC). Putin has been isolated since 2023, when the ICC issued arrest warrants for him and several advisors for crimes against humanity. The Russian president has since been unable to travel outside his country, because many of the ICC’s 125 member states have agreed to arrest and detain him if he sets foot on their territories.

The crimes for which the ICC issued the warrants include well-documented abductions of over 19,000 Ukrainian children aged four months to 17 years. The Yale Humanitarian Research Lab is tracking Russia’s systematic campaign to kidnap Ukrainian children and move them to Russia, where they are issued new identities and advertised for adoption after they undergo “re-education” to erase their emotional connection to their families, language and heritage. As Ukrainian parents wail, Putin has set up an online “catalog of Ukrainian children,” a photo database searchable by personal characteristics such as size and hair color.

The Alaska “summit” will be Putin’s first international trip since the warrants. European leaders have questioned the invitation, while Russians are crowing that it is a national “coup,” since Trump’s invitation came without any concessions from Putin. A King’s College professor of Russian history declared the symbolism of Alaska as the summit’s backdrop as “horrendous — as though designed to demonstrate that borders can change, land can be bought and sold.”

No one knows for sure what the outcome will be. But it’s a safe bet that Trump will issue platitudes that sound tough on Russia while delivering Putin’s ultimate goal: Cementing his territorial gains in Ukraine, thereby rewarding Russia for its aggression. Zelenskyy will reject the plan, Trump will demand the Nobel Peace Prize and pundits will continue to wonder if Putin’s get-out-of-jail-free card is a product of blackmail.