So far, Donald Trump’s ultimatums regarding Ukraine have shared an inevitable fate: They have always faded away on their own. The most recent one, delivered to Kyiv, required that they accept, by Thursday, November 27, a “peace plan” so favorable to Moscow it could have been drafted by Russian artificial intelligence. This shaky and contested plan, immediately partially rewritten, at least served as a reminder of a constant: the distrust, if not outright hostility, of the occupant of the White House toward Kyiv.
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This attitude goes back a long way, with the first sign appearing as early as July 2016. On the eve of the Republican National Convention that would nominate Trump for the presidential election, the Republican Party’s platform chief was approached by emissaries from the magnate who asked her to replace, in the section supporting the delivery of military aid to Ukraine, the phrase “lethal defensive weapons” with “appropriate assistance.”
This was the first step back from Republicans who had been highly critical of Democratic President Barack Obama, an impotent observer of the unilateral annexation of Crimea two years earlier. At that time, Kyiv was fighting Moscow-backed separatist militias in the Donbas. Arms sales, notably of Javelin anti-tank missiles, did, however, begin in 2018, backed by a bipartisan majority in Congress and by officials in the State Department and the Pentagon loyal to traditional Republican positions on Russia.
Then, for Trump, Ukraine became synonymous with his first impeachment procedure by the House of Representatives in December 2019. The Democrats, who had gained the majority after the November 2018 midterm elections, seized on the revelation of blackmail by the president against his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky.
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