{"id":359195,"date":"2025-08-20T10:32:13","date_gmt":"2025-08-20T10:32:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/359195\/"},"modified":"2025-08-20T10:32:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-20T10:32:13","slug":"trump-is-warning-europe-that-he-is-still-putins-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/359195\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump is warning Europe that he is still Putin’s man"},"content":{"rendered":"

WASHNGTON DC \u2013 The vapour trails left by the jets carrying European leaders back to their respective capitals may still have been visible in the skies above the Atlantic when US President Donald Trump<\/a> began taking steps to destabilise further his relationship with his recently departed visitors.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Rising early the next day, the President was the star guest on his favourite breakfast telecast. And he told Fox and Friends that if Volodymyr Zelensky<\/a>, Sir Keir Starmer or the other leaders who descended on the White House<\/a> on Monday thought they had succeeded in dragging the US leader out of Vladimir Putin<\/a>\u2019s orbit, they were entirely wrong.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"WASHINGTON,European leaders with Donald Trump in the Cross Hall of the White House on Monday (Photo: Ukrainian Presidency \/ Handout\/Anadolu via Getty Images)<\/p>\n

The interview was a masterclass in revealing the extent to which the Russian leader\u2019s outlook now dominates the American President\u2019s viewpoint on Ukraine. He accused European leaders of \u201cplaying cute\u201d during Monday\u2019s talks in which they attempted to flatter and cajole Trump<\/a> out of being beguiled by Putin<\/a>. He then falsely claimed that Kyiv had started the war (\u201cyou don\u2019t take on a nation that\u2019s 10 times your size\u201d), and invented his own version of the region\u2019s history out of thin air.<\/p>\n

Of course, only hours before, Russia had launched its biggest air assault in more than a month on Ukraine, with 270 drones and 10 missiles. More than 95 followed last night.<\/p>\n

Not that any of this stopped Trump ploughing on with his own version of events. He falsely asserted that former President Barack Obama<\/a> had approved the legal transfer of Crimea to Russian control in 2014. \u201cPutin, he made a good deal. He got it from Obama\u201d, claimed Trump, arguing \u2013 again falsely \u2013 that \u201cObama gave it away in one of the dumbest real estate deals I\u2019ve ever seen\u201d. In fact, to this day, even Trump\u2019s government does not recognise Russian sovereignty over Crimea, despite the US President\u2019s sympathetic contention in his Fox News interview that Russia has been \u201cexpanding everything\u2026 and spending a lot of money\u201d since the peninsula\u2019s illegal annexation by Russian forces.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Trump repeated the false narrative promoted by Putin that the Ukraine conflict has its roots in the expansion of Nato<\/a>\u2019s transatlantic alliance following the end of the Cold War. \u201cLong before Putin, it was always a no-no,\u201d insisted the President, falsely stating the history of Nato\u2019s expanded architecture. In fact, as early as 1991, President Boris Yeltsin said that Russia hoped to join<\/a> the alliance, and in June 2017<\/a>, Putin discussed Russian membership of Nato with President Bill Clinton.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"InTrump and Putin before their joint press conference in Alaska (Photo: Gavriil Grigorov\/ AFP)<\/p>\n

But Trump pressed on with his concocted version of events. \u201cRussia said we don\u2019t want the so-called opponent, or the enemy, let\u2019s use that term, we don\u2019t want them on our border\u2026 and then [Ukraine] went in with the United States said \u2018put us into Nato\u2019, and everybody knew you just can\u2019t do that\u201d. In fact, while preliminary relations between Ukraine and Nato date back to 1992<\/a>, the country only sought membership of the alliance after the Russians seized Crimea in 2014.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Most worryingly of all for European leaders, Trump appeared to walk back any suggestion that he might make an imminent announcement regarding US involvement in providing security guarantees for postwar Ukraine<\/a>. Asked on Fox whether he could promise his Maga followers that there will be no boots on the ground supporting any peacekeeping operations, he said \u201cyou have my assurance, you know I\u2019m President\u201d. Just hours earlier, The Washington Examiner \u2013 a newspaper popular with Trump\u2019s supporters \u2013 reported that<\/a> the President was flirting with the idea of a military presence in Ukraine. That dispatch may have sparked his rapid effort to shut the conversation down and head off any threat of revolt from the grassroots.<\/p>\n

Trump told Fox he would lay on \u201csome sort of security\u201d to help Europeans keep any postwar peace, but offered no specificity regarding his willingness to provide the American \u201cbackstop\u201d that Starmer has demanded as the price for UK forces to engage in the risky business of trying to prevent Russia from launching further attacks on Ukraine. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, suggested that US air support was \u201can option and a possibility\u201d. <\/p>\n

Trump also publicly indicated for the first time that he was sympathetic to Putin\u2019s demand for the entire eastern region of Donbas to be ceded to Russia in any negotiations that begin. \u201cDonbas, right now, as you know, is 79 per cent owned and controlled by Russia,\u201d he told his Fox inquisitors. Zelensky and the Europeans, he said, \u201cunderstand what that means\u201d. Saying Ukraine needs to be \u201cflexible\u201d in any negotiations that ensue, any support for the surrender of Donbas would allow Russian forces to leapfrog over Ukraine\u2019s existing defensive lines in the territory. <\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s entire interview on Tuesday morning was permeated by expressions of understanding, empathy and respect for Putin, despite the fact that the Kremlin leader remains sanctioned to the hilt by the US government and wanted for war crimes in Ukraine by the International Criminal Court<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Trump spoke especially fondly of his encounter last Friday with the Russian dictator in Alaska<\/a>. \u201cYou saw, when he got off his plane, I got off my plane. There\u2019s a warmth there\u2026 there\u2019s a decent feeling\u201d, he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHNGTON DC \u2013 The vapour trails left by the jets carrying European leaders back to their respective capitals…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":359196,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5174],"tags":[32,2000,299,5187,7661,333,658],"class_list":{"0":"post-359195","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-eu","8":"tag-donald-trump","9":"tag-eu","10":"tag-europe","11":"tag-european","12":"tag-russia-ukraine-war","13":"tag-vladimir-putin","14":"tag-volodymyr-zelensky"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115060640536361970","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=359195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359195\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/359196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}