Putin's response to Trump

The number of victims is steadily rising, and we understand why — the Russian Federation used practically everything at its disposal, every type of weapon, to attack peaceful Ukrainian cities

Moreover, the missile strike on the Chornobyl zone shows that the Kremlin continues to demonstrate its willingness to resort to nuclear blackmail, to create truly serious preconditions for a global catastrophe, solely to force Ukraine and the civilized world to capitulate on Russian terms. 

And this attack again reminds us: where the Russian army for years has failed to reach the objectives set by Putin back in distant 2022, Russian brutality and a readiness to intimidate the civilian population with constant aerial terror come to the fore.

"This attack is also a real response to the assurances by U.S. President Donald Trump and his associates that the president of Russia desires peace and unequivocally expressed such a wish during the ill-fated summit of the U.S. and Russian leaders in Alaska."

Literally a few hours before this massive attack, Trump’s special representative Steve Witkoff said that Putin had presented his own peace proposals and that he wished to achieve an end to the Russian‑Ukrainian war. 

Trump himself, during a meeting with reporters, advised them not to pay attention to the statements of Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov, who had practically refuted all of Trump’s reports about his genuine peace efforts, and Trump explained such statements by the Russian foreign ministry by saying that everyone is posturing instead of giving real assessments of what is happening in the peace process.

But it seems to me that refuting Kinzhal missiles, rockets, and drones is much harder than refuting mere statements by a deputy foreign minister or the head of the Russian foreign affairs ministry. 

Because, unlike words, rockets kill, and Kinzhal missiles try to destroy targets. And those targets can be ordinary residential buildings. In this situation, I want to remind once again that words alone are completely insufficient to sustain a desire to stop the war. Moreover, words that are not followed by any real actions become true complicity in Putin’s war and crimes.

"I have had to explain more than once that this is exactly what Putin seeks — to turn Trump and the current American administration into accomplices in his killings in Ukraine, so that they have nowhere to retreat and so that, having been willing to choose mediation and non‑intervention in the war, they instead choose to provide real assistance to Russia in its desire to subjugate the former Soviet republics and restore the so‑called borders of the USSR of 1991, within which, according to Putin and other former Soviet KGB members, Russia should function."

Therefore these horrific strikes once again highlighted the need to help Ukraine increase its air‑defense arsenals and to destroy the aggressive potential of the Russian Federation itself. In light of these killings, which Trump himself has repeatedly condemned, how does the Pentagon’s ban on Ukraine striking sovereign Russian territory with American long‑range missiles — and on strikes against regions of Ukraine occupied by Russia — look? I mean strikes on facilities where Russian pilots and missile crews prepare for new mass killings of the civilian population. Not simply as indifference, even if it is justified by the need to continue a negotiation process that exists only in Trump’s head. Not simply as a desire to mediate between victim and aggressor and to equate the two. But as real, deliberate, considered assistance to the Kremlin.

And now every such massive attack will be viewed in the context of the applause with which the U.S. president greeted the Russian president in Anchorage. Why did Donald Trump applaud then? Because Putin came to the U.S. to deceive him yet again and to later invite him to Moscow in response to the Russian leader’s willingness to visit U.S. territory? Or because Putin continues mass killings of civilian populations, continues to torment women and children in front of the whole world and the United States itself? In front of Donald Trump’s wife Melania, who supposedly cares about these shellings, while her husband is preoccupied with the results of yet another round of golf?

These are the questions that should be posed to everyone — to Donald Trump himself, to representatives of the U.S. presidential administration, and, of course, to the people who vote for politicians who then demonstratively show indifference to the killing of peaceful residents of Ukraine and other regions of the world, not realizing the role the United States, as the leader of global democracy, must play precisely to stop these cruel and senseless killings, which merely satisfy the lust for crimes of the Russian president and his compatriots infected with a chauvinistic virus.

Once again I want to express my sincere condolences and my hope that the context of assistance to Ukraine will change in light of Russia’s mass crimes.

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About the author: Vitaly Portnikov, journalist, laureate of the Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine.

The editorial board does not always share the opinions expressed by blog authors.