The Russian Shadow

But, two months into his presidency, his much-touted deal-making skills have failed to yield anything but more war.

Underlining the president’s failings has been his recycling of Kremlin falsehoods.

For example, Trump has repeated the Russian claim that Volodomyr Zelenskyy is a dictator because he hasn’t held a wartime election.

That he’s barred from doing so by Ukrainian law has somehow escaped the White House’s notice.

The president also claimed that Zelenskyy’s approval rating had fallen to 4%. More objective accounts have placed it at around 57%, 10% higher than Trump’s current rating.

The most shameless retailing of Russian propaganda was his claim that Ukraine started the war.

This is a rehash of Moscow info-chaffing meant to distract attention from its seizure of Crimea, its thinly disguised partisan destabilisation of the eastern Ukrainian oblasts, and Russia’s unprovoked invasion of the country in early 2022.

Trump followed this up with an interlude in the Oval Office in which the president, Vice-President Vance, and Defence Secretary Hegseth ambushed Zelenskyy on prime-time TV.

This was, it seemed, meant to burnish Trump’s credentials as a hard-nosed realist. If so, it signally failed.

The president came off like a blustering bully, complete with grade school quality sycophants. The upshot of their hectoring of Zelenskyy was their contention that he had to accept a deal.

Whatever else one can say about the exchange, Zelenskyy made a point that functioned like kryptonite: What kind could he make that the Russian leader would respect?

Vladimir Putin occupies an odd place in the political imaginary of the West, particularly at its rightward and leftward extremes. It is difficult to say which is more surprising.

Putin has become the darling of the far right.

This is quite jarring, given the prevalence of anti-Russian (not merely anti-communist) propaganda in the West for over half the 20^th century. No post-Soviet figure has so successfully rebranded himself as the Russian leader.

Once a mid-level KGB apparatchik grinding away in the backwater of 1980s East Berlin, Putin has not only risen to dictatorship but made himself into the poster boy for the anti-woke set.

So powerful is the equivalential chain that Putin has inspired in Western reactionaries that his claims that Volodomyr Zelenskyy, a Jew, is a Nazi are taken as fact.

The situation is even odder among some sections of the tankie left, wherein the Russian leader is considered a pragmatic anti-imperialist. The view underlying this is that, since Putin is opposed to NATO expansion, he merits the support of progressives who oppose it.

This belief is predicated on a failure to understand that it is possible to be right for the wrong reason. The fact that NATO is an expression of the geostrategic power of the United States and the European Union does not imply that everyone against it is ipso facto anti-imperialist.

Vladimir Putin is a case in point. He’s not anti-imperialist. Rather, he’s imperialist on other premises.

A related view sees his move to seize the eastern oblasts of Ukraine as merely a correcting of an improperly drawn border that left ethnic Russians, the majority in those regions, on the wrong side of the line. This involves several very questionable suppositions.

Most immediately, it asks one to believe that Putin would have been unwilling to go to war if it were not for the fact that these were the sites of much of Ukraine’s heavy industry and that seizing them would hinder the eastward spread of NATO (and the EU as well).

Putin has expressed himself at great length on the subject of the unreality of Ukrainians as an ethnic group distinct from Russians.

The proposition that he would be satisfied with some sort of boundary rectification involving Donetsk and Luhansk is about as implausible as the claim that he is, in any meaningful sense, anti-imperialist.

Donald Trump’s insertion of himself into this fraught situation has hardly made it more tractable, although it has made it somewhat clearer.

His leveraging of Volodomyr Zelenskyy to the negotiating table with the threat of cutting off military and intelligence aid to Ukraine has set a diplomatic process, at least of a sort, into motion.

This has, in turn, resulted in a proposal from the Ukrainian side for a 30-day ceasefire. However, once the ball entered Putin’s court, the illusory quality of Trump’s intervention became clear.

Putin responded with a list of caveats and provisos so long as to lead analysts to question whether he was setting up rejection of the proposal outright.

At this point, the Russian leader can’t accept anything short of the partial dismemberment and wholesale humbling of Ukraine. Achieving this goal has been and continues to be a hard slog.

Still, it is now tantalisingly close.

Vladimir Putin knows he has a willing abettor in the White House and more friends still in Congress. Further, he can now see that his efforts to rejig European politics to be more like those of his own regime are bearing fruit.

Far-right authoritarianism is on the rise in Europe. At the same time, the arrangements that have shaped European security policy since the end of the Second World War are coming apart.

Donald Trump has made it clear that he is not necessarily interested in fulfilling the United States’ obligations to defend its NATO allies in case of an attack.

All this is meat and drink to the Kremlin, both because it makes its belligerence toward NATO members all the more threatening and because, for just that reason, those states are now in the process of trying to shift a greater proportion of their resources to military ends.

This is a dangerous moment for Ukraine, but even more so for Europe.

With Trump prepared to amplify Putin’s mendacious claims about the conflict and the path to peace, the position of the EU and of its member states become increasingly challenging.

Worst of all is the transformation of language that this situation has brought about.

Anti-imperialism used to be a good political name. If it has not become yet another victim of the post-truth era, the truth of post-democracy seems likely to follow.