The Big Costs of Treating Ukraine Like Little Trumpland
Vladimir Putin considers Ukraine to be his backyard. It shares a nearly 1,500-mile border with Russia, was part of the Soviet Union, and for centuries has been referred to as “Little Russia” by domineering leaders of its northern neighbor. The ousting of Ukraine’s Kremlin-backed president after mass protest in 2014 preceded Putin’s seizure of its Crimean peninsula and instigation of a separatist war in the country’s industrial east. If he couldn’t exert his will on the government in Kiev, then he could at least weaken it.
In pushing Ukraine’s new, pro-Western president to investigate his political rival Joe Biden, Trump has taken a page from Putin’s book—treating Ukraine as something like Little Trumpland and its president like a world leader who has to do his bidding.
The irony in this saga is that in Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump has been trying to strong-arm a Ukrainian leader who to root out the endemic corruption that plagues his country. So Trump’s insistence, during a July 25 phone call with Zelensky, that Ukraine investigate discredited allegations against Biden over his eldest son’s business dealings in the country—against a backdrop of Trump more than $391 million in military aid—appears to have fallen on the ears of a man who seems unlikely to bend to such demands.
