MJ Akbar
THE lips said it, the mind read it. Some hours after war broke out in the White House in the name of peace, a lip reader deciphered what Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky muttered under his breath during the game-changer meeting with President Donald Trump and Vice-President JD Vance on Friday, February 28: sukya blyat. This is an insult in Russian.
It would have been so much more dramatic if I could claim that my source was the CIA or FSB, the current incarnation of Russia’s KGB. Alas, the information was freely available in London Times. The venerable British paper, now terribly modern, reported the meaning of the Russian insult in two words. The first was ‘bitch’; the second an option beginning with ‘f’ followed by three asterisks.
Trump and Vance did not need the services of any lip reader. They perceived attitude, disrespect and insolence from a man whose country had received more than a billion dollars a week, without conditions, as a gift, for the last three years. Trump, a firm believer in the dictum that seekers (‘beggars’ is too harsh for geopolitics) cannot be choosers, erupted. The lava has already singed Europe. It could scald NATO if not checked. Donald Trump was not created by God for nuance. He says what he thinks, and he thinks what he sees.
Democrats’ trigger
A whisper that has grown into a murmur across Washington suggests that this volcano of Mount Rushmore was triggered by Democratic Senators who advised Zelensky to provoke Trump. Bad advice. The Democrats probably thought that an apoplectic Trump would self-destruct. Instead, Trump has destroyed the façade that American support can be taken for granted. For the three years of this war, Democrat President Joe Biden had let Zelensky believe that dollars roll on the highway to Kyiv from a bottomless treasury. Nothing walks for too long on a one-way street.
What has become muted in the drama is that for the first 40 minutes the conversation was cordial while aides waited elsewhere to sign an agreement on Ukraine’s mineral mines and then enjoy a sumptuous lunch. (Trump does not give his guests hamburgers) Zelensky crossed his arms, a gesture of obduracy, if not hostility, when Vance suggested the Ukrainian leader had been insufficiently grateful to America and disrespectful to its President.
As former American Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had famously suggested during the long Iraq conflict, there were known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. Someone forgot to give Zelensky a brief on known knowns. It is absolutely known that Ukraine cannot fight Russia without American money, weapons and indeed Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites which provide communication for Ukraine’s forces.
European hugs
Zelensky needs guns. His European champions send Tweets. He needs troops; he gets hugs. America keeps Ukraine on the battlefield. If European politicians and British newspapers had divine power, Zelensky would get the Victoria Cross for war in the morning and the Nobel Prize for Peace in the evening, but newspapers have nothing to lose but their circulation and gasbags nothing to lose but their voice.
Lachrymose diplomacy
Zelensky’s shoulders must be dripping saline with Europe’s crocodile tears. The new advocate of such lachrymose diplomacy is British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, just recently introduced to foreign policy.
Even Starmer admitted, amidst the ballyhoo, that sending European troops to Ukraine without an American security blanket would be “folly”. If Ukraine gets American security, what does it need European troops for? The weekend conference hosted by Starmer in London at Lancaster House was sleight-of-hand.
The frontline Baltic states were absent. They know that the price of bogus belligerence is paid by those vulnerable to geography, not those who spout ideology in conferences and find ingenuous reasons for keeping their troops out of battle. Italy broke rank with the ghost warriors Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron.
What stopped Starmer and Macron from sending troops to Ukraine three years ago, particularly when the Russian advance faltered and their intervention could have made a difference? Putin was vulnerable when he failed to win a quick victory. Instead, there was much schoolboy cheering from the sidelines of London and Paris: you die, we throw our hats into the air.
Experienced Putin
What stopped Europe and America from sending troops to Ukraine when masked Russian soldiers took control of all strategic areas in the Crimean peninsula on February 27, 2014, and then formalised the annexation with a referendum on March 16? David Cameron was in Downing Street. Barack Obama, always full of homilies and half-smile piety, was in the White House. What did they do? Nothing. Why does the current strident commentariat, bristling from every pore, never mention 2014? Would it have been equally forgiving if Trump had been President in March 2014 instead of Obama? Vladimir Putin knows from experience that talk of Ukraine’s sovereignty is hot air. It was abandoned by Obama. If Ukraine was semi-sovereign in 2014, why should it be fully sovereign in 2025? And if 2014 needs to be reversed along with 2022, then is NATO ready for war against Russia? Impotence stopped Ukraine’s European allies three years ago.
Where is Ripley’s Believe it or Not! when you need it? This illustrated panel, now unfashionable probably because bizarre has become the new normal, became an addictive section of popular newspapers soon after it began life in the New York Globe in December 1918. Time for revival, beginning with this story from the Sunday Times of February 23, 2025. In 2014, Ursula Von der Leyen, current President of the European Commission and then Defence Minister of Germany, sent German troops on a NATO exercise with broomsticks painted black because they did not have rifles.
