Irony: Might Trump become Ukraine's liberator?

In February 2023, Russian President Vladimir Putin was facing a choice: He could either be the Don of the Donbas and bag its riches, or he could become the Czar of Crimea and militarily dominate the Black Sea.

So far, Putin has failed to do either. Although his armies continue to make incremental gains in Eastern Ukraine, the Donbas region is far from secure. And the Russian Black Sea Fleet has been forced to flee its ports in Crimea and the Sea of Azov.

Putin may face an added problem. President Trump may be preparing to deny him both by setting himself up as the unlikely liberator of Ukraine.

History, occasionally, likes its plot twists.

On Monday, Trump indicated that he wants to strike a $300 billion deal with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, declaring “We're looking to do a deal with Ukraine where they're going to secure what we're giving them with their rare earths and other things.”

Notably, by late Monday evening, Reuters reported that the U.S. had resumed military equipment and ammunition shipments to Ukraine. Thus far, no new military aid packages have been announced. However, it is significant that Trump, at least for now, is willing to continue backstopping the armed forces of Ukraine.

This would be a welcomed departure from expectations and a severe blow to Putin and his hopes of pulling off a "snow job" on Trump at the negotiating table. 

But more of the same will not win the war; Russia continues to target Ukrainian civilians with ballistic missiles. Trump must empower Ukraine to go on the offensive.

It would also be timely. As we cautioned yesterday, retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine and Russia, is on an ill-advised road to what could be a second Yalta Conference. In 1945, President Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta essentially conceded Eastern Europe to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, given the pre-atomic bomb exigencies of ensuring Russian help against the Japanese Empire.

China today represents the new threat in the Pacific, but Europe — especially Eastern Europe — can no longer be dissected from Asia. As Kellogg correctly observed during an interview with Bret Baier on Fox News Special Report last week, they are strategically, militarily and economically interconnected.

Kellogg realizes this is a new development. “When you look at the alliance that is now formed with Russia, with North Korea, with China and Iran, that wasn’t there before," he said. "It’s now together.”

Ukraine, in this sense, is ground zero — at least for now, until Taiwan finds itself in Beijing’s crosshairs — of Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s war against the West. Putin’s use of North Korean troops in his fight against Ukraine is dispositive of how Russia’s war has become truly global in scale.

China’s strategic economic machinations in Ukraine are often eclipsed by the strongman tactics of Putin’s invasion. Yet both Beijing and Moscow are after the same thing: Ukraine’s strategic geography and abundance of rare earth minerals and energy reserves, including coal in the Donbas and gas fields in Crimea.

On Tuesday, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev admitted as much, lamenting that Ukraine’s wealth might be used to repay Washington and Brussels to “piece the failed state of Ukraine back together.”

Xi has an even greater interest in ensuring Ukraine loses. Elizabeth Wishnick at the Center for Naval Analysis notes that multiple key arteries of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative are intended to pass through the heartland of Ukraine, including one rail line from Changsha to Chop in Western Ukraine and another from Xian to Budapest via Kyiv.

Thus, for a Trump administration that rightly views China as a far larger threat to U.S. national security, a win in Ukraine can kill two birds with one stone. 

As it is, Trump is intent on stopping cold Xi’s Belt and Road designs in the Western Hemisphere, including in Greenland, the Panama Canal and the Drake Passage. Doing so in Ukraine would deliver yet another blow, as would working with Poland to put an end to a key Belt and Road railway link from Chengdu to Lodz.

Not only would Chinese trade with the European Union be severely hampered, so too would its ability to exploit Ukraine’s vast mineral wealth, as Beijing is doing across Sub-Saharan and East Africa. 

Also, as Kellogg stated in his weekend interview with Baier, Trump is all about creating maximum “leverage.” And what better leverage could the White House create against Beijing than to safeguard Taiwan by threatening its Belt and Road designs on Europe?

Trump appears to be discovering that leverage can pay for itself, and it is precisely leverage that Zelensky is willing to give Washington. Ukraine can afford Trump’s $300 billion asking price — and far more if Trump ensures that Kyiv will regain all of its Russian-occupied territory in the Donbas and Crimea.

As we noted last year, Ukraine ranks fourth globally in terms of total assessed value of its natural resources, which are estimated to have “as high as $11.5 trillion” in total aggregate value. Much of that value is in the Donbas.

This immense wealth in natural resources includes the largest supply of recoverable rare earth resources in Europe, including cerium, yttrium, lanthanum and neodymium, which are used in production of flat television screens, aluminum and magnesium alloys, radar filters, camera lenses and magnets.

Even more significantly, Ukraine has already demonstrated its willingness to pay the highest price to ensure its survival as a nation and as a Ukrainian culture free of Russian invasion — and future repressive domination.

Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have been killed or wounded already. As noted by Kellogg, entire cities the size of Denver, including Mariupol in southeast Ukraine, have been leveled by Russia’s indiscriminate bombing in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions.

Trump has it in his power to liberate Ukraine and, in the process, strike blows against Putin and Xi’s war against the West. Either they get all of Ukraine’s minerals, or Washington and Brussels get some of them.

It is now his war to win or lose — not just in Ukraine but globally. 

Mark Toth writes on national security and foreign policy. Col. (Ret.) Jonathan Sweetserved 30 years as a military intelligence officer and led the U.S. European Command Intelligence Engagement Division from 2012 to 2014.