A Web of Disinformation

Susan Estrich on Feb 20, 2025

"You should have never started it," President Donald Trump said on Tuesday, accusing Ukrainian leaders of having started the war with Russia. "You could have made a deal." He followed up the next day on social media, branding Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine's leader, as a "dictator without elections" who had "done a terrible job" in office.

Even Vladimir Putin himself has never claimed that Ukraine started the war. Before the full-scale invasion three years ago, Russia seized the Ukrainian province of Crimea and took territory in the eastern Donbas region, including the provincial capitals of Donetsk and Luhansk. Referring to the invasion as a "special military operation," Putin claimed -- falsely -- that Vladimir Lenin created Ukraine, ignoring the fact that Ukrainians voted in a democratic referendum in 1991 to leave the Soviet Union. "Putin began a war against Ukraine, and against the entire democratic world," Zelenskyy said on the war's first day. The U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution calling for Russia's immediate withdrawal.

Since then, hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians have been killed and wounded, and whole cities levelled, and there have been credible reports of Russian soldiers committing atrocities.

These are Trump's new best friends. The "Evil Empire" -- Reagan's Russia -- is no more. The invasion of a sovereign nation is now that nation's fault.

How does this happen?

Summoning reporters, Zelenskyy responded. "I would like to have more truth with the Trump team," he said, arguing that Trump was living in a "web of disinformation." Aren't we all?

Trump remained in his web. "Think of it," he posted on Truth Social, "a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn't be won, that never had to start, but a War that he, without the U.S. and 'TRUMP,' will never be able to settle." That, presumably, is the reason the United States sat down with Russia this week to address the war without inviting Ukraine to the table. We can settle without them, but they cannot settle without us.

In fact, the United States has not spent $350 billion on the war. According to The New York Times, which in turn relied on the Kiel Institute in Germany, the accurate figure of how much aid we have allocated to Ukraine is $119 billion. The facts don't matter. The point is, according to Trump, that this is all Europe's problem, not ours. "This War is far more important to Europe than it is to us," he wrote. "We have a big, beautiful Ocean as separation."

A "big, beautiful Ocean" to protect us? Have we so totally forgotten the lessons of World War II? Do we really want to leave Europe on its own to deal with Putin's ambitions? This turns generations of American foreign policy on its head. Is this what America voted for, this sort of New World Order?

"I'll be happy to meet with Donald," Putin said on Wednesday. "We haven't seen each other in a while. But we're in a situation where it's not enough to meet just to have tea or coffee and sit and talk about the future." First, there is work to be done, "including on the Ukrainian track." The Russian dictator had nothing but praise for the Trump team. Referring to the meetings in Saudi Arabia from which Ukraine was excluded, he said: "On the American side, there were completely different people who were open to the negotiation process without any bias, without any condemnation of what was done in the past."

Stunning. In my "web of (dis)information," Putin recently killed the opposition leader while his troops committed atrocities and war crimes in Ukraine. I'm old enough to remember when being soft on the Soviet Union ("soft on Communism") was the death knell for liberal Democrats. Since when has it become the rallying cry of conservative Republicans? Russia is reportedly dangling millions or more in potential profits for American businesses who would be able to go back to business in Russia free of the sanctions. This is the sort of argument that Trump responds to. Excuse me, Donald.

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