Is a Desperate Trump Trying to Sell Out Ukraine to Get Russia’s Help on Iran?

A visit by perennial Trump administration negotiators Steven Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, followed immediately by one to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Donald Trump’s claim that a ceasefire in that war is imminent might make critics suspicious of another administration attempt to pressure Ukraine for major concessions to end that bloody war, this time in exchange for a Russian stand-down in helping Iran in the administration’s war with that country.

Any such obvious mutually advantageous deal could help both Russia and the United States at Ukraine’s expense. Most U.S. presidents—for example, Joe Biden—would avoid selling out a democratic wannabe nation such as Ukraine in favor of the kleptocratic dictatorship in Russia. However, President Trump has an affinity for authoritarian leaders abroad (and a supercharged imperial presidency at home), while having an especially forgiving relationship with Vladimir Putin. More obviously, in the past, even before Trump became trapped in the Iran quagmire, he tried to extract huge concessions from Ukraine found in a Russian proposal to end that war—for example, pressuring Ukraine to limit its military forces and relinquish some of its territory that Russia had not won on the battlefield, as well as curtailing Western military assistance to that country. 

Yet since Trump’s second term began, he has had diminished influence over Ukraine, because he dramatically scaled back direct grants of U.S. weapons to Ukraine in favor of selling them to European countries, which can then sell or give them to Ukraine. However, the United States still has some leverage over Ukraine, given the likelihood that it is still providing Ukraine with some intelligence to target Russia and Russian-occupied Ukraine. Also, Ukraine desperately needs sophisticated air and missile defense interceptors to fend off devastating Russian missile and massed drone attacks on the civilian populations in its cities. Trump has already agreed to let Ukraine eventually produce U.S. PATRIOT interceptor missiles, but this will only help in the long term. But Ukraine needs these air- and missile-defense interceptors now. They are in short supply because of profligate use in the U.S.-Iran War and American needs in other theaters—for example, to help defend Europe against Russia and Taiwan against China.

The Trump administration attacked Iran without apparently realizing that it would need some way to deal with Russian and Chinese assistance to Iran. This problem became much more acute when the U.S. optimistic strategy of decapitating the Iranian leadership to quickly and existentially bring down that government failed and more radical regime remnants not only have refused to capitulate but have zealously continued to constrict maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, which was open before the initial U.S. attack. 

The failed U.S. military strategy, a shortage of smart munitions to continue wailing away at Iran, and Iranian pugnaciousness have made the administration resort to a naval blockade, economic sanctions, and an expensive and dangerous effort to escort commercial ships through the now hazardous strait—which has been designed to squeeze Iran further economically and get some oil out of the Persian Gulf but which is unlikely to achieve the ambitious political goal of opening the strait. 

However, although halting or reducing assistance to Iran from Russia (and perhaps China) might marginally increase the administration’s chances that its new emphasis on an economic strangulation strategy might eventually motivate Iran to open the strait, the desperate Trump may be willing to sell out Ukraine to help achieve such an unlikely outcome. Witkoff and Kushner’s visits to Moscow and Kyiv may be an indication of that desperation.