Facts are a stubborn thing, and those facts tell us that under a “weak” Biden, Moscow could not even come close to allowing itself what it is getting away with under a “strong” Trump.
As soon as it became clear that Putin’s blitzkrieg had failed, the fate of Ukraine’s energy system and its railway logistics came onto the agenda. I remember discussing this issue in late autumn with one of the most forward-thinking representatives of the Ukrainian leadership, who wondered: why isn’t Putin striking bridges and railways? I should note that many “Strelkovs” and “Dugins” were openly asking the same question at the time. We have now received the answer: he was waiting for Trump.
Without Trump, Putin had no confidence that the “energicide” of Ukraine and the mass bombardment of million-plus cities with ballistic missiles would go unpunished. Now he does. Through all his actions, whatever good intentions he may have claimed, Trump consistently encouraged Putin to resort to terror. He created the confidence that no retaliation would come from America. And after Trump opened a “second front” in Europe, it became clear that no retaliation would come from there either.
In Anchorage, Trump effectively left Zelensky face to face with Putin in a dark alley, and Putin behaved exactly as one is accustomed to behave in St. Petersburg back alleys. Having failed to achieve decisive superiority on the battlefield over four years, Moscow finally managed to reach a vulnerability of Kyiv that had been obvious from the very beginning but had remained temporarily out of reach—its civilian infrastructure—and began methodically destroying it.
In this entire saga, there is only one downside for the Kremlin: Trump is not eternal, and history does not end with the current war, however tragically it unfolds. The residue left in Europe’s historical memory by the terror against Ukraine’s civilian population will not be washed away. Sooner or later, someone will have to pay for everything—either they themselves or their children. And perhaps—and this also happens—the children themselves will one day ask their fathers: what was that about?
