Terry Glavin: Trump throws Ukraine under the bus

A stupid habit that much of the western news media has adopted in reporting on the Trump administration’s various intrigues and contrivances related to Vladimir Putin’s savage war on Ukraine is the extravagant employment of the term “peace plan.”

The term gained almost immediately undeserved currency after Donald Trump’s return to the White House last January, when the American foreign-policy establishment was dragooned into an effort to extort $500 billion from Ukraine in a spoils-of-war minerals deal.

The arrangement, now nearly moribund, was no “peace plan.” Its purpose was to satisfy President Trump’s determination to recoup what he falsely claimed was $300 billion the United States had spent to assist Ukraine in defending itself after Russia’s full-on invasion in 2022. It was a lie Trump told repeatedly and almost invariably with the lie that Europe had spent only $100 billion on Ukraine’s defence.

At the time, the Kiel Institute for the World Economy could find only $119 billion the Americans had spent directly on Ukraine, compared with $138 billion spent by European states. In any case, the United States has allocated a total amount of zero to Ukraine since Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration, and yet the Trump White House still presumes to act as a legitimate interlocutor in Ukraine’s agonies.

The words “28-point peace plan” have taken up an extraordinary amount of headline space over the past three weeks. Devised in Florida in October by Trump envoy Steve Witkoff and his Russian counterpart, Kirill Dmitriev, with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner in tow, the document was nothing of the kind.

For good reason, historians do not refer to the Nazi-Soviet protocol of Aug. 24, 1939, as a German “peace plan.” Also negotiated in secret, and named after Adolf Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact — formally titled the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — cleared the way for the Third Reich to invade Poland, with Moscow’s collaboration.

It turned out Russia wasn’t on the European side of “peace” after all. The Molotov-Ribbentrop concordat divided Europe between Nazi and Soviet overlordship and immediately kicked off a series of bloody annexations and invasions across the European continent. The Second World War had begun, and Soviet supreme leader Joseph Stalin stuck with Hitler until Germany invaded Russia in 1941.

The secret U.S.-Russia pact that has been titled “Trump’s 28-point peace plan” was leaked last month to several U.S. news outlets along with transcripts of recorded conversations between Russian officials, and between Trump envoy Steve Witkoff and Putin’s backchannel to the Trump White House, Kirill Dmitriev. A European intelligence agency was almost certainly involved, at some level, in the leaked recordings.

The upshot is that the “peace plan” Trump ordered Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll to deliver to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was almost entirely a Russian concoction. If Zelenskyy didn’t sign it by American Thanksgiving, Trump said, he’d be on his own and he could “fight his little heart out.”

When the bombshell disclosures made it clear that the Witkoff-Dmitriev pact contained mostly Putin’s terms for Ukraine’s surrender, European leaders demanded a halt to Trump’s sabotage. The “peace plan” required Ukraine’s total capitulation — a surrender of Crimea and great swathes of Eastern Ukraine to Russia, a subjugation of NATO to Russian demands for Ukraine’s permanent exclusion, a massive reduction in the size of Ukraine’s military, the prohibition of any NATO troops on Ukrainian soil, a U.S.-enforced pardon for Putin for all his war crimes, a return of Moscow to the G7, and a lifting of all sanctions on Russia.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was dispatched to Geneva to calm things down, to no great effect. A separate delegation of Trump’s inner circle, led by Witkoff and Kushner, was dispatched to Moscow for followup talks with Putin. The big story out of Moscow turned out to be Putin’s declaration that he is now ready to go to war with Europe.

The outrage about the plan’s contents, even among Trump’s Republicans in Congress, was no small thing. Less noticed was the plan’s function and the prize Trump’s inner circle was eyeing in return for serving as Putin’s errand runners. In exchange for putting the screws to Ukraine, the Americans would gain preferential access to Russia’s frozen sovereign wealth fund, mostly held under sanctions by the securities repository Euroclear in Belgium. American investors would gain first dibs on the $300 billion in frozen Russian cash, to match American investments in Russia’s critical minerals, Russian resources in the Arctic, and maybe even a joint space mission.

The Europeans have been at loggerheads about all that frozen Russian money from the beginning. The Belgians say that it should remain under lock and key, otherwise the euro would be devalued and lawsuits could hammer the Belgian economy. A large chunk of these frozen funds are assets nominally belonging to the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), a Russian slush fund sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department three years ago. The RDIF, which has deep ties to Putin’s gangland oligarchs, also oversees the Russia-China Investment Fund.

RDIF’s chief executive officer is none other than Putin envoy Kirill Dmitriev, whose contacts with Trump go back nearly a decade.

To round out the sleaziness, Dmitriev, a Harvard graduate, is also an alumnus of McKinsey & Company, the global management consultancy intimately associated with Justin Trudeau’s deposed government as well as a variety of dictatorships around the world. Formerly led by Dominic Barton, Trudeau’s ambassador to China, McKinsey’s rap sheet includes a $650-million settlement on criminal charges related to boosting opioid sales for the American pharmaceutical giant Purdue Pharma.

Whether Witkoff and his friends will get their way by enlisting the foreign policy of the United States as Dmitriev’s accomplice in springing the locks on Euroclear’s vaults is an open question. It could well be that the Trump White House will head off German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who hopes to put Russia’s frozen assets to use on Ukraine’s behalf without technically confiscating the funds. The issue is coming to a showdown at the next European Council summit in two weeks.

Whatever we might make of what Witkoff, Trump, Dmitriev and Kushner have been up to, at least let’s avoid the indecency of calling it a “peace” plan.

National Post