Will Putin and Trump's Ukraine Deal Serve Their Own Interests?

Donald Trump did exactly what he promised to do. In the space of a ninety-minute phone call last week, he handed Ukraine on a platter to Vladimir Putin.

- JOHN DOBSON

That a disaster it was three years ago when President Vladimir Putin ordered his troops to cross into Ukraine and start a full-scale invasion of the country. He was so sure that it would be over in a few weeks that he even ordered the troops to take with them their parade uniforms for the inevitable victory parade along the streets of Kyiv, telling them they would be showered with flowers and applauded by a grateful nation for rescuing them from the hated Nazi regime in power. Had the delusional Putin known that his misadventure would still be going on three years later, the big question, which probably will never be answered, is would he have given that order on 24 February 2022?

There were probably two factors present in Putin's mind at the time which persuaded him to attack. The first was his belief in the mighty strength of his armed forces, no match for the meagre Ukrainian troops. The second was the feeble response by the West eight years earlier when on 20 February 2014 Putin ordered the annexation of Crimea. On that day, thousands of gun-toting men in unmarked uniforms appeared throughout the Ukrainian peninsular. Dubbed "little green men", they took over Crimea all the while Putin was denying they were even there. The line from Moscow was that they were "local defence forces", and it wasn't until a year later that Putin unashamedly admitted they were actually Russian forces. Three weeks after the invasion, a hurried referendum on the future of Crimea was held across the peninsula in which Moscow claimed that 96.7 percent of the populations voted to join Russia.