I don't share the antipathy that many people feel for President Zelenskyy, but he sure isn't doing himself any favors by continuing to pick fights with Donald Trump. 

Trump and Zelenskyy are in the midst of a war of words over Ukraine policy, and as an outside observer, I have to say I don't like what either of them has been saying. I support Trump's policy choice to wrap up the Ukraine war and think that a lot of the rhetoric used to justify continuing the fighting is complete BS. I don't think Trump is right to say that Zelenskyy is a tyrant who started the war. 

Zelenskyy, on the other hand, seems determined to act as if he has a right to an unlimited war budget from the American people and has seems to be deluded into believing that he and Europe have a prayer of defeating Russia without help from the United States. He doesn't even have a prayer of winning the war WITH the help of Europe and the United States. 

How do I know that? In 3 years and after hundreds of billions of dollars of aid, the war is in a stalemate. The body bags keep piling up, but the front lines move only meters one way or another, and nobody has a plan to change that, and certainly no plan to return to the status quo ante 2014, which is Zelenskyy's war aim. 

In that light, we are 10 years into a forever war, with something over a million people killed or wounded so far. The war started under Obama, who allowed Putin to take Crimea and occupy other parts of Ukraine. It was a stalemate under Trump. Restarted under Biden, during whose term about a million people died or were severely wounded, and now Trump wants to stop the killing. 

BREAKING — Zelensky govt reportedly blocks Trump's Truth Social network across Ukraine pic.twitter.com/QVbGSqe9fk

— Election Wizard (@ElectionWiz) February 20, 2025

Trump is right that this phase of the war wouldn't have started except for his defeat in 2020. And he is right that Biden and Zelenskyy should have negotiated a cease-fire when Russia was willing in 2022-23. But that doesn't make Zelenskyy the aggressor, and Trump shouldn't have said otherwise. 

But this is Trump, and Zelenskyy is wrong to antagonize him. Zelenskyy is hardly in a position of strength, either morally or practically speaking. He was antagonistic to Trump and did what little he could to defeat him during the campaign, and he certainly has been part of the great money laundering scheme that the war has become. 

On Trump's claim about money disappearing in Ukraine: We wrote last year about how corruption is still a big issue in Ukraine, and how the Pentagon at the time had only TWO inspector general staffers physically in Ukraine to oversee billions of $$.https://t.co/Vx83PAU8fs pic.twitter.com/k6ATBt8tvR

— Sarah Bedford (@sarahcbedford) February 20, 2025

Zelenskyy is playing a losing hand and should fold. Instead he is upping the ante both rhetorically and by shutting down Truth Social in Ukraine. 

Trump's rhetorical excesses--"mean tweets," as it were--shock the sensibilities of many who are used to the diplomat-speak and quiet backstabbing that are the normal way of doing political business. But Trump can do that because he is Donald Trump, and holds almost all the cards. 

Trump isn't interested in being fair; he wants to win, and because winning for him is almost always the same thing as winning for the American people, that works out well most of the time. 

If people are analyzing the Ukraine war as a great struggle between good and evil, then Trump's moves look like a great betrayal. But the fact is that the Ukraine war is a conflict between a corrupt transnational elite skimming off the top and an oligarchical mafia state run by an ex-KGB thug. Nobody has clean hands. 

USAID funded the vast majority of 'independent' media in Ukraine. What American taxpayers don't realize is that their money went to suppressing the truth.

Wild reporting here by @TanyaLukyanova_ in @thefp:https://t.co/7zp7WQguWE

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) February 19, 2025

We see this war through Cold War lenses because USAID-funded "independent media" has been paid to portray it that way. If you see it as what it is--an excuse to pillage European and American pocketbooks for the benefit of the transnational elite--you come to very different conclusions. 

One very good thing is coming out of all of this: European countries are concluding that they can't keep grifting off of the US taxpayer forever. For all the talk about the US being an "unreliable ally," the Europeans complaint may lead to something useful--them picking up the bill for their own defense. 

European countries have been able to subsidize their welfare states by having the US pick up the tab for their collective defense. If they are determined to go to war with Russia, the least they can do is pay for it.