When the Illusions Fell Away. Donald Trump’s Evolving Stance on Russia and Ukraine
Melinda HARING
Is there a method to the madness? Some Donald Trump boosters maintain that his America First foreign policy is a model of clarity—force the allies to spend more on their militaries, pursue transactional deals and, above all, ensure that he, and he alone, gets the credit for any peace deals. That’s the theory. Reality, as his mercurial approach toward Ukraine shows, is very different – writes Melinda HARING
.On the 2024 campaign trail, Donald Trump gave Poland indigestion as he praised Russian President Vladimir Putin as a strategic „genius” and proclaimed that he would end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office. Anyone who followed Ukraine since before the war, or alternatively those from Eastern Europe, knew that this was nonsense—and that Trump was about to learn a lesson about Russian foreign policy that his predecessors learned the hard way: Moscow cannot be charmed, persuaded, or even warmed up with personal diplomacy. It respects power.
President Trump tried. For six months he offered the Russia leader a chance to come to the negotiating table. President Putin curled his lip. After half a year of Moscow’s honeyed but fruitless phone calls and emissary Steve Witkoff’s pointless shuttle diplomacy, Trump received nothing but evasive statements. In Anchorage, Putin even lectured Trump for an hour about Russia’s rightful place in the world and Trump began to realize that he had been played.
Since that fateful August meeting, Donald Trump’s feelings toward Moscow have hardened. The follow-up meeting in Budapest has been put on ice. The White House has finally implemented more sweeping sanctions after dragging its feet repeatedly. Trump also declared that Ukraine could retake the land that Moscow has occupied since 2022, and then claimed he had never made the statement. Trump also flirted with sending Tomahawk missiles to compel the Russian president to negotiate.
Sending enough long-range missiles to Ukraine would end the war. Every Ukrainian brigade commander and retired US general I have talked with is confident that Putin’s grand fantasy of conquering Ukraine is over with several hundred long-range missiles. Kyiv knows the location of Moscow’s juiciest targets: its command and control centers, ammo depots, and refineries. One Ukrainian brigade commander I interviewed in Odesa in May said that 200 long-range missiles would end the war.
Then Trump blinked and said he wasn’t ever serious about sending Tomahawks. This week Trump made headlines saying that he doesn’t oppose sending Tomahawks to Ukraine.
It’s impossible to predict where the president will land on this crucial decision, but it’s clear that Trump now understands that Putin is fundamentally untrustworthy. What’s more, First Lady Melania Trump follows the war closely and reminds her husband about the stakes.
Melania, a native of Slovenia, has Putin’s number. She knows that he’s a vicious killer who has kidnapped hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian kids and it bothers her a great deal even though she’s ruthlessly apolitical and above the fray of Washington politics. President Trump recently said that his wife reminds him often that Putin’s bombs are hitting schools, hospitals and homes.
As Trump’s position has hardened on Russia, so too has that of his political base. According to the Harris poll in fall 2025, 73 percent of Republican voters now support more sanctions on Russia and arming Ukraine. [[https://www.newsweek.com/republicans-opinion-ukraine-10870558]] Indeed, the grim story of Russia’s abduction of Ukrainian children moves Republican MAGA voters more than 20 points, pollster Steven Moore found in a recent survey.
I have seen this with my own eyes. I recently took a returned Ukrainian child to Shreveport, La., home of House Speaker Mike Johnson. At Speaker Johnson’s home church, as the pastor recounted the tale of 16-year-old Danylo Aleksieienko’s abduction from his mother Alla in Kherson, Ukraine, hundreds of the faithful came streaming forward to pray for him. Thanks to his mother’s persistence and the efforts of the heroic Ukrainian nonprofit Save Ukraine, Danylo was reunited with Alla after being held by the Russian state in Russian-occupied Crimea for six months.
If Save Ukraine and his mother had not been able to bring Danylo home, he likely would have been drafted into the Russian army to fight his Ukrainian compatriots. So far, Putin has largely gotten away with stealing Kyiv’s children without suffering any consequences. Putin, views the influx of Ukrainian kids as a win-win: it helps Russia reduce its massive demographic problem and it undercuts Ukraine’s future by moving young Ukrainians to Russia, where state officials try to reprogram them. Danylo’s story and the stories of innocent Ukrainian children lured away to “two-week” summer respites offer a vivid reminder of why it is imperative to maintain the pressure on the Trump administration to back Ukraine.
.The president and his base are not immovable. They are starting to grasp the horror of Putin’s invasion. Will Trump eventually embrace a hawkish foreign policy in Ukraine? Probably not. But the scales have fallen from his eyes, and Ukraine’s friends must keep telling Danylo’s story and reaching out to MAGA voters and leaders. Trump will do the right thing. Eventually.
