Fear or trust?
Who fears and trusts the United States? This crucial question is being asked at this time, not by opponents of the US, but by some of the people who held very important positions in Washington. Congress has frozen the process of approving military aid to Ukraine.
This is happening at a time when Russian President Vladimir Putin has become stronger politically as well as on the battlefield. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy obviously realizes that the positive scenario for his country is to keep the defense line exactly where it is today. The plan to recover the territories currently occupied by Russia looks more and more like a chimera. Ukrainian soldiers have no ammunition to fight and are forced to wait to see what the US Congress will decide and whether Donald Trump will be re-elected president.
The Biden administration, it is true, supported Ukraine as much as possible. It created an international alliance and provided critical intelligence in the first 48 hours of the invasion when it was unclear whether Russian forces would quickly take over Kyiv.
Now Trump is playing his own political game. He knows that if the Ukrainian front collapses because the flow of American weapons is stopped, he will be able to blame Biden for it. At the same time, he is stoking the isolationist instincts of American public opinion and raising the question of who will repay the US for its assistance to Kyiv.
No one would want to be in the shoes of Zelenskyy, who became a symbol in the West after the Russian invasion. It must be a horrible feeling to have bet on and have your national survival depend on political developments over which you have little control. To wait, day after day, to see if you will receive the help you were promised and to know that, at the end of the day, everything will be decided on November 5, when the US elections will be held.
The US establishment claims that the outcome of the Ukraine war is vital to American interests because China and all the strategic competitors of the US are watching its progress. If this is true, we can imagine what those who decide and draw up policy in Beijing or Moscow are thinking today.
