"Trump Has Realized He's Made A Mess Of Things."
- 1.05.2025, 13:55
Why the U.S. president decided to give the green light for defense exports to Ukraine.
The Donald Trump administration has informed the US Congress of its intention to give the green light for defense exports to Ukraine through direct commercial sales. What changed the White House chief of staff's position? The website Charter97.org talked to Ukrainian political scientist and writer Vladimir Tsibulko about it:
- It was sort of a tie-in with the subsoil agreement, the critical minerals agreement. That agreement was actually agreed upon back when this initiative was announced. Today we already know that it's been signed.
And that's kind of a signal - in conjunction with Putin's behavior of not compromising. So Trump has to show that he is ready to increase pressure on the Kremlin.
This announcement of the willingness to sell is still conditional - a trial, so to speak. There we are talking about a small batch of weapons, somewhere around 50 million dollars. But in general, Vladimir Zelensky has repeatedly asked Trump to sell arms to Ukraine on a commercial basis.
Most importantly, this sale can unblock other processes. For example, there is an issue with the transfer of some Abrams tanks, which Australia is ready to transfer, but this is still delayed due to the lack of agreement with the American side. It seems to me that this is a really good signal.
By the way, most likely, Trump has decided to reckon with the position of arms manufacturers after all. The fact is that in Europe, many countries have begun to refuse American weapons. Over the past two months, after such loud statements by Trump, especially along the lines of F-35 aircraft, which can have systems to block the use of these aircraft, remote control.
It seems to me that it is under pressure from American arms manufacturers that Trump has to reckon with their position, because it is just the direct influence of the Republican lobby. Republicans have always been the main lobbyists for the interests of American arms manufacturers.
- Can Europe join the process of buying American weapons for Ukraine?"
- Most likely, we are talking about such a scheme: European funds are used to buy weapons and transfer them to the Ukrainian side.
- How long can Trump's more principled position be maintained?"
- It seems to me that arms manufacturers will try to develop some kind of collective position, so that the arms trade will go on without the influence of political power.
That was the case before, that But it seems to me that now Trump is just starting to look around himself and realizing that he's made a mess of things. And moreover the major defense complex plants that have gone belly up under the influence of Biden's decisions created the real conditions for Trump's own election. Most of those plants are in Republican states.
So it turns out to be a pretty strange story. And it's likely that the very public blocking of arms shipments to Ukraine was part of Trump's plan to influence Putin. But now Trump's aides may be explaining to him that he himself is influenced by Putin, not the other way around.