Former US Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations and Kyiv Post op-ed contributor Kurt Volker suggested in an interview that US President Donald Trump’s frustration with Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin’s deceptiveness may have led to the momentum to provide Kyiv with long-range Tomahawk missiles.
He said Putin “lied to Trump” about his sincerity of bringing an end to his more than three-year invasion of Ukraine, and because “Trump is transactional,” he said, this is why “it’s quite possible that the US will send Tomahawks to Ukraine.”
After the two met in Anchorage, Alaska, in August, Trump walked away thinking he had a deal with the imperialist leader, and on Aug 18, he met with President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House, and said he was a confident of a meeting between the Ukrainian and Russian leaders.
“Trump is frustrated,” Volker told Euronews. “Putin promised him he would negotiate and meet with Zelensky. (Putin) did it when Trump was with European leaders in the White House. He went and made a phone call to Putin who agreed in that moment,” Volker said. “But Putin lied to him and now Trump is irritated.”
Following the White House meeting with Zelensky, Volker summarized to Kyiv Post: “There are two key things that the US and the West need to focus on. The first one is ensuring that the reliable, visible, known pipeline of military support to Ukraine that American arms and ammunition, along with arms and ammunition from European allies and others, will continue to flow to Ukraine uninterrupted, and giving them what they need to be able to defend themselves, to have better air defenses and to go after Russia’s lines of communication. These are critical.
This is largely the case now. We’ve seen President Trump green-light European purchases of American arms and ammunition for transfer to Ukraine. He’s put NATO in charge of coordinating that, and there is now a pipeline of $90 billion that has been put out there in the meeting yesterday that can assure that that’s the case. So that’s one big signal to Putin that it’s not going to get easier.”
Still, at that point, there was no inkling that Trump would lend any thought to sending Kyiv the Tomahawks for fear of escalation.
That all changed, Volker said in the Euronews interview, when Putin made it clear he had no intention of meeting with Zelensky, so Trump upped the weapons ante.
“He made Trump look weak and Trump doesn’t like looking weak, so this is now a personal issue for him,” Volker told Euronews.
Beyond that, he said, “Trump is transactional. He’s all about money, and if somebody is paying, what does he care?”
“If the Russian invasion of Ukraine ends then Trump’s priority is that he can lift sanctions (on Russia) and make money.”