Ukraine is the biggest and most consequential of all the American betrayals
As the war enters its fifth year, it’s time for Europe to take the fight to Putin on its own terms and tell Trump to get lost.
By Simon Tisdall/The Guardian
Sat 21 Feb 2026
Viewed from Europe, the US’s failure to defend the people of Ukraine against Russian aggression is the greatest and most consequential of a host of recent American betrayals. It’s not just the sickening subservience shown to Vladimir Putin, an indicted war criminal and mass killer. It’s not only the victim-blaming and bullying of Kyiv into making concessions. It’s not even Donald Trump’s crass attempts to monetise the war and milk the misery of millions for Nobel glory, while undercutting Nato allies and trampling sovereign rights.
What really shocks, and hurts, is the sheer bad faith shown by a country that Europeans always counted a friend. As the 18th-century English gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe noted, “few circumstances are more afflicting than a discovery of perfidy in those whom we have trusted”. To echo Trump’s dark warning after he was rebuffed over Greenland: Europe will remember.
As the full-scale war Putin launched in 2022 stumbles into its fifth bloody year this Tuesday, Europe, like Russia, is in deep trouble. Yet so too is the US, though Trump and his mouthy muppets, Marco Rubio and JD Vance, don’t realise it yet. Most Europeans now regard their foremost partner as unreliable, even a foe. US global influence and leadership is fading fast, to gleeful China’s huge advantage. Everywhere, autocrats rejoice, as do Europe’s advancing far-right parties.
“The question of how this war is going to end is actually an existential question for Europe,” said Wolfgang Ischinger, chair of this month’s Munich Security Conference. “It will determine – in more ways than one – the future of this continent.” But the war is proving definitive, too, for Trump and his blinkered, bigoted Maga ideologues. Glossing over Russian depredations (and the illegal Venezuela coup), Rubio chose in Munich to target globalisation, “climate cults” and multiculturalism. The US secretary of state urged a return to ultranationalism, protectionism, closed borders and Christian culture. “Yesterday is over,” he declared.
Little Marco (as Trump calls him) is confused. Trumpism is all about recreating yesterday, about fantasies of “the good old days”. Putin suffers similar delusions. The war is part of his revanchist project to make Russia great again, to rebuild the Soviet sphere. Likewise, Xi Jinping, China’s leader, is attempting his own great leap backwards, by accumulating dictatorial powers to an extent unseen since Mao Zedong.
The open-minded, freedom-loving rainbow Europe of democracy and the rule of law is a living rebuke to these lumbering Frankenstein’s retro-monsters and their hard-right emulators. They revile and fear it. Like Ukraine, it stands in their way.
The US betrayal of Ukraine, foreshadowing its broader treachery, did not start with Trump. Bill Clinton’s post-independence 1994 security assurances for Kyiv proved meaningless. Barack Obama blinked when Putin seized Crimea in 2014. Joe Biden, haunted by cold war ghosts, reacted with fatal overcaution to the 2022 invasion.
What’s changed is that Trump’s betrayals are deliberate, and are happening now. Each dawn brings another day of infamy. Last year, Ukraine’s civilian casualties hit their highest annual level since the war began as Putin expanded a war that Trump pledged to end in 24 hours. Direct US weapons supplies have been cut to almost zero. Trump’s risible “peace process”, overseen by a business crony and his simpering son-in-law, indulges Putin’s maximalist demands while excluding Europe.
Trump’s 28-point “peace plan” – a lopsided roadmap to Russian victory – was swiftly discredited. Yet he is still insisting Kyiv surrender sovereign territory, setting a catastrophic precedent, and withholding security guarantees. He still aims to make a quick buck out of Ukraine’s mineral resources and postwar deals with Russia. He still habitually bullies Ukraine’s admirable president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And still he belittles European allies while courting Putin and authoritarians such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Argentina’s Javier Milei and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.
For shameless treachery, Trump has no modern equal. Yet the belief is growing that it cannot and will not continue. How much longer can willing dupes such as the Nato chief, Mark Rutte, prate about vital transatlantic ties when Trump is daily dissolving them in acid and vitriol? How dare Rubio lecture Europeans on Christian civilisation while he and other New World barbarians wink at Israeli atrocities in Gaza? Now they plan to attack Iran, again, and maybe Cuba, too. By what right?
Trump’s perfidious tyranny, equally toxic at home and abroad, will only worsen the longer it’s tolerated. Despite all the obvious obstacles and difficulties, it’s imperative that Europeans, and the pre-midterms, anti-Trump American majority, begin to speak with one voice – and match words with actions. And where better to start than in Ukraine, the actual and symbolic frontline in the battle between liberal democracy and the Trump-Putin axis?
Here’s what must be done: deploy troops from a European “coalition of the willing” to secure and defend Kyiv and other unoccupied cities; Russia cannot be allowed a veto. Enforce a no-fly exclusion zone, as I have repeatedly urged. Surge defensive missiles and drones. Beach Russia’s shadow fleet. Step up covert “active measures”, including cyber and sabotage, to counter Kremlin hybrid warfare. Seize assets, expel spies, expose lies, change the narrative. Europe must demand an immediate ceasefire, followed by phased Russian withdrawals, and assume a lead role in any final settlement talks.
If not, why not? For consider the alternatives: endless war, endless killing, or an unsustainable, unjust peace on Trump-Putin terms. Europe is on notice: the US cannot be trusted. The challenge is indeed existential. All that it stands for and holds dear is potentially at stake. No matter how it’s done, for the sake of Ukraine’s exhausted, undefeated people and their own future peace and security, Europeans (including Britain) must finally find the unity, courage and wherewithal to take the military, economic, diplomatic and moral offensive.
Europe must take the fight directly to Putin’s door. And tell Trump to get lost.
Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator. Was
By Simon Tisdall/The Guardian
Sat 21 Feb 2026
Viewed from Europe, the US’s failure to defend the people of Ukraine against Russian aggression is the greatest and most consequential of a host of recent American betrayals. It’s not just the sickening subservience shown to Vladimir Putin, an indicted war criminal and mass killer. It’s not only the victim-blaming and bullying of Kyiv into making concessions. It’s not even Donald Trump’s crass attempts to monetise the war and milk the misery of millions for Nobel glory, while undercutting Nato allies and trampling sovereign rights.
What really shocks, and hurts, is the sheer bad faith shown by a country that Europeans always counted a friend. As the 18th-century English gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe noted, “few circumstances are more afflicting than a discovery of perfidy in those whom we have trusted”. To echo Trump’s dark warning after he was rebuffed over Greenland: Europe will remember.
As the full-scale war Putin launched in 2022 stumbles into its fifth bloody year this Tuesday, Europe, like Russia, is in deep trouble. Yet so too is the US, though Trump and his mouthy muppets, Marco Rubio and JD Vance, don’t realise it yet. Most Europeans now regard their foremost partner as unreliable, even a foe. US global influence and leadership is fading fast, to gleeful China’s huge advantage. Everywhere, autocrats rejoice, as do Europe’s advancing far-right parties.
“The question of how this war is going to end is actually an existential question for Europe,” said Wolfgang Ischinger, chair of this month’s Munich Security Conference. “It will determine – in more ways than one – the future of this continent.” But the war is proving definitive, too, for Trump and his blinkered, bigoted Maga ideologues. Glossing over Russian depredations (and the illegal Venezuela coup), Rubio chose in Munich to target globalisation, “climate cults” and multiculturalism. The US secretary of state urged a return to ultranationalism, protectionism, closed borders and Christian culture. “Yesterday is over,” he declared.
Little Marco (as Trump calls him) is confused. Trumpism is all about recreating yesterday, about fantasies of “the good old days”. Putin suffers similar delusions. The war is part of his revanchist project to make Russia great again, to rebuild the Soviet sphere. Likewise, Xi Jinping, China’s leader, is attempting his own great leap backwards, by accumulating dictatorial powers to an extent unseen since Mao Zedong.
The open-minded, freedom-loving rainbow Europe of democracy and the rule of law is a living rebuke to these lumbering Frankenstein’s retro-monsters and their hard-right emulators. They revile and fear it. Like Ukraine, it stands in their way.
The US betrayal of Ukraine, foreshadowing its broader treachery, did not start with Trump. Bill Clinton’s post-independence 1994 security assurances for Kyiv proved meaningless. Barack Obama blinked when Putin seized Crimea in 2014. Joe Biden, haunted by cold war ghosts, reacted with fatal overcaution to the 2022 invasion.
What’s changed is that Trump’s betrayals are deliberate, and are happening now. Each dawn brings another day of infamy. Last year, Ukraine’s civilian casualties hit their highest annual level since the war began as Putin expanded a war that Trump pledged to end in 24 hours. Direct US weapons supplies have been cut to almost zero. Trump’s risible “peace process”, overseen by a business crony and his simpering son-in-law, indulges Putin’s maximalist demands while excluding Europe.
Trump’s 28-point “peace plan” – a lopsided roadmap to Russian victory – was swiftly discredited. Yet he is still insisting Kyiv surrender sovereign territory, setting a catastrophic precedent, and withholding security guarantees. He still aims to make a quick buck out of Ukraine’s mineral resources and postwar deals with Russia. He still habitually bullies Ukraine’s admirable president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And still he belittles European allies while courting Putin and authoritarians such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Argentina’s Javier Milei and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu.
For shameless treachery, Trump has no modern equal. Yet the belief is growing that it cannot and will not continue. How much longer can willing dupes such as the Nato chief, Mark Rutte, prate about vital transatlantic ties when Trump is daily dissolving them in acid and vitriol? How dare Rubio lecture Europeans on Christian civilisation while he and other New World barbarians wink at Israeli atrocities in Gaza? Now they plan to attack Iran, again, and maybe Cuba, too. By what right?
Trump’s perfidious tyranny, equally toxic at home and abroad, will only worsen the longer it’s tolerated. Despite all the obvious obstacles and difficulties, it’s imperative that Europeans, and the pre-midterms, anti-Trump American majority, begin to speak with one voice – and match words with actions. And where better to start than in Ukraine, the actual and symbolic frontline in the battle between liberal democracy and the Trump-Putin axis?
Here’s what must be done: deploy troops from a European “coalition of the willing” to secure and defend Kyiv and other unoccupied cities; Russia cannot be allowed a veto. Enforce a no-fly exclusion zone, as I have repeatedly urged. Surge defensive missiles and drones. Beach Russia’s shadow fleet. Step up covert “active measures”, including cyber and sabotage, to counter Kremlin hybrid warfare. Seize assets, expel spies, expose lies, change the narrative. Europe must demand an immediate ceasefire, followed by phased Russian withdrawals, and assume a lead role in any final settlement talks.
If not, why not? For consider the alternatives: endless war, endless killing, or an unsustainable, unjust peace on Trump-Putin terms. Europe is on notice: the US cannot be trusted. The challenge is indeed existential. All that it stands for and holds dear is potentially at stake. No matter how it’s done, for the sake of Ukraine’s exhausted, undefeated people and their own future peace and security, Europeans (including Britain) must finally find the unity, courage and wherewithal to take the military, economic, diplomatic and moral offensive.
Europe must take the fight directly to Putin’s door. And tell Trump to get lost.
Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator. Was
70-79
