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It’s not clear what Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin said to each other in their unrecorded phone call, but it is clear how that conversation registered with Moscow.
After two years of relative calm, Ukraine’s war with Russian-backed rebels took a deadly and destructive turn this week, pushing one town in the country’s eastern region to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.
Heavy fighting began within a day of the Trump — Putin phone discussion and was still underway on Thursday with battles stretching from Maryinka west to the town of Donetsk. In freezing weather, the shelling has driven people from their homes and left the region without power.
The fact that the escalation came just one day after Trump’s first conversation of his administration with Russian President Vladimir Putin has led to speculation that the Russian leader felt emboldened to move forward in Ukraine afterwards. (Trump avoided criticizing Putin throughout the presidential campaign and the two have praised each other in the past.)
Of course, Donald Trump is worried — for Russia. Because in the Fox News version of this renewed fight the headline is a little different,
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday accused Ukraine of starting the latest escalation to rally support from the new U.S. administration and other Western powers.
A request for comment to the White House about the flare-up was directed to the State Department. The release issued from State, in turn, said the US is “deeply concerned” about the renewed fighting.
What’s not in that statement? Any assignment of blame.
Though the State Department didn’t attribute just who started the renewed fighting to either side, the US delegation to the OSCE had no such qualms.
“Russia and the separatists initiated the violence in Avdiivka,” Charge D’Affairs Kate M. Byrnes, who is heading the mission while waiting on a replacement to be named, told the OSCE’s permanent council on Tuesday. “We call on Russia to stop the violence, honor the ceasefire, withdraw heavy weapons, and end attempts to seize new territory beyond the line of contact.”
During the campaign, Donald Trump made a famous gaffe in saying that Russia ‘Wasn’t going into Ukraine’
“He’s not going into Ukraine, OK, just so you understand. He’s not going to go into Ukraine, all right? You can mark it down. You can put it down. You can take it anywhere you want,” Trump said in an interview on Sunday with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on “This Week.”
That was despite the fact that Russia was already occupying the Crimea and other parts of its neighboring state. Trump later “corrected” his statement by adding that instrument of delicate diplomacy — a tweet.
But now there’s no form of Trump’s statement which remains true. Putin was in Ukraine before. He’s more in Ukraine now. And Trump seems completely unprepared to deal with it.
President Trump says that he thinks that the former head of the KGB is a good guy. He had, as he described it, a great conversation with the former Communist spymaster on Saturday. If that is true, then President Trump just got played for an actual fool. Again.
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