So now, after more than a decade of pretending that he is not associated with Russia and that he would honor the U.S. national security position of support for Ukraine and our European allies, President Donald Trump is openly backing Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.
Asked in October 2026 by a reporter about concerns that his dropping of sanctions against Russian oil on the 09th of October 2026 would funnel money to Putin’s war on Ukraine, President Donald Trump blamed Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky for prolonging the war :
“Zelensky could have settled this war many times. Many, many times,” Trump said, “And he chooses not to.” Trump blamed Zelensky for the high cost of diesel because Ukrainian forces have targeted Russian oil refineries, although since Russian oil was sanctioned, the actual chokepoint for diesel prices is the Strait of Hormuz, largely closed because of Trump’s war on Iran.
President Donald Trump accused President Zelensky of wanting “to make problems for the world. He wants to make problems for our farmers, our ranchers, with diesel fuel, because Russia supplies a large portion of the diesel fuel throughout the world.” Ukrainians have hit Russian oil refineries to stop the flow of money into Russia as it evades sanctions and sells oil through its so-called shadow fleet. Russia, in contrast, has been striking civilian targets in violation of the laws of war.
President Donald Trump continued with a warning to President Zelensky, saying “he’d better damn well stop.”
Ukraine continues to fight against Russia because Russia has invaded Ukraine and is trying to occupy Ukraine’s eastern industrial area in violation of the United Nations charter that vows no country will use threats or force against another’s territorial integrity. Until President Donald Trump took office, the United States was the key guarantor of this principle.
The U.S. has stood against Russia’s 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine not only because of the principle of territorial sovereignty, but also because of security guarantees the U.S., along with the United Kingdom and Russia, gave to Ukraine in 1994. After the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991, Ukraine had the third-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. In exchange for Ukraine’s giving up those weapons, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia agreed to secure Ukraine’s borders. In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, they agreed they would not use military force or economic coercion against Ukraine.
Then Russian leader President Vladimir Putin worked to bring Ukraine under the sway of the Russian oligarchs who rose to replace the region’s communist leaders, monopolizing formerly publicly held industries as those industries were privatized. American journalist Paul Klebnikov, the chief editor of Forbes in Russia, was murdered in 2004 after calling attention to what the oligarchs were doing.
In that same year, a Russian-backed politician, Viktor Yanukovych, appeared to be elected president of Ukraine. But the election was so full of fraud—including the poisoning of a key rival who wanted to break ties with Russia and align Ukraine with Europe—the government voided the election and called for a do-over. Yanukovych needed a makeover fast, and for that he called on an American political consultant with a reputation for making unsavory characters palatable to the media : Paul Manafort.
For ten years, from 2004 to 2014, Manafort worked for Yanukovych and his party, trying to make what the U.S. State Department called a party of “mobsters and oligarchs” look legitimate. He made a fortune thanks to his new friends. In 2010, Yanukovych finally won the presidency on a platform of rejecting NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization through which Europe joined together to oppose first the USSR, and then the rising threat of Russia. Immediately, Yanukovych turned Ukraine toward Russia. Then, in 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power in what is known as the Revolution of Dignity. He fled to Russia.
Shortly after Yanukovych’s ouster, Russia invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it, prompting the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia itself and also on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in the United States and in its territories. These sanctions hurt Russia and froze the assets of key Russian oligarchs, including President Putin.
Now without his main source of income, Manafort owed about $17 million to allies of Yanukovych and President Putin, especially Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. By 2016, his longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone was advising the presidential campaign of President Donald Trump, and Manafort was happy to step in to help. He did not take a salary. He began as an advisor in March 2016 and became the campaign chairman in late June, after meeting on June 9 with Don Jr., Jared Kushner, and Russian operatives.
It turned out that Russia was looking for a way to grab the Ukrainian land it wanted without continuing to fight. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election explained that Manafort and his partner, Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik, in summer 2016 “discussed a plan to resolve the ongoing political problems in Ukraine by creating an autonomous republic in its more industrialized eastern region of Donbas, and having [Russian-backed Viktor] Yanukovych, the Ukrainian President ousted in 2014, elected to head that republic.”
The Mueller Report continued : “That plan, Manafort later acknowledged, constituted a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.” The region that Putin wanted was the country’s industrial heartland. He was offering a “peace” plan that would carve off much of Ukraine and make it subservient to him. This was the exact opposite of U.S. policy for a free and united Ukraine, and there was no chance that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who was running for the presidency against President Donald Trump, would stand for it. But if President Donald Trump were elected, the equation changed.
According to the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, Kilimnik wrote : “[a]ll that is required to start the process is a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push) from D[onald] T[rump] saying ‘he wants peace in Ukraine and Donbass back in Ukraine’ and a decision to be a ‘special representative’ and manage this process.” Kilimnik further suggested that Manafort “could start the process and within 10 days visit Russia ([Yanukovych] guarantees your reception at the very top level, cutting through all the bullsh*t and getting down to business), Ukraine, and key EU capitals,” and that “once then–Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko understood this ‘message’ from the United States, the process ‘will go very fast and DT could have peace in Ukraine basically within a few months after inauguration.’”
To conclude, On Friday 09th of October 2026, despite the fact that Russia is backing Iran, whose military is killing U.S. soldiers, President Donald Trump proudly announced he was removing sanctions to let Russia sell its oil on global markets. Ukrainian attacks have curtailed Russian production, so the amount it has available to help the diesel squeeze in the U.S. is negligible, but the ability to rake in cash as the world’s current oil shortage has driven up prices is invaluable to President Putin for his desperate war effort.
