Freezing aid to Ukraine shows Trump is no ally to the West

Donald Trump’s foreign policy chief has said foreign aid to all countries apart from Israel and Egypt is to be halted. The results for Ukraine could be catastrophic, writes Sam Kiley in Dnipro

Donald Trump said he was going to do it. His foreign policy and his defence team gave due warning that they’d do it. And yet, as Marco Rubio smashed a fist into the solar plexus of an already battered Ukraine, there was still a stunned surprise.

In a memo sent to embassies and agencies who rely on US funding, to the tune of $72bn (£57bn) at last count, the new US secretary of state placed a stop order on American worldwide aid funding, for up to 90 days.

Excluded from this move are Israel and Egypt. They’re fine.

Ukraine is a democracy that has been identified by the highest court on the planet, the International Criminal Court, as being the victim of war crimes. But aid from the US, both civilian and military, appears to have been cut overnight with the stroke of a pen.

As the memo was being digested around the world, one aid agency head was quoted by the Reuters news agency as calling it “lunacy”.

Jeremy Konyndyk, a former United States Agency for International Development official who is president of Refugees International, said. “This will kill people. I mean, if implemented as written in that cable ... a lot of people will die.

“There’s no way to consider this as a good-faith attempt to sincerely review the effectiveness of foreign assistance programming. This is simply a wrecking ball to break as much stuff as possible.”

But it’s worse than that. Rubio’s edict, which is intended to bring all foreign aid operations around the world into line with Trump’s foreign policy objectives, directly serves the interests of Vladimir Putin.

Anticipating this dramatic freezing of foreign assistance, the outgoing administration of Joe Biden rushed through an additional $2.5bn in emergency military aid for Ukraine last December. Of that, the New York Times reported, half would come from existing US stockpiles and the rest spent on newly purchased weapons.

Biden also signed off on $3.4bnn in financial aid support for the Ukrainian economy. One project, agreed on 5 December last year, involves US aid of $825m to Ukraine’s energy sector. These are emergency funds to, literally, keep the lights on while Russia targets the nation’s power grid.

All of that support is now either in doubt or frozen for weeks and possibly months, at a time when Trump wants to drive a “peace deal” between Ukraine and Russia and force both sides into negotiations.

During the Cold War groups like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Western politicians sympathetic to the communist ideology of the Soviet Union were derided by the KGB as “useful idiots” who were accidentally serving the interests of the Kremlin.

Ukraine is on the back foot militarily. After three years of war, its troops are exhausted, its government under Volodymyr Zelensky is weakening, and its ammunition is dangerously low. Ukrainian blood is turning the farmland of the east into mud.

If ever there was a strategic blow Putin would love to see an ally deal to Ukraine, it would be the undermining of its morale by threatening to garotte its arms supplies and signalling to its fighting forces that they are being abandoned.

Trump’s frequent deriding of Nato, the cornerstone of Western security against Russia, while Russian officials including Putin have signalled their designs on the Baltic states (all Nato members) and even Poland, suggests that the US president is firmly in Camp Kremlin. Western Europe is now vulnerable too.

Trump has long maintained that he has sympathy for Russia’s invasion, because of Ukraine’s desire to join Nato, and that he was minded to cut aid spending for Kyiv. Now he’s done that.

With such malice aforethought, one can only conclude that Trump is no idiot. He can no longer be considered an ally either.