Ukraine policy is getting messier by the day
by digby
Trump is such a clod that he just says whatever he comes into his head without regard to how it will be taken.You can only imagine what he has said to other foreign leaders. >:
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that President Donald Trump pledged to help him take back the peninsula of Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014 in the aftermath of the Ukrainian revolution.
This week has already been dominated by revelations from conversations between the two presidents, with a July phone call between the two men prompting an impeachment investigation into the president.
A Trump commitment on Crimea would complicate the issue further, given the allegations that Trump offered Zelensky a quid pro quo of U.S. support and military aid in exchange for a Ukrainian investigation into 2020 presidential candidate Joe Biden.
Such a pledge would also inflame opinion in Russia, which now considers Crimea part of the nation and those living there Russian citizens, despite objections from the international community.
Following their meeting at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, Zelensky told reporters that he and Trump discussed the contested Crimean peninsula, Unian reported. Zelensky said he told his counterpart that “Crimea is a beautiful place” and “it is a large beautiful part of our country.”
“It seems to me, and I heard that he agrees that this is our native land and we will get it back,” Zelensky told journalists. The president claimed that Trump told him, “Yes, you need to work, and we will help you.”
Trump has previously angered Ukrainians by reportedly suggesting that Crimea is Russian territory because the majority language there is Russian. Zelensky appears to have addressed the error when meeting the commander in chief this week.
“You know there were statements that if people there speak Russian, it is no longer Ukraine, Zelensky told reporters. “I explained to him that this is our land; we have no issues about communication or language. We have a state language, and it’s Ukrainian.”
In the official White House transcript of the meeting, Trump stressed that Crimea was annexed while President Barack Obama was in office. “I think it was handled poorly,” Trump said. “But it’s just one of those things.”
Blaming your predecessor for everything only gets you so far when you are more than halfway into your term.
Trump probably just meant that he would provide military aid, but the way he said it made it possible to take it as a promise of something more substantial. That’s why diplomats and normal presidents are careful about choosing their words. Unfortunately, Trump only has a vocabulary of about 100 of them so there’s not much to choose from.
Zelensky surely knows that you can’t trust anything Trump says. Putin certainly does. But at some point he’s going to say something like this that an adversary will use as an excuse to do things they wanted to do anyway.
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