The jury’s back in after considering Trump’s accusations against Zelenskyy

Republicans support Trump out of loyalty, not the facts. But they’re not the jury.

“I suppose I’ll just drink it if he’s no longer here. A toast: The King!” By AI.

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• Millions of deaths

• Ukraine doesn’t know where half the aid given to it is

• You should never have started it

• Dictator

Millions of deaths

In the play—which I’ve acted in—and the film—which I didn’t—of Twelve Angry Men, Juror #3 (Lee J. Cobb in the movie, below) is convinced the defendant kid is guilty because he was heard to shout at his father “I’ll kill you!” Juror #8 (Henry Fonda) reasons that people say that all the time without meaning it. It turns out he’s right, because Juror #3 proves it:

People say millions all the time (“I’ve told you a million times, stop exaggerating”), and Mr Trump said it on Friday in a heated exchange, so we don’t need to take it literally, even if knowing when to take Mr Trump literally and when to ascribe his remarks to hyperbole can be a challenge, and in fact he said it to the head of state of a foreign nation, and not to his shoe-shine boy, or Mr Vance for that matter. But, let’s just look at the actual figures.

First, the Second World War, which lasted from September 1939 until August 1945. Six years. Total military and civilian losses, around 85 million. That’s millions, more millions than ever before or since, and it includes the six million that Israel suffered before it was even founded.

Second, the Vietnam War, which lasted from November 1955 to April 1975, or nineteen-and-a-half years. Total military and civilian losses, between 1.3 and 3.4 million. That’s millions as well, even if it’s the lower figure, I’ll concede.

Third, the Russo-Ukrainian War. Trump restricts his comments to the past three years, so he doesn’t include the skirmishes and battles that took place between 2014 and 2022 (the number of dead in that period lies at around 14,300).

Ukrainian estimates of military losses since 2022 are around 46,000. Russian estimates of their losses are much fewer, around 6,000, although neither figure can be verified. At the meeting in the Oval Office, however, Trump seemed to be pleading the Russian case, and so it is Russia’s own estimates of her losses that we must take as being intended by him, for, even if he contended he is absolutely neutral, he can hardly be understood as implicitly calling the Russians liars, now, can he?

Civilian losses in Ukraine are in the tens of thousands according to Ukrainian sources (let’s say 50,000). Russian civilian losses are virtually negligible, perhaps a few hundred (call it 500). If we are generous to Trump and estimate total military and civilian losses at 46,000 + 6,000 + 50,000 + 500, that results in 102,500 and, if we (even he doesn’t) include the period from 2014, the figure is at around 150,000 which accords with the unverified figure of a couple of hundred thousand as stated by some sources. If all casualties (death and injury taken together) are included, the figure is nearer one million. It is possible that Trump confused deaths and casualties, but the distinction is an important one (especially to the dead).

That said, millions retains the hyperbolic impact of the playground (or jury room, for that matter), without in any way being based in reality, although Trump maybe has one point, which he didn’t make, so I will: any one of those 102,500 really has no regard for the other 102,499, because dead is dead. These are human beings, not statistics. And they were killed in violation of international law, a fact that Trump seems repeatedly to elide over.

Ukraine doesn’t know where the aid is

You can assume you know what that means, but it means a lot of things, not just one thing. If you’re in doubt, aid refers to the aid that the US granted to Ukraine. The amount itself is in dispute. Trump says 350 billion dollars, others say around 175 billion dollars—oddly, precisely half Trump’s figure.

One thing it can mean is that someone stole the aid, and Ukraine doesn’t know where it is, like if someone were to steal your bicycle. Theft is endemic in wartime: black markets and trade in all the loose weaponry that’s floating around. Life expectancies are short; opportunism is rife.

But, in fact that’s not what Mr Zelenskyy means when he says Ukraine doesn’t know where the aid is. In fact there is one person who does know where all the Ukrainian aid is, and that is Mr Kellogg, the US envoy to Ukraine (who reports to the US government, of which Mr Trump is the head, in case we’d forgotten), who has said that the US keeps close tabs on where all the aid that is earmarked for Ukraine goes to. This is an accounting matter, and putting the Ukrainian president on the hot spot on such things is perhaps unfair. But where does aid go, then, when it goes to Ukraine?

Well, a lot of it doesn’t go to Ukraine. It goes where most of the world’s aid goes: it stays in the country that gives it. Another word for aid is help, and another word for international aid is help yourself.

The US ships ammunition and guns and whatnot to Ukraine, okay. Then they allocate aid funds to replenishing their own stocks of those items. So, when they send a HIMARS unit to the battlefield, they take one out of stock and apportion the cost of a new one (about 50 million dollars) against the aid package granted to Ukraine. Ukraine gets the old HIMARS, the US gets the new one, and 50 million gets knocked off the amount of aid still due to Ukraine and is paid, not to Ukraine, but to Raytheon Inc. in Andover, Massachusetts.

Now, keeping tabs on that is asking a lot of the president, who’s more concerned with where to deploy the HIMARS in order to wipe out the enemy, rather than with which T-account the cost (whatever it is) came off in some far-off government department in Washington. It’s not germane to the question of a treaty settlement to the conflict in any event, and it’s unfair for Trump to have raised it as he did, because producing arguments at the bar—to use a legalism—is no way to litigate, even in a court of law, and even if that was what Zelenskyy had been doing anyway. (Why does answering Trump’s utterances make one feel somewhat silly, far sillier than Trump must feel in making the utterances in the first place?)

Whatever, let’s wrap this up: furthermore, some aid comes in the form of humanitarian aid or diplomatic assistance. That’s why Zelenskyy doesn’t know where it is—he’s not the accountant.

It is just possible that someone nicked some of it. That’s something that can happen, especially when unauthorised persons with questionable security clearance are let loose in databanks containing sensitive financial information, though I haven’t heard recently of any such instance in Kyiv, but in Washington ... perhaps?

You should never have started it

If ever there was a broadside out of the blue, this was it. Out of nowhere. Or perhaps out of the mouths of babes and sucklings come sweet words of innocence. Trump says this with reference to the past three years: You’ve been there for three years. (He’s actually been there for 34 years, but never mind) You should have ended it. ... You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.

One answer to that, Mr Zelenskyy’s, which he gave on an ex tempore basis, was that Russia cannot be trusted. He questioned the diplomatic route that JD Vance seemed to be advocating. Now, it is not very diplomatic to say you cannot trust your diplomatic counterparts, but if Mr Zelenskyy feels that way, then surely saying so to his negotiating partners is not out of line? If he’s to make a deal, he has to lay down the precepts underlying the deal he’s going to make.

Ukraine, just like Russia and the United States of America, is a member of the United Nations, which, in its charter, makes clear that no sovereign state should require to cede territory through the use of force by another sovereign member state. In particular (UN Charter, article 2(4)):

All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

The signatories to that undertaking include the Russian Federation, the United States of America and the Republic of Ukraine. Just for the avoidance of any doubt.

The amassing of troops on the Russian side of the border between Russia and Ukraine in late 2021 and early 2022 was stated at the time by the Russian president not to constitute a military threat to Ukraine. This proved to be mendacious, when, several weeks later, Russia did effect an incursion onto Ukrainian territory. In so doing it breached its undertaking of a few weeks previously, and also that set down in article 2(4) of the UN Charter, as well as its undertaking in terms of its membership (self-asserted, it must be said) of the UN Security Council.

In light of that, it’s hard to see what deal Ukraine should have made: a deal to obviate a danger posed by a Security Council member, that was in all events illegal, and which Russia had said did not exist? Maybe that’s the kind of deal that everyone should be making with America right now. Deals to resolve non-existent problems that might yet become existent problems. In the mafia, they call that protection money.

However, the Russian problem dates back not to 2022 but to 2014, when Russia used the diversion of a popular revolt in Ukraine to effect an invasion of the Crimea, which is a valuable stronghold in the Black Sea and which is as good as unassailable from the landward side. Its conquest of Crimea was a fait accompli about which there was no deal to strike. What? Offer to buy it back? Like in Tom Cruise’s film Risky Business, where he ends up buying the whole contents of his parent’s house off the furniture van into which the pimp has loaded them as an act of theft?

Later, deals were in fact struck in the form of the Minsk accords, by which Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts were to be returned to Ukraine. They weren’t, as it turned out, and the 2014 Minsk I accord and the 2015 Minsk II accord (signed also by France (President Macron) and Germany (Chancellor Merkel)) are in desuetude following the 2022 invasion.

Zelenskyy was interrupted whilst making a statement about a prisoner exchange in 2019. This took place in pursuance of the Minsk I and Minsk II treaties. Zelenskyy’s point was that Russia didn’t abide by its commitments, but then he was cut off by JD Vance. Zelenskyy of course represents the Ukrainian viwpoint, but views on that prisoner exchange do in fact vary.

The fulfilment of commitments under the 2019 prisoner exchange between Ukraine and Russia has been a subject of ongoing debate and scrutiny. While the exchange itself took place successfully, with both sides releasing a significant number of prisoners, there were concerns about the broader context of the commitments made. Following the exchange, there were reports and accusations from both sides regarding the treatment of prisoners and the conditions under which they were held. Additionally, some Ukrainian officials expressed concerns that Russia did not fully adhere to the spirit of the agreements related to the Minsk process, which aimed to resolve the conflict in Eastern Ukraine. In summary, while the immediate exchange was carried out, the overall fulfilment of commitments and the subsequent actions taken by both parties have been contentious and thereafter contributed to tensions in the region.

Maybe, if he’d been allowed to finish his sentence, Zelenskyy might have clarified his statement: Minsk was a series of accords that was supposed to settle differences between Russia and Ukraine but which imposed commitments only on Ukraine. There were no commitments on Russia, which was a cute device that was aimed at presenting Russia as having settled an internal, not an international, dispute. So, it is less a question of Russia not having adhered to Minsk, and more a question of it having engineered Minsk to absolve itself of any obligations at all. If that is diplomacy worthy of trust, 我是一個中國人.¹

The simple statement of making a deal to avoid conflict is attractive. But Trump has never specified what kind of a deal would have been feasible, how its implementation could have been guaranteed, and at what stage it might have been sued for. Those who back his statement simply haven’t applied their minds to the chronology or to the facts as they unfolded on the ground. They condemn Zelenskyy and praise Trump not on the basis of justification but out of simple political allegiance.

Note, Trump doesn’t cite NATO expansion as a cause of the war. But he may yet do so, as he seeks to wriggle out of his treaty commitments and deliver his erstwhile allies up to the object of his long-standing admiration.

What these wild statements do demonstrate, however, is that Messrs Trump and Vance were woefully ill-prepared for this meeting, and that suggests that the purported agenda was not their true agenda. If they were hoping to achieve a humiliation, they succeeded; though it was not Ukraine’s in the end, but their own.

Dictator

There was one last dig at Ukraine: the fact Zelenskyy had not organised elections. Really, a quite astounding proposition. Much has been said about Ukraine’s statutory prohibition against elections in a state of martial law, about Britain’s lack of elections in World War II (as a riposte to Nigel Farage), and so on and so forth. In an American context, one is minded of the long period in office of F. D. Roosevelt, prompted by the US’s involvement in World War II, even if he did stand for, and win, the 1940 and 1944 elections. I wonder if such an extension could be deemed to have become necessary à l’ukranienne if the US were involved in a war around the year … 2029?

It may seem like one, but this is no storm in a teacup, and the ship whose sails should be torn to sheds in it is Trump’s. For we know by now that Trump promotes no agenda that is not of benefit to him. So, what, we might ask, is the benefit to Trump of a Ukrainian election?

It could be to disrupt internal affairs in Ukraine, and use that as an opportunity to grab something or to let Russia grab something, or whatever, just like the 2014 Maidan Revolution had. Or it could be that Trump and Putin already know who would win such an election, the way the mob know what number will come up on their roulette wheel. Depending on which side you’re on, an election these days can be an extremely unreliable pathway to power; or it can be very reliable.

One possibility that looms large in my mind, and which I know is very present in Mr Trump’s, is this: the degree of control, not just indirect but increasingly direct, that dark powers have over the electronic and other methods that get used to test the voting public’s preferences: voting machines. We lend credence to the issues posed by Pegasus and other Israeli spyware; we know ransomware is a problem, and we know that cloud computing can never be 100 per cent safe. So, how come we’re so sure about voting software?

Trump never walked back his accusations of vote rigging in 2020. And nor would I if I, like him, suspected that vote rigging was a very real possibility. Perhaps even one I had indulged in myself. His wild accusations may well have been based on intimate knowledge of how vote rigging works, which would be why he persisted in them. But his accusations never won the day given that, protest as he might, he could never produce the evidence. Because it’s one thing to produce evidence, and it’s quite another to prove how you got hold of it.

I would keep election rigging and tech bosses present in your minds, together with that lasting image from the Inauguration: Musk the Triumphant, with the other tech bosses all looking like lost schoolboys, not entirely sure what they were doing there, even if they might have known how they got there.

By taxi, of course.

1. I’m a Chinaman.