Trump was impeached because of his handling of Ukraine. This needs to be remembered, especially when he toutes that the war wouldn’t have started if he were president.
In case you forgot, Trump was impeached because of his illegal dealing with Ukraine. The fact that this isn’t mentioned every time he claims the war wouldn’t have happened if he was president needs to change.
Trump was impeached in his first term because of the “quid pro quo” call that was made public. I’ll be honest. I didn’t know shit about Ukraine back then, but since the war started, this event has been SO memorable for me.
Trump was impeached. Even though that apparently carries no weight in politics nowadays, I think it’s important to remember. Trump was impeached for bribing Ukraine leadership to help him win the 2020 election. When he says this war wouldn’t have happened if he had been president, he means it would have happened behind the scenes.
This is an excerpt from the impeachment:
Using the powers of his high office, President Trump solicited the interference of a foreign government, Ukraine, in the 2020 United States Presidential election. He did so through a scheme or course of conduct that included soliciting the Government of Ukraine to publicly announce investigations that would benefit his reelection, harm the election prospects of a political opponent, and influence the 2020 United States Presidential election to his advantage. President Trump also sought to pressure the Government of Ukraine to take these steps by conditioning official United States Government acts of significant value to Ukraine on its public announcement of the investigations.
I think it’s also important to remember that the war started in 2014 when Putin stole Crimea, before Trump even ran for president in the first place.
That said, Trump is probably correct that Putin strategically timed his further aggression for when Trump was not in office. The subtext that people need to understand, though, is that Putin didn’t need to create any “buffer states” while Trump was in office because having his stooge neutering the United States (and therefore pretty much NATO as a whole) achieved most of the same geopolitical goals anyway.
To be clear, Putin was never not going to try to take all of Ukraine (along with the rest of the previous Warsaw Pact, if not all of Europe) in the long run. It’s only the timing of the invasions that he would vary, to prop up his stooge as a “peacemaker” in order to keep him useful for longer.
The numbers are fuzzy but probably a thousand Ukrainian soldiers and civilians were killed during his first term due to Russian aggression. They just kept the fighting rather quiet because the invasion of Donbas was old news by then.