The MAGA War on Ukraine

The escalating tension between the Trump administration and Ukraine in recent weeks has been accompanied by an alarming surge of extreme anti-Ukraine rhetoric in pro-Trump quarters. Some of this rhetoric has even implied that Ukraine is America’s enemy. On Monday, Trump administration official Elon Musk called Arizona’s Democratic senator Mark Kelly a “traitor” for travelling to Ukraine in support of that country’s defensive war effort.

Hostility to Ukraine is becoming a party line on the MAGA Right. The issue isn’t just the cost to American taxpayers. The US$128 billion that the US has given Ukraine over the past three years amounts to less than US$120 per year per American. And as a recent article on the Council of Foreign Relations website noted:

A large share of the money in the aid bills has been spent in the United States, paying for American factories and workers to produce the various weapons that are either shipped to Ukraine or that replenish the U.S. weapons stocks the Pentagon has drawn on during the war. One analysis by the American Enterprise Institute found that Ukraine aid is funding defense manufacturing in more than seventy U.S. cities.

Nor is antipathy to Ukraine simply about bringing an end to the bloodletting, notwithstanding the Right’s professed disdain for “warmongers” eager to “fight to the last Ukrainian” and Trump’s own claim that he wants to “stop the death.” When Trump suspended air-defence supplies and intelligence-sharing to Ukraine earlier this month in an attempt to pressure the country into “settling,” Russia began bombing Ukrainian cities with renewed vigour. Asked during a press conference on 7 March if Vladimir Putin was “taking advantage of the US pause right now on intelligence and military aid,” Trump was phlegmatic about the loss of life: “I actually think [Putin’s] doing what anybody else would do. I think he wants to get it stopped and settled, and I think he’s hitting them harder than he’s been hitting them. And I think probably anybody in that position would be doing that right now.”

The party line is now strong enough that even some “heterodox” pundits and publications with large right-wing audiences have pivoted away from their initial support for Ukraine. In the first two years of the conflict, coverage at the Free Press was firmly pro-Ukraine. But since the reelection of Donald Trump last November, the publication’s position has become more sympathetic to “right-wing peaceniks” (once described by Free Press contributor Eli Lake as “Code Pink Republicans”) and correspondingly unsympathetic to Ukraine’s cause. Some of this commentary has been shoddy and even dishonest.

Last December, the Free Press published an essay titled, “Ukrainians Are Sick of the War. But We’re Not Allowed to Say It” under the byline of Ukrainian journalist Dmytro Filimonov, who spoke to Free Press reporter and Russian émigré Tanya Lukyanova. But Lukyanova failed to disclose Filimonov’s longstanding ties to Russia and to Russia-controlled insurgents in Eastern Ukraine. A second Lukyanova article in February uncritically reproduced claims made by two notorious pro-Russia cranks that “the US government controls Ukrainian media” and persecutes independent Ukrainian journalists. After the Trump/Zelensky Oval Office blowup on 28 February, four of the five think-pieces published by the Free Press blamed Zelensky. And while the editors later ran articles by regular contributors Eli Lake and Douglas Murray sharply criticising the American Right’s pro-Putin turn, both were hosed with anti-Ukraine sentiment in the subscriber-only comment section.

Much of this hatred for a country valiantly resisting a war of aggression reflects Trump’s own prejudices and sense of personal grievance. The “Russiagate” investigation that dominated his first administration perversely fortified his preexisting sympathy for Vladimir Putin, while his antipathy to Ukraine increased following his 2019 impeachment for pressuring Zelensky to provide dirt on Biden in return for US armaments. (Conservative writer Jeff Blehar thinks these grievances are justified. I do not.) And because the MAGA movement is cultish, its leader’s likes and dislikes are automatically adopted by many of his supporters.

The Ultimate Betrayal

America just switched sides in the Ukraine war.

QuilletteFrancis Fukuyama

But some of the reasons given for the anti-Ukraine stance are transparently bogus. In a 2023 speech at the Heritage Foundation, then-Senator JD Vance—one of the staunchest opponents of aid to Ukraine since the start of the war—paid lip service to the courage of Ukrainian troops before asserting that “they have the most corrupt leadership and government in Europe and maybe the most corrupt leadership anywhere in the world.” Like all formerly communist countries, Ukraine does have a serious corruption problem, but Vance’s statement is blatantly untrue.

According to Transparency International, the leading global anti-corruption watchdog, Ukraine currently ranks 105th in public-sector corruption out of 180 countries with a score of 35 out of 100, while Russia ranks 154th with a score of 22 out of 100 (the lower the score, the more prevalent the corruption). Before the 2014 popular revolution that toppled the pro-Kremlin regime of Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine was plagued by Russian levels of corruption and a score of 25, but Ukraine’s record on corruption has been improving ever since. It is also worth noting that Vance is inconsistently bothered by corruption: Viktor Orbán’s Hungary is only slightly less corrupt than Ukraine (and its corruption score is moving in the opposite direction) and the most corrupt country in the European Union, but Vance believes that American conservatives ought to emulate Orbán’s illiberal democratic model.

Claims that Ukraine is “not a true democracy” because it persecutes Christian churches, or controls the media, or forcibly mobilises men are usually made in equally bad faith. Ukraine is a country fighting a defensive war on its own territory, a situation in which restrictions on civil liberties are not remotely unusual. The United States instituted a draft and suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, and it introduced forced conscription and censorship during World War II when it was not fighting an invasion. While there have been reports of forcible conscription in Ukraine, which is deplorable, the number of conscripts is dwarfed by the number of Ukrainian soldiers who either comply with draft orders or volunteer at recruitment centres.

Ukraine’s independent media is still flourishing—and covering difficult issues including forced conscription—despite censorship of war-related reporting and curbs on enemy propaganda, which exist in any country at war. And while valid questions have been raised about religious freedom in Ukraine, the Ukrainian branch of the pro-Kremlin Russian Orthodox Church has done little to separate itself from its parent since the war began, and collaborator priests are a genuine problem. Meanwhile, there is remarkably little concern in MAGA quarters about the harassment and violence suffered by Ukrainian evangelical Christians under Russian occupation.

In a bizarre segment on the Free Press podcast, the publication’s regular contributor Batya Ungar-Sargon argued that support for Ukraine is related to an “elite” tendency to “villainise” Putin because the chattering classes hold him responsible for helping Trump win the 2016 election. But the late Russia scholar Stephen F. Cohen was already complaining about the “relentless demonisation of Putin” by the American media in February 2014, and lamenting that not even Stalin’s Soviet successors were “so personally villainised.” This was before Putin’s seizure of Crimea the following month, and over a year before Trump announced his first run for president. It does not appear to have occurred to Ungar-Sargon that Westerners dislike Putin’s destruction of Russia’s fledgling democratic freedoms, his habit of jailing and murdering journalists and political opponents, his brutal wars against Chechen separatists in the 2000s, and his invasion of Georgia in 2008.

Ungar-Sargon is correct that Trump’s 2016 candidacy had a partisan effect on American views of Putin, but she has misidentified the party most affected. Polling indicates that Republicans had a slightly more negative opinion of Putin than Democrats in 2014. Around the time of the 2016 presidential election, Democrats’ approval of Putin fell by eight percentage points, from -54 to -62. Republican approval of the Russian dictator, on the other hand, rose by 46 points, from -66 to -10. The number who regarded him “very unfavourably” dropped from 51 percent in July 2014 to fourteen percent in December 2016, while the overall “favourables” jumped from ten percent to 37 percent.

As I wrote in the early days of the war, growing sympathy for Putin on the US Right is partly explained by a shift towards the populism and “anti-globalism” of which he is seen as a champion—and by the implausible belief, cultivated by Putin and his propaganda machine, that the Kremlin stands for traditional religious and sexual values in opposition to an increasingly godless, “woke,” and pathological West. The corollary is that Ukraine is suspect because it wants to leave the Russian orbit and join Western liberal degeneracy—specifically, the European Union, which the Right believes is a cesspit of progressive authoritarianism and creeping Islamisation.

Ukraine and the Pro-Putin Right

Reactions to Russia’s war in Ukraine have become a perfect demonstration of the “horseshoe theory,” according to which the extremes of Left and Right must converge. Amid overwhelming international condemnation of Russia and sympathy for the Ukrainians’ courageous resistance, Putin-friendly voices blaming the West, NATO, and particularly the United

QuilletteCathy Young

In January 2022, as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine loomed, the neoreactionary monarchist writer Curtis Yarvin (aka “Mencius Moldbug”) was eagerly speculating that Russia’s conquest of Ukraine could herald the defeat of liberalism in continental Europe. Yarvin ruefully acknowledged that Putin was unlikely to turn Ukraine into “into a perfectly-governed jewel of the new, reviving, post-American and post-liberal Central Europe—with traditional clothing, modern transportation, and fiber-optic Internet, but without porn, K-pop or the gay.” After all, he conceded, Russia had already turned Crimea into “a half-ruined backwater ruled by some petty local thug.” But such a scenario was still preferable to liberalism, he concluded. Yarvin’s fanfiction would hardly merit attention but for the fact that US Vice President J.D. Vance is an admirer.

There is a widespread belief on the US Right that the pro-Western incarnation of Ukrainian democracy produced by the 2014 Euromaiden protests was actually an American “Deep State” operation organised by the Obama administration, George Soros, and various liberal NGOs. This notion has recently been boosted by the Trump administration’s attacks on USAID (the United States Agency for International Development), an organisation originally established by JFK under the aegis of the State Department. USAID became one of the principal targets of Elon Musk’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), following inaccurate claims about the use of its grants to fund “diversity, equity and inclusion” projects and LGBT activism. Opponents of American international power on the Right also used the occasion to attack democracy-promotion programs, including a project that sent young people from several Latin American countries to Cuba to scout out potential dissidents—an initiative Musk described as “very corrupt.”

Attention inevitably turned to USAID’s assistance for Ukraine. Altogether, Ukraine-related projects received about US$5 billion in US funds between 1991, when Ukraine became independent, and 2014—mostly through USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, a formally private nonprofit that received an annual appropriation from the US State Department as part of the USAID budget. While most of this money was spent on nonpolitical projects like healthcare and environmental protection, a portion of it also went to various anti-corruption, election-integrity, and civic-education NGOs involved in the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 Revolution of Dignity.

Making the World Safe for Autocracy

Forced to choose between the values upheld by the National Endowment for Democracy and fealty to Donald Trump, Republicans have opted for the latter.

QuilletteRonald Radosh

In late 2004, a fraud-riddled election in Ukraine was won by the Russian-backed candidate Viktor Yanukovych, and the result sparked massive protests on Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti or Independence Square. Twelve days later, the country’s Supreme Court threw out the result, citing “systematic and massive violations.” The re-run election was won by Viktor Yushchenko, who had been a victim of dioxin poisoning during the campaign several months earlier. Yanukovych won the 2010 election by rebranding himself as a pro-European centrist, but he subsequently pivoted towards Moscow and reneged on a trade deal that would have put Ukraine on the path to EU membership. New Maidan protests led to Yanukovych’s impeachment, and he fled to Russia.

Pundits on both the isolationist Right and the anti-American Left have long embraced Putin’s view that Ukraine’s two pro-Western revolutions were essentially US-engineered coups. The Trump administration’s attacks on USAID (which did highlight some frivolous allocations) have supercharged these suspicions on the MAGA Right. A particularly striking example of this radicalisation is provided by the conversion of Russian émigré journalist Yulia Latynina, a longtime Putin foe and, until recently, a staunch supporter of Ukraine. Latynina was among the signatories of the April 2023 “Declaration of Russian Democratic Forces,” which unequivocally backed Ukraine and criticised the Biden administration’s inadequate provision of military assistance. In recent months, however, Latynina’s concerns about the pernicious influence of the progressive Left in the West have made her an enthusiastic Trump supporter, and she has drifted towards a more Ukraine-sceptical position.

On 9 February, Latynina posted an extraordinary monologue on her YouTube channel in which she announced what amounted to a full reversal of her previous position. Musk’s “evisceration of USAID” and the revelations it produced, she said, had “upended [her] ideas about the way the world works.” She now believes that the Russia–Ukraine war was deliberately fomented by USAID in order to further a “woke” globalist agenda; that Zelensky and his government were the creation of this globalist cabal; and that even the Russian opposition abroad has been fatally compromised by USAID grants. According to Latynina, criticism of Russian imperialism and of the historical oppression of Ukrainians under the Russian Empire and the Soviet regime is merely a variation of the progressive Left’s “decolonial” discourse and obsession with victimhood.

Latynina apparently now believes that USAID was pushing a progressive agenda under the George W. Bush administration, and she even took a swing at the NED’s support for pro-independence activists in Ukraine in the late 1980s. What makes all this particularly bizarre is that USAID’s support for Ukrainian activists and the anti-Putin opposition in Russia is not news. This information has been freely available and debated for years. In a particularly pleasing irony, Latynina herself received a “Freedom Defenders Award” from the US State Department in 2008, which would presumably make her a tool of Deep State subversion according to her new creed.

Latynina’s current political philosophy is succinctly explained in her 21 February discussion with Ukrainian politician Oleksiy Arestovych, a formerly popular Zelensky advisor who is now a Russia-sympathetic Trump supporter. Arestovych frankly declared that he prefers republicanism based on “the right of the strong” to liberal democracy based on “the right of the weak.” Latynina enthusiastically agreed. Modernity, she said, has made “might is right” a valuable principle because might is no longer determined by brute force but by smarts and technological know-how. (This principle, of course, could have been employed to justify the behaviour of Nazi Germany and even Stalin’s Soviet Union.)

While predicting that Trump’s ascent signals liberalism’s final defeat, Arestovych warned that “the lefties won’t give up without a fight,” including in Ukraine, where he says he intends to seek the presidency and pursue an alliance with Russia. Of course, he added, he wants to defeat his opponents by using persuasion “as long as there’s a chance.” And if they won’t listen to reason? “Well, we’ve got the justice system. Or maybe an accident, anything could happen.” Remarkably, Latynina let this chilling (and very Putinist) call for the imprisonment and assassination of political opponents pass unchallenged.

The idea that the Ukrainian state is a stronghold of “the woke Left” is as detached from reality as the idea that Ukraine is a Nazi regime. Indeed, as a number of people have pointed out, Ukrainian patriotism and military valour are precisely the sort of virtues that one would expect national conservatives to applaud—unless, of course, national conservatism is less about conservatism or national sovereignty than it is about the appeal of authoritarianism.

Right-wing critics of “Islamisation” in Europe ignore the awkward fact that Russia harbours a de facto sharia statelet within its borders—the “autonomous republic” of Chechnya, the dictatorial president of which, Ramzan Kadyrov, is one of Putin’s closest allies. Prosecutions of Koran-burners in Europe—which usually result in fines—elicit understandable outrage from American conservatives. But when a Russian college student burned a Koran on video, he was sent to Chechnya for trial, beaten on camera by Kadyrov’s son, and given a three-and-a-half-year sentence (later increased to fourteen years), and the anti-Europe, pro-Putin Right said nothing.

Likewise, those on the Right who see Putin’s post-communist Russia as a conservative-friendly state ignore the degree to which his regime valorises Russia’s Soviet past. Ukraine’s post-2014 “decommunisation” drive has been a sore point for the Kremlin. Putin may have blamed Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks for creating the modern Ukrainian state and giving it historically Russian lands—but in the areas of Ukraine under Russian control, the authorities have been restoring previously demolished Lenin monuments as well as Soviet-era street names honouring Lenin, Karl Marx, and other communist heroes. Conquered and devastated Bakhmut has had its name changed back to the Soviet Artemovsk—after “Comrade Artyom” (Fyodor Sergeyev), a Bolshevik revolutionary and close friend of Stalin’s. In a particularly cruel mockery of their victims, Russian occupiers recently opened a museum honouring Stalin’s henchman Andrei Zhdanov in his native Mariupol, a city taken in spring 2022 after a particularly horrific siege.

This “recommunisation” in the occupied areas of Ukraine isn’t about communist ideology per se; it’s about imposing Russia’s imperial will on Ukrainians and suppressing their cultural legacy. Even so, it honours an unspeakably evil left-wing totalitarian regime. Unfortunately, many people on the modern US Right seem to despise liberalism more than communism.