Victor Davis Hanson: Volodymyr Zelenskyy Is No Winston Churchill

“Donald Trump is incurring a lot of criticism lately on the Ukrainian war. He's trying to negotiate an end to the war. Remember, there's probably somewhere around 1.5 million dead, wounded, missing, and captured on both sides, together. That is the largest casualty rate figure total in Europe since the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942 and 1943. In his “Art of the Deal” style he came in and he said some things the last week that got people very angry. I'll just give you two examples. He said that Zelenskyy was a dictator and that he ‘should have stopped the war and never started it.’

“That got people anguished because we know that Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine on February 24th of 2022. So, why did Donald Trump say that? Of course, he doesn't believe that Zelenskyy started the war because he has campaigned himself on the following narrative: ‘Under George Bush, in 2008, Russia invaded Ossetia and Georgia.

“‘In 2014, under the Obama administration, they invaded the Donbas and Crimea. On February 24th of 2022, under Joe Biden, they tried to take Kyiv. However, of the last four administrations, there was one in which they did not leave their borders to invade another nation—my administration. Why? Because unlike the prior three presidents, I was able to establish deterrence.’”