Europe sent Putin $1 trillion, Obama blinked, and Biden tied Ukraine’s hands. Why is Trump the only traitor?

It has been a busy week for outrage. On Oct. 9, President Donald Trump announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin would release Russian diesel to the world market, 300,000 tons at once and millions more to follow. The Trump Treasury Department issued a temporary license.On Oct. 11, Trump announced an energy ceasefire, “effective immediately,” to which “both parties have agreed.” Kyiv learned of its agreement from the post. And this week, a cable network reported that FBI Director Kash Patel had landed in Russia.The verdict arrived before the facts. Trump sold Ukraine. Trump betrayed Ukraine. Repeat it often enough, and it starts to sound like reporting. Some of the criticism is earned. Seven senators, four of them Republicans, say the diesel deal runs counter to the 2022 law banning Russian energy imports, which passed the House 413-9 and the Senate unanimously. Telling Ukrainians on Oct. 10 to get “a new leader who can make a deal” was not diplomacy. It was a Kremlin talking point, delivered free of charge.What is not earned is the double standard. So, let us run a simple test. Keep the facts. Change the name. Listen to the vocabulary.On Feb. 27, 2014, Russian special forces seized government buildings in Crimea. The next day, Vice President Joe Biden called Ukraine’s prime minister. The Obama White House readout says he “commended the government for its continued restraint.”That day, acting President Oleksandr Turchynov wanted to declare a state of war. Minutes of his security council, published two years later, indicate that Washington and European capitals urged Kyiv not to resist. Crimea was annexed in March. In Washington, this was called restraint.In January 2022, then-President Joe Biden mused that a “minor incursion” might leave allies fighting “about what to do and not do.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky replied that there are no minor incursions. Five weeks later, the full-scale invasion began. Washington had predicted it and failed to deter it. The forecast was celebrated as an intelligence triumph.That May, Biden signed another near-unanimous law, the Ukraine Lend-Lease Act: 417-10 in the House, unanimous in the Senate. No weapon was ever delivered under it. It expired in September 2023. The White House said it preferred aid Ukraine would not have to repay.In June 2023, Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mercenaries seized the military headquarters in Rostov-on-Don and drove toward Moscow. I spent a decade in counterintelligence. When two states are in a hot war, an armed mutiny in the enemy’s rear is a gift from God. Intelligence services dream of manufacturing one.According to CNN, Washington reached Kyiv at the foreign-minister level, through deputies and ambassadors, cautioning against strikes inside Russia: Don’t rock the boat. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told his diplomats to say nothing. Officials privately assured Moscow that America had nothing to do with the mutiny. Then Biden said so publicly, to give Putin “no excuse” to blame the West.The gift was taken out of Ukraine’s hands and returned to sender, with a note attached: no excuse.Then there is Europe. Eurostat has recorded European purchases of Russian fuel in every month of the war. When Trump wrote that the European Union had paid Russia $250 billion for energy, an EU source promptly corrected him, citing official statistics: about 197 billion euros from March 2022 through July. The correction did not deny the payments. It disputed the receipt.The Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air puts the war-years total near 238 billion euros. In dollars, that is roughly Trump’s number. In the first nine months of 2026, according to the German group Urgewald, EU ports took a record 12.18 million tons of Russian Arctic liquefied natural gas, worth an estimated 7.88 billion euros. France took nearly three-quarters of September’s deliveries. Start the clock at Crimea, and Eurostat’s own import data put the bill at about 964 billion euros through July.Trump’s entire deal, if Putin delivers every ton, is 4.8 million tons of diesel. Zelensky’s verdict on it: “Allowing Russia to sell petroleum products is an investment in a war that must be ended, not prolonged.” Fair enough. By that standard, what is a record year of Russian gas in European ports?Europe’s ban on Russian liquefied gas waits until Jan. 1, 2027. Trump’s diesel license expires in April 2027. Europe’s deadline is called a phase-out. Trump’s is called betrayal.Europe has other currencies, too. On Sept. 22, at the request of Emmanuel Macron’s France and Robert Fico’s Slovakia, the EU took two of Russia’s richest men, Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman, off its sanctions list. Paris cited “national security.” A 2020 decree signed by Macron made Bidzina Ivanishvili, founder of Georgia’s ruling party, a knight of the Legion of Honor. The Biden Treasury Department later sanctioned him for undermining Georgia’s democratic future “for the benefit of the Russian Federation.” Asked by a French lawmaker to revoke the honor, Paris replied with a description of the procedure, not a proceeding. And this year, the European Parliament gave Angela Merkel, who blocked Ukraine’s and Georgia’s path to NATO in 2008 and championed Nord Stream 2, the top grade of its new Order of Merit.Where were the headlines that Paris and Bratislava had sold out Ukraine? That Macron had betrayed Georgia?Run the test. Put Trump’s name on the Usmanov request. Put it on Ivanishvili’s medal. You already know the headlines. You have been reading them all week.A talking point is neither false nor true because Trump uses it. The invoices and the medals are what they are.As for betrayal: Trump swore an oath to the U.S. Constitution. He is America’s president, not Ukraine’s. He can be wrong about Ukraine. He can be careless with Ukraine. But a president cannot sell or betray a country he never swore to serve, and he is not obliged to help it. America helps Ukraine when helping Ukraine serves America. Crimea was annexed, and the war in Donbas began, on former President Barack Obama’s watch. The full-scale war began on Biden’s.The obligations, meanwhile, run one way. In July 2025, Zelensky signed a law placing Ukraine’s anti-corruption agencies under the prosecutor general, then reversed it nine days later, after street protests. Last November, investigators exposed a kickback scheme at the state nuclear company. Timur Mindich, Zelensky’s former business partner, left for Israel hours before the raids. Kyiv has asked for his extradition.Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff, resigned after investigators searched his home. In May, he was charged with laundering about $10.5 million. Four days after a court remanded him, he walked out on $3.2 million bail. He said he did not have the money. He said he did not know who paid it.Does a government living on American weapons and intelligence owe no one clean books in wartime? Especially in wartime?Note, too, who gets the courtesy. In July, after Ukrainian strikes hit ships in the Caspian Sea that Kyiv said were carrying Iranian military cargo to Russia, Iran’s foreign minister announced that his Ukrainian counterpart had assured him the strike was “unintentional.” Tehran got a reassurance. This month, Washington got “not honest” and “an obvious weakness.”Earlier this week, I argued that Trump is collecting levers for an election calendar. I asked readers to mark four dates: Oct. 18, the Graham sanctions law’s first deadline; Oct. 27, Israel’s election; Oct. 29, Cyrus the Great Day; Nov. 3, America’s midterm elections.Since I filed that piece, Kyiv agreed to the energy truce, if Russia did. That evening, Russian strikes hit a power plant in Kharkiv. The next day, Zelensky observed that Putin apparently does not read Truth Social. By the Kyiv Post’s count, it was Washington’s fourth announced energy truce since January 2025.Answering Trump, Zelensky offered elections in exchange for “60 days of total ceasefire.” The Kremlin replied that it does not want a ceasefire, though it might pause on Election Day itself. Each test ends the same way: Kyiv says yes, and Moscow says no, with words or with drones. Each refusal goes into a file that opens on Oct. 18. Call it chaos if you like. It is controlled.And the FBI director? Politico had reported a planned trip in July. When MS Now, formerly MSNBC, reported that he had landed, the condemnations were ready. Patel was at a law enforcement event at Liberty University in Virginia. The FBI posted the video. The network said it regretted the error. The outrage landed. The director did not.And the audience, those of us who pass the verdict along? Three questions, to be answered in private. Did I share the Patel story? Did I share the correction? Have I ever shared the 964 billion euros?There is an old line: If the facts contradict the belief, so much the worse for the facts.So, read the vocabulary back. Restraint. Intelligence triumph. No excuse. Phase-out. National security. Procedure. Merit. Unintentional. And for one man: betrayal. The facts changed less than the vocabulary.I have said it many times: Irrational hatred robs a person of judgment and analysis, then leads him into error. For Obama, Biden, and Brussels, the outrage arrived 12 years late, if it arrived at all. For Trump, it arrives before the facts.GEORGIA’S OPPOSITION HATES TRUMP MORE THAN THEY FEAR PUTINHatred can explain everything. The truth demands that we explain how we, too, might be wrong.Oct. 18. Oct. 27. Oct. 29. Nov. 3. The record will be in soon enough.Emzari Gelashvili is a San Francisco–based geopolitical analyst and columnist who monitors Russian-language media. From 1996 to 2008, he held senior positions in Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs, with a counterintelligence career focused on Russian and Iranian intelligence operations, and he was a member of the Georgian Parliament from 2008 to 2012. His work appears in Newsweek, the Hill, the Washington Examiner, RealClearDefense, and RealClearWorld, and on emzargelashvili.substack.com.