By LONDON — President Donald Trump’s decision to pause American military aid to Ukraine is handing Russia’s Vladimir Putin the upper hand on the battlefield and on the world stage, former officials and experts warned Tuesday.
Two White House officials said the defense assistance was being reviewed to make sure it was contributing to the administration’s goal of being “focused on peace.”
As well as likely crippling Ukraine’s military efforts, pulling the plug will deepen the chasm between the Trump administration and Washington’s longtime European allies, who are already scrambling to fill the void left by a U.S. government’s rapprochement with Moscow.
Michael McFaul, Washington’s former ambassador to Russia under President Barack Obama, said pausing Ukraine aid was akin to President Franklin D. Roosevelt losing “the 1940 election to an America Firster who then had the U.S. switch sides in World War II … We’d all be speaking German now.”
“That’s why this current moment feels like,” he wrote on X. “Three years into a war between an imperialist dictatorship with autocratic allies and a democracy, Trump just switched sides.”
