Former Ukrainian Foreign Minister Criticizes Trump’s Turn to Russia

Ukraine’s former foreign affairs minister Dmytro Kuleba said the Trump Administration’s recent diplomatic efforts with Russia were bound to fail in the annual Lamont Lecture at the JFK Jr. Forum Monday evening.

“If there is a strategy of stopping the war, we have a very different understanding of what strategy is,” Kuleba said. “Nothing of what has been done so far, in the last months, in the last three weeks, or the last week — a particularly heated debate — made Russia slow down its aggression against Ukraine.”

“I would be happy to be the first one to applaud his peace effort, if I saw at least the slightest decrease of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine,” Kuleba added. “But it doesn’t happen.”

Just hours before Kuleba took the stage, the United States voted against a United Nations resolution to condemn Russia’s actions in Ukraine, siding with Russia, North Korea, and Belarus over its European allies.

“Europeans realized that the United States is gone. The security umbrella is not there anymore,” Kuleba said.

Kuleba’s talk — held on the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — was part of an annual lecture series dedicated to international security issues. Kuleba served as foreign minister from March 2020 through September 2024, playing a central role in mobilizing international support for Ukraine, and now serves as a non-resident senior fellow at the Belfer Center.

His lecture was followed by questions from moderator and Belfer Center Director Meghan L. O’Sullivan, focusing heavily on Ukraine’s future in the wake of evolving U.S. policy toward the conflict.

“Couldn’t be imagined a month ago,” Kuleba said. “A reality today.”

Despite Trump’s latest efforts to broker a peace deal, Kuleba said he doesn’t expect Russian president Vladimir Putin to honor a possible ceasefire and permanently withdraw from Ukraine.

“How many more intellectual exercises do we have to undertake to accept the reality that sometimes, a country makes a decision to destroy another country,” Kuleba said. “Whatever we do to try to engage them, to encourage them, they will not reciprocate.”

Trump’s diplomatic position isn’t novel, Kuleba said. He argued that Western countries have often pursued “reconciliation” and “resets” in the face of Russian incursions — a soft approach that he said has cost Ukraine dearly.

“For 30 years, the United States of America and the rest of the West looked at Ukraine through the eyes of Russia, through the lens of their relationship with this great nation — never willing to assess Ukraine on its own merits,” Kuleba said. “As bitter as it is to say, we are paying for this today.”

“The strongest intellectual ability is not to stick to what you believe in and to what you’ve been preaching for years,” Kuleba added. “It is to change the belief in the face of facts and for the sake of humanity.”

Kuleba also said China would be a key player in any decision regarding Ukraine’s future. He claimed that Chinese President Xi Jinping will be watching negotiations closely and that Putin will “always choose China” over the United States.

“The United States twists Ukraine's arms and extends a handshake to Russia,” Kuleba said. “This is the new reality that we have to come to terms with. And the biggest beneficiary of this reality will be China.”

But without a dramatic change in U.S. foreign policy, Kuleba found little to be optimistic about in the long term. Notably, he said that joining NATO — once Ukraine’s ultimate goal — now seemed unlikely given the organization’s uncertain future.

“The question of what will actually stop Putin and deprive him of the wish to continue on his mission of destroying Ukraine is an open question,” Kuleba said.

“I will be very honest with you, I do not see any definite answer,” he said.

—Staff writer Elise A. Spenner can be reached at elise.spenner@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X at @EliseSpenner.