CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Who is the Enemy Now?

Photograph Source: Russian Presidential Executive Office – CC BY 4.0

There is a very real and increasingly noisy meeting point between parts of the American MAGA right, several European far-right parties, and positions which, whatever their motivation, increasingly favour catering to Moscow.

Remarkably, this is right at a time when—according to one or two current and former US officials openly viewing Putin as misled by his advisers—CIA chief John Ratcliffe Globemastered his way to Moscow to tell Russia it needed to cut a deal with Ukraine before it was too late for them. That, at least, was one reported view.

I admit there’s an important distinction between being pro-Russian and being willing to entertain Russia, and Trump and Vance are not exactly your straightforward Kremlin allies. Their administration has at times taken measures Russia has disliked.

But something larger has changed. Russia is treated by parts of the Western right less as the traditional enemy than as a conservative, nationalist power they believe they can do business with, while liberal Europe is portrayed as increasingly objectionable. Better relations is definitely a priority but on what terms?

The people liable to pay the most for this are Ukrainians, whose country just so happens to have been invaded by Russia and part of whose territory Russia continues illegally to park inside. The Center for Strategic and International Studies now reckons about two million soldiers have been killed, wounded or gone missing since the invasion, a remarkable 1.4 million of them Russian. Every time you find yourself writing about this you have to dramatically increase the numbers.

As I’ve written before, Trump’s dramatic departure in early 2025 from previous US policy towards Ukraine is loaded with significance. In early 2025 Trump publicly attacked Zelenskyy, opened negotiations with Moscow without Ukraine or the Europeans initially at the table, and temporarily suspended American military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine.

More recently, the picture has complicated itself further. At the July 2026 NATO summit Trump announced that the US would grant Ukraine a licence to manufacture Patriot interceptors—a potentially major concession, and one which confused the moniker of Trump being Putin’s man.

But Ukraine needs interceptors right now, not just the capacity to manufacture them at some later date. The distinction between a missile intercepted this winter and one intercepted at some theoretical point in the far distant future is less academic beneath a wailing air-raid siren.

That problem is definitely becoming nastier as Russia is increasingly using its cheap new Banderol cruise missile against Odesa’s ports. Ukrainian officials say the weapon has been involved in roughly 80% of recent strikes on the area’s port infrastructure. It is fast enough to be difficult prey for Ukraine’s interceptor drones but cheap enough to make shooting it down with scarce conventional air-defence missiles an exceptionally grim piece of arithmetic. Not to mention the nightly hell visited upon civilians in Kyiv.

To be fair, Trump’s position isn’t usefully described as simply “pro-Russian”. It is maybe better understood as a dramatic weakening of the traditional American assumption that containing Russian aggression in Europe is a vital American interest.

That distinction seems to matter.

Many Europeans have not forgotten JD........

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