Donald Trump must find it oddly frustrating. He keeps showing the world exactly who he is, and yet the world keeps refusing to believe it. As clearly as he can, he is announcing that he is not the leader of the free world, that he is not even a reliable member of the democratic west, that he is in fact an ally of its enemies – but the west, including Britain, either doesn’t fully get the message or can’t quite bring itself to draw the obvious conclusion.

Trump had another go this week, finding multiple ways to declare that in the war between Russia and Ukraine, he is no mediator or peace broker but a partner of Vladimir Putin. In fairness to him, the US president had loudly issued that declaration within weeks of his return to the White House when, in February 2025, he delivered an on-camera dressing down of Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, seeking to humiliate the Ukrainian leader by telling him “you don’t have the cards”, even as JD Vance demanded their visitor show gratitude. That should have made Trump’s position sufficiently plain, but in the past few days he has all but put it up in lights.

Earlier this week Ukrainian forces found that an essential piece of kit – a version of Elon Musk’s Starlink system used by Kyiv to guide its drones – was no longer working at speeds greater than 100mph. That meant not only a sudden shrinking of Ukraine’s ability to strike behind the frontlines, but also the hobbling of an air defence system vital in protecting the capital from Russian jet-propelled drones. This was no technical hitch. Starshield, the military-grade version of Starlink, is owned and controlled by the US government – and, as Reuters reported, the order to limit its use in Ukraine came from the White House. Put simply, Trump actively intervened in the war to weaken Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. “The decision will bring a lot of human losses,” Zelenskyy told Piers Morgan. “Of course, people will die.”

Trump’s move was hardly a bolt........

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