by Alexander J. Motyl
04/21/25
The Hill
Why are the American president and vice president so reluctant to visit Ukraine?
After all, both are fearless, or act as if they were. The ongoing war can’t possibly faze them. President Trump even has God, who supposedly saved him from assassination, on his side.
And Ukraine surely matters, both on its own terms and in the president’s agenda. The country is now generally acknowledged to be the only thing standing between Russian imperialism and Western democracy, while the administration insists that it will end Russia’s war, perhaps even by the end of April.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky implicitly invited both of them during his disastrous Feb. 28 meeting in the Oval Office. More recently, Zelensky repeated the invitation explicitly on “60 Minutes,” saying, “We want you to come, to come and to see. You think you understand what’s going on here. Okay, we respect your position. But, please, before any kind of decisions, any kind of forms of negotiations, come to see people, civilians, warriors, hospitals, churches, children destroyed or dead. Come, look, and then let’s — let’s move with a plan how to finish the war. You will understand with whom you have a deal. You will understand what Putin did.”
So what’s holding Trump and Vance back? There are several possible answers.
The first is discomfort. Living in Mar-al-Lago or Trump Tower can spoil a person, and even though Vance may have experienced hardship as a boy in Appalachia, he’s put those days well behind him, preferring to hobnob with the rich and powerful rather than with “hillbillies.”
Why travel to a country that is in the throes of a relentless bombardment of innocent Ukrainian men, women and children by Steve Witkoff’s pal Vladimir Putin? Who wouldn’t prefer playing golf in Florida? And besides, unlike the Ukrainian civilians who don’t matter except as numbers on Putin’s ledger, the president and his veep are among the world’s most powerful men. The days when generals charged the enemy in the front line are gone. Far better, and safer, to berate the Ukrainians and shed crocodile tears at Russian “mistakes” — such as the targeting of downtown Sumy on Palm Sunday — from the comfort of the White House.
The second possibility is distaste — of Ukraine, of Zelensky, of Ukrainians. After all, Ukraine has no “cards” and, worse, was stupid enough to have started the war by being invaded by Russia. The country and its people are losers and hence unworthy of a visit by America’s great leaders.
Besides, what could the Americans possibly learn that they don’t know better? As Vance implied, he knows all he needs to know about Ukraine precisely because he hasn’t been to
Ukraine, and the rest is just Kyiv’s propaganda. Trump, meanwhile, is a genius and knows everything about everything by definition.
Naturally, both men hate Zelensky. Ostensibly because he refused to cooperate in the Hunter Biden scandal, but just as likely because he’s a know-it-all who thinks he knows Ukraine better than they do and doesn’t refrain from saying so. And he is, of course, just a salesman, a “dictator” who hopes to gain legitimacy by parading the mistakenly killed “people, civilians, warriors, hospitals, churches, children destroyed or dead” before Trump and Vance.
The final explanation is disquiet. Both Trump and Vance know enough about Christianity to appreciate that the Ten Commandments are not just God’s casually assembled wish list, but a set of moral injunctions. And they must know that one of the commandments concerns killing. Although their sense of right and wrong is almost moribund, it may be vital enough for them to appreciate that, in making nice with an accused war criminal, war-monger and genocidaire, they are effectively endorsing his mass murder of Ukrainians.
Let them die thousands of miles from the moral coziness of the Oval Office and appear only as this morning’s statistics. To actually see their torn limbs, spilled guts and bloodied faces wouldn’t make America great again. Better to stay as far away as possible and bemoan death and destruction from a safe distance.
Vance illustrated his moral obtuseness on Apr. 15 when he explained his approach to the war: “I’ve also tried to apply strategic recognition that if you want to end the conflict, you have to try to understand where both the Russians and the Ukrainians see their strategic objectives. That doesn’t mean you morally support the Russian cause, or that you support the full-scale invasion, but you do have to try to understand what are their strategic red lines, in the same way that you have to try to understand what the Ukrainians are trying to get out of the conflict.”
To claim that both Russia and Ukraine have comparable, and thus morally neutral, “strategic objectives” is absurd. Witkoff doesn’t understand that Russia’s objective is Ukraine’s destruction, while Ukraine’s is survival. Does Vance? His statement, like his thuggish behavior on Feb. 28, suggests that he prefers to believe that Ukraine “started” the war and therefore deserves what it gets.
In the final analysis, all three factors — discomfort, distaste and disquiet — are at work: Trump and Vance prefer comfort to hardship, dislike Ukraine and feel some guilt for the crimes they are abetting.
Don’t expect them in Kyiv any day soon. Do expect them in Moscow.
Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”