Pompeo says Trump will not let Putin ‘roll via Ukraine’

Throughout the presidential campaign, Trump regularly kept the Ukraine issue at arms length. He often questioned the necessity of sending military aid to Ukraine, citing the high costs associated with it. At Fortune’s Global Forum in New York, however, Pompeo — who served in the Trump administration from 2017 to 2021 — believed the President-elect would adopt a more hardline position on the Russian invasion of Ukraine now that he is set to reenter the White House. 

“President Trump is not going to allow Vladimir Putin to roll through Ukraine,” Pompeo said during a joint interview with former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. “Withdrawing funding from the Ukranians would result in that and he will be told that by his entire team. It’s not his M.O. to allow that to happen.”

On Saturday, Trump posted on Truth Social, the upstart social media platform owned by his media company the Trump Media & Technology Group, that Pompeo and former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley wouldn’t be rejoining his new administration. Both Haley and Pompeo have been Ukraine hawks since the start of the war. At the conference, Pompeo acknowledged that his support of U.S. aid to Ukraine differed from those of other Republican officials.

In a show of bipartisan camaraderie Panetta said he’d hoped Pompeo would have been appointed to a role in the second Trump administration. “They need his view of the world, and I really think the Trump administration in the first term benefited from having people like Mike Pompeo there,” Panetta said. 

One of Trump’s primary dissatisfactions with the U.S.’s military aid to Ukraine was the cost. As of October, the U.S. had sent $64 billion in military assistance to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, according to the State Department. 

Pompeo sought to cast the significance of the war in Ukraine as an example of a larger, global struggle between liberal democracies—represented by the U.S. and its allies in NATO—and autocracies, such as China, Iran, and North Korea. He said Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Ayatollah of Iran Ali Khamenei would be waiting to see if the West wins, or concedes to Putin. Pompeo’s counterpart on stage, Panetta, echoed those sentiments.

“In many ways Ukraine is also fighting for other democracies because the message that is sent to Putin is a very important message that has to be sent to Xi, it has to be sent the Supreme Leader [of Iran], it has to be sent to Kim Jong Un — that they cannot just have their way with sovereign democracies,” Panetta said.

Pompeo said he believes Trump would come around to that point of view. “It’s absolutely critically important that the perception is the West stood up to this thug and this horrible guy [Putin] and didn’t allow evil to triumph and that’s imperative,” Pompeo said. “I’m very hopeful President Trump will see that imperative.” 

On the campaign trail Trump took a more isolationist stance on foreign policy than the traditional, hawkish Republican position. During the debate with his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump twice dodged a question about whether he wanted Ukraine to win the war. In his answer he highlighted the cost of the military aid and claimed reports of the death toll from the war were “fake numbers.” 

Now, as a president-elect, Trump is immersing himself more fully in the Ukraine question. Last week he spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin following his reelection. On the call, he reportedly told Putin not to further escalate the war in Ukraine. (Trump spoke to Putin at least seven times since he left office, according to a source cited in a book by journalist Bob Woodward).

In the days following the election Trump also spoke to Ukrainian premier Volodymyr Zelensky in a call that was joined by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. In September, Trump met with Zelensky when he made a visit to the U.S. Trump has not always seen eye-to-eye with Zelensky. During a podcast interview just a few weeks after their meeting Trump called Zelensky “the greatest salesman on Earth” for having received U.S. military aid. Trump also blamed Zelensky for starting the war. 

“He should never have let that war start,” Trump said on the PBD podcast. “The war’s a loser.”

Trump has pushed for a speedy resolution to the war. He regularly touted his record as a dealmaker when he was a real estate developer in the private sector as making him uniquely suited to reaching a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia. During the debate Trump said if won the election an agreement would be made before he was even inaugurated. In July, Trump said he would be able to pull it off in just “24 hours.”

When asked about that timeline, Pompeo said he saw the process taking longer. “I’ll take the over,” Pompeo said.

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