‘US not idiot with chequebook’: Trump Jr warns POTUS may abandon Ukraine war

US President Donald Trump may walk away from the war in Ukraine, his oldest son, Donald Trump Jr, suggested in his comments at the Doha Forum in Qatar on Sunday (Dec 8). He also said that Ukraine’s “corrupt” rich had already left the country, leaving “what they believed to be the peasant class” to fight the war with Russia. This comes as the Trump administration is ramping up pressure on Kyiv to give up its territory to Moscow. Meanwhile, Trump later said that he was “a little bit disappointed” with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for not engaging with or reading his peace proposal to end the deadly war in Europe.

Speaking at the Middle East conference, the US president’s son said that Zelensky was prolonging the war because he knew he would not win an election if the conflict with Russia came to an end. He added that borderline deity on the left but suggested that his country was far more corrupt than Russia, the Guardian reported.

When asked if his father, who claimed that he could bring peace to Ukraine in his election campaign, would simply walk away, Trump Jr said maybe he would. He added that Trump was one of the most unpredictable people in politics. He also vowed that the US will no longer be “the idiot with the chequebook”.

While Trump Jr is not part of the US administration, he has remained a key figure in the MAGA movement. His remarks suggest antipathy among some Trump administration officials towards the Ukrainian government.

Trump Jr also slammed the EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, saying that European sanctions have not helped but simply increased the price of Russian oil, which Moscow can use to fund its war in Ukraine. “We are going to wait for Russia to go bankrupt – that is not a plan,” he said of the European plan.

The US president’s son further alleged that the risk of Venezuelan drug boats bringing fentanyl into the US was “far more a clear and present danger than anything that is going on in Ukraine or Russia.”

Trump Jr claims rich fled Ukraine

He also claimed that he observed that on a single summer day in Monaco, 50 per cent of the supercars like Bugattis and Ferraris had Ukrainian number plates. “Do you think that was earned in Ukraine?” he asked.

“We hear all the rumours about what is going on when we see every licence plate in Monaco is Ukrainian […] the rich fled and they left what they believed to be the peasant class to fight these wars. There was no incentive to stop because long as the money train was coming and they were stealing, no one was auditing anything so there was no reason to come to peace.”

Last month, Trump said that the corruption scandal in Kyiv that forced Zelensky to sack his chief of staff and top negotiator was not helping the talks to end the war. “Ukraine’s got some difficult little problems,” he said.

Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, has come under scrutiny as the nation’s anti-corruption authorities carried out a raid at his apartment on Friday (Nov 28). The investigators said that they had discovered a $100-million kickback scheme in the strategic energy sector earlier this month, sparking widespread public outrage. The revelation came at a time when Russia was blasting the country’s power grid, forcing blackouts across the country as Ukrainians faced heating outages in winter.