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If Donald Trump could, he would fly to Munich to sign away Ukraine to Vladimir Putin, and return to wave the document as “peace in our time”, hoping to claim at least the second Fifa peace prize. Whatever the complicated motives of Neville Chamberlain, his well-grounded fear after the carnage of a world war of another apocalypse and his wishful thinking that Hitler would be satiated after carving up Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain had not sent his son-in-law and former golf partner and real estate partner in advance to cut back-end deals with the Nazis to profit for his family and cronies. Though Chamberlain is judged as grievously misguided in history, Winston Churchill eulogized his “perfect sincerity according to his lights” and declared his mistaken gesture as rooted in the “noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart”. Putin has proposed a meeting with Trump and Xi Jinping to settle the Ukraine war on Russian terms without the presence of the troublesome Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The Wall Street Journal described such a meeting as “unprecedented”. As a historical matter, that would be untrue. The Czechs were not present at Munich when their country was delivered to Hitler. Part of Trump’s urgent reason for selling out Ukraine is to cast blame before the midterm elections for the inflation wrought by his tariffs and Iran war. Panicked by plunging polls, he has ramped up his rhetoric against Zelenskyy as the alleged source of the crisis that Trump himself has created. Portraying Zelenskyy as the villain, Trump projects himself, as usual, as the victim. His perceived political need and irreducible pathological neediness dovetail with his longtime admiration of Putin as the unconstrained strongman he has always wished to be. Since Trump’s first visit to Moscow in 1987, he has dreamed of the bonanza of Russian deals to be lavished on him from Putin. Upon his return, he paid for full-page ads in major newspapers calling for the US to stop funding the defense of countries capable of defending themselves and to cease defending the flow of oil through the Gulf. “The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help,” the ad said. From the start, the ideology has been a token of his greed, decades before he hawked his “America First Collection” of digital tokens. Putin has been the unwavering object of his aspiration, one of the few people he has not betrayed or sought to humiliate, but to whom he bends his knee. “Together,” tweeted Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s head of the Russian sovereign wealth fund, over a graphic showing the Russian bear and the American eagle on the same side poised to fight against the British lion and a shattered European Union flag. He was celebrating on 16 October what he conceived as the new axis against the western allies the same day that Trump waived sanctions against Russia under the Lindsey Graham Act. Graham, who died in Washington just hours upon returning from a visit of support to Ukraine, was hailed as Trump’s closest friend in the Congress, which passed the bill overwhelmingly, Democrats and Republicans in rare unity. Graham’s sister, Darline Graham Nordone, whom Trump imposed on the South Carolina governor to be appointed as the martyr’s replacement, was prominently made the marquee sponsor, lending the novice senator a credential. In a Republican primary debate, she said: “National security is not my thing.” When Trump tossed aside the Graham Act without bothering to consult her, she was left to sputter an ineffectual objection, leaving her vulnerable in an unexpectedly close race. Her prospect and dignity were shards of Trump’s collateral damage. Trump vehemently blamed Zelenskyy for supposedly prolonging the war, called him “not a good guy for us to deal with”, and said that the Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian refineries were a “disgrace” and had “better damn well stop”, and that Ukraine needed a “new leader who can make a deal”. After an hour-and-a-half phone call with Putin on his 74th birthday, so friendly that neither wanted to hang up the phone first, according to Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s aide, Trump announced his sweetheart deal for 300,000 metric tons of diesel from Russia, followed in November by 500,000 and an additional million. For this, Trump waived sanctions. The stunt gives Putin hard cash to continue operating his war machine, while the diesel will be statistically insignificant to the price in the US market. The US consumes 300,000 tons within 14 hours. Zelenskyy called this a “happy birthday gift to Putin”. The effect of Trump’s transaction could not help struggling American consumers, but is a practical help to sustain Putin’s aggression. Trump’s giveaway was followed by the sudden restriction of Ukrainian access to the Starshield network, managed by Elon Musk for the Pentagon, that is indispensable to Ukraine’s defense. For a week, in an Abbott and Costello routine of “who’s on first”, Musk blamed the Pentagon, while Trump claimed to be out of the loop. “It wasn’t me and I don’t think it was Elon,” he said. Ukraine’s frontline communications were immediately degraded. The outage directly preceded barrages of Russian missile strikes that knocked out energy infrastructure and left 600,000 Ukrainians without power. Slowly, after outraged reaction from the Europeans and Congress, connectivity was mostly but not completely restored. Musk, whose businesses are dependent on federal contracts, is the largest donor to the Republican campaigns in the midterm elections, spending $366m so far, exceeding the $276m he spent to elect Trump in 2024. The diesel deal was a successful ploy as part of Putin’s larger scheme to leverage Russian energy assets as bait to Trump in order to end US support for Ukraine. In early September, Putin pitched Trump’s self-interested envoys, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, on the vast international assets of Lukoil, Russia’s second-largest oil company, requiring a treasury department waiver, thereby opening the door for a host of shadow agreements. The Abu Dhabi royal family and the Qatari Al-Khayyat brothers would hold a large part of the equity, the New York Times reported. The Qatari investors are simultaneously partnered with Kushner on his luxury real estate project in Albania, which has provoked a popular uprising called “the Flamingo revolution”. Another partner in the Lukoil consortium, Todd Boehly, CEO of Eldridge Industries, a holding company, and co-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Lakers, has donated $2m to Trump’s political action committee, Maga Inc. The negotiator on the Russian side, Kirill Dmitriev, is the one who enthusiastically tweeted: “Together.” But the Lukoil deal is hardly the only one apparently in the pipeline; Trump laid the groundwork for an array of post-sanctions opportunities. “A classified report produced by a European intelligence agency states that Trump and people around him have discussed several potential contracts in Russia,” Dexter Filkins reported in the New Yorker. The document detailed 10 ventures after a “peace deal” – that is, after forcing a Ukrainian surrender on Russian terms. Against this background of the Russian strategy, large and small movements of Trump and his family become clarified, from the Kushner-Witkoff-Dmitriev negotiations to Don Jr’s wedding party in the Bahamas paid for in part by a Putin thug, Umar Kremlev, head of the Olympic-banned International Boxing Association. A “large” contingent of Russians was present at the intimate wedding party, according to ProPublica, but their identities remain unknown. Kushner was also present at the celebration. Fiona Hill, who served as Trump’s director for Russian affairs on the national security council in his first term, has described Trump as awestruck in his relationship with Putin. Trump envied him as the “ultimate badass”. She observed how Trump’s pathetic need to be seen as a peer to the autocrat allowed him to be played like a fiddle. At the 2018 Helsinki summit, she was horrified when Trump dismissed the findings of the US intelligence community that Russia had interfered in the presidential election of 2016 on his behalf, deferring to Putin by saying: “President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be.” Hill thought she might stage a fake medical emergency or pull a fire alarm to stop Trump from humiliating himself and the US. But that was during the first term, before Trump grasped how to use the presidency, with official immunity granted by the supreme court, to forge his own kleptocratic state to achieve his highest aspiration: attaining the exalted law-free status of Putin. Trump’s effort to become the full partner with Russia makes his pay-for-play ballroom seem a mere bauble by comparison. Among Trump’s infinite abuses is his suborning of the Department of Justice to pursue his retribution snark hunt of a “grand conspiracy” of his alleged enemies of the “deep state” for perpetrating the “Russia hoax”, those national security officials who asserted the factual truth that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to benefit him. In early October, however, the key man appointed to run this operation, the veteran Washington attorney deep into rightwing causes, Joe diGenova, resigned, “saying top department officials were pressuring the team to bring criminal cases before they were ready”, according to the Wall Street Journal. Nobody now observing Trump’s relations with Putin is accusing him of “collusion”. There is no secrecy. Trump brazenly proclaims his aspiration to partner with Russia and to become the equal of Putin. “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine. They haven’t been doing much,” he said. After Russia released an American schoolteacher imprisoned for four years on what the state department called false charges, a human chip to personify Putin’s gratitude to Trump, Witkoff praised Putin: “You are a humanitarian.” Zelenskyy told NBC’s Meet the Press that if Trump “will take the side of Russia”, it would be a “a historic mistake and big tragedy”. Dmitriev tweeted Trump’s remark: “We’ve given a lot to Ukraine. They’ve given us nothing.” Dmitriev added his comment: “Clarity.” Nobody in retrospect will eulogize Trump for “noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart”. Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist and co-host of the Court of History podcast