Luke Harding’s new account links Trump’s return to a US betrayal of Ukraine

A warning built from a war zone

Luke Harding’s latest book presents the war in Ukraine not as a distant geopolitical contest, but as a sustained betrayal played out in public. In a review for The Guardian, the book is described as a sober record of how successive American presidents have struggled to understand Vladimir Putin, and how Donald Trump’s return to office turned hesitation into something far more damaging for Kyiv.

Harding’s case begins with a familiar pattern of presidential misjudgment. George W Bush once said he had looked Putin “in the eye” and found him “trustworthy”. Barack Obama judged that Putin was making a mistake in Ukraine and Syria, yet did little to stop him. Joe Biden, by contrast, backed Ukrainian resistance after Russia’s full-scale invasion, but his fear that Putin might reach for nuclear weapons if cornered made him cautious, especially about long-range strikes into Russian territory.

That caution, the review says, frustrated Ukrainians enough that some came to see Trump as the man who might shake the stalemate. Instead, Harding argues, they got the opposite. Trump believed his personal rapport with Putin would be enough to force Moscow into an immediate ceasefire, and he came to see President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as the obstacle — a leader fighting a war Trump assumed was unwinnable.

From pressure to abandonment

According to Harding’s account, the new administration did not intensify pressure on Moscow. It began by abandoning Ukraine. The United States voted at the UN General Assembly with a small group of countries aligned with Russia against a resolution condemning Russian aggression, at a moment when even China abstained. Trump also denounced support given to Ukraine under Biden, inflating the scale of American assistance to $350bn when it was closer to $70bn, and demanded privileged access to Ukraine’s mineral wealth as repayment.

The humiliation deepened in the Oval Office, where Zelenskyy was confronted by Trump and JD Vance after attempting to correct false claims about Ukraine’s war effort. He was then ushered out of the White House and denounced further. The review also notes that intelligence support to Ukraine’s frontline forces was briefly cut off, a move that carried immediate battlefield consequences.

Trump’s faith in Putin did not disappear there. Later in the year, he invited the Russian leader to Alaska for a summit and treated him with unusual deference, assuming Putin was prepared to compromise. Harding’s account suggests the Russian leader had only one compromise in mind: that Ukraine should hand over territory without fighting. The meeting ended in failure, with Trump irritated by one of Putin’s long historical lectures on Russian-Ukrainian relations and the encounter wrapping up before lunch.

The book’s strongest evidence

The review suggests Harding is most persuasive not when recounting diplomatic theatrics, but when reporting from Ukrainian cities under attack. As Zelenskyy was being publicly ambushed, Harding was in Odessa at a clinic hit by an Iranian-designed Russian Shahed drone. There, a worker named Olena Palsh described how a children’s clinic they had created “with love” had been destroyed in an instant after five years of work.

Those on-the-ground scenes, the review argues, give the book its emotional and moral force. Rather than treating the conflict as an abstract dispute over strategy, Harding shows its human cost in the destruction of hospitals and clinics, and in the lives of people caught in the machinery of a war Putin continues to frame as a struggle over territory he regards as naturally Russian.

Harding also broadens the picture beyond Ukraine. He writes about a North Korean soldier, Ri Chol-nam, who found himself fighting for Russia and attempted suicide after the shame of being captured by Ukrainians. Other chapters examine China’s efforts to exploit the conflict and Putin’s attempts to intimidate Europeans, including reports of sabotage against seabed internet cables and drones entering European airspace.

Trump, Putin and the unanswered question

At the centre of the book are Trump and Putin, and Harding does not avoid the question of whether Trump might himself be a Russian asset. The review frames the issue carefully: is Trump simply drawn to autocrats and their concentration of power, or does Russian kompromat exist that he is desperate to keep hidden? Harding lands on a sharper formulation, asking, “If Trump were a Russian agent, what exactly would he do differently?”

The final twist in the review is that Putin now appears disappointed by Trump, because the American president has not delivered the Ukrainian surrender Putin wanted. That creates a different puzzle: if Trump was willing to accommodate Putin so readily, why has the Russian leader not made the compromises needed to close the deal? The reviewer suggests that answer may be hardest to find of all, and notes the loss of Harding’s access to Moscow, where his contacts might once have helped him probe why Putin persists with what now looks like a futile and costly war.

For readers of politics and publishing alike, the book appears to offer more than another account of summitry and presidential vanity. It is being read as a chronicle of a war in which misreading an aggressor has had real consequences — and in which the United States, under Trump, is portrayed not as a restraining force but as part of the betrayal.