Some of us never left Ukraine’s side — even if Washington did

I did not leave the Republican Party, and I am not going anywhere. But I am tired of watching most of my party’s leaders in Washington behave as if abandoning Ukraine to Vladimir Putin is simply the price of loyalty to this president.

President Donald Trump has never hidden his instinct to accommodate Putin, and we shouldn’t expect that to change. What can change, and what must change, is the silence of Republican officeholders who know better and say nothing while the administration does Moscow’s bidding.

On Friday, that silence got harder to defend. After a phone call with Putin, the president announced that Russia would immediately ship more than 300,000 tons of diesel, 500,000 more in November, and a million tons after that.

Within hours, the Treasury eased sanctions on Russian diesel for six months, the first such license since the invasion to run longer than the standard 30 days.

Just last month, the president signed a bipartisan sanctions law designed to choke off the oil and gas revenue that pays for Putin’s war. Republicans voted for that law. Now the administration is clearing the way for Russian diesel, announced while presidential envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff met with Ukrainian officials in Miami to discuss a peace proposal.

Diesel isn’t the only deal on the table. The New York Times reported this month that the administration’s Ukraine talks have widened to include a multibillion-dollar sale of Lukoil’s global oil fields, refineries and gas stations.

Putin himself reportedly raised that deal with Kushner and Witkoff at the Kremlin in September. Its investors include Middle Eastern business groups with ties to the envoys’ families and a co-owner of the Trump-linked World Liberty Financial.

The Times found no evidence that either envoy stands to profit personally. Still, a peace process that doubles as a deal-making venue for the president’s circle is not free-market capitalism. It is the crony kind, and conservatives should call it that.

Consider also Kushner’s recent remarks at a diplomatic forum in Kyiv, where he argued that Ukraine holds the last card between war and peace because Kyiv won’t hand over the territory Putin demands.

In Kushner’s telling, the “rest of the deal” is already assembled, and Ukraine needs to concede its own land. In the mouth of the president’s own son-in-law, the obstacle to peace is Ukraine’s refusal to surrender, not Russia’s decision to invade.

Then there is the company the Trump family keeps. ProPublica recently reported that Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch and Putin ally who runs a boxing federation financed by Gazprom, substantially bankrolled Donald Trump Jr.’s Bahamas wedding celebration this spring.

Kremlev is also closely involved with Healthy Fatherland, a Russian youth organization run by his wife’s twin sister. Ukraine has sanctioned that organization for its alleged role in abducting and forcibly relocating Ukrainian children from occupied territory. This is the man who helped pay for a Trump family celebration.

Put the wedding, the Kushner remarks, and the diesel deal side by side, and the optics aren’t a distraction from the policy. They are the policy, illustrated.

Here is what elected Republicans keep getting wrong: they assume the base has moved with the White House on Russia. It hasn’t.

YouGov’s most recent polling found that 52% of Republicans sympathize more with Ukraine than Russia, while barely 3% side with Moscow. Even among Trump’s most devoted MAGA supporters, 45% still side with Ukraine. Pew’s polling this spring found a growing share of Republicans now describe Russia as an enemy of the United States, not a partner or competitor.

We need to hear that from our own party’s elected officials, not just from Trump’s critics on the left.

Too many Republicans in Congress who privately understand what Putin is have decided that public silence is the safer play. It is not safe. It is a betrayal of a Republican tradition that once stood, unambiguously, against Russian aggression.

We cannot dictate what this president says about Putin. We can insist that the Republicans we elect to the House and Senate stop providing cover for it. Start with the sanctions law they passed just weeks ago. Every Republican who voted for it should be asked a simple question: will you defend your own law?

Our Republican Legacy exists to make that case inside our own party, not outside it. There are still Republicans, more than Washington seems to realize, who believe Ukraine deserves to win this war. It’s time our elected officials remembered they work for us, too.