Ukraine says it is unwilling to compromise in response to claims by Trump

• "Trump's arrival  gave us breathing space. He gave us a pause, a chance to get ready."
• Ex-Trump national security advisor John Bolton says 'Putin saw Trump doing a lot of his work for him,' so he chose not to invade Ukraine
• Lev Parnas: “How My Work For Trump and Giuliani Sought to Make Ukraine Defenseless”
• At least three times now, Trump has interfered with those negotiations by vowing that Russian president Vladimir Putin will release Gershkovich for him and him alone. He said it in last night’s CNN debacle, where he also made a big deal out of the idea that Putin will do it as a favor, without an exchange of money.
  • He said something else last night in his slurry of words that jumped out. Somewhere in his discussion of Putin’s invasion of eastern Ukraine in February 2022, Trump said: “Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my—this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream.”
    • Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager and then conduit to Russian operatives, in summer 2016 “discussed a plan to resolve the ongoing political problems in Ukraine by creating an autonomous republic in its more industrialized eastern region of Donbas, and having [Viktor] Yanukovych, the Ukrainian President ousted in 2014, elected to head that republic.”
    • Manafort had helped to get the pro-Russian oligarch Yanukovych into office, and when Yanukovych fled to Russia after the Ukrainian people threw him out, Manafort was left unemployed and in debt to other oligarchs. When he went to work for Trump, for free, he promptly wrote to his partner Konstantin Kilimnik, whom the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee identified in 2020 as a Russian operative, asking how “we” could use the appointment “to get whole,” and made sure that the Russian oligarch to whom he owed the most money knew about his close connection with the Trump campaign (p. 135).
    • “That plan, Manafort later acknowledged, constituted a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine” (p. 140). The region that Putin wanted was the country’s industrial heartland. He was offering a “peace” plan that carved off much of Ukraine and made it subservient to him. This was the dead opposite of U.S. policy for a free and united Ukraine, and there was no chance that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who was running for the presidency against Trump, would stand for it. But if only Trump were elected….
    • Manafort’s partner and Russian operative Kilimnick wrote that "[a]ll that is required to start the process is a very minor 'wink' (or slight push) from D[onald] T[rump] saying 'he wants peace in Ukraine and Donbass back in Ukraine' and a decision to be a 'special representative' and manage this process." Following that, Kilimnik suggested that Manafort ‘could start the process and within 10 days visit Russia ([Yanukovych] guarantees your reception at the very top level, cutting through all the bullsh*t and getting down to business), Ukraine, and key EU capitals.’ The email also suggested that once then–Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko understood this ‘message’ from the United States, the process ‘will go very fast and DT could have peace in Ukraine basically within a few months after inauguration’” (p. 99). The men continued to work on what they called the “Mariupol Plan” at least until 2018.
  • After Russia invaded Ukraine again in 2022, Jim Rutenberg published a terrific and thorough review of this history in the New York Times Magazine, pointing out that Putin’s attack on Ukraine looked different with this history behind it. Once Biden took office in 2021, the many efforts of the people around Trump, including most obviously Rudy Giuliani, to influence Ukrainian politics through their ties to the White House were over.
    • “Thirteen months later,” Rutenberg wrote, “Russian tanks crossed the Ukrainian frontier.” Once his troops were there, Putin claimed he had annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, two of which were specifically named in the Mariupol Plan, and instituted martial law in them, claiming that the people there had voted to join Russia.

Adhering to your rationale, noted war and Russia hawk, George Bush, was actually weak on Russia, since they invaded Georgia during his tenure. And Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, must've been tougher on Russia than Oleksandr Turchynov, Petro Poroshenko, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy each. Does that about sum up your position?