Former national security adviser John Bolton called President Trump’s Ukraine strategy “incoherent” in an opinion piece published Monday.
“President Donald Trump’s Ukraine policy is no more coherent today than it was last Friday when his administration executed search warrants against my home and office,” Bolton said in the opinion piece for the Washington Examiner, titled “Trump’s utterly incoherent Ukraine strategy.”
“Collapsing in confusion, haste, and the absence of any discernible meeting of the minds among Ukraine, Russia, several European countries, and America, Trump’s negotiations may be in their last throes, along with his Nobel Peace Prize campaign,” he added.
Last Friday, federal agents searched Bolton’s home. The FBI confirmed there was “court-authorized law enforcement activity” happening close to Bolton’s house in Maryland, with the search reportedly linked to his handling of classified information.
Bolton, who served in Trump’s first administration, has become a critic of the president in recent years.
“The administration has tried to camouflage its disarray behind social media posts, such as Trump comparing his finger-pointing at Russian President Vladimir Putin to then-Vice President Richard Nixon during the famous kitchen debate with Nikita Khrushchev. Why Trump wants to be compared to the only president who resigned in disgrace is unclear,” Bolton said in his piece.
Since his return to office in January, Trump and his administration have pushed for an end to the war in Ukraine but have not had much luck. The president recently met with both Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Washington, D.C., over a matter of days.
In an interview that aired Sunday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that Ukraine “has the right to exist” but added a caveat to that right related to territory.
“Ukraine has the right to exist, provided it must let people go,” Lavrov said. “The people whom they call terrorists, who they call species and who — during a referendum — several referenda in Novorossiya, in Donbas, in Crimea, decided that they belong to the Russian culture and the government which came to power as a result of the coup was determined as a priority to exterminate everything Russian.”
The Hill has reached out to the White House for comment.
