On the afternoon of Oct. 19, President Donald Trump paused on the White House lawn to speak with a huddle of reporters before boarding a flight for a campaign rally in Kansas. When asked about the brutal war raging in Eastern Europe, the President shockingly downplayed the relentless campaign of violence that’s routinely inflicted by Russia against Ukrainian civilians.
“Russia, frankly, has been fine with Ukraine,” Trump stated, offering a jarringly sanitized version of the worst killing ground on European soil since the Second World War. He added, with a dismissive wave of his hand, “They haven’t been doing much.”
If Trump didn’t already hear what the Russian military had done that day he should have known about it, and the press as well, before meeting with them prior to his leaving the White House. At approximately 4:30 p.m. in Ukraine — which was 9:30 a.m. in Washington — a Russian Shahed kamikaze drone had intentionally slammed into a crowd of families in a municipal park in Nova Vodolaha.
The explosion ripped through a stroller, instantly killing 14-month-old Anhelina Mariukhna, mortally wounding her schoolteacher mother, Inna, and killing 8-year-old Arina Koval alongside three other civilians.
For hours the international news media had alerted the world about the massacre. Trump, by presenting a reality where the aggressor was “doing fine” not only grossly mischaracterized the entire war, including the day’s events he either intentionally ignored a documented war crime or didn’t know it had even occurred.
Trump’s failure to even mention the massacre in Nova Vodolaha was not unusual in the least, as he never acknowledges the suffering of Ukrainian civilians at the hands of Putin’s army. Instead, his public messaging consistently deflects global attention away from the blood-soaked realities of the war.
On Oct. 20, while the community of Nova Vodolaha was preparing the bodies of Anhelina, Inna and Arina for burial, President Trump stood before reporters again. This time, his focus shifted from downplaying Russia’s violence to openly lamenting its lack of strategic efficiency.
Bemoaning the tactical failure of the initial 2022 invasion, Trump criticized a “very stupid” Russian general for making a “terrible mistake” by turning a thousand tanks off a concrete highway into the mud. Had that general been more competent, the President asserted, “the war would have been over in one day.”
The tragedy in the eyes of Trump was not that a sovereign American ally was being subjected to a brutal war of attrition. The tragedy, in Trump’s view, was that dictator Vladimir Putin’s forces had not crushed Ukraine when it had the opportunity to do so during day one of its illegal and immoral invasion.
Trump doesn’t appreciate being confronted with the reality that the Russians have suffered 1.5 million casualties, including half a million dead soldiers, whose blood soaks the ground of places you never learn about — the shattered concrete of Bakhmut, the industrialized ruins of the Avdiivka coke plant, the pulverized tree lines of Vovchansk and the nameless muddy fields outside Kupyansk, Robotyne and Pokrovsk. These areas witnessed suicidal Russian infantry charges which have decimated their ranks, yet Trump, a pathological liar, disingenuously and continuously lies to cover up the carnage.
In October 2026, for example, the Russian military is projected to suffer over 45,000 casualties for the third consecutive month. In what universe could a military operation sacrificing nearly 1,500 men every single day ever be described as doing “nothing” as Trump does? This is not a misunderstanding of the current military situation in Ukraine; it is the intentional deception and the fabrications of a leader who has no regard whatsoever for the truth. Rather Trump’s rhetoric is the willful, manipulative, machinations of him acting against traditional democratic alliances, signaling to everyone his affinity for Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime.
For an administration accused of viewing foreign policy through a purely transactional lens, this rhetorical alignment closely matches reported economic coordination over Russian energy assets. Specifically, reports from investigative observers have detailed how secret peace negotiations between Moscow and Trump’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, expanded to involve a multi-billion dollar deal directly tied to Lukoil, Russia’s second-largest oil company.
The proposal, discussed directly during high-level meetings between Vladimir Putin and Trump’s representatives, involves the sale and restructuring of Lukoil’s sprawling $22 billion global portfolio of oil fields, gas stations and massive refineries. The deal is structured to benefit a consortium heavily packed with close Trump allies and Middle Eastern business executives who share deep commercial ties with the Trump family.
By attempting to engineer a public narrative where Ukraine’s defense is entirely futile and Russia is “doing nothing,” the rhetoric serves to smooth over the geopolitical outrage of a proposed “energy ceasefire” — clearing a path to validate a massive commercial transaction with the Kremlin while the direct, lethal consequences of a forced Russian victory are paid in civilian blood.
To ensure this deal went through and to aggressively force Kyiv to the negotiating table, the administration executed an act of direct technological betrayal. Prior to this intervention, the Ukrainian military maintained a superlative record of shooting down Russia’s conventional kamikaze drones, routinely logging an interception rate between 85% and 96%. Ukraine achieved this staggering defensive shield utilizing high-speed interceptor drones guided in real-time by SpaceX’s military-grade satellite system, Starshield, and the civilian Starlink network.
However, in a coordinated effort to paralyze Ukraine’s capability to hunt these threats and strike back at Russian economic assets, Trump and Elon Musk actively sabotaged Ukraine’s connectivity. Acting on directives from inside the White House, SpaceX secretly clamped unprecedented speed and connectivity restrictions on receptors traveling over 100 miles per hour — instantly blinding Ukrainian interceptors mid-flight.
This deliberate throttling artificially collapsed Ukraine’s drone defense interception rate down to a devastating 54%. It was this engineered blind spot that directly allowed the jet-powered Shahed drone to penetrate deep into Kharkiv Oblast completely unhindered, flying directly into Nova Vodolaha on Oct. 19.
The blood of Anhelina Mariukhna, her mother and the four other Ukrainians murdered in Nova Vodolaha will forever stain the hands of indicted war criminal Vladimir Putin and his flunkies, including Trump, an American traitor, and his accomplice Musk.
John S. Hancock Jr. lives in Concord.