Trump’s Junior Insults Against Ukraine – “Poor Peasants” at the Front

Donald Trump Jr. sat on stage at the Doha Forum on December 7, 2025, confident and arrogant as always, and spoke about Ukraine as if he were describing a country he knew from an old black-and-white archive film. The Ukrainian leadership, he said, was sending “poor peasants” to the front while all the wealthy had long fled the country. It sounded like the kind of simple story that sticks in people’s minds because it offers a clear perpetrator-victim scheme: at the top the corrupt elite, at the bottom those who are sacrificed. Only this story has as little to do with reality as a campaign commercial has with an actual situation report.

Ukraine has mobilized since the beginning of the war along legal guidelines, not along social categories. There is no list that says who is wealthy and therefore does not have to serve. There are volunteers, professional soldiers, reservists, workers, artists, entrepreneurs, farmers, programmers, mechanics, university graduates. Men from cities, villages, factories, suburbs, from Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv, Dnipro. And yes – also wealthy men, well-known men, men with careers that in the United States would be described as part of the elite. Oleksandr Usyk volunteered. Wladimir Klitschko volunteered for the Territorial Forces and remained in the country, but without front deployment, his brother Vitali Klitschko remained as mayor in Kyiv, leading the city through the war. And they are only the most visible examples. That people with money could theoretically flee does not mean it is the rule. On the contrary: many who tried were arrested. Ukraine has strict exit bans – and it enforces them.

Trump Jr., however, tells the opposite. Perhaps because it fits his political, misguided line. Perhaps because it sounds better in the United States if you describe Ukraine as a morally rotten system that lets its own citizens bleed out. It is the kind of sentence Kremlin strategists love: easy to share, hard to refute without boring the audience with facts. Anyone who wants to delegitimize Ukraine does not need tanks – they need a story people believe because it seems logical: the elite saves itself, the poor die. Russia has built on exactly this image for years. And now the son of the American president repeats it.

Trump Jr. then told an anecdote that he considered proof but in reality only exposed his own worldview. “I was this summer with my beautiful girlfriend Bettina in Monaco, and we were driving around, and on an average day 50 percent of the supercars – the Bugattis, the Ferraris, all that – had Ukrainian plates.” It was meant to sound like an eyewitness report of a fleeing elite. In fact, he only describes that he visited Monaco – that place where the wealthy of the entire world have gathered for decades, whether from Russia, the United States, the Emirates, or indeed from Ukraine. Whether Trump Junior even knows what a Ukrainian license plate looks like is another matter. Some Ukrainian millionaires have lived there for years, long before the war. A handful of luxury cars in the principality is not evidence of an alleged moral failure of a state at war. But Trump Jr. presented this scene as if one could deduce the attitude of an entire nation from the number of Bugattis on the Côte d’Azur. It is the same pattern: personal impressions as political diagnosis – and the attempt to construct a blame narrative that dissolves upon closer inspection.

Let us look at reality: Ukraine has organized the defense of a country under attack on all fronts for more than three years. It deploys soldiers who come from every layer of society. It has volunteers who go to the front even though they do not have to. It has men who lived abroad and returned to fight. The image of a “poor peasant army” is not only false, it is an insult to those who serve there – to those who have died, to those who return without arms, without legs, without sleep.

The claim that all the wealthy have fled is equally absurd. That some individuals tried to leave the country is not proof of a mass phenomenon. That Trump Jr. introduces his observation with the anecdote of a summer vacation with his “beautiful girlfriend Bettina” says more about him than about Ukraine. It seems as if he views a nation at war through the window of his private jet: far away, manageable, easy to classify.

It is not new that the Trump family uses the war in Ukraine to support its own line: less support, more pressure, quick deals that please Russia. But this narrative from Doha was a low point because it dehumanizes something that deserves no rhetoric at all: the commitment of millions of Ukrainians who defend their country while Trump Jr. tries to explain to them in a Gulf state who they are. One can debate strategies, diplomacy, mistakes of the Ukrainian government, the role of the West. But anyone who dismisses people defending their country as “poor peasants” is not engaging in geopolitical analysis. He is repeating what Moscow has been broadcasting into the world with heavy machinery for years: Ukraine is a state without structure, without morality, without a future. Only this claim is as false as the idea that wealth protects from mobilization.

The truth is uncomfortable for those who need simple answers: Ukraine is not fighting with peasants. It is fighting with citizens. It is fighting with people who did not ask whether they had enough money or influence to escape a war. It is fighting because another country decided to erase it from the map. Trump Jr. wanted to impress in Doha. What remains is a sentence that views the world like a reality TV format: with the assumption that complexity only gets in the way and that people he does not know play roles he assigns to them. But war is not a script. And Ukraine is not a backdrop for political stupidity from Florida.