President Trump ran on a promise to stop pouring American money into foreign wars with no finish line.
Joe Biden kept the checks flowing right up until his final weeks in office.
But Trump just traced the whole mess back to the man who handed Biden the keys.
Trump Drops the Blame Right Back on Obama’s Desk
President Trump sat down with Newsmax’s Finnerty and skipped the diplomatic small talk. He went straight at the former President who held the Oval Office when Russian troops marched into Crimea.
“Look, it really began with Barack Hussein Obama when they made them give up Crimea,” Trump said. “Crimea is the most valuable part, by far, of Ukraine.”
That’s a mouthful for a sitting President to say about a man who left office nearly a decade ago. And Trump didn’t stutter once.
Russia seized and annexed the Crimean peninsula in early 2014. The Obama White House answered with sanctions, body armor, night-vision goggles, and helmets.
When Kyiv begged for Javelin anti-tank missiles, Obama said no. His team worried that real weapons might provoke Vladimir Putin.
So the same President who drew a red line in Syria and then shrugged when somebody stepped over it watched Putin grab an entire peninsula and shipped over helmets. Funny how the glowing Obama retrospectives always seem to run out of pages before they get to that part.
There’s an even stranger footnote. During the 2012 campaign, Obama mocked Mitt Romney for calling Russia America’s top geopolitical foe, cracking that the 1980s wanted their foreign policy back. Two years later, Putin rolled into Crimea.
Trump has made this case before. In an April 2025 post on Truth Social, he wrote that “Crimea was lost years ago under the auspices of President Barack Hussein Obama, and is not even a point of discussion.”
In that same post, aimed squarely at the Ukrainian President, Trump asked, “if he wants Crimea, why didn’t they fight for it eleven years ago when it was handed over to Russia without a shot being fired?”
Biden Inherited Obama’s Mess and Stuck Taxpayers With the Bill
Joe Biden had a front-row seat for all of it. He served as Obama’s Vice President when Putin took Crimea, and he worked as the administration’s point man on Ukraine.
Then Biden got the top job. Putin launched a full-scale invasion in February 2022, and Biden started treating the US Treasury like an ATM with no daily withdrawal limit.
Congress approved roughly $175 billion in total assistance for Ukraine across the first three years of the war, according to Reuters. Biden pushed for those packages and signed them.
But he never told the American people what winning looked like. No endgame. No exit ramp. No price tag at the finish line.
And Biden kept the spigot open even after voters threw his party out of the White House in November 2024. In his final weeks in office, Biden announced $2.5 billion in new security assistance, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen made another $3.4 billion in budget aid available to Kyiv.
Biden promised in a statement that his administration would “continue to work relentlessly to strengthen Ukraine’s position in this war over the remainder of my time in office.”
Read that sentence twice. He talked about strengthening a battlefield position. He never said a word about ending the war.
The Settlement Trump Wants and the Holdout Blocking the Door
Trump wants a deal, and he made clear who he sees as the bigger obstacle right now.
“Zelensky is not a good guy for us to deal with,” Trump said. He added that “if they’re going to end up with a settlement of some kind, they’re not going to do it with him, he doesn’t want to settle.”
Then Trump delivered the line that will have cable news panels clutching their pearls for a week. “I find Zelensky to be more difficult to deal with than Putin,” he said.
The usual suspects will spin that as Trump cozying up to Moscow. But Trump didn’t sound like a man picking a side in somebody else’s war. He sounded like a man trying to close one.
“It should end soon,” Trump said. “I think they actually both would like to see it end.”
The Crowd That Lost Crimea Wants Another Decade of War
Line the record up and the picture gets pretty clear. Obama watched Putin take Crimea and refused to send lethal weapons. Trump approved a plan in December 2017 to provide Javelins, and his State Department cleared a $47 million Javelin sale in March 2018. Biden then wrote checks in the tens of billions with no plan to stop.
Now, to be fair, Obama didn’t send nothing. His administration committed more than $600 million in security aid between 2014 and 2016, according to the Associated Press.
But none of it was the hardware Kyiv actually asked for. Sending goggles to a fight against tanks is a gesture, and Putin knew the difference.
Could a tougher Obama have stopped Putin cold in 2014? Nobody gets to rerun history. Maybe Putin moves anyway.
But the lesson that weakness invites aggression didn’t start with Crimea, and it won’t end there either. Every bully on the planet watches how an American President responds the first time somebody tests him.
And the neoconservatives and globalists who spent more than a decade itching for a showdown with Russia learned nothing from any of it. They now call any settlement a surrender. They want more billions, longer-range missiles, and deeper American involvement, all while flirting with the risk of a nuclear confrontation between the two biggest atomic arsenals on earth.
These are, in a lot of cases, the same Washington hands who gave the country Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan. Their track record speaks for itself, and it doesn’t speak well.
It’s not hard to see where their road leads. One more aid package becomes two. Two becomes a permanent line item that American families pay for at the gas pump and the grocery store.
Voters sent Trump back to Washington in 2024 with a simple instruction to end it. He keeps pointing at 2014 because that’s where the tab opened.
Obama opened that tab, and Biden ran it up to $175 billion. Now the guy left holding the check is the only one in the room asking when it ends.
Sources: Breitbart News, “Trump: Ceding Crimea Under Obama Began War, Zelensky’s Bad Because ‘He Doesn’t Want to Settle’”; Newsmax, Finnerty; The National News Desk, “Trump blasts Zelenskyy for rejecting Crimea deal, says it prolongs ‘killing field’”; South China Morning Post/Reuters, “Weeks before Trump returns, US sends US$5.9 billion in aid to Ukraine”; CBC News; Associated Press, “Trump distorts Obama-Biden aid to Ukraine”; PolitiFact; CNBC, “US officials say lethal weapons headed to Ukraine”