With 10% commission on Ukraine weapon sales, Trump is real profiteer of Russia's war — not India

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has accused India of profiting from the Russian war on Ukraine, but US President Donald Trump is the real profiteer.

Trump is selling weapons to Ukraine via European countries at a 10 per cent premium — using the war to fulfil American coffers that are getting depleted as a result of his tax cuts and ballooning government expenditure.

Moreover, Trump has essentially made the US military a private militia as he has put a cost to US involvement in providing security guarantees to Ukraine.

“We are selling arms to Europeans, who are then selling them on to the Ukrainians, and President Trump is taking 10 per cent mark-up on the arms. So maybe that 10 per cent will cover the cost of the air cover,” Bessent told Fox News.

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Ironically, Bessent —who has inadvertently exposed Trump’s profiteering— is the same official who accused India.

“They [India] are just profiteering. They are reselling. This is what I would call the Indian arbitrage — buying cheap Russian oil, reselling it as product,” Bessent previously told CNBC, adding that India has made $16 billion in “excess profits”.

As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has reportedly offered to buy up to $100 billions of weapons from the United States, Trump is set to get a $10 billion cut — in addition to any taxes that sellers would way to the US government anyway.

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Trump has said that he will not put American troops on the ground in Ukraine as part of any peacekeeping force. But he has said that he will be open to deploy American warplanes to police Ukrainian skies. He has suggested that those planes would operate from Ukraine’s neighbouring countries. Notably, Ukraine’s neighbour Poland is a Nato member and has regularly hosted fighter planes of allies like the United States and the United Kingdom.

“When it comes to security, they [European nations] are willing to put people on the ground. We’re willing to help them with things, especially, probably, if you talk about by air because nobody has stuff we have,” Trump told Fox on Tuesday.

Trump has also suggested that he could join European nations in providing Ukraine with Article 5-type security guarantees to Ukraine in case of a peace deal outside of Nato’s frameworks. The Article 5 is one of the core elements of Nato that defines the collective defence principle, which terms an attack on ally on all allies and allows for a united response.