Trump's reality check in Ukraine
There has been no art of the deal in the war Trump promised to end in 24 hours
During the 2024 election, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to end the Ukraine war in 24 hours. He had a simple strategy to accomplish this goal: give Vladimir Putin as much as possible while forcing Ukraine to accept as little as possible. He declared that Ukraine would never join NATO. His administration has made it clear that no new military aid will be authorized. He sidelined Europe. He even blamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for starting the war. The most recent source of tension between Washington and Kyiv is Trump’s demand that Ukraine recognize Russia’s annexation of Crimea, an obvious red line for Zelensky.
As Trump leaned harder and harder on Ukraine to accept a terrible deal, he asked nothing of Russia. Instead, he launched negotiations with no preconditions, discussed future economic cooperation and “dividing up certain assets” with Putin, and demanded $500 billion in Ukrainian natural resources for military support the United States had already provided. He offered no security guarantees in exchange, which was one of the reasons for the Oval Office blowup between Trump, Zelensky, and Vice President J.D. Vance in February. Faced with the threat of an immediate cessation of U.S. support, Trump assumed Ukraine would be forced to capitulate in short order. Instead, Trump only managed to secure a narrow ceasefire covering energy infrastructure—which both sides claim has been broken multiple times, and which Russia now says has expired.
Despite all Trump’s brash talk about how quickly and easily he would end the war, the self-mythologized dealmaker is on the verge of giving up. After talks with European and Ukrainian officials in Paris on Friday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said: “If it is not possible to end the war in Ukraine, we need to move on.” He claimed that the Trump administration would decide “in a matter of days whether or not this is doable in the next few weeks.” This is a last-ditch effort to coerce Europe and Ukraine into accepting conditions that are extremely unfavorable to Kyiv. It clearly isn’t a threat directed at Moscow, as Putin would like nothing more than to see the United States relinquish its role as mediator.
“If for some reason one of the two parties makes it very difficult,” Trump recently said, “we’re just going to say you’re foolish, you’re fools, you’re horrible people, and we’re just going to take a pass.” Of course, there’s only one party that could end the war tomorrow with no difficulty at all, and that’s Putin. But Trump has made it clear from the beginning that he blames the victim rather than the aggressor in Ukraine. The reason his negotiations have been so ineffective is that they’re based on a flawed premise—Trump assumes Ukraine is the main impediment to peace and thinks Putin is eager to end the war.
But Putin has made it clear that he’s in no hurry to do so, as his ultimate goal isn’t just the theft of several oblasts in Eastern Ukraine—it’s the destruction of Ukrainian sovereignty. This is why Trump’s early giveaways to the Kremlin were such a disaster—they showed Putin that time is on his side and encouraged him to pursue his maximalist aims. When Rubio declared that the United States is ready to give up, the Kremlin signaled that it’s more than happy to wait. After Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had a call with Rubio on Thursday, the ministry said Lavrov “reaffirmed Moscow’s readiness to continue collaborative efforts with American counterparts to comprehensively address the root causes of the Ukrainian crisis.” This is the sort of boilerplate Moscow always uses to drag out the process, and the “root cause” of the “crisis” for Russia will forever be Ukrainian sovereignty.
In the face of all observable reality, Trump believes the root cause of the war is Ukraine—he regularly accuses Zelensky of being a warmonger and deflects blame from Putin. After a devastating Russian missile strike on Sumy on April 12, Trump described it as a “mistake,” despite the fact that two missiles in a row struck the city center—the second of which targeted first responders. The attack killed 36 people and injured many more, which made it the deadliest strike on Ukrainian civilians since 2023. When Trump was asked about Ukraine’s request for more Patriot missile defense systems in the wake of the attack, he said: “When you start a war, you’ve got to know that you can win the war, right? You don’t start a war with someone who’s 20 times your size and then hope people give you some missiles.”
If Trump is serious about walking away from the negotiations, he won’t just abandon Ukraine and the United States’ European allies—he will inflict a historic blow on American leadership. “It is not our war,” Rubio said when he announced that Trump has grown impatient. “We didn’t start it.” This is logic that belongs on the playground, not in the State Department—the United States doesn’t have to start a war to recognize the strategic necessity of defending its allies and deterring aggression. But playground logic has been a defining feature of Trump’s foreign policy—he bullies allies and throws tantrums when they don’t accede to his demands. He boasts about foreign leaders “kissing my ass” to make trade deals. He bullied Zelensky in the Oval Office, kicked him out of the White House when he pushed back, and cut off military and intelligence aid to Ukraine as a punishment. Now that negotiations are failing, he wants to take his ball and go home.
There has been no “art of the deal” for Ukraine. Trump immediately threw away his leverage in negotiations with Russia by making it clear that American support for Ukraine would soon be cut off no matter what. This gave Putin every incentive to run out the clock with token concessions (like the energy infrastructure ceasefire) and cynical assurances that he’s open to further negotiations. At the very least, Trump could have suggested that military aid to Ukraine was still on the table even if he had no intention of pushing for it in Congress.
After Trump was elected, some Ukrainians were hopeful that he would put their country in a stronger position than Biden. One soldier told the Kyiv Independent: “I believe that Biden and his administration are impotent.” The paper reported that a “recurring theme among Ukrainian residents hopeful that Trump will turn the tide of Russia’s full-scale invasion was an overarching sense of fatigue with the pace of Biden’s support for Ukraine and a desire for quicker action.” Oleksiy Melnyk is the co-director of foreign policy and international security at the Kyiv-based Razumkov Center, and he said Trump’s “unpredictability gives some people hope.”
Trump has for many years claimed that the United States must be more “unpredictable.” But when it comes to Ukraine, his actions have been entirely predictable at every step. He ran on bitter opposition to the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine and chose a vice president who once declared: “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.” He attacked Biden for supporting a pointless “proxy war” in Ukraine and constantly claimed that the administration was risking “World War III.” If Trump wanted to be unpredictable, he would have urged Congress to pass another funding bill for Ukraine. He would have told Putin that support for Ukraine would continue until Moscow started taking negotiations seriously. He wouldn’t have created deep cracks in the Western alliance by relentlessly attacking Zelensky and NATO in public while refusing to criticize Putin. Although it was difficult to predict the extent to which Trump would surrender to Russia, attack America’s allies, and undermine his own strategic position, this isn’t the sort of “unpredictability” Trump’s defenders had in mind.
The Ukrainians who hoped Trump would surprise them by taking a hard line against Moscow were tragically wrong. He has instead accommodated Putin at every available opportunity and inflicted permanent damage on the Western alliance that Ukraine has been trying to join. In the Oval Office ambush of Zelensky, Trump said, “You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now. With us, you start having cards.” But what good are the United States’ cards if Trump refuses to play them?
Trump appears to believe the war is unwinnable for Ukraine. One of the most revealing moments of the Oval Office clash was when Trump said, “If you didn’t have our military equipment, this war would have been over in two weeks,” to which Zelensky replied: “In three days. I heard it from Putin. In three days.” Zelensky was referring to the widespread view among many analysts that the country would fall in a matter of days at the start of the war. Trump apparently agreed with this view, initially describing the invasion as “genius” and “savvy.” But less than two months after the invasion began, Russia was forced to completely withdraw its troops from the region around Kyiv. While Russia controls roughly 20 percent of Ukrainian territory, its advance has been painfully slow and it is suffering far more casualties than Ukraine (though it also has a larger military and population). Despite Russia’s significant advantage in manpower and resources, it’s more difficult to wage an offensive war than a defensive one.
Had Trump shown Putin he was serious by reaffirming the U.S. commitment to Ukraine, the negotiations would have a much greater chance of success. Even if he planned to eventually rescind U.S. support, he could have had this discussion with the Ukrainian government and European leaders behind closed doors instead of publicly attacking allies, embracing Russia, blaming Ukraine for the war, and shouting at Zelensky in front of the cameras.
As the Trump administration insulted European governments and insisted that they would have no say in the negotiations, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was in Munich arguing that “Europe must provide the overwhelming share of future lethal and nonlethal aid to Ukraine.” The Trump administration wants Europe to shoulder a much greater defense burden, but it has offered no plan to responsibly facilitate this historic transition. It has instead expressed contempt for European governments (which have contributed $155 billion to Ukraine) and attempted to cut them out of negotiations. It has imposed tariffs on America’s European allies and threatened to launch a devastating trade war against them. Just months after treating Europe as irrelevant in the negotiations, the administration is on the precipice of making itself irrelevant. Rubio plans to skip the next round of ceasefire talks in London. It’s a good thing there are still grown-ups in charge in Europe who don’t throw fits and sulk when they realize that a phone call isn’t enough to end a major war.
One of the strangest aspects of Trump’s leadership is the disconnect between his infatuation with strength and his unwillingness to use the most effective levers of American power. The United States is the anchor of the most successful military alliance in history. Russia is a poor, corrupt, and increasingly isolated dictatorship that has become dangerously dependent on China. Moscow believes it has the right to dominate its neighbors, but those countries have other ideas. This is why NATO has steadily expanded since the end of the Cold War—countries in Russia’s “sphere of influence” have chosen to join the democratic West instead of remaining shackled to an aggressive and backward autocracy. The only way for Russia to maintain its suffocating grasp on its neighbors is through force, but this plan has backfired in Ukraine—the country has never been more hostile to Russia or more eager to join NATO and the EU. Putin will be remembered as the father of modern Ukrainian nationalism. Meanwhile, NATO continues to expand with the accession of Sweden and Finland—which added 830 miles to the alliance’s border with Russia.
The combined military and economic strength of NATO countries far exceeds Russia. Ukraine has been able to fend off the Russian onslaught for over three years with restrained support from the United States and its European allies. The Ukrainians who were frustrated with Biden were correct that his fear of escalation placed significant limits on the weapons systems they received and how those systems could be used.1 But the Trump administration is negotiating as if the war is already lost. It’s treating Russia like a peer superpower instead of a decaying petro-dictatorship with a GDP smaller than Canada’s. Trump is giving Putin what he has always craved: a green light to dominate his neighbors without fear of interference from Washington. This is because Trump shares Putin’s hostility to the rules-based international system that the United States has helped to build and maintain over the past 80 years. Trump wants the freedom to shred trade agreements, abandon allies, threaten America’s neighbors, and replace international institutions with his own ideas about what the world should look like.
Last month, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declared that the Trump administration is “rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely coincides with our vision.” When the United States refused to call Russia the aggressor in Ukraine in a recent UN resolution, Peskov marveled that this would have once been “impossible to imagine.” Lavrov has praised Trump’s “common sense.” As Trump threatens to annex Greenland, Putin observes that this is perfectly understandable: “It’s obvious that the United States will continue to systematically advance its geostrategic, military-political and economic interests in the Arctic.” Putin said this because he has an interest in abandoning international rules and norms around sovereignty and aggression—Trump is acting like a 19th century imperialist, which is a mirror image of Putin’s behavior. There is a tacit agreement between Trump and Putin: you control your sphere of influence, and I’ll control mine.
Trump deluded himself into believing that Putin is a friend who would resolve the conflict quickly and hand him a major political victory, but it should already be obvious that this was a huge miscalculation. Trump is an incompetent negotiator with a short attention span and an inflated sense of what he alone can accomplish. Did he really think incessant flattery of Putin would convince him to abandon a geopolitical obsession on which he has staked his legitimacy? Did he think Russia would be content with 20 percent of Ukrainian territory and the survival of a government it compares to the Nazis?
The Trump administration has been conducting negotiations in an alternate reality where Ukraine is the aggressor and Putin is desperate to find a path to peace. Trump’s envoy to Russia, Steve Witkoff, believes Putin is a trustworthy negotiating partner who doesn’t really want to take over Ukraine. “Why would they want to absorb Ukraine?” he asked during a recent interview with Tucker Carlson. “They don’t need to absorb Ukraine.” Witkoff said he thought Putin, a former KGB intelligence officer, was “straight up with me.” He endorsed the “referendums” held at gunpoint in Russian-occupied territory. He said Russia had no designs on other European countries. He said, “I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy” and stressed the complexity of the war in Ukraine. After the assassination attempt on Trump, he said Putin “went to his local church and met with his priest and prayed” for his buddy.
The Trump administration’s illusions about Putin and the war were always bound to be shattered. But instead of recognizing how disastrously they misjudged one of America’s greatest adversaries and holding him accountable for launching the largest conflict in Europe since World War II, they’re prepared to throw up their hands and move on. This wouldn’t just be a humiliating failure for Trump—it would also confirm that the United States no longer has the patience, moral clarity, or fortitude necessary for global leadership.
Three years of war have revealed that initial concerns about escalation were overblown, as the Biden administration was able to provide F-16s, ATACMS (which the administration authorized for use inside Russia), and other more advanced weapons without dragging NATO into a larger conflict.