What The Hell America!

IT’S “UNFORTUNATE” THAT EUROPEAN LEADERS think Vladimir Putin isn’t interested in peace, U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff told CBS News last week. “I know what I heard,” Witkoff insisted, recalling his latest visit to Moscow, “the body language I witnessed.” It was a frightening echo of George W. Bush, who declared after meeting Putin in 2001 that he had “looked the man in the eye,” got “a sense of his soul,” and “found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy”—a hopeful take Bush later came to regret as he learned from bitter experience how duplicitous and aggressive an adversary he faced in the Kremlin.

This is a lesson Donald Trump and team have yet to learn, but it’s only the beginning of what the 47th president doesn’t understand about his Russian counterpart. Even more dangerous, Trump doesn’t grasp that his vision of peace in Ukraine—a compromise requiring concessions on both sides—is fundamentally at odds with Putin’s vision. Russia’s ambitions in Ukraine center on one goal and one goal only, and it’s not something that can be split 50–50. Putin is determined to end Ukrainian sovereignty—its very existence as a freestanding, independent nation.

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This mismatch doesn’t bode well for ceasefire talks continuing this week in Saudi Arabia. As long as one man seeks a deal—even a lopsided deal—and the other wants capitulation, they will inevitably talk past each other. Worse still, only Putin sees the skew, and he wants to prolong it. It serves his interest.

The longer he can keep Washington and Kyiv tied up in talks, the more time the Kremlin has to accomplish its aims militarily—seizing more Ukrainian territory, undermining Ukrainian morale and running out the clock on European war fatigue. Meanwhile, the longer the game goes on, the more desperate Trump becomes and the more he gives away—slice after slice of American power and Western leverage over Russia.

Some of the president’s concessions have been more consequential than others. It’s galling to watch Trump and his team parrot Putin’s talking points—that Volodymyr Zelensky is a dictator, that Kyiv started the war, that it’s not actually Ukraine’s fight but a proxy conflict between East and West. The White House looks ridiculous spewing nonsense like this, all of it taken directly from the Kremlin. But as long as it’s just talk, it can do only so much to hurt the Ukrainian war effort.

The same is probably true of Trump’s bullying style. Ambushing Zelensky in the Oval Office was a gift to Putin—an unmistakable signal about which side the United States is on. But odious as it was, it was more mood music than tactically or strategically impactful. So too this month’s temporary suspension of U.S. military aid and intelligence for Ukraine. The halt sparked terror across Ukraine and spooked European allies, many of whom are now reconsidering the purchase of American weaponry. But it isn’t clear that it altered the course of the war in a material way.

Trump’s credulous approach to U.S.-Russia negotiations may be more hazardous. Some of the president’s giveaways have been harmless enough. Putin bet big on a feint about the fighting in Kursk, offering to spare what he claimed was a large contingent of Ukrainian troops encircled by Russian fighters—and Trump gushingly accepted the offer without checking facts. (In reality, there had been no encirclement.)

Other overeager concessions, including endorsing Putin’s idea for a limited ceasefire—Kyiv and Moscow would agree to halt strikes on energy infrastructure—may be more insidious. What Putin knew and Trump apparently didn’t: Kyiv has just unveiled a new long-range missile, the Long Neptune, that can inflict serious damage on Russian oil depots. An energy-infrastructure ceasefire would curtail Ukraine’s use of the new weapon.

Other unsolicited White House concessions will cause more damage—to the Ukraine war effort and the Western alliance. Closing Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty cuts off 10 percent of the Russian population who listen to the stations regularly for news about the West. Halting the program that tracks abducted Ukrainian children abandons 30,000 missing kids to their fate at the hands of Russian captors. Pulling the United States out of the team investigating Russian war crimes in Ukraine means thousands of rapists and torturers will go unpunished.

Only time will tell how the administration has undermined American security by ceasing cyberoperations against Russia or how it has left Europe vulnerable to Russian hybrid warfare—assassinations, arson, undersea cable-cutting, and disinformation—by suspending U.S. efforts to investigate this escalating sabotage.

This week’s agreement on shipping in the Black Sea could also be a boon to Moscow, especially if is accompanied by an easing of sanctions that allowed Russia to resume agricultural imports and shore up its economy.

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But dangerous and unnecessary as all these steps are, none of them helps close the gap between Trump’s and Putin’s avowed aims in Ukraine. The hard men in the Kremlin are surely having a good laugh—Trump’s unforced errors are a delicious bounty. But none of these sweeteners are likely to bring Moscow any closer to a deal, because none of them touches the core issue that drove Putin to launch the war.

The Russian strongman makes no effort to hide his aim. “Russians and Ukrainians were one people,” his infamous 2021 essay on Russian-Ukrainian “unity” maintains. Russia was “robbed” by the successive Communist governments that “created” the Ukrainian state. Thirty years of independence have destroyed the once thriving Ukrainian economy. Western powers abetted this decline by poisoning Ukrainian minds and “dragg[ing]” the new state into their sphere of influence. “The formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, aggressive towards Russia, is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us,” Putin claims—and it must be reversed. Bottom line: the only Ukrainian sovereignty Putin can accept is “sovereignty . . . in partnership with Russia”—an existence, other vassal states like Belarus and Kyrgyzstan show, that’s no kind of sovereignty at all.

Trump has not endorsed Putin’s aims, and his talk about wanting compromise suggests he may not believe in the “unity” of Ukraine and Russia. But capping Ukraine’s weapons, reducing its army, and taking steps that grant Russia a bigger role in the Ukrainian political system would be major wins for Putin’s dream of ending Ukrainian independence. So would barring Ukraine from NATO and lifting U.S. sanctions on Russia, freeing Moscow to pursue the war indefinitely.

How far will Trump go? It depends how badly he wants “peace.” If what that means is peace at any price, Putin is eager to seal the deal.

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