Trump is giving Putin a most wonderful gift

Donald Trump wants the war in Ukraine to end. Volodymyr Zelenskyy wants the war in Ukraine to end. Many other presidents and prime ministers want the war to end. Vladimir Putin is not one of those presidents. The war in Ukraine has become the political, psychological and economic center of Putin’s regime.

That basic asymmetry would seem to doom any attempt at a negotiated peace — it is, in fact, the main reason no meaningful peace negotiations have occurred in the three-and-half years since Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Trump thinks he has a solution, though. He says he intends to use his negotiating prowess and keep ratcheting up economic pressure until Putin has no choice but to stop the fighting.

Between the bombastic social media posts, the shifting deadlines, the erratic announcements — one day a White House official says Trump will meet with Putin only after Putin meets with Zelenskyy, another day Trump drops the requirement — it’s easy to overlook the fact that Trump’s policy toward Russia largely follows the same failed strategy employed by the Biden administration, the first Trump administration and the Obama administration before that. For more than a decade, the United States has responded to Russian aggression by threatening and gradually imposing economic sanctions. That some of Trump’s sanctions take the form of tariffs doesn’t alter the nature of the policy.

The conventional theory behind sanctions is that economic pressure destabilizes regimes, possibly forcing the leader to change course. In one scenario, widespread hardship — unemployment, inflation, shortages — leads to popular discontent, even unrest. In another, a shrinking economy and loss of access to foreign markets anger the elites, who stage a palace coup or at least compel the leader to change direction.

The problem with this theory is that it’s wrong. When sanctions have an effect, it is usually to immiserate ordinary people. The elites remain wealthy, and the gap between the rich and the poor only grows. Rather than foment resentment against the regime and the elites, this tends to rally society against the country that imposed the sanctions. That enemy, after all, is far away and easily turned into an abstraction, while the elites at home control the media, which frames the conflict. They also control the jobs and the goods, making it much costlier to hate the elites at home than the enemy far away. And beyond a certain level, hardship leads people to withdraw from even thinking about politics, because they have to focus on survival.

As for the palace coup scenario, Russia has shown clearly how sanctions come to have the opposite of their intended effect. Superrich Russians living abroad who found their access to Western markets cut off and some of their assets frozen moved to places like Dubai or returned to Moscow. What else were they going to do? That the economic pie is shrinking doesn’t mean that the elites suddenly start conspiring to overthrow the leader — a risky proposition unlikely to succeed in the best of cases; it means only that they compete harder for what remains of the pie.

The conventional model dictates that sanctions be imposed gradually, following stern warnings. This gives the Russian regime time to prepare for the impact: to subsidize domestic production of goods that will no longer be imported (Obama-era sanctions did wonders for Russian farmers and cheese makers), to prioritize new export markets as well as to find third-party countries through which to, say, export oil or import dual-use technology. It also bolsters ties between Russia and countries that are already under U.S. sanctions — such as Iran, which has become an essential partner in Russia’s drone warfare.

And still, one presidential administration after another has touted sanctions as its main instrument in getting Putin to change his ways. Joe Biden imposed multiple rounds of sanctions, though none were “devastating,” as he had promised. Trump imposed an additional 25% tariff on India, ostensibly as a penalty for importing Russian oil, and has promised more secondary tariffs for Russia’s other trade partners. Year after year, American presidents do the same thing, expecting different results. In this one way Trump is no crazier than his predecessors.

However difficult it is for foreign-policy theorists to grapple with the limitations of the economic pressure approach, for Trump it is all but impossible. Again and again, Trump has shown that he assumes that everyone is motivated by money.

He is not alone in this: Many Western analysts have repeatedly suggested that Putin would seek an off-ramp in Ukraine once the war proved costly for Russia and, perhaps more to the point, for him personally. As much as Putin loves wealth, however, he has shown that he loves power even more — eternal power in his own country, which he wins by expanding Russia’s borders, and power in the world at large, which he wins by making other leaders fear him. Trump seems to be unaware that, by meeting with Putin, he is giving Putin exactly what the Russian leader wants — a demonstration of his power.

Trump is giving Putin additional gifts by agreeing to meet with him without Zelenskyy and by sidelining the European Union. Trump is affirming for all of Russia to see what Putin has claimed all along: that the conflict is really between Russia and the United States.

The moment Putin walks into the negotiating room, he has gotten everything he wants — plus an opportunity to make a quip about Alaska as historically Russian land (consider this a prediction). If the meeting does not produce an agreement, Putin loses nothing. Trump, on the other hand, would lose face if he walked out empty-handed. He may be motivated to accept something, anything.

The conditions for peace that Russia offered in June were merely a more elaborate display of the four things Putin has consistently demanded: land, including parts of Ukraine that Russia has not occupied; an end to Western military aid to Ukraine; guarantees that Ukraine will never be invited to join NATO; and a change of leadership in Ukraine. Trump can agree to those conditions, but Zelenskyy will never accept them. Putin has very little reason to change his demands.

Still, if the Russian leader is inclined to help Trump look good — a big if — they may emerge with some kind of a ceasefire agreement. This may be a time-limited ceasefire, contingent on Ukrainian withdrawal from parts of eastern Ukraine. Such a deal would force Ukraine to retreat from positions it considers strategically important while giving Russia a couple of months to regroup before attacking again, on the pretext that Ukraine didn’t abide by Russian demands. Another possibility that has been floated is a ban on waging war deep inside enemy territory, or an air truce. Such an agreement would save lives — in Kyiv and Odesa, which have come under Russian barrages day after day, but also in Russian cities, which Ukraine has grown increasingly capable of attacking with drones.

For Ukraine, an air truce would come at tremendous strategic cost. It would continue to be a country at war. It would still be governed under a set of state-of-emergency provisions. Families would continue to be separated, with so many women and children having fled to Western Europe while the men remained. Worst of all, people would continue dying at the front, in the villages and towns near the front line, and in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, which is about 20 miles in.

The ability to attack deep in Russian territory is Ukraine’s sole negotiating advantage. These days, Russian airports are frequently forced to suspend operations because of drone attacks. The mayor of Moscow reports on the number of drones intercepted by air defense in much the same way as the mayor of Kyiv does. This is not enough to destabilize Putin’s regime, but it is enough to make him nervous. If drone attacks deep inside Russian territory stopped, war — what Russian propaganda still calls the “special military operation” — may once again come to feel far away.

The only thing that could force Putin to negotiate in earnest is the possibility of military defeat. Without that prospect, he is content to let the war continue forever. He doesn’t care about losing wealth as much as Trump imagines he does, and he doesn’t care about losing soldiers at all. In 2022 and again this May, the Kremlin noted that Peter the Great’s war with Sweden, which began in 1700, lasted 21 years. This war, too, could go on for decades.

One doesn’t have to go back centuries to imagine what that would be like. The forever war is already here. A devastating new documentary, 2000 Meters to Andriivka, by Ukrainian director Mstyslav Chernov shows what it looks like.

The film follows a Ukrainian brigade trying to liberate a small village. It takes them months to cover the distance in the movie’s title, roughly the equivalent of 1 mile. The movie shows the gigantic horrors of war — entire cities destroyed, swaths of farmland turned into minefields and what looks like miles of identical fresh graves — and the smallness of it: handfuls of soldiers, armed with semiautomatic rifles, killing and being killed one person at a time, taking one prisoner at a time, fighting for one trench at a time, in terrifying minutes that stretch into hours. It is relentless like a nightmare. A platoon commander says that he dreams of the fighting, then wakes up to the fighting. “And I thought, this war is a nightmare none of us can wake up from,” the narrator says.

As the soldiers on-screen drag themselves through mud and ruins, the voices of Western commentators and newscasters occasionally intrude, off screen.

“Western confidence is likely to dip.”

“If we’re not getting results here, then perhaps Ukraine wants to think about another plan, even some land concessions for peace.”

“Western officials have expressed disappointment in a much-vaunted counteroffensive.”

“Russia has millions more men from whom to draw. There’s no path to a military victory here, only more death.”

“How sustainable is this level of support when there’s really no end in sight to the war?”

Those are not, in the end, complicated questions. No, Ukraine cannot win this war as it is fought now. Yes, this war may drag on indefinitely, and yes, this means more and more death. But this was never and still is not the only possible outcome. The United States and NATO have always had the capacity to put an end to this war the only way it can be ended: by defeating Putin. They have consistently chosen not to do that, relying instead on old, failed policies. In this one way, Trump is more of the same. He just puts on a much bigger show.