The expression “snow job,” first uttered during the Second World War, was a play on the idiom “snowed under,” meaning “an elaborate cover up … an attempt to convince someone that something is true, when it is in fact not.” It can also refer to “intense flattery to get someone to do something you want.”
For Russian President Vladimir Putin, it is all of the above — especially as he attempts to curry favor with President Trump. Putin now hopes to achieve at the negotiating table what his armies have failed to do on the battlefields of Ukraine.
Putin does not want a ceasefire or a peace deal to bring the war in Ukraine to an end. But he knows that a temporary ceasefire is a means to Ukraine’s eventual end — and that Trump and NATO are seeking to end the war sooner than later.
Retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine and Russia, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have publicly signaled that the official position of the U.S. is to “bring the war to an end.” Trump himself has repeatedly said both he and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky are ready to negotiate a deal. Putin, however, senses blood in the water in both Washington and in Kyiv.
Far from strong-arming the Russian president to the negotiating table, the West is perhaps unwittingly giving negotiating leverage to Putin — and he is seizing the opportunity in an effort to retrieve his faltering campaign in Ukraine.
Putin likely believes Trump is dealing him a potentially winning hand. Giddy at the prospect, the Kremlin appeared to direct Vladimir Solovyov, the host of the popular evening television news magazine on state-controlled Russia-1, to hint at Putin’s coming gambit.
Moscow will buy Ukraine in exchange for the 300 billion Euros of Russian funds being impounded by the European Union — provided, of course, that Trump “hand[s] us everything all the way to Transnistria,” the breakaway province of Moldova that abuts Ukraine’s southwestern border.
Solovyov reveled in the idea that this scheme would give Russia full control of the Black Sea. But what would happen to the Ukrainian people? Solovyov suggested moving them “out to Poland, Hungary, Romania, whatever.” This is known as genocide by negotiation.
Then came the ultimate snow job. Solovyov suggested to his guests that the U.S. should withdraw from NATO and “restore a military alliance with the Russians like the one we had during the Great Patriotic War,” which we know as World War II.
There is only one problem with all of this. Putin has already told us what his real end goal is in Ukraine — and in Europe.
As we warned last week, the Russian president made his “duplicitous position crystal clear.” As the Institute for the Study of War noted, Putin has advertised that he “is willing to negotiate with the United States about the war in Ukraine but … maintains his demands for Ukraine’s full capitulation.”
Putin is not merely trying to snow Trump under ahead of negotiations. He is also trying to freeze out Zelensky from participating. On Tuesday, Putin said that Russia could hold peace talks with Ukraine but ruled out speaking directly with Zelensky because he considers the Ukrainian president an “illegitimate” leader.
Zelensky responded that Putin was “afraid of negotiations and was using cynical tricks” to prolong the nearly three-year conflict.” In other words, Putin is only using the prospect of negotiations to buy time.
The White House should heed Zelensky. He has witnessed Putin’s snow jobs before — and none more obvious than when Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claimed in January 2022 that Russia was not seeking a pretext to invade Ukraine.
Putin still believes he can win. He just needs the U.S. and NATO to stop supplying weapons and ammunition to Ukraine, and he has said that the fighting would end “in a month and a half or two.”
That is why Putin wants to negotiate directly with Trump. He believes he can reason with Trump, and to do that he must appeal to Trump’s ego. He attempted to do just that last Friday when he told reporters that if Trump had been president — “if his victory hadn’t been stolen in 2020 — then maybe there would not have been the crisis in Ukraine that emerged in 2022.”
Chinese general, strategist, philosopher, and writer Sun Tzu once wrote, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
To execute a proper snow job, one must know his enemy — and Putin at least thinks he knows Trump. He saw Trump’s comment last week as an opening: “Let’s get this war, which never would have started if I were president, over with! We can do it the easy way, or the hard way — and the easy way is always better.”
But there is no easy way with Putin — only his way. His comments and his actions suggest he has no intention of negotiating anything other than the complete capitulation of Ukraine on his timeline.
Neither Trump nor NATO can permit themselves to be snowed under by Putin, who is simply setting conditions for his final act.
Col. (Ret.) Jonathan Sweet served 30 years as an Army military intelligence officer. Mark Toth writes on national security and foreign policy.
