President Trump promised that when he entered office, he was going to assess the Russia-Ukraine situation and try to facilitate an actual end to the war.
People who have been watching this war very closely understand Russia’s original goal: take Kyiv, completely ingest and then digest all of Ukraine, and turn it into a functioning part of the new Russian empire.
That failed very early on in the war.
The war then very quickly transmuted into a Ukrainian attempt, backed by Europe and the Biden administration, to take back portions of the country that had essentially been conquered by Russia in 2014 after the Euromaidan Revolution. That revolution was an attempt to take Donbas and Crimea back from Russian forces but was largely doomed to failure. The only way for it to have been successful would have been to arm Ukrainians to the extent that it might have prompted a larger Russian intervention, possibly using tactical nuclear weapons.
It may be that those concerns over a larger war were exaggerated. However, the risk-reward relationship was out of balance. The reality was that the West had very little interest in Ukraine fighting a large-scale war to take back Donbas and Crimea, areas that are predominantly pro-Russian by virtually all polling data, even before the fake Russian democratic takeover. Those areas were historically very pro-Russian.
Russia taking over those areas was devastating to the economy of Ukraine. Much of Ukraine’s oil-rich area is in its east, in the Donbas region. Crimea, of course, is on the Black Sea, where many of the warm water ports available to the Ukrainians were.
The reality was that, barring some sort of massive war effort, those areas were not going to be retaken by Ukraine. So, this conflict had settled into a stalemate for almost three years; the original invasion took place at the end of February 2022.
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For a very long time, the Biden administration had a conflicting and mutually exclusive strategy. On the one hand, the Biden administration suggested they would continue to provide endless aid until “victory was achieved,” but on the other, they refused to provide either the necessary aid to achieve full-scale victory or to define victory as something other than full-scale victory.
These were mutually exclusive tactics. If they were defining victory as, “Ukraine takes back Donbas and Crimea,” then they were going to have to give Ukraine the weaponry necessary to accomplish that. Anything less would lead to stalemate and loss. Or, theoretically, “victory” could have been redefined as survival, meaning Russia already controlled Donbas and Crimea before the 2022 invasion thus Russia’s goal had already been defeated. At that point, victory could have been achieved — by any sort of rational stretch of the imagination — by simply fending off further Russian territorial aggression.
By that measure, the war should have come to an end a couple of years ago, basically because the battle lines in Ukraine have been fairly solidified for roughly two and a half years.
The late Henry Kissinger proposed that this off-ramp essentially be offered in May 2022. I thought that his idea was the correct approach because there was no actual end goal achievable.
The Biden administration openly admitted this. They basically said, “We are going to provide weaponry until victory is achieved.” How was victory defined? They said, “We don’t know.”
You cannot win a war if you refuse to define victory. Either victory would mean taking back all Ukrainian territory, which would have required the Biden administration to send F-16s to Ukraine, or victory would be defined in some other way, in which case an off-ramp should have been sought.
Trump is taking a much more concerted view of reality; he is open to negotiations with the Russian regime. He has put forward a proposal to meet with Vladimir Putin directly. He revealed on Wednesday, according to the New York Post, that he and Russian President Putin have agreed to start talks immediately to end Moscow’s war on Ukraine.
“[W]e want to stop the millions of deaths taking place in the War with Russia/Ukraine,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, contending that the war “would not have happened if I were President, but it did happen, so it must end. No more lives should be lost!”
The Post continued:
The president also said that he and his Russian counterpart expressed openness to “visiting each other’s nations,” while letting slip to reporters in the Oval Office Wednesday afternoon that “we expect that he’ll come here, and I’ll go there, and we’re going to meet also, probably in Saudi Arabia.”
Trump added on Truth Social that the negotiating process “will begin by calling President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy [sic], of Ukraine, to inform him of the conversation, something which I will be doing right now,” before revealing that the American delegation to any peace talks would be led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, national security adviser Mike Waltz, and Middle East special envoy Steve Witkoff.
Zelensky then confirmed in a Facebook statement that he and Trump had “a meaningful conversation” about “opportunities to achieve peace [and] discussed our readiness to work together at the team level, and Ukraine’s technological capabilities—including drones and other advanced industries.”
In other words, he was making an argument to Trump that the United States should provide Ukraine with enough weaponry to fend off any future Russian attack.
Now, in reality, Zelensky is going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming to the deal, at least publicly. Why? Let’s assume you’re a Ukrainian citizen, and you’ve watched your brothers and sisters get murdered by the Russians, which is what has happened over the course of this war. You’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people if you combine both sides’ dead and wounded.
You’ve been told by Zelensky that you’re not just going to win the war, but you’re also going to push the Russians off of every inch of Ukrainian land, and now you’re going to get less than that. Zelensky is going to have to take the political hit unless the United States is willing to take the political hit.
Biden was never willing. He was always cowardly and pusillanimous when it came to the idea that he would take the hit for anything less than a full Ukrainian victory. He did not want to be blamed for Ukraine not being able to push Russia off that land. So, instead, he decided to let the war percolate and simmer on, and he was willing to allow his poll numbers to be boosted by Russian and Ukrainian dead.
Why? Because he was unwilling to do what actually had to be done, which was to publicly negotiate a deal with Putin over Zelensky’s head and then cram down the deal on Zelensky. That would have made him a bad guy in the eyes of many members of the Left in the United States who decided that the Ukrainian flag was going to go in their profile.
If Biden had been a brave, capable leader, he would have negotiated the off-ramp that everyone saw coming.
The off-ramp looks something like this: Ukraine does not become a part of NATO because one of the reasons that Russia says they invaded Ukraine was because Russia didn’t want to be bordered by NATO nations. Instead, there would have been, effectively, a mutual defense guarantee between the United States, Europe, and Ukraine to prevent a further act of Russian aggression that was not exactly NATO.
There wouldn’t have been an entry by Ukraine into the EU, which has always been a sort of hot button issue in Ukraine. In fact, when Zelensky was first elected, he was not somebody who was considered supremely for entering the EU. It was only after the Russian invasion that he seemed to turn wildly in that direction.
What the deal looks like is Ukraine gets armed up to prevent further Russian invasion. Russia gets to claim sovereignty over these areas — which, by the way, it already has. In its own Duma, they’ve already voted to claim sovereignty over Donbas and Crimea.
The international community probably half-accepts it. They don’t say, “Yes, this is now sovereign Russian territory,” but they do say, “We are not going to foment war over the retaking of that territory.”
Then, everybody basically goes weapons-down for the moment. It doesn’t end the conflict. It’s more like the Korean War. There’s an armistice line. There was never any peace agreement signed at the end of the Korean War. There just ended up being a North Korea and a South Korea. And that armistice line has been holding since 1953.
That’s probably the best-case scenario. President Trump is not willing to allow Putin to slow-play this, to wait for Trump to withdraw aid and then invade the rest of Ukraine.
I said all this during the campaign. There was all of loose talk, by both isolationists on the Right and nut-jobs on the Left, that Trump was going to walk into office, immediately pull all aid from Ukraine, and allow Putin to stroll down the streets of Kyiv.
I said that was not something that Trump was willing to do. Why? Because Trump doesn’t want a headline in which he surrenders Ukraine to Putin.
If there’s one thing that President Trump cares about on a personal level, it is not being made to look weak and feckless. So he was always going to provide continued aid to Ukraine to the point where some sort of off-ramp could be reached.
President Trump is a strong president. And he wishes to give off the image of a strong president, which is why he’s not going to cut off the aid. President Trump is deeply American. And this country was founded on strength and on freedom.
Trump is not a fool. He’s not going to trust Putin, who’s a deeply untrustworthy, evil dictator. He throws people off the third stories of buildings if they happen to cross his regime.
But Trump understands power. He innately understands politics in his bones.
He is taking the pragmatic, utilitarian approach to the situation. It has been the correct approach for several years, but Biden was unwilling to do it. Trump will be seen by those on the Left as a bad guy for having “sold out” Ukraine. But Ukraine was never going to be able to retake the territories.
And Trump has the guts to face everyone down and get the job done.
