Ukraine could be a big win for Trump
Russian President Vladimir Putin is weakened. Now is the moment to push him to end the war.
5 min
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President Donald Trump faces plunging public approval at home and a messy war he initiated abroad. But he has an opportunity to change that narrative, not in the Middle East but more than a thousand miles away, in Europe, where a bloody war rages on between Russia and Ukraine. In recent months, the tide has turned in that conflict in ways that make peace finally possible.
Ukraine is now in the fifth year of a war against an adversary with roughly 12 times its economy and more than four times its population. Its mere survival has been one of the great military and national achievements of the modern era. But now, Kyiv is no longer simply surviving. It is changing the arithmetic of the war.
For years, Russia’s brutal advantage was not that it fought well. It was that it could fight badly and endure the cost. Its army used conscripts, convicts, ethnic minorities, poor men from remote regions and anyone else the state could throw into the furnace. It lost staggering numbers of soldiers, but could recruit more than it lost, often bringing in more than 30,000 men every month.
That equation has begun to break. Russia is taking losses at a rate that appears to exceed its ability to replace trained troops. Its advances, bought at enormous cost, have slowed to a crawl. Russian forces that once aspired to take all of Donbas are now moving in meters, not miles. In May, battlefield trackers suggest Russia barely gained territory at all and may even have lost some ground. Russia’s size, once its great advantage, has become a liability: more logistics to protect, more targets to defend, more territory vulnerable to attack.
Ukraine, meanwhile, has substituted speed, intelligence and ingenuity for mass. It has built a formidable drone industry, much of it homegrown. It plans to produce more than 7 million drones this year. (By comparison, the United States is planning to produce about 300,000 by the end of 2027). Ukraine is using midrange strikes to disrupt Russian logistics and command posts behind the front. It is using long-range drones and missiles to hit refineries, oil depots, airfields, radar sites and military factories inside Russia itself. Russian President Vladimir Putin can no longer keep the war safely contained in Ukraine. Even Moscow’s Victory Day celebration in Red Square last month was scaled down under the shadow of Ukrainian drones.
None of this means Ukraine is close to an easy victory. Russia is still pounding Ukrainian cities with its own missiles and drones. Kyiv remains short of Patriot interceptors. It still has manpower problems, and its politics have been strained by corruption scandals and harsh conscription.
But the momentum has shifted. One crucial reason for this change is Europe. Perhaps the most underappreciated success of the war this year has been Europe’s ability to step in after America stepped back. European aid has now largely offset the collapse in American support for Kyiv. The European Union’s 90 billion euro loan package is beginning to move, freed from Viktor Orban’s obstruction after his defeat in Hungary. Europeans have taken charge of this war.
This is where Trump comes in. His diplomacy toward Ukraine has so far been a study in squandered leverage. He berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, treated Ukrainian concessions as the starting point of negotiations and gave Putin reason to believe he could wait the West out.
[JB note: this emphasis automatically appears on my screen. I don't know why this happens.]
But Trump still has tools no European leader possesses. He could threaten to restart major American military aid to Kyiv, tighten sanctions on Russian oil and the shadow fleet, and speed up the sale of U.S. weapons to NATO countries for transfer to Ukraine. Then he could offer Putin an exit ramp in the form of a peace deal. Remember, Russia has lost somewhere between 350,000 and 500,000 soldiers in a war that according to a new independent survey is now deeply unpopular at home.
Trump’s pro-Russian bias ironically positions him well to make such a deal. Putin knows Trump has long been skeptical of Kyiv and indulgent toward Moscow. Of course, for the Ukrainians and Europeans to accept the deal it would have to be serious. Ukraine should be willing to concede territory, but its new borders must be defensible. It needs real security guarantees that anchor Ukraine in the West. The war is not about Donbas. It is about whether Ukraine will remain a sovereign country free to choose its future.
Putin’s twin theories of victory were that Ukraine was weak and that the West would tire. Both have collapsed. This is Trump’s opportunity. He could help end the worst war in Europe since World War II, secure Ukraine’s place in the West and deter a revanchist great power with an imperial project to defeat the West. This would be a real achievement, not a phony, photo op ceasefire like the ones in the Middle East that Trump has brandished. It would be a deal that actually deserves to be called historic.
Fareed Zakaria writes a foreign affairs column for The Post. He is also the host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS.
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