Earlier this month, President Trump read Russian President Vladimir Putin the riot act: sign a peace deal ending the 41 month-long war in Ukraine or prepare to watch your biggest customers, like China and India, decrease their purchase of Russian oil and gas to avoid U.S. tariffs of 100 percent. In the meantime, Trump continued, the United States would be selling everything from munitions to Patriot missile defense systems to its NATO allies, who in turn will re-route this equipment to the Ukrainian army. Trump’s decision was greeted almost universally as a step in the right direction.
A lot of ink has been spilled in the days since on Trump’s supposed transformation from Putin sympathizer to Putin hater. But this is a sideshow to the main event: will Trump’s tougher line actually help him achieve an end to the war? History gives us an answer, and unfortunately, it’s not the one the Trump administration is looking for.
After months in which Washington attempted to entice Moscow into a diplomatic process, Trump has concluded that sticks are just as important as carrots in moving Putin towards an acceptable endgame. Indeed, as much as he panned Joe Biden’s strategy toward the war, Trump is now as close as he has ever been in executing it. The assumptions now guiding Trump’s strategy on the conflict are nearly identical to Biden’s: with the right combination of U.S. sanctions and military aid, the Russians will grow tired of fighting and agree to negotiate a way out.
Yet this assumption has been tested over the last three and a half years, and the conclusion is clear: the war in Ukraine is of such importance to Putin that he’s more likely to double down than talk under duress.
We can state this with confidence because this is precisely how Putin has acted since the war erupted. There have been multiple times during the conflict when Russia was presented with an opportunity to prioritise diplomacy but chose instead to continue its quest to subjugate Ukraine — or at the very least create facts on the ground that would eventually produce a peace deal more to its liking. In Putin’s mind, allowing Ukraine to win at the negotiating table is as dangerous as allowing Ukraine to win on the battlefield.
There are numerous instances in which Russia endured the pressure and came out the other side as committed to its objectives as it was before. When the Russian army’s offensive in Kyiv fizzled out during the first three months of the war, Moscow re-oriented its campaign plan to Ukraine’s eastern regions even as it explored what concessions it could wring out of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Despite the immense casualties the Russian army was sustaining at the time, Russia’s terms were tough: no Ukrainian membership in NATO, the Ukrainian army’s size must be capped to 85,000 personnel and Moscow must retain a veto over any postwar security arrangement for Kyiv.
In September 2022, the Ukrainian army was making significant territorial gains in the northeast, capturing hundreds of square miles in a matter of days. Russian troops, bewildered, disorganised and unprepared, were forced to withdraw from their positions in what many Western pundits at the time called a turning point in the war. Putin, however, didn’t get the memo. Rather than sue for peace, he ordered a partial mobilisation of 300,000 Russian men to plug the gaps, stabilise the lines and over time retake some of the territory that was lost. His back against the wall and facing a Western-supported Ukrainian army on the upswing, Putin gambled on escalation in the hope more troops could alter the balance of power on the ground.
A similar dynamic occurred in the summer of 2024. In yet another surprise offensive that caught Moscow off guard, the Ukrainians swept into the southern Russian province of Kursk, at one point capturing more than 380 square miles in the process. Coming at a time when U.S. military aid shipments to Kyiv were at a steady clip, Zelensky described the offensive as a way to not only take the war to Russian soil but to convince the leadership in Moscow to begin serious diplomacy. The reality was exactly the opposite; confronted with the most significant incursion into Russia since World War II, Putin devoted more conscripts to the area and, with the help of the approximately 12,000 North Korean soldiers Pyongyang agreed to deploy, gradually drove the Ukrainian army out. Today, the Ukrainian city of Sumy, just across the border from Kursk, is now an active front in the war.
One can certainly sympathise with Ukraine’s predicament. Russia’s aerial barrage is now at a fever pitch. This, along with Putin’s tendency to mouth words about peace at the same time he’s bombing cities, is instigating Trump’s wrath to the point where the administration’s Ukraine policy looks eerily similar to Biden’s.
The stakes for Putin are far higher than they are for Trump
But we should be under no illusions: the same policy is bound to have the same dismal results. Another $10 billion worth of U.S. weapons shipments isn’t likely to accomplish anything more than what the Biden administration’s $62 billion in military aid did. While it’s an uncomfortable question, U.S. officials need to begin asking whether there is anything the United States can do, short of a direct U.S. military intervention no serious policymaker would pursue, that will push Putin to change his strategic calculus.
Ultimately, Ukraine’s geopolitical trajectory matters more to Russia than it does the United States. The stakes for Putin are far higher than they are for Trump. As long as this is the case, none of us should be predicting game-changers in the weeks and months ahead.
