New York Post
With every passing day, the Trump administration’s effort to bring about an end to the war in Ukraine through a real estate-like deal, swapping land for peace, looks increasingly futile.
No amount of flattery or concessions to Russia can change the fact that Vladimir Putin is not interested simply in establishing control over some contested territories, supposedly populated by Russian speakers.
He wants to end Ukraine’s existence as an independent nation, capable of charting its own course without the Kremlin’s boot on its neck.
Earlier this week, Russia violated the partial ceasefire of attacks on energy infrastructure by bombing energy facilities in Kherson.
“Not long ago I said we’d grind [Ukraine] down,” Putin then declared on Friday, “now it looks like we’ll finish them off.”
Together with a relentless, daily pounding of Ukrainian cities, it should not be difficult for President Trump to see that he is dealing with an untrustworthy, bad-faith actor who must be stopped and deterred — not accommodated or befriended.
Yet, accommodation seems to be a preferred route for many in the administration, presumably including for President Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, now also in charge of negotiations with Russia.
In the course of his interview with Tucker Carlson, Witkoff waxed lyrical about the putative affection that Putin, a reputed manipulator and former KGB officer, harbored for President Trump.
“When the president was shot,” he said, Putin supposedly “went to his local church and met with his priest and prayed” — before commissioning a “beautiful painting” of the US president.
Worse yet, any visible progress in the negotiations in Saudi Arabia seems to be coming at the price of significant US concessions to the Kremlin.
While Ukrainians accepted the idea of a partial ceasefire in the Black Sea essentially without conditions, US negotiators had to lure Russia by offering to restore Russian access to world grain and fertilizer markets — including by reconnecting Russian banks to the global, US dollar-dominated, financial system.
The war in Ukraine may sometimes seem static and thus pointless — but the picture from the battlefield hides its fundamental unsustainability for Russian public finances.
With deflated oil and gas revenue, a labor shortage, and interest rates above 20%, the Russian economy and its military production are bound to hit a wall in the coming year or two.
Bailing them out now, to produce a partial ceasefire or a peace deal that Putin will promptly break, is bad policy.
Nor is it true that Putin is doing “what anyone else would do,” as President Trump recently put it.
Russian authorities have abducted between 20,000 and 35,000 Ukrainian children to Russia, changing their names and dates of birth, indoctrinating them, and recruiting teenage boys into the Russian military.
Once again, Putin is not interested in land.
He is interested in turning Ukraine into an integral part of Russia, or its appendage — an obedient Belarus-like statelet under an autocratic pro-Kremlin leadership.
Hence the insistence, unfortunately embraced by some in the US administration, on an early election or a replacement of President Zelensky with a “transitional administration,” as Putin put it on Friday.292
Putin’s hand is weaker than it appears, and it is not too late for the Trump administration to change course.
Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, they say, is the definition of insanity.
In contrast, continuing in the current advances — promising a normalization of the US-Russia relationship or agreeing to the Kremlin’s increasingly brazen demands, including on the withdrawal of Western military support for Ukraine and ruling out a NATO-led peacekeeping force — only makes the United States look weak and ineffectual.