Trump Is Inviting Russia to Abandon Its War Aims
Trump's isn't offering concessions, merely reminding Russia this is a lot costlier for her than him
Biden wants Russia to not accomplish her aims in Ukraine. And Trump likewise wants Russia to not accomplish her aims in Ukraine.
Biden’s approach to that end centered around reassuring Kiev of US support “for as long as it takes” and priming America for the same
Trump’s approach meanwhile is to try to shut the war down.
This is partly due to differences in worldview. Bidenites were only too happy to be allocating $60 billion annually to bleeding Russia, and would spend twice as much for that purpose if they could.
Trumpers meanwhile would rather allocate the $60 billion to China if they could.
But this is only a part of the story. The other part is that the war has reached a different more mature stage, and that Kiev itself has shifted to looking for a way out.
In the last six months, the Zelensky government has gradually moved away from emphasizing outward confidence and the centrality of restoring territorial control, and to emphasizing the long-term security and survival of Ukraine, and the openness in principle to talks (thus de facto giving up on lost territories) under certain conditions (Western security assurances).
If last June Zelensky held a “peace” conference which he was adamant had to exclude Russia, already in July he insisted a Russian delegation would be invited to the next one. In truth, that the Trump-Biden debate had happened in the meantime and made Kiev reckon with the reality that Trump was a real possibility was definitely a factor in this. It was the very next day after the debate that Zelensky first spoke of a “diplomatic route” to ending the war.
However, despite Kiev’s past public-facing bravado, at lower levels Ukrainian-Russian contact never stopped, there are constant technical talks to exchange prisoners and the slain. In late 2023 a bigger secret deal was also reached to make energy targets off-limits to bombing, and similar talks were again ongoing in mid-2024 when they were scuttled by Ukraine’s Kursk offensive. Kursk itself was primarily launched for political aims to enhance Ukraine’s position in potential upcoming talks as some part of the Russian Federation under Kievan control complicates Kremlin’s insistence that territorial delineation proceed from facts on the ground. (With Kursk Ukraine also successfully dragged the US deeper into war vs Russia and tied it more firmly to itself.)
The Trump factor has forced Kiev to adapt how it talks about war and peace in public, but what it actually thinks privately is dictated by its war fortune, not the White House occupant. Its 2023 offensive went nowhere and its intensified 2024 mobilization drive has now conclusively failed to resolve its deep infantry shortage. These are the big drivers of the shift in mood in Kiev, not Donald Trump.
The war is at a stage now where it is evident that Ukraine’s warfighting model can in the best-case scenario deliver an eventual draw after more ground is lost, and in the worst-case will peter out before the Russian one, which may or may not entail a smaller or larger collapse.
However, every outline of a peace deal from the Trump camp invites Russia to abandon the war without having attained her war aims. To accept that it came up short, and give up on seeing where its current warfighting model will take her. (A model that is appallingly costly but not entirely ineffective.)
The standard Trumpian proposal (Vance, Waltz, Kellog) calls for a freeze along the existing line of control, and Ukraine formally out of NATO, and ends there. But this is absurd. Moscow does not fight over the formality of NATO membership, but over the essence of the question shall Ukraine be “Anti-Russia” or “Little Russia”, or something in the middle, and what?
Firstly, Ukraine was never going to be in NATO anyway. Secondly, formal Ukrainian NATO membership is a dead letter of no consequence if the West isn’t also willing to shed Western blood for it, which has been shown conclusively it is not.
Thirdly, the absence of a formal NATO membership has also been shown conclusively to be no hindrance whatsoever to Kiev receiving vast quantities of military, financial, intelligence, and technical backing against Russia.
The peace framework that Trump is advertising is something that by now Russia could have also gotten from Kiev or the Bidenites. That these did not go around publicly offering such a deal is because their constituencies are more realistic about Russian war goals, and thus they do not see the benefit of advertising willingness to forsake lost territory just to air a proposal Moscow will surely reject.
(Zelensky also correctly understands the more urgent talks for Kiev are not with Russia, but with the West to gain clarity on what security assurances, if any, can a post-war Ukraine count on from that side. Without clarity on that, a Kiev government can’t begin to know which Russian demands are safe to defy and which must be begrudgingly accepted.)
But Trump is no dummy either. Aside from offering to Moscow to give up on her Ukraine aims, he also keeps repeating just how costly the war is for Russia. He has just said Russia has lost “one million” lives in the war.
So when Putin rejects his proposal to give up in Ukraine it will be easy for Trump to wash his hands clean. He can then say: “I tried ending a bloody killing and reallocating billions to confronting China, but I really can’t be held responsible if a Stalin 2.0 would rather see another million of his people dead. In any case, this is costing us a lot less than it is costing him.”
The retort could be that continued war is also killing Ukrainians, but why should MAGA care about that? It’s not Trump who is hanging up “odin narod” posters in Kharkov and Kherson, it is Putin. The leader who should actually regret Ukrainian deaths is the one who claims them as his own people.
Putin won’t be ready for a deal until Kiev is ready for Istanbul-style concessions or Moscow’s warfighting model has exhausted itself, and Trump will have no problems walking away. (From the talks, not the war.) The two men are not unknowns, the big unknown is how much more Russia’s current volunteer-based warfighting model has left in the tank — if more than Ukraine, and how much more. This—not personalities—will decide what Moscow, Washington, and Kiev will be ready to sign onto and when.
The US-Russia stuff is predictable and in substance won’t be different than if Biden had stayed on for another term. Propping up Kiev may not be Trump’s preferred use of resources, but that doesn’t mean he finds pulling out and paving the way for a Ukraine in Russia’s orbit on his watch preferable. The latter is plenty enough for him to keep the US in the war and thus for the war to continue—that pouring riches into bloodshed is rarely anyone’s ideal scenario is trivial. Wars don’t require anyone to welcome them, merely to find alternatives even less attractive.
How exactly the US-Kiev relationship will proceed is more uncertain. Bidenites exited the stage having in their final act pressured Kiev to throw teenagers into the Slavgrinder. Will Trumpers soon follow suit? Waltz indeed already has. Will Trump’s “peacenik” populism be soon reduced to public threats that if Ukraine wants to continue receiving American aid it better starts throwing those 18-year-olds into the grinder? (Trump loves his one-track “hardliners" like Bolton/Waltz who he thinks set him up for a good negotiating position. In reality, voenkoms kidnapping teenagers from streets and schools could be extremely bad for Ukraine’s staying power in the war.)
Will the US maintain the aid at the current $60 billion level? Trump will privately be inclined to, so as not to undermine his position ahead of the attempted shutdown of the Russian war, but it may not be possible. Most military aid Ukraine has already received came from existing US stocks, but in some categories the Pentagon is reaching the limit of how much it feels comfortable giving up.
The most extreme example are ATACMS which the US still has many thousands of, but which can not be sent without turning various globe-spanning Pentagon contingency plans they are allocated to into dead letters. (Bidenites in communication with Waltz greenlighted ATACMS into Western Russia in November, but shipped no additional missiles, which made their strike expansion a farce with Ukraine by then already down to the last 50 missiles.)
The other big part of US aid packages are orders for new weapons with US arms manufacturers. However many of these are still working on orders for Ukraine placed in 2023 and 2024. Allocating budget billions just to extend the backlog even further may not be seen as particularly urgent or necessary. (Albeit it actually is very necessary as it assures manufacturers it is safe to expand capacity but such foresight is rare in political halls.)
Thus the flow of newly-built weapons to Ukraine will actually be greater than ever, but the overall flow will be lower. Lower will also likely be nominal valuations of future Ukraine aid bills, simply due to the physical reality of the partially depleted stocks and existing backlogs. This would have happened even if Harris had taken the White House. Indeed the Biden admin had already reached the point where it couldn’t realize the full volume of transfers Congress had authorized due to stocks no longer being there. Aid flow is hard-capped by the reality that, except for artillery shells (which are produced in government-owned armories), Bidenites did not mobilize the US defense base for war, and there is less to spare than at the onset.
On the other hand, Trump’s blustering and extortionist ways may work to squeeze a few additional billions in financial backing for Kiev from the impressionable and spineless Euroweenie elites. (When it comes to offering financial aid, which actually is easy to scale, Bidenites were already far stingier than Euros.)
Albeit most likely Putin won’t be ready for a peace deal on Trump’s timeline (ie in the first 6 months of 2025) neither is it particularly likely that his current war posture will be sufficient to fully attain his Istanbul war goals. Imposing a Weimar-style army-size limitations on a foe that has yet to be militarily broken is a tall order and a fantasy without historical precedent. (The shocking thing is Ukraine was even entertaining it, and at a moment when Moscow was in the process of the largest retreat of the SMO.)
Also, any Ukrainian government that simultaneously submitted to harsh army-size caps AND to Kremlin’s interpretation of “denazification” and Russian-language rights would doom itself. The question would be only whether this death would be first delivered by nationalists from within for doing the bidding of “Muscovites”, or the Russians from without for not implementing the peace bargain.
The changing of the guard in the White House will produce some new interesting twists (a renewed push for much harsher oil sanctions spearheaded by Waltz) but does not spell a radical or fundamental shift for this war. This is so evident and basic I feel silly and embarrassed even pointing it out, but seeing the level of delusion in some circles (hordes of people laughably thought the 90-day Trump foreign aid ban would apply to Ukraine) it is apparently necessary to do so
Trump says so much that's self-conflictory, that some of it has to sound true, but that doesn't mean he is. If he's positioned for a no-deal then someone else is motivating him. Ukraine is a fantastic profit maker and military testing ground for the USA. It'll end its role in the war when it believes there's more profit to be made from 'peace'. PS: Russia on the move the past 24hrs.
Certainly the attempt of an analysis on the current status, which is also not quite easy because at the moment it can not be said clearly what Trump really wants or. how free he is in his decisions actually Keyword Deep state.
As I have travelled many times to the USSR / RF, it seems to me that the author has not yet sufficiently dealt with the Russian soul or mentality. This is a general problem.
The core of RF especially the big cities St.Petersburg and Moscow are 100% behind the RF government. One should not always speak of Putin, nor should one always only speak of Trump, it is the respective government apparatus and the forces behind it.
Selensky has not yet revoked his decree of 2022 "Prohibition of negotiations with RF", so his statements we could enter into negotiations are doubtful.
The USA is not giving up the latest technology for nothing, nor are the Europeans.
You know, we former GDR citizens have learned to read and listen between the lines and this often seems to me as the great advantage that I hear from former West German colleagues and friends.
The whole sanction policy has not brought, it only damaged the Europeans, especially Germany.
The deindustrialization of Europe, especially Germany, is making massive progress and playing Trump or the USA into its cards. That’s why Trump may not really have an interest in ending the conflict.
One should also be honest, which in the article also claimed, how much of the billions of dollars really went to Ukraine and not into the coffers of the defense corporations.
Finally, one should open a simple calculation, when are the human reserves of Ukraine so exhausted that further resistance is pointless? In contrast, what it looks like in RF.
Russians will never give up MOTHER RUSSIA.
They have something in common with the US Americans and their star banner.
Do you look for this context in Europeans?