From the Telegraph / Yahoo!News:
"Trump has never tried to stop Putin, but with our help Kyiv can hold off Moscow
Before he came into office, Donald Trump said he could stop the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. Now he has had more than 24 weeks, but the fighting continues unabated.
Today the possibility looms of a meeting between President Trump and President Putin, so people are excited. They say Trump has hardened against Russia; America has threatened Russia with tougher sanctions. Might something actually happen?
If you look at Trump’s presentation of the issue since coming into office, you will certainly observe some alteration.
Before he came into office, Donald Trump said he could stop the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. Now he has had more than 24 weeks, but the fighting continues unabated.
Today the possibility looms of a meeting between President Trump and President Putin, so people are excited. They say Trump has hardened against Russia; America has threatened Russia with tougher sanctions. Might something actually happen?
If you look at Trump’s presentation of the issue since coming into office, you will certainly observe some alteration.
In the early months, he spoke almost as if using Russian talking points, and badmouthed President Zelensky of Ukraine. But he probably registered that the disgusting scene in the Oval Office in February in which he and Vice-President Vance tried publicly to humiliate Zelensky had not been such a brilliant idea.
Trump also became annoyed with Putin for not accepting his ludicrously favourable offer to Russia just like that. This burst out in his telling tweet on May 27: “What Vladimir Putin doesn’t realise is that if it weren’t for me, lots of bad things would already have happened to Russia and I mean REALLY BAD.”
He was accidentally admitting that his idea of peace in Ukraine was to give Russia most of what it wanted, and he had been working hard to that end. Why was friend Vlad not grateful? He felt personally affronted that Putin would often (as he still does) kill some more civilians shortly after one of the two men’s friendly phone calls: “He’ll talk so beautifully, and then he’ll bomb people at night.”
Occasional Trump expressions of outrage have continued. But so have his deadlines that pass unnoticed. He has never come through with a major deterrent against Russia. The latest trip to the Kremlin of the president’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, seems to have effaced the sanctions deadline against Russia which Trump claimed, a few days earlier, to have brought forward. One senses that Trump, not Putin, is the one begging for a deal.
Imagine it from Putin’s point of view. Certainly, he wants to keep on the right side of Trump, but he has very different priorities. His quarter of a century in power has been shaped by wishing to rebuild the Russian empire and, in the process, destroy European security as established with the fall of the Soviet Union. In the words of James Sherr, the veteran British-Estonian Russia watcher, Putin sees Ukraine simply as an “amputated vassal” to be subdued. He does not want peace before that work is finished.
Conceivably, Putin might want the sort of ceasefire that Trump advocates, but only if he could extract immediate advantage. He is not currently under enormous pressure to stop fighting. He has enough cash and arms (Russia now gets more shells from North Korea than Ukraine gets from the whole of the EU) and, despite losing about 1,000 a day, enough men whom that money can buy.
At the back of his mind is the long-standing Russian belief that the United States is its permanent enemy: so three more years of the Russophile Trump may seem of little account.
Putin will also sense the danger of losing momentum. Like Macbeth, he is “in blood / Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.” Without the joy of victory or the tension of continued combat, Russians will start asking difficult questions of a leader who has demanded so much of them with so little to show for it and has ceded economic and political power to China.
Strange to say, the psychological position of Ukraine is not so dissimilar. It is true that it has far fewer men and resources than Russia. If the issue comes down to attrition alone, it will eventually lose; but the fashion in the West for saying the Ukraine has lost is not borne out by the facts.
More than two years ago, I helped deliver a field ambulance to a stabilisation point near the Bakhmut front. I was told this week that, despite continuous fighting, the total Russian advance in that area since then has been three miles. A year ago, we were all reporting that Pokrovsk was about to fall. Today, despite the Russian 2025 offensive, we are reporting the same thing. Ukrainian advances in drone warfare in that time have been spectacular – though Russia catches up with technology fast. The raids at the end of May which knocked out Russian UAVs, some of them in Russian bases thousands of miles away, were astonishing.
The Ukrainians long for respite, of course. The strain on their troops is enormous, but there is virtual unanimity in the country that they must keep as much territory as possible and remain independent and sovereign.
I expect they would concede some things – de facto loss of Crimea, perhaps – but only as part of a policed settlement. They fear – indeed they know, because Trump has said as much – that America is not prepared to protect any deal it may broker. So how much use is anything it may propose?...
So when either side looks at Trump, neither sees an all-powerful saviour or wise mediator. They see someone who does not understand or share their modes of thought. He cannot grasp what an existential war means, and therefore how a lasting peace could be arrived at. For discreditable reasons, he is pro-Russia, and never admits the evil of Russia’s aggression, but the main point is that he can hustle but not deliver.
Obviously, he is a very powerful man, and so must be humoured, but if either Russia or Ukraine accepts a ceasefire, each will be doing so only to weaken the other side, militarily or diplomatically. No ceasefire will last.
The other aspect of the situation which Trump seems not to understand is the threat to European security and global order, and NATO’s role in protecting the post-1945 peace that guarantees these things. This makes him dangerous, but also, in a sense, marginal.
This is where Europe has benefited from Ukraine’s courage and tenacity. With the honourable exception of Britain’s quick-acting military support, led by Boris Johnson in February 2022, the main European powers were flummoxed by Putin’s invasion. If Ukraine had not so successfully resisted, European security today would be broken, north, south and east. Ukraine has bought us time, and with it, a greater toughness and realism about collective defence.
The EU plus Britain have a GDP 12 times the size of Russia. We are getting better, though much too slowly, in helping to supply Ukraine and giving it a freer hand to make much more of its own defence equipment. It is preparing new generations of weapons. And now, as part of fairer burden-sharing, the United States is selling us, through NATO means much less bureaucratic than EU ones, kit we can then supply to Ukraine.
It is well within our power and rights to create a situation in which Russia cannot win in Ukraine and cannot achieve the wider destabilisation which it is attempting from Estonia to the Balkans. We should not be deflected by Trump’s sound and fury, signifying not all that much."
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