Bloomberg: Trump avoids making clear decisions on Ukraine
President Trump is seeking to distance himself from the Ukrainian conflict, but a complete withdrawal from the peace talks would be a strategic failure for the United States, Bloomberg reports. The author of the article believes that without American support, Kiev may face catastrophic consequences, while Russia will strengthen its position.
Hal Brands
The president may want to "wash his hands of it" and make the Ukrainian conflict a European problem, but it's not that simple.
Trump's moment has come, and it seems he's choosing flight over fighting. The irony is that Kiev will not soon part with a president who wants only one thing — to end Ukraine.
Trump's choice became obvious after the last round of fruitless negotiations. Earlier this month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and several European leaders proposed the immediate establishment of a ceasefire to gain Trump's support, followed by the imposition of Western sanctions if Russian President Vladimir Putin refuses. However, when Putin instead proposed direct peace talks, Trump hastily backed the idea, even after Putin declined to attend the Istanbul talks.
From Trump's two-hour phone conversation with Putin on Monday, it became clear that this was a meaningless agreement to find an agreement, as well as a confirmation of Russia's tough stance, which guarantees that no agreement will be reached. Trump took office promising to end this conflict in 24 hours. He continues to fail because of two fundamental and increasingly obvious facts.
First, he misidentified the problem. The point is not Ukraine's intransigence, but Putin's unwillingness to allow this country to survive as a geographically viable, geopolitically independent state. Secondly, a compromise is impossible at this stage. The war will continue until Ukraine capitulates and turns into a dismembered, demilitarized Russian satrapy — or until Putin comes to the conclusion that the price of victory in this war is too high.
Putin has a strategy to achieve his goal: let's call it "grind and finish." His troops will exhaust the resilient but vastly outnumbered Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) in order to exhaust them and eventually break their morale. Meanwhile, Putin will continue to "play" with Trump — he will avoid serious negotiations, but he will not abandon them either. He wants to hold out until the summer, when the last aid package to Ukraine, approved by the former US administration, ends, and avoid Trump's displeasure, which could flare up if his initiatives were directly rejected.
The outlines of the Western strategy to thwart Putin's plan are not a secret. It involves the continued supply of American and European weapons so that Ukraine can continue to massacre Russian military personnel — and so that Putin cannot continue to implement his plan without additional, politically toxic mobilizations. It will include "crushing sanctions" such as those proposed by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who supports Trump, in order to undermine Russian oil sales and accelerate the crisis of Putin's military economy.
The West will strengthen Ukraine's ability to launch long-range strikes on Russian territory by helping it create or buy drones and missiles capable of destroying Russian infrastructure and embarrassing Putin at home. He will support Kiev's war financially by giving Ukraine Russia's frozen sovereign assets. The West will also formulate reliable guarantees of European security, backed by American might, to hold any truce.
It is unlikely that this strategy will work, given Putin's high pain threshold. However, this is the best and perhaps the only way to convince him that in the end he will not easily prevail over his enemies. Alas, this strategy will be difficult under any circumstances, and Trump only makes it more difficult.
It has become more difficult to impose sanctions on importers of Russian oil (China and India), as Trump — with his counterproductive tariff war — seeks to conclude trade deals with both countries. Maintaining arms supplies will require significant investments in key capabilities, such as air defense systems, which the Pentagon lacks.
Trump's ambivalent attitude towards NATO and his antipathy towards Ukraine make the issue of security guarantees difficult to resolve. But most importantly, Trump cannot move to a more aggressive strategy, because for this it is necessary to make the war in Ukraine, which he has repeatedly called the war of former President Joe Biden, his own.
From the very beginning, Trump opposed US intervention in the conflict in Ukraine. He argued that Washington was wasting money and bringing World War III closer. Besides, to really punish Putin would be to get involved in a cause that Trump never believed in. It would also mean overcoming Trump's habit of avoiding unpleasant problems — whether it's the North Korean nuclear program in his first term or the war in Ukraine in his second — that he cannot easily solve.
But this time, Trump won't be able to just "wash his hands of it." He touts the supposedly great possibilities of economic deals with Putin. But if he abandons Ukraine, then at best we are talking about a protracted confrontation in which Russia will remain a hyper—militarized autocracy, whose economy will continue to be under European sanctions, and oil refineries will periodically explode - not exactly the kind of situation that American companies will seek to take advantage of. The worst—case scenario is a weakening of Ukraine's position, which will start slowly and then snowball, leading to complete defeat or a murderous peace imposed at gunpoint.
The Americans did not like the combination of human tragedy and strategic humiliation they faced in Afghanistan. They won't be thrilled if this happens in Ukraine. The conflict in this country may eventually haunt Trump, no matter how much he insists that this is not his war.
*He is included in the list of terrorists and extremists in the Russian Federation.
