But will it last, or will Trump return to his old ways when it comes to Russia? The post Dramatic Shift in Trump’s Thinking About the Russia-Ukraine War appeared first on Washington Monthly.
The Russian reaction wasn’t long in coming. Just hours after President Donald Trump met with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in the Oval Office on Monday to announce new missiles for Ukraine and 100 percent tariffs on Russia if the two countries can’t agree to a ceasefire in 50 days, the Moscow Stock Exchange Index rose sharply. Russian investors, expecting worse from Washington, were apparently relieved by the outcome of the meeting.
Later that day, Senator Konstantin Kosachev, chair of the foreign affairs committee in the Russian parliament’s upper house, dismissed the news from the White House as “much ado about nothing.” “Over 50 days, a whole lot can change on the battlefield,” he wrote menacingly on social media, “and in the moods of those in power in the U.S. and NATO. But our mood won’t be affected.”
The Oval Office announcement signals a dramatic shift in Trump’s thinking about the Russia-Ukraine war. After insisting for months that Ukraine was the problem—responsible for the conflict, and reluctant to make peace—the 47th president finally seems to see that Russian President Vladimir Putin is the one who won’t lay down arms. This is a significant breakthrough, and if Trump follows through on the new strategy, it could change the course of the war. But many potential pitfalls lie ahead—in Europe, Washington, and Moscow.
The resumed weapons shipments will differ from traditional military aid in two critical ways. First, no “aid” is involved—the U.S. will not give Ukraine anything further. Trump is offering instead to sell a big new batch of air-defense batteries, long-range missiles, and ammunition for use by the Ukrainian armed forces.
Second, unlike most lethal assistance, the sale involves an intermediary. Washington will sell the new weaponry to NATO members—Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Canada, to begin with—which will then pass it on, free of charge, to Ukraine. The first tranche is expected to include some $10 billion worth of matériel, with more—potentially much more—coming later.
This ingenious mechanism, proposed originally by Volodymyr Zelensky, solves a lot of problems. Trump remains true to his idée fixe, “America first,” advancing both U.S. financial interests and his personal ambition to dominate world affairs. Ukraine gets the weaponry it desperately needs to defend itself against an ever-more rapacious Russia. Europe mends its fraying ties with the U.S. and fends off a Ukrainian defeat that many on the continent fear could bring large numbers of hardened Russian troops and battle-tested weaponry to the borders of NATO.
Also important, although NATO will coordinate arms shipments to Ukraine, the aid will flow bilaterally—through national capitals, not NATO Headquarters in Brussels. So there will be no need for all of Europe to agree unanimously—a requirement that has held up package after package of European Ukraine aid and sanctions for four years.
The only problem: adding steps adds complexity and new ways of things going wrong.
The questions begin with Europe. Like Americans, European voters are increasingly skeptical of open-ended aid to Ukraine. Germany’s fragile coalition government, expected to take the lead in the new assistance plan—it proposes to purchase two Patriot air-defense missile batteries priced roughly $1.1 billion a piece—faces growing anti-war opposition from both the right and the left.
Support is more solid in the Nordic countries, and Europe as a whole has outpaced the U.S. in military and budgetary assistance to Ukraine, providing some $182 billion in aid compared to our $134 billion. But even the best-intentioned and tightly focused European efforts have sometimes struggled to deliver as promised. Remember the “coalition of the willing” created this spring to send peacekeeping troops? The challenge now: translating good intentions into large weapons shipments that arrive in time to make a difference on the ground.
Second, and even more uncertain, it’s unclear how long Trump’s dramatic shift in thinking will last. His attitude toward Vladimir Putin veered from warm to cold and back to warm again over the 35 minutes he and Rutte spent in the Oval Office. The president began relatively optimistically, going as far as to say he didn’t think Congress needed to pass a tough pending sanctions bill—implying that the mere threat of tariffs would probably bring Putin to the negotiating table. Then, shifting gears, Trump stopped just short of calling the Russian strongman a criminal: “I don’t want to say he’s an assassin. But he’s a tough guy.” Minutes later, the tone of the conversation shifted again with Trump blandly reassuring listeners not once but several times, “I think we’ll get it done”—as if a sustainable ceasefire was just beyond reach.
Meanwhile, even as he tried to pivot, the president held fast to many of his old, mistaken claims about the war. He’s still exaggerating how much the U.S. has spent to arm Ukraine, claiming $350 billion—more than double what we have disbursed. He continues to insist that the conflict is Joe Biden’s war, even as he considers enabling Kyiv to hit Moscow and St. Petersburg with long-range missiles. (Perhaps not surprisingly—another sign of just how tenuous and uncertain the new strategy is—as soon as it came out that Trump had suggested long-range strikes on Russia in a phone conversation with Zelensky, the White House disavowed the news. Trump “was merely asking a question,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted, “not encouraging further killing.”)
Trump can’t let go of the idea that Kyiv played a significant part in starting the war, and he continues to assert what he calls his “parameters” for peace—a deeply unfair deal that would formally cede large chunks of Russian-occupied territory and bar Ukraine from joining NATO. Perhaps most troubling, even as he threatens the Kremlin, Trump can’t disguise his deep admiration for Russia or his ambivalence about Ukraine, and he hasn’t closed the door on a better relationship with Putin. “I’m disappointed in him, but I’m not done with him,” the president told the BBC shortly after he met with Rutte.
The third and most disquieting question mark hanging over the new strategy is Russia. Nothing Putin or his proxies have said since the start of the war supports Trump’s belief that the Kremlin is prepared to stop the bloodshed in Ukraine. Putin has put the Russian economy on a wartime footing, turbocharging the defense industry, diverting millions to military salaries, and flooding the provinces with exorbitant bounties for families of fallen soldiers. Neither he nor Russian popular opinion seem fazed by the million men killed or injured in the conflict. Despite his army’s plodding and costly progress, Putin appears convinced he is winning on the battlefield.
No matter how sharply the West presses him, Putin repeats the same nonnegotiable demands. There can be no peace until what he calls the “root causes” of the war have been addressed. Ukraine must accept permanent neutrality between East and West. Its military must be neutered and its politics distorted to allow unhindered Russian interference. Moscow continues to claim large swathes of Ukrainian territory it hasn’t conquered and demands a legally binding promise that NATO stop expanding eastward.
Putin has made some effort to humor Trump. He would clearly like a thaw in U.S.-Russia relations and a resumption of trade with the West. But nothing suggests these goals are more important to him than his lifelong dream of restoring what he calls the “Russkiy Mir,” the Russian world or “Russian civilization”—an extended sphere of influence and control encompassing any lands once dominated by the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union. “Putin values the relationship with Trump and had good discussions with [White House special envoy Steve] Witkoff,” an anonymous source close to the Kremlin told Reuters this week after the Rutte meeting. “But the interests of Russia come above all else.”
None of this bodes well for Trump’s dream of ending the war. The president may ultimately be right that strengthening Zelensky is the best way to bring Putin to the table, but that strategy will only work if the pressure is concerted and consistent. Comments coming out of Moscow since the Trump-Rutte meeting—including a veiled nuclear threat from Kremlin senior aide, Kirill Dmitriev—suggest Putin sees Trump’s new push for the half-hearted feint it is. The Russian is still determined, as Trump himself has put it, to “go all the way“ in Ukraine, capturing as much territory as he needs to break the back of Ukrainian nationhood.
The only silver lining: credulous and grudging as Trump may be and still deluded about Putin, the new NATO strategy stands a fairly good chance of delivering badly needed arms and ammunition to Ukraine, where nobody in a position to use it has any illusions about Putin.
The post Dramatic Shift in Trump’s Thinking About the Russia-Ukraine War appeared first on Washington Monthly.
