Once upon a time, Donald Trump promised to end what he dubbed “Biden’s war” in Ukraine within 24 hours of his second inauguration. But a year and a half after Trump moved back into the White House, the war continues to rage. Moreover, he has put on his predecessor Joe Biden’s hat, trying to coerce Vladimir Putin into accepting peace on Western terms by raising the stakes to new, insane levels.
Several such attempts by the U.S.-led West throughout the 12 years of the Russia–Ukraine war invariably ended in fiascos that have come to define the trajectory of this conflict. The crude attempt to reframe the 2014–2015 Minsk agreements in Ukraine’s favor prompted Russia’s all-out invasion in February 2022. Ditching the Istanbul framework agreement in the spring of the same year resulted in an epic catastrophe for Ukrainians. Even if the war ended soon, Ukraine would need decades to recover in demographic and infrastructural terms. But just as on every previous occasion, the pro-war lobby is doing its utmost to promote the narrative that this time things are going to be different.
“It’s an escalation, but it’s also an escalation that can help lead to an end,” Trump said at the NATO summit in Ankara last week. He praised his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky for doing “an amazing job” with drone strikes on oil refineries that have engineered a fuel crisis across Russia and an acute one in the occupied Crimea.
Trump’s apparent turnaround was preceded by a massive PR surge aiming to prove to its one-man target audience, Trump himself, that “the tide is turning” and Russia is beginning to lose. Judging by Trump’s statements in Ankara, the effort seems to have paid off, with a significant caveat being his propensity for changing his mind shortly after saying things observers interpret as policy.
The “turning tide” campaign rests on a constellation of dubious assumptions about the state of the war, Russia’s society and economy, and the West’s ability to contain the conflict without it sliding into nuclear apocalypse.
One assumption is that fuel shortages caused by drone strikes could make the war untenable for Putin by raising domestic political pressure. This line of thought derives from imagining modern Russians, or at least the Russian establishment, as snowflakes who will turn against Putin as soon as they have to wait a whopping 20 minutes to get their car fueled. The same kind of magical thinking fueled Western excitement during the Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny in 2023 and Ukraine’s Kursk incursion in 2024.
There are multiple issues with this approach. First, Russians have experienced far worse economic and security conditions in living memory. If you need to figure out what kind of hardships a post-Soviet people can potentially endure, look no further than Ukraine, which successfully adapted to the near-total destruction of its own large refineries earlier in the war.
The problem is that Russian resilience is just beginning to be tested. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s society and economy have worn down to a dangerous level that Russia, if the war of attrition continues, would take decades to reach. There is virtually no way for Ukraine and the West to make Russia so unlivable that Putin would end the invasion before Ukraine itself becomes completely lifeless. This equation has been obvious from the war’s outset, although somehow not to its ardent cheerleaders.
What Russia is doing now in response to Ukrainian strikes is inching towards total war, with Russian drones and missiles methodically knocking out petrol stations in addition to energy infrastructure. Moscow has also begun to target food-processing facilities, agricultural equipment, and trucks on highways. Ukrainians are bracing for another horrific winter in unheated apartments, while Russians are merely at the stage of making an extra effort to fuel their cars. The contrast couldn’t be starker.
Finally, Russians largely do buy into the Kremlin’s narrative about the war. They see it as existential and themselves as underdogs fighting for their sovereignty against the enormous Western military and economic machine. What Trump has been doing to Iran over the last several months has bolstered their impression of malign Western intentions (and confirmed for them the importance of having a huge nuclear arsenal).
Moreover, Russians are being flooded with rabidly xenophobic, even genocidal, anti-Russian propaganda on social networks, thanks to government-linked online mobs like NAFO and, sometimes, high-ranking officials in Kiev and elsewhere. In a recent tweet, Sergiy Kyslytsya—Zelensky’s first deputy chief of staff and formerly a UN ambassador—wrote about the “exceptional degeneracy” of Russian society, comparing the Russian world to “mold” that must be “wiped out” rather than bleached. The tweet was promoted by America’s former Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried, one of the architects of NATO expansion into the post-Soviet space, including Ukraine.
Western cynicism regarding Ukraine—as in the late Senator Lindsey Graham’s statement about the U.S. helping Ukraine fight to the last Ukrainian, or in the EU proposal to stop admitting draft-age Ukrainians fleeing mobilization—also doesn’t go unnoticed.
It is hard to predict how long Trump will remain a Russia hawk, but it is safe to say that another historical chance to settle the conflict has been squandered, and the old pattern that has defined the trajectory of this conflict for years is back: Every time peace becomes a realistic prospect, the pro-war lobby derails it by selling the illusion that it will take just few hundred billion more dollars and the next technological magic wand to vanquish Putin’s war machine.
The result has been the same every time—hair-raising escalation, enormous and partially irrecoverable losses for Ukraine in lives, territory, infrastructure, and Russia pressing even harder than before. Every time Ukraine emerges from an escalatory period, it faces far more disastrous terms of peace than it could previously have achieved. There is no indication this time will be different.
Driven by war-industry lobbyists, most Western discourse regarding the Ukraine war evinces a severe misunderstanding of the conflict in every aspect—from the trajectory of the conflict to Russia’s true motives and intentions to human rights and democracy in Ukraine. It hinges on a plethora of taboo subjects, like the brutality of Ukraine’s mobilization and the public resistance to it (see the Lviv riot last week), as well as the infiltration of the Ukrainian state and military by former far-right street thugs, many of whom have become darlings of the Western media and the defense industry.
It also draws a surreal, essentialist portrait of Putin’s Russia as an inherently evil, alien civilization that’s incompatible with Western values by definition, rather than a complex, post-totalitarian society whose phobias and authoritarian instincts are partly driven by the long history of Western aggression (including current footage depicting what the U.S. and its proxies have done to Iran and Gaza).
Strategic planners and think-tankers in Washington concoct schemes to “weaken Russia,” but their efforts have so far produced the exact opposite result—a Russia that’s increasingly adaptive, technologically advanced, ready for modern war, and genuinely hostile to the West. For now, it is the Ukrainians, above all, who are paying the price with their property, blood, and future livelihoods.
Trump might be thinking that he can atone for the Iran debacle by being “tough on Russia” and resolving the Ukraine war on Western terms. But he could soon find himself facing an even greater debacle than the one he’s created in the Middle East.
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