Trump Exhausts All The Other Options With Vladimir Putin In Ukraine

And changes his policy from a stronger position than ever before

Grok AI

First, a brief recall of how we got to this turning point, and the reasons why it took so long. Then we may consider what Donald Trump is doing to end Russia’s war on Ukraine, and what may follow.

Two days after taking his second oath of office, Donald Trump warned Vladimir Putin that if he did not agree to peace, “I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries.” Secretary-appointee of the Treasury Scott Bessent told Congress that he would be happy to exert the economic leverage that was left unused against Russia under the Biden administration if Trump told him to, saying “I believe that the sanctions were not fulsome enough” before.

But this threat seemed to recede. During February, Trump wanted to conclude a three-way agreement with Russia and China to reduce nuclear stockpiles and defense spending. This new world order to reduce strategic tensions was to follow peace in Ukraine. Trump’s negotiating team made the best offer imaginable, indeed they offered Russia everything that Tucker Carlson thought Putin wanted, but still came up empty. Trump blew up at Volodymyrr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, then cut off intelligence and aid. His envoys indicated that peace was possible, but only if Ukraine made big concessions. Ukraine grudgingly agreed.

Meetings in Riyadh led to nothing, however, and Putin started telling his oligarchs to prepare for a long war rather than a near peace. He was playing for time. His demands were already maximal, but Putin doubled-down on them anyway. By the end of March, Trump said he was “angry” and “pissed off” at Putin. He admitted that the Russians might be “dragging their feet.”

But at every turn, there was another phone call in the offing. At the beginning of April, President Donald Trump was so eager to have a meeting with Vladimir Putin that his inner circle had to hold him back. He got a phone call in March, but no meeting in April. Instead, the Kremlin was still stringing him along with the proffer of another phone call. Trump indicated that he was beginning to take offense at the humiliation of Putin “tapping me along.”

By the end of May, Trump warned Putin via Truth Social that he might consider secondary sanctions because the Russian president was “killing a lot of people.” Whereas “I’ve always had a very good relationship with” him, suddenly, in the fourth year of Putin’s war on Ukraine, the Russian strongman had “gone absolutely CRAZY!” Speaking to reporters, Trump had a touch of genuine anger in his voice. He was getting mad, or at least performing the role of a man getting mad (‘kayfabe’).

Three problems preoccupied Trump, two foreign and the third domestic. None of it is ‘four dimensional chess’. On the contrary, it is in his nature to separate interrelated problems into discrete solutions. Trump’s preference has always been for one-on-one negotiating partnerships. Rather than multilateral complexity, he would have the Ukraine-Russia and China-Taiwan tensions each resolve as bilateral simplicity.

During March, Trump was also trying to get Iran to agree to a deal that would end the regime’s uranium enrichment program with a carrot-and-stick approach, and supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei rebuffed his threat. On April 13, Trump gave Iran sixty days to agree on a halt to their uranium enrichment program. Sixty-one days later, Israel launched a twelve-day war that annihilated Iranian air defenses, with American stealth bombers delivering the biggest blow of all to the Fordow enrichment facility.

Also during March, Putin agreed to Trump’s request for mediation with Iran regarding a new ‘nuclear deal’. Putin was still offering to mediate right before the Fordow strike in June. Now the Kremlin angrily denies that Putin ever encouraged Iran to give up uranium enrichment, calling the report “defamation.” The practical geopolitics of the Iran-Russia-America relationship have not changed since 1947, and Iran is a material ally of Russia in the war on Ukraine. This has been a foreign policy tangle, a briar patch of multilateralism, the form of negotiation which Trump hates most. While it remains unclear just how far the Fordow strike has set back Iran’s enrichment dreams, Operation Midnight Hammer has also dispensed with the need for Putin’s mediation. It has simplified the situation for Trump.

China is the second of Russia’s three allies against Ukraine. US ammunition magazines and manufacturing are simply not ready for a war with China over Taiwan. Patriot PAC-3 interceptor missiles are in very high demand to protect American intereststs and allies. Right now 42 PAC-3 interceptor missiles are produced every month, or 500 per year. China probably has somewhere between 1,200 and 2,000 missiles pointed at Taiwan right now.

Elbridge Colby and Pete Hegseth have prioritized the Middle East over Ukraine during the period of increased threat from Iranian ballistic missile salvos. More recently, they held up Patriot stocks being transferred to Ukraine in Germany. Rather than animus against Ukraine, this was a policy of deterrence aimed at China. In the event of a three-way war with Russia and China today, the United States would simply not be able to supply enough PAC-3 interceptor missiles to allies in both Europe and Asia.

China and Russia have posed this same dilemma for American military alliances before. It is a key strategic purpose to the ostensible alliance between uneasy neighbors. When the Truman administration responded to the Chinese-backed North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950, they were convinced that Russia intended to attack in Europe if America overcommitted in the peninsula. As a result, two-thirds of the spending and war material raised through Congressional authorization during the Korean War actually went to Europe instead of Asia.

The Trump administration believes it has now disentangled the Gordian knot of ammunition allocation. If Russia can be forced to stop fighting by 2027, when Xi Jinping wants his military ready for war with Taiwan, the United States can be ready to meet that next challenge, hopefully deterring China from aggression at all. Trump can afford to be generous with PAC-3 supplies to Ukraine for the time being.

Then there is the Republican Party in Congress. A small minority of the caucus — let’s call them the Marjorie Taylor Greene corps — is actively hostile towards Ukraine.

Another tranche of Republicans leans away from intervention out of conservative instinct, both because war is expensive and because Ukraine aid has been propagandized as welfare handouts. Trump was keen to make it clear that Europe is paying for the Patriots, now. “We’ll send them a lot of weapons of all kinds. And they’re going to deliver those weapons immediately to the site, to the site of the war, different sites of the war, and they’re going to pay for 100 percent of them,” Trump said.

This is a permission structure for the second tranche of Republicans to join the narrow majority of the caucus which supports Ukraine. It took time, but the MTG corps has been marginalized, and now the caucus is moving forward with new aid packages.

Yesterday, Trump credited the First Lady for changing his mind about Putin. “I go home. I tell the first lady, ‘You know, I spoke to Vladimir today. We had a wonderful conversation.’ She said, ‘Oh, really? another city was just hit.’ There's times I'd get home. I'd say, ‘First lady, I had the most wonderful talk with Vladimir. I think we're finished.' And then I'll turn on the television, or she'll say to me one time, ‘Wow, that’s strange because they just bombed a nursing home. I'd say, ‘What?’”

While amusing, this possibly-apocryphal anecdote also recasts his apparent change of mind as a change of heart. True or not, it is another rationalization (‘permission structure’) for MAGA minds to accept the change of policy from Trump.

Although Trump says the phone calls with Putin have been “very pleasant,” he also says “the talk doesn’t mean anything” because “then the missiles go off at night.” He said it yesterday while sitting next to NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in the Oval Office. Putin “fooled Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden — he didn’t fool me,” Trump said, once again disowning responsibility for the war starting. This time, however, he was taking responsibility for enabling Ukraine to continue the war.

With the alliance boosting their defense spending as Trump had demanded, NATO is objectively stronger now than before he returned to office. In the most remarkable turn of all yesterday, Trump praised Europe for having “a lot of spirit for this war. When I first got involved I really didn’t think they did, but they do,” he told reporters. “The level of esprit de corps they have is amazing.”

Sacre bleu, he even spoke French!

“You’ll be seeing things happen,” Trump warned last week, and so we are. Yesterday he said that secondary sanctions against countries buying Russian oil, and potentially grain, are on the proverbial table. Such measures would effectively cut off Russia’s last sources of income from the outside world.

Unlike the “two weeks” at a time that Trump kept extending his invitation for Putin to make peace, he has now given an ultimatum of fifty days and indicated a willingess to outdo Joe Biden in terms of supplying Ukraine with weapons.

In addition, White House sources have been floating an asset seizure of $5 billion, which would pay for a lot of weapons for Ukraine. Such a move would also signal Europe to start seizing the frozen Russian funds held in their banks. This was a step the Biden administration never dared to take. If the war ended tomorrow and the assets were unfrozen, whoever was in charge of Russia would have no incentive to keep their money in western banks, anyway, so this choice never made much sense as anything but fear of escalation. Trump has no such fear now, which is very interesting.

But Joe Biden did leave Trump about $4 billion in congressionally-authorized aid money for Ukraine, funding which Trump has seen fit to withhold until this time. In the words of Sen. Everett McKinley Dirksen, “a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” This aid will have even more impact now, right as the Russian ‘summer offensive’ seems to be reaching its climax, than it would have in January.

Putin reportedly told Trump in a phone call this month that he intends to attack Ukraine harder than ever during the next sixty days. But if the offensive in Sumy is any indication, Putin intends to send his army mostly on foot. Russian formations have fewer armored vehicles than ever and use more repurposed civilian vehicles than ever.

Meanwhile, the Russian motor vehicle industry is experiencing “one of the worst years in the history of the modern Russian car market, as sales are unlikely to exceed 1 million units,” just over half the sales numbers in 2024. Russians are running out of things to drive on the battlefield. Instead, Russian units depend ever more on cheap Chinese golf carts and dirt bikes.

Putin wants to cut defense spending in 2026, but he does not want to stop the war. He wants the central bank to lower interest rates while he prints rubles, but he does not want inflation. Putin demands that the war continue next quarter without a plan to pay for it. Rather than learn from failure, Putin doubles down on illusions. His Potemkin economy will not seize up and stop all at once, but it is not going to get better, and because the war itself is the primary economic engine, peace would be followed by recession in any case.

Put simply, economic doom is certain, though the exact date is uncertain. That reckoning is now bigger and closer than it has ever been, so the threat that crippling secondary sanctions present is correspondingly worse than it was January.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump said he would end the war on his first day in office. Upon taking office, he pledged to end the war in 100 days. On Day 173 of his term, yesterday, Trump gave Putin another fifty days before he uses sanctions in a bid to end the war. It has taken a long time to get here, and there is still some way to go, but we have at last reached the point where Donald Trump sends Marco Rubio to meet with Sergey Lavrov instead of Steve Witkoff.

Having exhausted all the other options for ending Russia’s war against Ukraine, the president has finally defaulted to doing the right thing. Because it has taken this long, Trump enters this phase with greater leverage than he had in January, or April, or even June. Doing the right thing has more impact than it ever did before. He is the one holding all the proverbial cards, now.

Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, is in the weakest position he has ever been. Russia is in its most fragile state since Putin’s rise to power. If forced to make peace, Russia will endure a recession that makes the 1990s seem like good times by comparison. Putin had six months of deal offers that were better than whatever he will get, now. Henceforth, the offers only get worse.