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TRUMP’S ABOUT-FACE ON UKRAINE  
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John Feffer
July 16, 2025
Foreign Policy in Focus
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_ Trump thinks of himself as an unstoppable force. But Putin is an
unmovable object who won’t be bullied because he is the ultimate
bully. _

President Trump, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian
President Vladimir Putin , Aurelien Morissard and Pavel Bednyakov/AP

 

He promised to end the war in 24 hours. He made nice with Russian
President Vladimir Putin and parroted Kremlin talking points. He
humiliated Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky in front of the cameras
in the Oval Office. He refused to send more weapons to Ukraine.

But that was the old Donald Trump.

The new Donald Trump is pissed off that Russia hasn’t taken his
generous offer of peace. The new Donald Trump admits
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Putin pulled a fast one. “I believed he was someone who meant what
he said,” Trump confesses, echoing the earlier gullibility of George
W. Bush who’d gushed that he could get a sense of Putin’s soul.
“He can speak beautifully, but then he bombs people at night. We
don’t like that.” When the new Donald Trump shifts to the royal
“we,” it’s a sign of profound disappointment.

So, now, the United States is readying a new package of military
support for Ukraine that includes both defensive and offensive
weaponry. Meanwhile, Congress is considering bipartisan legislation
that would authorize the president to levy a 500 percent tariff
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any country still buying fossil fuels or uranium from Russia. Trump
has scaled back that threat to 100 percent while imposing a 50-day
deadline for Russia and Ukraine to sign a deal.

Is this all a theatrical ploy to push Russia to the negotiating table
and compromise? Or is this a decisive break between Trump and Putin,
comparable to the recent split between the president and Elon Musk?

The one constant, of course, is this: don’t trust the U.S.
president. He doesn’t think with his brain or even with his gut. He
is moved by his gallbladder, and right now Putin is the object of his
bile. Here’s the problem: Putin feels the same way toward Ukraine.

PUTIN’S INTRANSIGENCE

Back in April, when I last wrote about the war
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a pretty good deal. The Ukrainian government was willing to consider
territorial compromise. Trump was eager to reestablish economic
relations with Russia. NATO membership for Ukraine was off the table,
and the U.S. government wasn’t supplying Kyiv with any new weapons
(much less any security guarantees).

But when the opportunity arose in May to meet with Zelensky in
Istanbul, Putin didn’t show up. More troubling, he didn’t pivot
from his maximalist demands. Ukraine would have to give up territory
it still controlled in the four provinces Russia had formally annexed.
To achieve a “comprehensive peace,” Ukraine would also have to
reduce its military, ban any third-party forces on its soil,
and dissolve “nationalist groups.”
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add insult to injury, Ukraine would have to give up any claims for
compensation for the damage that Russia has caused.

The easy explanation for Putin’s intransigence is his belief that he
can win on the battlefield. Russian forces have moved slowly but
surely westward. The Ukrainian forces that seized a slice of Russian
territory have been expelled. The Kremlin seems to have an unlimited
number of drones and missiles with which to pummel Ukrainian cities
and infrastructure. Not long ago, Russia launched a record 477 drones,
which it then quickly surpassed with 550 drones. Last week, 728
drones entered
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airspace. By September, Russia will likely be able to launch a
thousand drones at a time
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and civilian casualties in Ukraine are rising.

But any optimism in the Kremlin runs up against some challenging
realities, even before Trump’s about-face is factored in and those
heavy tariffs start biting.

Let’s start with the math.

RUSSIAN REASONS NOT TO BE CHEERFUL

If Russian troops keep up their modest pace of land seizure—and
that’s a big if—they will complete their occupation of the four
Ukrainian provinces that the Kremlin has already claimed…in February
2028
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To occupy all of Ukraine would take 89 years. The Russian public is
getting antsy, with only a minority supporting a war
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dislodge Zelensky. Their grandchildren are going to be even unhappier
if they are still sacrificing on behalf of a forever war in Ukraine.

Those sacrifices include over a million Russian casualties since the
full-scale invasion in 2022. The daily casualty rate has nearly
doubled
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2023 (693) to the first half of 2025 (1,286). That’s nearly half a
million casualties a year. At this rate, Russia will sustain another
1.5 million casualties just to take the rest of those four provinces.

The Russian economy, meanwhile, is hurting, has been hurting, will
probably continue to hurt after hostilities cease. As Georgi
Kantchev writes
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the _Wall Street Journal_,

_Manufacturing activity is declining, consumers are tightening their
belts, inflation remains high and the budget is strained. Russian
officials are now openly warning of the risks of a recession, and
companies from tractor producers to furniture makers are reducing
output. The central bank said Thursday that it would debate cutting
its benchmark interest rate later this month after lowering it in
June._

When the war eventually ends, even if a compensation package is not on
the table, Russians will have to pay the bill for the war. And the
opportunity costs of spending money on drones and bullets, instead of
modernizing factories and diversifying away from fossil fuel exports,
will ensure that the Russian economy remains stuck in the twentieth
century.

Then there are the military setbacks Ukraine is inflicting. Most
recently, an attack on a Russian ammunition depot
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occupied Donetsk yielded spectacular results by removing much of the
firepower that Russia was relying on for its summer offensive. After
an earlier strike killed the commander
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the Eighth Army, Russian forces in Donetsk “now face a grim reality:
no shells, no missiles, and no one to lead them,” writes Chuck
Pfarrer [[link removed]] in the _Kiev
Post_. “Among the destroyed munitions was Russia’s principal
storage point for Surface-to-Air Missiles in Ukraine.

Earlier, with Operation Spiderweb, Ukrainian drones ranged far across
Russia, even to the Olenya airbase in the Arctic more than 1,200 miles
away, to destroy one-third
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the country’s strategic bombers. The psychological impact of the
operation must have been devastating for Kremlin planners.

But nothing compares with the latest news that Trump is now
encouraging
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to launch long-range strikes in Russia if the United States provides
the necessary missiles. In a conversation with Zelensky, Trump wanted
to know if the Ukrainians could hit Moscow and St. Petersburg to
“make them feel the pain.”

UP AGAINST THE WALL

Anything short of total victory makes Putin look bad. As Lawrence
Freedman writes in _Foreign Affairs_
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_For Putin, ending the war without meeting his core political
objectives would be tantamount to a defeat and would leave the
patriotic, ultranationalist bloc that he has cultivated and nurtured
during the war deeply angered. The more moderate Russian elite might
be relieved by such an outcome, but with so little to show for such a
costly effort, there would still be a dangerous reckoning. Many would
begin to ask, “Was it worth it?” and to wonder about the
fallibility of Russia’s leadership._

What Putin has achieved so far is hard to spin as a victory. Crimea is
a favorite vacation destination for Russians, but the peninsula today
is like a very expensive summer house with huge cracks in the
foundation wall and multiple nests in the attic that send hornets down
to harass the owners on a continual basis. The Ukrainian military has
destroyed enough Russian vessels to ensure that the Black Sea is not
the Russian lake Putin wants it to be. The Donbas is a ruined
landscape full of Ukrainian resistance fighters who will probably
continue to operate even after a ceasefire. Sure, there’s some
valuable resources beneath the ground, but good luck trying to access
them with saboteurs all around.

These are the reasons for Putin’s intransigence. It’s not that he
wants a stronger negotiating position in future peace talks. He has
effectively linked his political fate to a decisive win in Ukraine
because compromise will mean an uprising from forces to his right
(sound familiar, Netanyahu?). Meanwhile, anyone of political
importance who might cheer an end to the war is in jail, in exile, or
in the ground.

WHAT IS TRUMP THINKING?

Given that Trump thinks with his gallbladder, it’s a fool’s errand
to try to figure out his strategy. In his usual vulgar way, he is
trying to have it all.

The U.S. president wants to send weapons to Ukraine but have the
Europeans pay for it (so far, Germany, Denmark, and the
Netherlands are ready to buy
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systems for Kyiv). He wants to punish Putin for his refusal to kowtow
to the Oval Office, but he is also giving him 50 days
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applying any secondary sanctions. He wants Ukraine to launch attacks
that the Biden administration was reluctant to countenance, but he
also wants a peace deal that ends the fighting.

Hell hath no fury like a narcissist scorned. Trump doesn’t really
care about the war in Ukraine. All he really wants is for Putin to
acknowledge his alpha-male status, return to the negotiating table,
take Trump’s generous offer, and accept a deal that can last until
the next U.S. presidential election. That will be enough for Trump, at
least in his own mind, to earn a Nobel Peace Prize, which he grumbles
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he won’t get because the naysayers have always been against him.

Trump thinks of himself as an unstoppable force. But Putin is an
unmovable object who won’t be bullied because he is the ultimate
bully. Trump rants about taking over Greenland, Canada, Panama; Putin
launches actual invasions. Trump is scared to send any soldiers into
battle; Putin sends wave after wave into the meat grinder. Trump
threatens to take away Rosie O’Donnell’s citizenship
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Putin orders his enemies killed.

Trump’s about-face on Ukraine is all about face. Trump wants a
face-saving solution so that he doesn’t look an idiot for promising
to end the war in 24 hours. Putin, meanwhile, wants to wipe Ukraine
off the face of the map. It’s really no contest.

But Putin, too, must face facts. Trump might be a pushover, a chicken
hawk, a TACO. But in Ukraine, Putin has found his own unmovable
object.

_JOHN FEFFER is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus. His latest
book is Right Across the World: The Global Networking of the
Far-Right and the Left Response
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_FOREIGN POLICY IN FOCUS (FPIF) is a “Think Tank Without Walls”
connecting the research and action of scholars, advocates, and
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partner. It is a project of the Institute for Policy Studies._

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* Ukraine
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* Russia
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* United States
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* Vladimir Putin
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* Volodymyr Zelensky
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* Donald Trump
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