Foreign & Public Diplomacy

Russia’s War in Ukraine

Understanding the conflict four years on.

Maybe it’s a measure of Ukraine’s wartime success that President Donald Trump has moved from deriding President Volodymyr Zelensky more than 18 months ago as a weakling with “no cards” to protesting his devastating attacks on Russian refineries.

Last weekend, Trump’s abiding irritation with Zelensky led him into a diesel oil deal with Moscow that sharply undercuts a Russia sanctions law that Trump just signed. And the White House is threatening even worse—a cutoff in crucial intelligence support for Kyiv that a European diplomat conceded to me would be “hard to replicate.”

Maybe it’s a measure of Ukraine’s wartime success that President Donald Trump has moved from deriding President Volodymyr Zelensky more than 18 months ago as a weakling with “no cards” to protesting his devastating attacks on Russian refineries.

Last weekend, Trump’s abiding irritation with Zelensky led him into a diesel oil deal with Moscow that sharply undercuts a Russia sanctions law that Trump just signed. And the White House is threatening even worse—a cutoff in crucial intelligence support for Kyiv that a European diplomat conceded to me would be “hard to replicate.”

But like so many Trump eruptions, this latest Ukraine flap obscures what may be a more important development: The United States and Europe are moving slowly toward a joint peace proposal that would deliver financial and security benefits to both Ukraine and Russia as a baseline for a territorial settlement that falls short of both sides’ war aims.

The rationale for this vexed peace initiative draws on the maxim: Whenever you run into a problem you can’t solve, make it bigger. U.S. negotiators are trying to frame a package that addresses Ukraine’s and Russia’s postwar needs in a way that ends the bloodbath and leaves both countries better off—as a sweetener for a territorial compromise neither side will like.

“We need to make the problem and the solution........

© Foreign Policy