When President Trump returned to the Oval Office earlier this year, he confidently proclaimed that he could broker an immediate end to the Russia-Ukraine war. But the White House has gotten a better sense of the potential for meaningful compromise in the months since, and revised its expectations down — way down.

“I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin,” Trump told reporters in late May. The same day, he posted on Truth Social that Russia’s leader “has gone absolutely CRAZY.” Since then, although the administration has continued to press Moscow for some sort of compromise with Kyiv, more of its officials now seem to grasp that Russia has no real interest in de-escalation.

But why, precisely? After all, the Kremlin has already expended enormous blood and treasure in its efforts to dominate Ukraine, and is continuing to do so. Russian battlefield casualties are estimated to have hit 1 million, making its campaign against Ukraine more costly than all of the country’s post-World War II conflicts combined.

Still, the Kremlin has persisted in its war of aggression, for both ideological and practical reasons.

Ideologically, recent years have seen the revival of Russia’s dreams of Eurasian empire and concerted attempts by the Kremlin to revise its borders outward — and to do so at the expense of........

© The Hill