During the Biden administration, the most effective tool Russia’s President Vladimir Putin had to sustain his invasion of Ukraine proved to be his warnings of nuclear escalation, a tactic that prompted Kyiv’s allies to drip-feed its supply of arms for fear of provoking one. That threat lost its power through overuse, but in the Trump era the Kremlin has been handed a still more potent weapon: the peace process.

More than a year into negotiations that President Donald Trump said would take him 24 hours to resolve, talks in Dubai this month produced nothing beyond a prisoner swap — invaluable to the troops and families involved, but irrelevant to a settlement. Steve Witkoff, the real-estate developer chosen to drive this U.S.-led initiative, gave a short readout from the three-way meeting on the social-media platform X, in which he couldn’t even declare "progress” on the issues that matter: namely, territorial concessions by and security guarantees for Ukraine.

The reality is that while Trump’s peace drive may seem unimpeachable — as would any calls for a ceasefire — it has tipped the scales of war in Moscow’s favor, providing distraction and political cover as the U.S. halted virtually all contributions to Ukraine’s defense, leaving a $46 billion annual shortfall in Kyiv’s total military and financial aid that Europe has struggled to fill. Last year, the U.S. even briefly stopped critical intelligence sharing, allowing Russia to recapture territory in the Kursk region that Ukraine had seized to divert Russian forces and to have something to trade in settlement talks.

© The Japan Times