BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI|AFP via Getty Images

President Donald Trump walks with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G20 Summit in Osaka, Japan, in 2019.

While campaigning for president, candidate Donald Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine in one day. Since taking office, however, it has become obvious that the president’s focus is not on peacemaking, but rather on building his relationship with and making deals to suit Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

I served as U.S. ambassador to Moscow a decade ago and lived there for years before, so I know from firsthand experience that Putin cannot be trusted. He is a cynical strongman whose priorities and policies are antithetical to American values and interests. And no matter how much U.S.-Russian relations might be repaired or restarted, there is no universe in which Putin is a U.S. ally or trustworthy partner. He seeks to weaken the United States, divide us from our allies and strengthen the autocratic world at the expense of the democratic one. A strongman who’s held an iron fist on power in Russia for a quarter-century, Putin has single-mindedly pursued these objectives for decades, dating back to his time in the Soviet-era KGB security agency.

Over the years, I have negotiated with the Russians many times and learned that if you give concessions to Putin’s Kremlin without asking for anything in return, they pocket those concessions and ask for more. I can tell you that our president is going about this the wrong way; he is giving away his “cards,” to use Trump’s favored metaphor, up front.

To begin with, Trump seems to be viewing the entire war through Putin’s distorted lens. Trump has blamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for starting the war and has called Zelenskyy the dictator in the equation – two false claims that Putin has made for years. The undeniable reality is that Putin invaded neighboring Ukraine in 2014 to seize the strategic peninsula of Crimea and occupy eastern Ukraine with Russian-backed militias. And it was Putin who launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 to seize more territory and attempt to depose Zelenskyy, a democratically elected leader, so he could install a puppet regime that’s friendly to Moscow.

Daniel DePetrisFeb. 28, 2025

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