The Trump Administration’s latest efforts to end to the war Russia started against Ukraine will likely be for naught for one simple reason: Vladimir Putin isn’t interested in peace.
Putin is the problem; Ukraine is not. Putin is the obstacle to peace; Ukraine is not. Putin is the one who should feel as much pressure as possible, not Ukraine. Putin is the one who started this war; Ukraine didn’t.
Accordingly, the United States, together with its European allies, should ramp up military assistance for Ukraine, seize the $300 billion in frozen Russian assets and make those funds available to Ukraine, and ramp up sanctions against Russia and its accomplices. The war won’t end until Putin and Russia are defeated on the battlefield – when the Russians on the front lines, about whom Putin doesn’t care, have had enough – and through economic pressure.
Since launching his initial invasion in 2014 with the illegal annexation of Crimea and the move into the Donbas and then ramping that up with the full-scale invasion in February 2022, Putin hasn’t been interested in peace with Ukraine but instead has wanted pieces of Ukraine. Large pieces. He seeks to topple Ukraine’s democratically elected government, destroy Ukraine’ s independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity, and leave Ukraine vulnerable to reinvasion. He thinks he can outlast Western support for Ukraine and is willing to hang on “as long as it takes,” to borrow a phrase from the previous U.S. administration.
Putin and Russian officials reject the idea of Western security guarantees for Ukraine, the focus of the latest diplomatic negotiations between Ukrainian and U.S. officials. They insist on recognition of Russian occupation of Ukrainian territory and on the withdrawal by Ukraine from parts that Russia doesn’t even control. They don’t recognize Volodymyr Zelenskyy as the legitimate leader of Ukraine. Heck, they don’t recognize Ukraine as a real nation.
Ukraine has shown tremendous flexibility in negotiations with U.S. officials, from accepting that NATO membership isn’t in its foreseeable future to a willingness to hold elections despite martial law which prohibits them.
Ukrainians want to end the war as soon as possible, but they also reject, and rightly so, the idea of territorial concessions. Giving up territory would mean consigning hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens to living under brutal Russian repression and surrendering land that is important militarily. Instead, Ukrainians insist on, and deserve, Western security guarantees to avert yet another Russian attack against their country.
Russia is under growing strain, as Western sanctions are taking a toll, and the heavy militarization of the economy diverts resources from citizens’ needs.
Russian oil, which, along with gas, is a chief source of revenue for Russia’s economy and military, has dropped to $40 per barrel for the first time since the war began. Bloomberg reports that the U.S. Treasury Department is preparing tighter sanctions on Russia. And the European Union may finally be preparing to seize the bulk of the frozen Russian assets to make them available to Ukraine.
On the battlefield, Ukrainian forces have performed heroically and impressively against a much larger military. They have inflicted more than a million casualties (killed and wounded) on the Russian side, essentially destroyed the Russian Black Sea fleet, and hit military and militarily related targets deep inside Russia: Ukrainian strikes have hit more than half of Russia’s refineries and taken offline nearly 40% of Russia’s entire refining capacity.
Russia, on the other hand, targets Ukrainian schools, apartment buildings, hospitals and energy facilities, seeking to freeze Ukrainians into submission. The Kremlin expected this war to be over in a matter of days, weeks at most – as did many analysts in the West.
More recently, some have been arguing that Russian forces are on the march, seizing more Ukrainian territory, and that Russian victory is inevitable. In fact, in 2025, Russian forces have advanced roughly 25 miles within Ukraine, from Avdiivka to Pokrovsk, at enormous cost in Russian lives and materiel. Since February 2022, Russia has seized territory that is only about half the size of the state of Iowa.
Just as the predictions four years ago about how the invasion would play out were wrong, the latest forecasts misjudge and underestimate Ukrainians’ ability to fight, their bravery, and their ingenuity. Ukraine’s drone technology and production, for example, which have been vital to its pushback against Russian forces, are entirely indigenous.
The latest U.S. diplomatic push to end the war is apt to fail not because of Ukraine but because of Putin. There should be no more trips to Moscow by U.S. officials, no talk of doing business in Russia, no dropping of accountability for the war crimes Russia has committed against Ukraine.
Let Putin get the message from a stronger Ukrainian military bolstered by the West as well as tightened sanctions. It’s the only language he understands.
