#WTH The path to peace for Ukraine

Zelensky needs Donald Trump, like it or not

In an ideal world, the United States would have properly backed Ukraine, provided the necessary weaponry to repel Russia in 2022, and would have driven a chastened Vladimir Putin back to Moscow to lick his wounds. But it’s not 2022, and that didn’t happen. I’ve written about how Joe Biden (and Barack Obama) led us to this moment before, and it doesn’t require rehashing. So — and please forgive this lazy cliché — we are where we are. How do the good guys win?

I have read endless articles about what should happen, if only Donald Trump were a different person. Endless laments for what might be if only the President understood Putin’s evil, Zelensky’s greatness, the value of democracy, the implications of a Russian win, history, NATO, Europe, blablablablabla. Yes, it would be simply amazing if Donald Trump were not, er, Donald Trump, and if he were, somehow, Kamala Harris, or Nikki Haley, or someone the establishment didn’t loathe. But here’s a news flash for you: He is Donald Trump, and for the next 247 days this year, and three more years, and then another 20 days, he’s what we’ve got. And writing endless op-eds about how the world would be a better place were it not so is bloody pointless.

Donald Trump is the President. He’s what we’ve got; if we want to save Ukraine, somehow, that’s the guy we need to work with. Period. Here are some more facts, many of which we review with our own Fred Kagan in this week’s pod.

• Ukraine is not losing to Russia right now, but it’s not winning either.

• Russia is expending tens of thousands of lives on minuscule gains, and that’s ok with Putin.

• Russia is low on arms and munitions (golf carts!!), but North Korea and Iran are backfilling for Putin.

• Ukraine is manufacturing drones and ammo, but not enough, and it needs the United States for air defense.

• Europe can neither arm Ukraine sufficiently to prosecute the war successfully against Russia, nor can it provide the necessary intelligence to prevent devastating attacks on civilians. (We talk about why with Fred; it’s pretty interesting.)

• Zelensky is a brilliant wartime leader and a crap diplomat. The skills that won the world’s praise in 2022 — stubbornness, humor, acting — aren’t serving Z as well anymore. Indeed, they are hurting him, and Ukraine.

• Steve Witkoff is a disaster, a Putin parrot, and an advocate for the Kremlin line. But Donald Trump still trusts him.

Though some may disagree, all these are, to my mind, facts. But there’s more. Ukraine is the supplicant; they need us. That may be frustrating and annoying, but it’s both the military and political reality. And here’s another one: Zelensky is the one who blew his political capital with Donald Trump on that fateful day in the Oval Office. (I wrote about it here if you want to review the bidding.) Was Vance dreadful? Yep. Did Trump pile on? Yep. Was it a scene we should hope to never witness in the capital of the free world? Yep. So what? It happened, and now it needs to be managed.

Ukraine is out of options right now. If it wants to prosecute the war, it needs sufficient weaponry, and America is the only source for a good deal of it. Ukraine can say damn the torpedoes, and watch as more and more of its people are murdered, and more and more of its territory is swallowed. But there is no path to victory without America. And America, in the person of our President, does not want the war to continue. We can jump up and down and say that’s wrong, but it’s his view, and he’s not going to change it.

If Ukraine accepts that it has no path to victory without the United States, and therefore needs to go along with Trump’s plan to end the bloodshed, then it must also accept that it does not have the leverage necessary to make major changes to the peace plan being offered. Is that also lousy? Yep. But it’s the reality. Ukraine can play hard to get, but it risks the Oval Office problem again and again. And that’s what’s happening. For example, the one page “plan” proffered by the US to Kyiv as a take it or leave it includes US de jure recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea. Is that gross and wrong? Sure. But there are zero prospects for Crimea’s liberation right now, and more importantly, Donald Trump is not asking Kyiv to recognize Russian sovereignty over Crimea. (As a side note, when did the world suddenly become so exercised about Crimea? It’s been 11 years, and I haven’t seen a single expression of genuine outrage from any Western leader.)

Notwithstanding this fact (and yes, it is a verified fact, Crimea is not on track for liberation), Volodymr Zelensky up and announced he was damned if he would recognize Russian sovereignty over Crimea. Never mind that no one was asking him to. What was the point of his exclamation? Anger at Russia? Outrage? Totally justified. But was now the right moment? Because it’s not just Z and his domestic audience in this game. Trump was watching, and proclamations like this persuade him that Zelensky does not want peace.

I hear you angrily muttering that it’s Putin who doesn’t want peace. You’re totally right, but that’s not the perception in the White House. And if Zelensky wants something from America — and he does — then the smart play is to remain strategically silent and let Russia refuse the deal Trump is offering. Let Russia play the obstructionist.

Here’s the best option for Zelensky: Sit down and negotiate the most important thing of all: Security guarantees. There’s no victory option; there’s no retaking all of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia. Not in the near term. Joe Biden’s foot-dragging made sure of that. The most important thing for Ukraine is to ensure that Russia cannot rest, rearm, and finish the job. The Minsk Accords didn’t save Ukraine after 2014, and words alone won’t save them in the coming years. They need a peacekeeping force, a buffer, a wall, and the arms necessary to repel the Russians from the United States to guarantee peace.

We can wish till we were blue in the face that Europe hadn’t spent the last four decades disarming; wish that Biden hadn’t rested his policy on the risible theory that Putin would tire of this war before the West did; that Trump wasn’t the man that he is; wish elements of the GOP and the VP weren’t excessively sympathetic to Putin; wish that Zelensky had better diplomatic skills; and, while we’re at it, wish we were on track to win the lottery. But at the end of the day, the only element that can, perhaps, be managed is Zelensky. It’s time for him to, dare I say it, put on a jacket and tie, swallow his diplomacy pills, and manage a negotiation with the United States to advance the least worst interests for his country. The question, unfortunately, is whether he can do that.

HIGHLIGHTS

What is the state of play in the Ukraine war?

FK: I think as the first context that we need to have is that the Russians have been on the offensive across the entire front, with the exception of the Kursk incursion, for going on a year and five months now, and that has been a continual series of Russian assaults on Ukrainian positions at enormous cost. In 2024, the Russians lost nearly half a million casualties and they gained an area nine-tenths the size of Rhode Island. The first thing to keep in mind is that Putin looks at those numbers and apparently he's okay with that because what he's been doing has been doubling down on that, and we've seen an intensification of Russian offensive operations, again, relatively little adaptation, although some, relatively very small gains. They haven't taken a major settlement since they took Avdiivka at the beginning of last year.

Does Putin think he’s winning?

FK: The core dynamic is that not only is Putin okay with the kinds of losses that he's been sustaining for these very marginal gains, but that he thinks he's winning. And so he approaches these negotiations from the perspective of someone who thinks that he is winning and will win. And by win he means win it all. He doesn't mean just win the four regions that people are talking about. He's got much broader ambitions than that, which he's laid out on a regular basis.

How long can Putin actually continue this war?

FK: Putin is acting as if he can do this forever. In truth, he can't actually do this forever. But this is a very important bluff. He's trying to portray the impression that he can and will do this forever. He's basically raising with the expectation that everybody else will fold. But if we don't fold, if we actually continue to support Ukraine, then yes, he is going to run out of tanks. He's going to start to run out of artillery pieces. The North Koreans are going to give him some. They're not going to give him enough to offset the losses fully.

Actually important factoid, North Koreans are now providing more than half of the artillery that the Russians are shooting in terms of shells because Russian industry can't. He doesn't have enough people to man his industry either. He's got a lot of problems coming up. And so as we look at the current situation, he thinks he's winning now because he's counting on us to break. He's counting on the West's will to continue to support Ukraine to break, and he's basically counting on this bluff working, but if the bluff doesn't work, he's going to start to have very serious problems.

How essential is American support to Ukraine? Can it be backfilled by the Europeans?

FK: So there are things that America is providing that no one else can provide and that are essential to Ukraine's ability to defend itself. It's a much smaller list now than it was when we were having discussions last year about whether to renew U.S. aid. You are absolutely spot on to point out the ways in which the Ukrainians and also with European support, and the Europeans really have stepped up here, have helped to wean them off of a lot of basic stuff that the U.S. had been providing.

But look, the Russians are firing ballistic missiles at Ukraine on a regular basis, and the Patriot air defense system is the only system that is capable of shooting down ballistic missiles. So if the U.S. stops providing Ukraine Patriots, then the Ukrainian cities will be open to a Russian ballistic missile attack with no ability to defend themselves at all. Now, it's true. Most of the ballistic missiles get through anyway, but the Ukrainians are able to do important point defense with that, and that depends entirely on the U.S. provision of Patriots. Other air defense systems that we provide are also critical in keeping Russian airplanes out of the sky. And if you think about what the Russians did in Syria when they were able to operate manned aircraft over Syrian cities, they would love to be able to do that in Ukraine. So the air defense systems that we're providing are absolutely essential.

Beyond that, we saw what happens when the U.S. suspends intelligence sharing with Ukraine. And we saw that and that suspension of intelligence sharing materially contributed to the rapid Russian gains in Kursk. It prevented the Ukrainians from using some of the U.S. provided systems. But it did something else as well that's really important. Some of the intelligence that we're sharing with Ukraine is missile launch warning and warning that Russian aircraft are taking off to bomb Ukrainian cities. And the Ukrainians use those warnings in the fantastic app that they have that tells people to go to shelters. So when we suspend intelligence sharing, we suspend the Ukrainians' ability to know that there's an incoming attack and that makes Ukrainian civilians much more vulnerable to a Russian attack, which is a problem because the Russians regularly attack Ukrainian civilian infrastructure and civilian locations, and Putin just said he's going to continue to do that.

Why is Putin so emboldened despite the heavy losses?

FK: As small as the Russian gains are, you're right, Dany, the Ukrainians are on the defensive and the lines are moving generally to the west. And Putin is looking at that, and that is encouraging him.

If we would lean in and help the Ukrainians start to push back and have the line start moving to the east, that would force Putin to rethink whether this is something that he wants to continue to do. So there are some aspects of the U.S. assistance that are absolutely essential. Again, a much smaller list and a much less expensive list than when we were talking about this last year. And then there's a lot of optional stuff that the U.S. could provide that would really create a positive incentive structure for Putin to do what President Trump rightly wants, which is to come to the table and accept a reasonable deal.

What more can we provide Ukraine?

FK: One thing that we could do is we have huge stocks of armored vehicles, of all varieties that are sitting in Europe waiting for the Russian invasion. I don't know, maybe one will come up. We could provide large quantities of those stocks to the Ukrainians and that's M-1s and Bradleys and other armored fighting vehicles, which would make a big difference on the battlefield. The Ukrainians need tactical mobility. This is a huge challenge. So that's one thing that we could do.

We could lean into rebuilding our own defense industrial base, as you have talked about, Marc, in a very sensible way, taking advantage of financial offsets from frozen Russian assets, from European contributions and so forth, to do the things that we need to do in order to expand our production of artillery systems, of long range strike, of air-to-ground missiles, of air-air missiles, of surface-to-air missiles and begin producing those in a way that we start providing them to Ukraine as a way of getting our own defense industrial base back to the point where it needs to be if we're going to be able to resist, for example, China. So those are a number of things we could do.

We could provide more intelligence. We provide some, we could provide more. We could obviously take all the gloves off of the Ukrainian long range strike and say they can use our systems to hit any of the targets they want to, including the air bases from which Ukrainian cities are regularly bombed. That could make a big difference.

Are the Ukrainians able to turn around the situation on the battlefield if we ramp up support?

FK: Look, I don't want to over-promise this. I don't want to over-sell this. There's a lot that would need to happen here. But we're seeing a lot of problems and vulnerabilities in the Russian military, a lot of which are being sort of papered over and concealed by the fact that the Ukrainians are in this frozen situation with limited resources, absolutely unsure of whether they're going to get anything else out of the United States at all of what the Europeans are going to be doing for them and are on the defensive and the Russians are wailing on them. In that circumstance, you don't see a lot of the problems in the Russian military, but the reason to think there's a lot of dissatisfaction in the Russian military, the Russians call them meat assaults. They don't like that. The Russian soldiers post videos of Russian troops on crutches and limping around wounded being ordered into the assault that's going on. They don't like that either.

There's a lot of things that are going on, in other words, that are sort of concealed behind the fact that the Russians are on the offensive and they can keep pushing and they're grinding and Putin is happy and they're being reported and so forth. If that starts to turn around, it's possible, again, you don't want to oversell this, but it's possible that you could see a dramatic shift and a lot of the fundamental flaws and cracks in the Russian military could come to the fore if the Ukrainians were able to mount a serious counteroffensive.

What do the Russians want in a negotiation?

FK: The Russians are increasingly making it clear what they actually want. And it's as if they're listening to our own conversation and they're listening to Witkoff saying there's four regions that they want. And it's almost as if Putin is wondering if we're not getting the message about what the demands actually are.

And so recently the Russian spy chief Naryshkin. and the Russian foreign minister Lavrov put out a bunch of statements that made clear what they want. And Lavrov in particular started talking about Russia's rights in the former Soviet Union and the former Russian Empire. And the latter is actually kind of important because as this is not a new thing, as you talk about how the Russians view the world and what they think they're entitled to, well, I mean in some ways, if you read them quite literally, they think they're entitled to Brighton Beach and any place where there's a bunch of Russian speakers.

The Russians are making a heck of a territorial claim. How are they advancing their expansionist claims?

FK: They're building an entire ideology that is a revanchist neo-imperialist ideology, and they're investing a lot of energy in this. And it's an ideology that's a very much of an anti-Western ideology. It takes me back. It's a real Slavophile ideology that says that the we, great Russian people, are naturally entitled to a huge hunk of the world, and that happens to be whatever hunk of the world we say we're entitled to, but in particular, it's this part of the world which includes, yes, five NATO member states. And so if we're at all serious about coming to the defense of our lives, by the way, these are the NATO member states that are in general terms, meeting their two percent NATO commitments, in a lot of cases exceeding them.

NATO states that Russia claims are clearly worried by Russia. What do they think about Trump?

FK: They're listening to the Russians, but they're also listening to President Trump and saying, "I'm only going to defend NATO member states who are paying their... " Well, they're paying their bills. So these are the states that we would be talking about defending. So when you start to look at the bill for that, the big switch is who has Ukraine? Right now Ukraine has the second-largest army in Europe and the second best by a long margin before you get to the next most competent European military. And that military has been standing off the Russian military for more than a year under very difficult circumstances and holding it back. Because the flip side is we talk about how little Russians gained. That's because the Ukrainians have fought them off. So you can have that military backed by that industrial base with that people, with that technological capability holding the Russians off, and in fact, holding the rear of a Russian attack into the Baltics at risk.

What happens if the U.S. cuts off support for Ukraine?

FK: What I do know is at a certain point we're going to run low and the Russians, you're certainly going to see some more Ukrainian cities, especially frontline cities, really start to get hammered. Zaporizhzhia, for example, cities of 750,000, the Russians are taking beat on it. I could absolutely imagine that Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv city really start to get hammered by Russian bombs.

That can happen and you will see the lines start to move to the west faster. You will see Ukrainians have to fall back, have to be pushed back. You may see some Ukrainians get encircled. And this is where I'm not going to catastrophize it, but I'm going to say this is another place where war can become nonlinear because the Ukrainian defensive line is thin and it's fragile and it's held together by what they have now. If the Ukrainians make a few military mistakes, if the Russians are able to get in a few strong jabs, you could see parts of this line really start to crumble in the absence of American support.

It's hard to tell exactly what happens if something like that occurs. So I'm not going to catastrophize it. I'm going to say the Ukrainians are going to continue to fight. The Europeans are going to step up and try to help them. The lines are unlikely to collapse immediately and probably not at all, but there is a danger that things could go really bad.

Is there a scenario in which this becomes Trump’s Afghanistan?

FK: It's hard to tell how people will react in a circumstance of things looking like they're collapsing in this way when the Russians are working so hard to get in there and take advantage of all of these things. So there absolutely are scenarios where this could turn into Trump's Afghanistan, and he's got to worry about the U.S. Embassy in Kiev and a whole bunch of other terrible things happening. Except it's never going to be Afghanistan because it's not in the middle of Central Asia. And this is the thing that we need to keep in mind. There was a degree to which Afghanistan was Vegas, right? Okay. I mean, that's not going to be true over the long term, by the way. We will live to regret the fact that we've just wrote that off in the way that Biden did in that terrible fashion, but it's going to take a lot longer. This is right on NATO's doorstep, and the effects will be felt immediately. And this will not just slip off the pages.

What do the Ukrainians have to offer Trump in negotiations to maintain American support?

FK: I don't know what President Trump is willing to accept from the Ukrainians as demonstration of their willingness to make peace. The Ukrainians have offered a bunch of concessions already. They're clearly prepared to offer more concessions. The Russians have not only offered no concessions, they've only increased their demands. So it's not entirely clear to me what is sufficient for President Trump. And therefore, I don't know whether the Ukrainians will be able to agree to whatever is actually sufficient for President Trump from that perspective. It's very much of an unequal playing field here. He seems to be demanding right now very little of the Russians, and he's demanding a lot of the Ukrainians. And I don't know what decision President Zelensky will make. My hunch is that he, President Zelensky, will try very hard not to say no and will try very hard to come to an agreement with President Trump about what the yes looks like and what the caveats on it are.

Because I do think that President Zelensky understands that the American support is critical and that it's worth playing for that as long as it looks like there's a chance to receive it. So my hunch is that he'll try very hard to get to a mutually agreeable conclusion.

Read the transcript here.

SHOWNOTES

Trump says he hopes Ukraine, Russia will make a deal this week (Reuters, April 20, 2025)

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 20, 2025 (Critical Threats Project and Institute for the Study of War)

Zelenskyy accuses Russia of violating Putin’s Easter ceasefire 2,000 times (The Guardian, April 20, 2025)

Ukraine ramps up artillery production amid fears of falling U.S. support (Washington Post, April 19, 2025)

Kyiv Pushes Back on ‘90%’ Peace Deal Claim Amid Planned London Talks (Kyiv Post, April 19, 2025)

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 19, 2025 (Critical Threats Project and Institute for the Study of War)

Rubio Says U.S. to Decide in Days if End to War in Ukraine Is ‘Doable’ (New York Times, April 18, 2025)

US Offers to Ease Sanctions on Russia in Ukraine Peace Proposal (Bloomberg, April 18, 2025)

Ukraine open to buying US military aid package for $50 billion, Zelensky says (Kyiv Independent, April 9, 2025)

Trump Must Forge a Ukraine Peace Deal on America’s Terms—Not Putin’s (Fred Kagan, New York Pose, January 19, 2025)

Dollars and Sense: America’s Interest in a Ukrainian Victory (Elaine McCusker, Fred Kagan, and Richard Sims, AEI, January 9, 2025)

The real strategy behind Russia’s sudden truce announcement (Nick Paton Walsh, CNN, April 19, 2025)

Putin is Unlikely to Demobilize in the Event of a Ceasefire Because He is Afraid of His Veterans (Kateryna Stepanenko, Institute for the Study of War, February 23, 2025)

Russia's Weakness Offers Leverage (Christiana Harward, Institute for the Study of War, February 19, 2025)