Ever since Donald Trump won the 2024 election, I have assumed Ukraine was doomed to fall to Russian President Vladimir Putin since no one would be able to stop the 47^th president ending military support for Ukraine.  

In office, Trump has often mocked Ukraine’s ability to defeat Russia on the battlefield, promoted ceding Ukrainian land to Russia, and threatened to yank support. Last Friday, he gave Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a Thanksgiving deadline to accept a 28-point “peace” plan heavily favoring Russian interests. (Please read Tamar Jacoby’s chilling analysis of what’s in that plan.) 

Then, things got weird.  

On Saturday, Trump said the plan was “not my final offer,” and Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a bipartisan group of pro-Ukraine senators that the plan wasn’t even America’s plan but Russia’s. But late in the day, Rubio posted on X that “The peace proposal was authored by the U.S.” with input from Russia and Ukraine. 

On Sunday, Trump ranted on his social media site about how “UKRAINE ‘LEADERSHIP’ HAS EXPRESSED ZERO GRATITUDE FOR OUR EFFORTS” and “THE USA CONTINUES TO SELL MASSIVE $AMOUNTS OF WEAPONS TO NATO, FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UKRAINE (CROOKED JOE GAVE EVERYTHING, FREE, FREE, FREE, INCLUDING ‘BIG’ MONEY!).” But also on Sunday, U.S.-Ukraine negotiations intensified. On Tuesday, an anonymous American official told CBS News that Ukraine “agreed to a peace deal” with details pending. Other reports were less declaratory, and the Russian foreign minister took a skeptical tone toward the nascent deal. “If the spirit and letter of the Anchorage agreement are erased,” he said, referring to the agreement made between Trump and Putin last August that informed the 28-point plan, “we’ll be in a fundamentally different situation.” The Washington Post reported, “Most analysts think the latest changes will be unacceptable to Moscow.” 

What explains the whiplash-inducing remarks from the White House, and especially from Rubio? Toronto Star columnist Justin Ling, reporting from an international security forum in Nova Scotia, argued that “[Vice President J.D.] Vance and his hard-right janissaries have long wanted Rubio gone ([Ukraine envoy General Keith] Kellogg is already departing.) It seems they out manoeuvred [sic] him by drafting and leaking the plan behind his back, then forcing his capitulation after he denounced it.” 

A New York Times account of the negotiation zigs and the zags is more circumspect but tracks Ling’s analysis: “By any measure, the administration’s rollout of the new plan was maladroit at best. The White House was taken by surprise by the leak of its details … Mr. Rubio downplayed the proposal last Wednesday as ‘a list of potential ideas,’ while Mr. Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, embraced it.” European leaders and pro-Ukraine Republicans were horrified by the plan, prompting the series of conflicting White House statements. Still, “by Sunday night Mr. Rubio appeared to have wrestled back control of the negotiations. He excised — for now — sections that would forever bar Ukraine from joining NATO and that banned NATO member states from forming a security force inside Ukraine that would deter Russia from launching a new invasion.” 

But Rubio wouldn’t have the leeway to conduct negotiations with Ukraine without Trump’s permission. Other Trump officials have been sent packing for less subordinate behavior. Why is Rubio still around? 

Granted, Rubio might get fired before this column is published. But assuming he still has his job, I think the answer lies in Ling’s observation that Trump “doesn’t care what happens to Ukraine. He is motivated only by a pathetic and delusional desire to win the Nobel Peace Prize.” 

Trump must know he would never win a Nobel for washing his hands of Ukraine, ending military support, and letting Moscow steamroll Kyiv. Any fantasies of a medal ceremony in Oslo hinge on an actual peace agreement.  

The president’s insatiable thirst for shiny awards and recognition from elites he otherwise disdains gives him reason to grant Rubio latitude to negotiate. Most crucially, it offers Ukraine leverage to resist a bad deal. But it gives Putin nothing. 

The Washington Post recently explored Putin’s endgame: 

Putin is willing to fight on despite the economic pain and stunning casualties that dwarf the losses of the United States in Iraq or the Soviet Union in Afghanistan because he senses U.S. and European weakness and Ukrainian exhaustion, according to analysts.  

For Putin, the cost is worth it because it is not a question so much of conquering land but of reversing the Soviet Union’s loss of the Cold War and reasserting Russia’s status as a global power, said former Russian diplomat Boris Bondarev.  

“He’s fighting not for villages in Ukraine. He’s fighting not for territory in Ukraine, not even for rare earths in Ukraine. He is fighting for a much bigger outcome,” he said. “He wants the United States, first of all, and Europe to admit that Russia has its exclusive sphere of influence where the United States and Europe are forbidden to interfere.”  

“It’s not about territory. It depends on how long Ukrainians are going to fight, so his goal is to crush their appetite to resist.” 

If that is true, then what Rubio and Zelensky reportedly are devising—a deal to allow NATO forces inside Ukraine—won’t give Putin an “exclusive sphere of influence” and is unlikely to win his blessing. And Putin has reason to hold out; if the next American president is Vance, who appears more than ready to pull up stakes, then in three years, Russia could be handed Ukraine on a silver platter. 

Fundamentally, the three leaders want different things. Putin wants an exclusive sphere of influence beyond Russia’s borders. Zelensky wants no Russian influence within Ukraine’s borders. Trump wants a medal and a better lead on his obituary than “first president to be convicted of fraud and impeached twice.” These interests do not align. Trump could give Putin what he wants by ending military support for Ukraine, but that’s not going to impress the jurors in Oslo and therefore does not give Trump what he wants. Only a negotiated settlement between Putin and Zelensky would suffice. If a deal just came down to drawing new borders, perhaps a painful but acceptable middle ground, literally, could be found. But if Zelensky wants security guarantees backed up by NATO, and Putin wants NATO out of his backyard, then there’s no middle ground.  

In other words, Trump’s narcissistic and futile compulsion for a Nobel Peace Prize may be what allows Ukraine to fight on. 

The post Could Trump’s Narcissism Save Ukraine?  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The world appears to have dodged a bullet. Donald Trump and team are walking back from their latest and most outlandish proposal for peace in Ukraine. American and Ukrainian negotiators meeting in Geneva are working to revise the plan, and U.S. and European officials have agreed to meet separately to discuss its implications for NATO and the European Union. The outcome of these talks is unknown, and it’s hard to imagine a deal that will satisfy all parties—the Russian, Ukrainian, and European positions remain starkly at odds. But whatever the result, some things are already clear—including three lessons for the U.S. and Europe.  

Kyiv and its European allies have long feared that Trump would betray Ukraine by using U.S. leverage to impose an unfair, unrealistic peace settlement modeled on a real estate deal—splitting the difference between two sides, in this case, a rapacious aggressor and its much smaller neighbor struggling to defend itself. In fact, the 28-point peace plan leaked last week was far worse than that. It didn’t even pretend to split the difference. With a few minor exceptions, Moscow got everything it wanted, and Ukraine got nothing. The deal rewarded the aggressor and pummeled the victim, strengthening a voracious Russia while enriching the U.S.  

But Washington wasn’t just betraying Ukraine—the proposed deal would also be disastrous for Europe. With Ukraine sidelined—its large, experienced army and cutting-edge weapons neutered—nothing would stand between Europe and Russia, now armed to the teeth, invigorated by four years of war, and openly hungry to reclaim more of what it considers its historic sphere of influence. 

The American and Ukrainian negotiators who met in Geneva this weekend have reportedly made substantial changes to the original plan. Other significant issues need to be settled by direct talks between Trump and Zelensky. 

But it’s hard to see Vladimir Putin agreeing to a modified plan. He has made clear for months that his position is unchangeable, and he is unlikely to accept anything less than Trump’s original outline. “If Kyiv doesn’t want to discuss the proposals,” the Russian strongman announced last week, “that’s fine with us, as it leads to achieving the goals of the special military operation by force.” In other words, back to business as usual in Ukraine, with a long, bloody winter ahead. 

The original proposal, negotiated by special envoy Steve Witkoff with input from Putin’s close associate Kirill Dmitriev, mandates a long list of draconian concessions from Ukraine—ultimatums that could threaten its existence as a nation. Its armed forces would be cut by one-third, from some 900,000 troops to 600,000. Russia would be allowed to keep not just the territory it has seized over nearly 12 years of savage fighting, but also a large swathe of Ukraine it has been unable to conquer—a strategic high ground roughly the size of Delaware.  

Kyiv would be required to renounce joining NATO, and NATO would have to promise to stop expanding, barring all other prospective members anywhere in the world. Russian officials would receive amnesty for their war crimes—an unmistakable signal to other aspiring aggressors in the Middle East and Asia. Western sanctions on Russia would be lifted, and Moscow would be invited to rejoin the Group of Seven advanced industrial countries.  

Among the proposal’s most jarring provisions—telltale signs of Trump’s true motives—are commercial. The centerpiece of the plan, Russia’s ultimate reward, is “reintegration into the global economy,” and the principal means to this end—surprise, surprise—is a long-term “economic cooperation agreement” with the U.S. The blueprint spares no detail about what Team Trump envisions: “mutually beneficial” deals on “energy, natural resources, infrastructure, artificial intelligence, data centers, rare earth metal extraction projects in the Arctic, and other . . . corporate opportunities.”  

Meanwhile, Washington would effectively seize the nearly $300 billion in Russian assets frozen by the West shortly after the 2022 invasion—all but about $5 billion of it sitting in banks under European jurisdiction. The European Union has been negotiating a plan to leverage these assets to help Ukraine win the war and rebuild its battered cities. But the Trump plan would plow the money into American-led investment funds for Russia and Ukraine, with significant revenue flowing back to Washington. The plan also provides for the U.S. to collect a fee for any activity it undertakes to secure the peace agreement. 

But even that is not the worst of it. By far the most onerous provisions of the proposal are those that pretend to guarantee the future security of Ukraine and Europe. Not only would Kyiv be severely weakened, but no NATO or other European troops would be allowed to help keep peace in Ukraine after a ceasefire. That would be left, astonishingly, to the U.S. and Russia. “A joint American-Russian working group on security issues will be established,” the document states, “to promote and ensure compliance with all provisions of this agreement.”  

As for the Russian threat to Europe—a threat increasingly taken seriously by intelligence agencies across the continent—the plan says virtually nothing about it. One laughable provision, ignoring decades of treaty violations by Putin and associates, commits Russia to “enshrine in law its policy of non-aggression towards Europe and Ukraine”—as if the law, domestic or international, means anything to Moscow. “It is expected,” another bullet point suggests meekly, “that Russia will not invade neighboring countries.”  

Washington originally gave Ukraine until Thursday to approve the deal, threatening severe repercussions if Kyiv declined. The Trump administration is no longer sending weaponry to Ukraine, but it still supplies arms indirectly by selling them to Europe—and that would surely have come to an end. Even more dire for Kyiv, the U.S. could stop sharing the intelligence that has sustained Ukraine’s fighting capacity since the beginning of the war.  

The U.S. provides information on incoming Russian missiles, covert activities, battlefield movements, and long-range targets deep inside enemy territory. Much of the American and European weaponry vital to Ukrainian operations would cease functioning without U.S. intelligence and software updates. Challenges would emerge immediately and worsen over time as the information provided in the past grew increasingly stale. Most troubling, unlike with most types of weaponry, there is no European substitute for what the U.S. supplies. 

But even if Trump were to insist on the toughest provisions, Volodymyr Zelensky could still walk away from the deal. Even after four years of brutal war, Ukrainians are in no mood to surrender. And if it’s Putin who walks, Team Trump could pivot again—they’ve done that before. There’s no predicting, and the negotiations are likely to drag on for days. 

Still, even now, three lessons stand out. 

The first and most apparent is a warning to the White House. Steve Witkoff isn’t just an amateur with shockingly little knowledge of Ukraine or Russia. He’s also dangerously credulous and, after four friendly visits to Moscow, appears to be under the influence of one of the world’s shrewdest manipulators. Trump is also vulnerable to Putin’s wiles—far too vulnerable. But Witkoff is in a different league—all but taking dictation from a self-proclaimed enemy of the West. The president should rein in his special envoy or restrict his remit before his naive bumbling results in real harm to the U.S. and its allies.  

The second lesson should be familiar to anyone who’s been watching the war in Ukraine. Putin will not settle for anything short of his long-standing maximalist demands. He doesn’t want peace. He doesn’t want to compromise with Kyiv. He wants total victory—the subjugation of Ukraine, the dismantling of NATO, vindication of his belief that might makes right, and that international borders are meaningless. That’s why he likes the Witkoff plan—it opens the door to almost all of that.  

What Trump and Witkoff still don’t seem to grasp: even with this plan in place, Putin is unlikely to stop until he gets everything he wants—most likely through resumed aggression in Ukraine and Europe. The only way to end the conflict is to persuade him he can’t achieve his ends, no matter how long he continues fighting—and the West must stay the course until he understands he can’t win.  

The third and sharpest lesson of the week is for Europe. Most continental leaders grasp the threat Witkoff put into play, and they know it goes beyond Ukraine. “Wars cannot be ended by great powers over the heads of the affected countries,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared over the weekend. “If Ukraine were to lose this war and then, most probably, collapse, that would also have consequences for the whole of European politics.”  

Most European effort since the deal was leaked has focused on getting through to Trump—securing a seat at the negotiating table and modifying the plan. That may be worth trying. It’s a tactic that succeeded in the past, including in the wake of the Anchorage summit in August—and Europeans are acutely aware that neither they nor Ukraine can afford to alienate Trump completely.  

But the near success of the Witkoff plan should alarm Europe, sparking a sense of urgency in Brussels and other European capitals. European leaders see the growing threat from Russia. They’ve watched with mounting fear as Moscow escalates its gray-zone attacks on NATO—sabotage, arson, assassination attempts, cyberattacks, and disinformation campaigns. Brussels and other capitals have been talking about a historic defense buildup since the Ukraine war began in 2022. But so far, there has been more talk—plans, promises, blueprints, and legislative proposals—than action. And time could be running out, especially if Ukraine were forced to stop fighting, leaving Europe without a shield and freeing Russia to take the next step against the West.  

What the Witkoff plan revealed, and the prospect should be terrifying for Europe: Washington may be willing to let this happen. Far from standing with its NATO allies against a clear and present danger, the plan would have rewarded Russia, encouraged further aggression, and vindicated Putin’s belief that strong countries can do as they please in their spheres of influence—and Washington would have done nothing to stop him as long as Trump found a way to benefit financially.  

The White House may or may not be backing down now, but the lesson should not be lost on Europe. It cannot and must not continue to rely on Washington to keep the peace. What’s needed isn’t just managing Trump’s excesses and cleaning up his mistakes, but an all-out push toward strategic autonomy, starting with an urgent defense buildup modeled on the transformation that made America the “arsenal of democracy” in the 1940s. 

Will either America or its allies learn these lessons? Probably not—or not right away. Instead, Europe and the U.S. are likely to spend the coming weeks struggling to amend a plan that will in the end prove too reasonable for Putin. It won’t be the first time this has happened. We’ve seen repeatedly since Trump returned to the White House. Instead of moving decisively to counter the threat from the East—leveraging frozen Russian assets, restricting Moscow’s oil revenue, cracking down on its trading partners, and arming Ukraine to win the war—the world again gets distracted by a “plan” that’s probably going nowhere. 

The post Three Lessons From Trump’s Latest Plan for Ukraine  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The war in Ukraine has transformed Western European thinking about defending itself against its giant neighbor, Russia. The latest push, proposed last week by the European Union, is a blueprint for a better coordinated military buildup—procuring and manufacturing weapons together rather than separately, country by country. It’s an ambitious plan, in line with other pending continent-wide reforms—deregulation and a single capital market—and like them, it promises increased efficiency and scale in pursuit of shared European goals. What’s unclear is whether the 27 EU members and their allies, including Britain, can put aside national interests for the common good. The stakes could hardly be higher, but the evidence is mixed. 

Much has changed in Europe since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, with countries across the continent talking a much different game than four years ago. After decades of hoping for good relations with Moscow, most leaders now see their eastern neighbor as an aggressive, revanchist power, preparing potentially for a hot war and already menacing nearby nations with an array of gray-zone weapons—from disinformation and cyberattacks to sabotage of critical infrastructure. Uncertain if an increasingly fickle and isolationist U.S. will stand by them, many Europeans recognize they must prepare to face the enemy alone, and defense is now Topic A in political circles. 

Many countries are actively preparing. National defense budgets have increased dramatically—from €218 billion in 2021 to a projected €392 billion in 2025. A generation of innovative startups is competing with seasoned contractors to develop cutting-edge weapons. The most concerned capitals are discussing mandatory conscription, and some have mounted national programs to teach civilian defense. 

Still, for all this progress, many across the continent, concerned about the pace of change, wonder if Europe will succeed in translating its bold talk into action. 

 The problem starts with defense spending. In 2014, shortly after Russia annexed Crimea, all NATO members agreed to increase defense outlays to 2 percent of national GDP. But by 2021, only six had. Last year, driven by President Donald Trump’s bullying and fear of Russian President Vladimir Putin, NATO set a new goal of 5 percent. But only part of that total—3.5 percent of economic output—must be spent on weapons and ammunition, with countries allowed to use the remaining 1.5 percent for “critical infrastructure,” and many proposed infrastructure projects, like a much-ridiculed bridge between Sicily and the Italian mainland, hardly meet the laugh test.  

 Along with these national commitments, in 2024, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen set a €500 billion goal for EU defense spending over the next decade. Officials across the union lauded the idea, and some spoke ambitiously about including €500 billion in the next EU seven-year budget. That now seems unlikely, but Brussels has moved to make good on von der Leyen’s goal with the Security Action for Europe (SAFE) initiative, borrowing €150 billion to finance low-interest loans for member states working to boost defense production. The bloc has also enacted a four-year rule change, the “national escape clause,” that could make it easier for capitals to spend an estimated €650 billion from their own budgets on defense. 

If this money comes through, it will be a huge increase—according to one estimate, leaked to the press this weekend, it could amount to as much as €2.4 trillion over four years. European funding is unlikely to match the U.S. defense budget, which totaled $997 billion in 2024, but it could rival Russian and even Chinese spending, estimated at $149 billion and $314 billion, respectively, in 2024.  

The problem: It will be up to national leaders to take advantage of the new EU incentives, and many may hesitate for financial and political reasons—neither the far left nor the far right is on board in many countries. Meanwhile, the EU has struggled to pass the much smaller €1.5 billion European Defense Industrial Strategy, proposed in 2024 but still not formally approved.  

So too with European aid for Ukraine. Already in the first year of the war, many in Europe talked a better game than the U.S.—shrewder about Putin and with a better understanding of Ukraine’s needs. These European voices have grown stronger with time, making up for Americans, who have grown hesitant, if not reluctant, to help. According to one estimate, in 2022, Europe provided €16.5 billion in military aid—compared to Washington’s €24 billion. But by 2024, the ratio had reversed: Ukraine received €42 billion from Europe and €16.5 billion from the U.S. Washington has allocated no new aid since Trump took office in January, while Europe provided €24 billion in just six months in 2025.  

This aid has been crucial for Ukraine, sustaining it—indeed, guaranteeing its survival—even as Russia’s military grew stronger and Moscow learned from its mistakes in the early months of the war. But European aid dropped dramatically this summer to less than half the monthly average earlier in the year, and the continent still devotes only a tiny fraction of its annual GDP to Ukraine. From 2022 to 2024, the biggest donors, including Germany and Britain, allocated just 0.2 percent of economic output, while smaller countries in southern Europe spent less than 0.1 percent. 

It isn’t hard to understand why. National budgets are tight. Two of the bloc’s biggest member states—France and the United Kingdom—face crippling debt crises. Until recently, Germany was constrained by a constitutional “debt brake,” barring Berlin from accruing a deficit of more than 0.35 percent of GDP.  

Still, the math is straightforward: when it comes to military spending, Europeans’ actions do not match their rhetoric—on their own defense or aid to Ukraine. 

Nor is money the only issue. Even more challenging than budget constraints, the EU is hamstrung by a deep-rooted inclination to put national interest first—at the expense of collective interest. Former Italian prime minister Enrico Letta illustrated the problem metaphorically in a much-cited 2024 EU report on European competitiveness. Letta had hoped to gather input for his paper in cities across the continent, traveling from capital to capital by high-speed rail. But he could not make the trip by rail because national railway systems run most European high-speed trains, and few connect to high-speed trains in neighboring countries. 

Defense investment is similarly fragmented. Europe makes five different types of main battle tanks. At least seven countries produce artillery. French defense giant Thales competes head-to-head with Sweden’s Saab and Germany’s Hensoldt to sell defense electronics and sensors to developing countries worldwide, to cite just one example.  

It’s hard to find a policymaker or defense expert who doesn’t extol the virtues of cooperation. Coordinated planning, collective procurement, and joint production would allow the continent to produce much more for less and accelerate its urgently needed military buildup. But age-old habits and ingrained interests argue against the collaborative action that’s needed. 

No project illustrates the challenge more clearly than the sputtering partnership between France’s Dassault and Germany’s Airbus to build a sixth-generation fighter jet, the Future Combat Air System (FCAS). Launched in 2017 by Berlin and Paris and later joined by Madrid, the €100 billion initiative is meant to be an equal collaboration—one country, one vote—delivering a state-of-the-art, AI-enhanced fighting platform by 2040.  

But long-running tensions between the industry partners erupted publicly this fall when Dassault announced it wanted a freer hand to complete the project’s next phase. If Germany couldn’t agree, the company would go it alone. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron are eager to resolve the conflict, but the manufacturers seem to be at an impasse, and by all accounts, the high-profile collaboration is on the verge of collapse. 

The new EU proposal, the Defense Readiness Roundup 2030, will be debated this week at a meeting of the bloc’s 27 national leaders. It attempts to address this entrenched fragmentation. The document identifies nine “priority areas”— including ground combat, artillery, drones, and air and missile defense—and urges member states to tackle them collaboratively. Countries are encouraged to collaborate on producing and purchasing weapons. Recommended approaches include joint ventures and “capability coalitions.”  

“There is a clear need,” the report states, “to invest more, invest together and invest European” rather than buying off-the-shelf products from American or Asian defense contractors. Building on the €150 billion set aside for low-interest SAFE loans—funding available only for joint production by two or more EU or allied countries—the report suggests there may be more money to come for collaborative projects.  

The roadmap is not naïve. Its authors know better than to ask member states to cede national control, particularly of defense. But the paper sets an ambitious goal: that by 2020, 40 percent of European defense production—more than double the current share—will be collaborative. 

The obstacles to collective action start with history—80 years of European dependence on American leadership for all things defense-related. Since the launch of the transatlantic alliance in 1949, Washington has been responsible for NATO command and control, and members have rarely cooperated except at the direction of the U.S. The EU’s collective decision-making process poses a second major hurdle. Virtually all big bloc decisions require unanimity, now routinely stymied by pro-Russian Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and other populist, far-right leaders. Also problematic: the continent’s lack of a single credit market, slowing the flow of capital and inhibiting cross-border investments. 

What’s needed is the political will to cut through these thickets, advancing difficult political and financial reforms and subordinating national interest to the common good. Can Europe pull this off? Will it do so quickly enough? Western intelligence services predict the Kremlin could be ready for full-scale war in Western Europe by 2030 and possibly as soon as 2027. Meanwhile, the gray-zone war that escalated dramatically last month with aerial incursions in a half dozen countries is all but certain to get hotter. A robust defense buildup is the only way to fend off a possible Russian attack, preserving European peace and prosperity. 

There is reason for hope. In contrast to the U.S., European leaders and much of the public are aware of the threat, and many countries have made impressive strides. But nothing has come easily. There are objections and obstacles at every step, and the pace of change has been painfully slow.  

This week will bring two critical tests as Europeans debate the commission’s defense spending proposal and respond to Trump’s latest pendulum swing on Ukraine—another strong tilt toward Moscow. EU founding father Jean Monet’s often quoted remark has rarely seemed more apt: “Europe will be forged in crises and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises.” Few crises in the continent’s post-World War II history have seemed as urgent as the potentially existential challenge it faces today, and the outcome is far from clear.  

The post Can Europe Turn Tough Talk on Russia into Action?  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

It’s almost as difficult to say something new about Russia as it is to write an original biography of Abraham Lincoln. To her credit, Julia Ioffe comes close with Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy, which looks at the country’s turbulent 20th century, and its inauspicious first quarter of the 21st. It does so by employing the novel lens of women’s role in Russian society, which often alights on figures—tragic, heroic, imbued with conviction—largely unknown in the West. Motherland is also a memoir of her family, which emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States in the 1980s when she was seven.

In less expert hands, Motherland could have ended up just another clever but vapid conceit of the Manchego: The Cheese that Explains Spain variety. (That’s not a real book; at least, I very much hope it isn’t.) Women really were at the vanguard of Bolshevism, and their elevated role in the workers’ paradise was intended to show how serious communists were about gender equality. 

This isn’t entirely an aberration. Before the Revolution, Russia “had the highest number of female radicals of any country in Europe,” Ioffe writes. Our own Western imaginations tend to default to the Stalinist version of the Soviet Union: sanguinary, hungry, grim. But before that, Vladimir Lenin allowed something of an intellectual and artistic hothouse to flourish in Moscow and the city then known as Petrograd, now St. Petersburg (where I was born and raised when it was called Leningrad). True enough, Lenin may never have been the ferocious yet avuncular leader of official Soviet lore, but until his 1924 death, the Soviet project retained a measure of idealism—in which women were welcome.

To do their part in creating the socialist paradise, women would be liberated from the demands of the family. “I hate marriage. It is an idiotic, meaningless life,” the influential political theorist Alexandra Kollontai wrote (the Soviet Union was one of those rare societies that minted many political theorists whom it actually valued). But as Ioffe points out, Kollontai and other women in the vanguard had little in common with Western feminists, such as American suffragettes, who were agitating in a somewhat different way, and in a somewhat different direction, at least ideologically.

“The paramount distinction for socialists was not gender or nationality or religion; it was class. Everything else was secondary,” Ioffe writes in this, her first book. That made me think of the modern-day socialist thinker Adolph L. Reed Jr. and his seminal No Politics but Class Politics. Today’s left has vociferously rejected such unity of purpose for an intersectional approach, which explains why we have a President Donald Trump to contend with once again.

The breadth of progress for Soviet women was truly remarkable, if ultimately fleeting. “By 1917, Soviet women had the (increasingly irrelevant) right to vote, years before their Western peers,” Ioffe points out. “They had the right to no-fault divorce and child support, paid maternity leave, and free higher education, including in the sciences, by 1918. By 1920, they had the right to abortion, provided by the state for free.” In fact, the USSR was the first nation to legalize abortion.

But it’s not all heady freedom, of course. War, alcoholism, and political violence haunt this book’s heroines from start to finish, often leaving them as household heads and sole providers. This was true during the political repressions of the late 1930s and after the ravages of World War II, the Great Patriotic War that cost the Soviet Union over 20 million lives. And it remained true through the demise of Communism. “By 1991, Russian women were exhausted from all the things that the previous decades of Soviet rule had required of them,” Ioffe observes. “But the collapse of the Soviet Union did not allow women to return to their womanly mission, as [Mikhail] Gorbachev had proposed. Faced with hunger, instability, and salaries that weren’t paid for months, millions of Russian men lay down on the couch and took to drink.” The Russian woman, in these pages, is ambitious but exhausted, idealistic but saddled with grim day-to-day realities. Coming from a family of strong Russian women, I tend to agree with Ioffe’s assessment. 

Ioffe acknowledges that, under the reign of Vladimir Putin, conservative quasi-Christianity dominates, with American evangelicals helping to implement new abortion bans. Ioffe retains a deep love for her native land, but returning to Moscow on a Fulbright scholarship in 2009, she finds that Russia has adopted gender roles that borrow the worst of both the Soviet Union and the West.

“This situation when a woman is strong, and not in a feminine way but a masculine one, and a man is weak, this role reversal is what has led to women’s unhappiness,” one woman lectures Ioffe. “This is what leads to diseases like breast cancer, uterine cancer—because of this lack of acceptance of her own femininity.”

Ioffe is in an unusually strong position to tell this story. Born in Moscow, into an unusually prosperous and accomplished family by the standards of Soviet Jewry, Ioffe lived a comfortable life in the capital—worlds away from my own childhood. The grim postwar apartment blocks of Leningrad, where I was born and raised, may as well have been on Mars. Nor did penury follow her to the United States, as was the case for so many of us diasporists. Her family settled in Maryland; Ioffe eventually made her way to Princeton and, after graduation, moved to New York and became a writer for some of the country’s most prestigious media outlets, including The New Republic, where she spent several years, and Politico, which she left after a brief stint and an off-color joke about Donald and Ivanka. The extent to which her family has apparently chronicled its manifold peregrinations is unusual, for Soviet Jewish families in particular. Sometimes, it could seem that little was worth remembering other than survival itself. It was oddly refreshing to step into this richer, happier world. 

When her sister became an oncologist, Ioffe writes, she extended the lineage of female doctors in the family to a fourth generation. Yet Americans wanting to celebrate this as a #GirlBoss triumph are quickly checked by the author. “Measured against the history of their own country, the Soviet Union, the women from whom I descend were perfectly average people,” Ioffe argues. “They were ordinary women who happened to be the subjects—and products—of one of the most radical social experiments in history: the attempt to emancipate women and build a new Soviet person.” 

The dream was never realized, but even the fleeting experiment with true gender equality comes off here as impossibly enticing, a plangent hint of what could have been. I’m glad that Ioffe has the intellectual nuance to see the Soviet Union as more than just a failed experiment that ought to be forgotten, like the cinematic oeuvre of Pauly Shore. We had free health care! But that, truly, is another story…

Soviet women fought in World War II, becoming some of the Red Army’s finest fighter pilots (Polina Gelman) and snipers (Lyudmila Pavlichenko). To read of their exploits while the bilious Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth prattles on about lax fitness standards (which do not, in fact, vary by gender in the American military, his embittered assertions notwithstanding) is a sobering experience.

A founding partner at Puck, the journal of politics and culture, Ioffe continues to show vestiges of The New Yorker’s understated writing style and its comfort with power and its handmaidens. “I was leaving a cocktail reception at the Munich Security Conference,” one sentence goes. There, she happens to run into Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of late dissident Alexei Navalny. Ioffe reported extensively on Navalny’s rise to political stardom; though she describes Yulia as lacking her husband’s charisma, the 49-year-old widow is yet another Russian woman who has been forced into carrying out her fallen husband’s work. Ioffe also chronicles the plight of the female punk group Pussy Riot, whose persecution by the Kremlin was, in retrospect, a warning the West should have taken more seriously.

Ioffe’s own family history acts like a tributary to the main narrative, constantly nourishing it with a personal quality. Family members were hounded during the Stalinist terrors, perished in the Holocaust, and made the difficult decision to emigrate. It’s easy to forget that history is more than just a procession of great and terrible men. Their vanities and cruelties inevitably take their toll on ordinary people wanting to lead ordinary lives.

Motherland ends on an unsettled note, in an unsettled world, with Russia a pariah state that has traded closeness with the West for ties with North Korea and Iran. “I dream of Moscow almost every night,” Ioffe writes in the conclusion of Motherland. Now that, thanks to its barbaric invasion of Ukraine, Russia is essentially in a proxy war with much of Europe and the United States, Ioffe, who showed extraordinary physical bravery in covering the 2014 Russian assault on Crimea, isn’t able to go home again or even visit. She has turned her homesickness into an original and impassioned work. I imagine that the women in her family would be proud, even if she didn’t become a doctor. 

The post Russia Through a Feminist Lens appeared first on Washington Monthly.

It was the kind of display only NATO can mount. Several hundred Italian troops from the alliance’s Baltic air policing mission stood in formation at Estonia’s Ämari Air Base, more than 1,500 miles from home. Some of the world’s most powerful weaponry loomed behind them on the windswept tarmac: an F-35 fighter jet, a SAMP/T air defense missile launcher, a Typhoon Eurofighter, and a CAEW radar surveillance plane.

Just days after three Russian MiG-31 fighter jets violated Estonian airspace, loitering for 12 minutes before being escorted out by NATO aircraft, Italian defense minister Guido Crosetto had flown in to thank the Italian pilots who intercepted the planes. A big bear of a man with a shaved head, he and Estonian defense minister Hanno Pevkur stood together on the runway to announce that Italy would extend its rotational presence in Estonia, leaving its jets and air defense system at Ämari through spring 2026.

“If [the Russians] are looking for a response,” Crosetto declared, “this is it—our strengthened presence here.”

His determination seemed all the more striking coming from one of the founders, along with Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, of the right-wing populist party, Brothers of Italy, that many once worried would be skeptical of NATO and hesitant to confront Russia. “We’re here,” Crosetto proclaimed, “to show with our physical presence that we are an alliance, and we work as an alliance.”

The MiG incursion in Estonia was just one in a spate of Russian violations of European airspace this fall. In early September, 21 Russian drones crashed or were shot down over Poland. Four days later, a Russian drone was intercepted over Romania. The morning before the ministers met at Ämari, more drones were sighted in nearby Baltic Sea countries, buzzing over airports in Oslo and Copenhagen. Other swarms have appeared in the weeks since over France, Germany, and Lithuania.

Americans have been preoccupied with the shutdown, but many in Europe wonder if the war in Ukraine might finally be spilling out across the continent. At a time of growing transatlantic tensions and questions about NATO, would Americans take note of the danger? And how would the West respond?

Few nations have a bigger stake in NATO than tiny Estonia, with a population of 1.4 million, and its two Baltic sister states, Latvia and Lithuania, all three long overshadowed by their giant neighbor, Russia. Tsarist Russia fought Europe on Estonian territory in the 16th century. Russia conquered and ruled much of the Baltic region through the 18th and 19th centuries. A brief period of Estonian independence between the two world wars gave way to a brutal Soviet occupation in 1940.

“Every Estonian family lost someone under communist rule,” one young woman told me. An officer shot by a Russian firing squad, an intellectual deported to the gulag, a farmer run off his land and hunted down in the forest: altogether, roughly one-fifth of the population was murdered or dispersed.

The Russian incursion last month came as no surprise. Estonia has been contending with Russian gray-zone warfare—cyberattacks, sabotage, drone overflights, and undersea cable cutting—since what many call its “re-independence” in 1991. Today, citizens and politicians put a premium on resilience, and no political faction questions the national focus on preparedness: robust defense spending, mandatory conscription, a large volunteer defense force, and extensive civilian resilience training. Tallinn plans to spend 5.4 percent of GDP on core military needs in 2026—well above the 3.5 percent now pledged by most NATO members.

But even against this backdrop, Estonians were stunned in 2021 to hear Vladimir Putin declare his imperialist aims in Europe: not just to reclaim Ukraine but also to push NATO back to its pre-1997 borders. For Estonia, which joined the alliance in 2004, this would mean the removal of all NATO troops and weaponry, leaving it to its own modest resources in the face of an aggressive, revanchist Russia.

No one I spoke with in Estonia thought the MiG incursion marked the beginning of a hot war in Europe. “There is no acute military danger on our borders,” Jonatan Vseviov, secretary general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told me. “The Russians are stuck in Ukraine, and they do not want a military confrontation with NATO—we know that with certainty.”

The all but universal consensus in Tallinn is that the Kremlin’s goal was to cow Ukraine’s European supporters—Denmark, Norway, Estonia, and Poland are among Kyiv’s staunchest NATO allies—sowing fear among the public and concentrating minds on homeland defense rather than aiding Ukraine.

Still, no one doubts the longer-term danger for Europe. “Putin wants to make life as we know it impossible,” explained Vseviov, a dark-haired man with a square brow who used to be Estonia’s ambassador to the U.S., “by dividing NATO and creating a buffer zone on his border—weak, divided, corrupt countries. This has been one of his top goals for three decades: to ensure that democracy, free markets, and the rule of law can’t seep across the border to Russia.”

A block away, at the defense ministry, officials monitoring the Russian threat have been stunned to see Moscow mounting a historic military buildup even as it wages the largest and deadliest war in Europe since World War II.

“The Kremlin is losing 30,000 soldiers a month in Ukraine but still managing to replace them by recruiting 30,000 men each month,” says Kristjan Mäe, the slender, sandy-haired head of the ministry’s policy planning department. Russian defense spending more than quadrupled from 2021 to 2025, and most of its 1.3 million active-duty personnel are now battle-hardened. “To run the war and the buildup in parallel is very significant,” Mäe notes. “Even as it wages war in Ukraine, Russia is preparing for a larger war in Europe.” Still, he agrees, there will be no military attack as long as Russia is tied up in Ukraine.

Everyone I meet with in Tallinn makes the same point about the war in Ukraine: Ukrainians are fighting for them, defending Europe, and weakening the Russian military. Several quoted former Estonian spy chief Mikk Marran: “Every Russian tank destroyed in Ukraine is one less Russian tank that could someday invade Estonia.”

Estonia has led every European effort to support Ukraine and often acts as a gadfly, urging others in the European Union and NATO to provide more aid. But everyone I met in Tallinn had a slightly different idea of what it might mean for Estonia once the fighting in Ukraine ends. 

Mäe’s worst nightmare is a Russian victory. “That would open the door to something much worse,” he explains. Moscow would likely move tens of thousands of troops from the front in Ukraine to the new military bases it’s building on the border of Estonia. It might take a few years to regroup and replenish, but Russia is already stockpiling weapons. Worst of all, Mäe says, “victory would prove to the Kremlin that despite the cost of war, the reward is even greater.”

Yet even a Russian loss would be unlikely to bring relief in Tallinn. “There will be no end to history,” the foreign ministry’s Vseviov explains. “We will still need to confront Russia. It just may be a little easier if Moscow loses. That would put us in a better position to continue the struggle.”

The bigger question hovering over these scenarios is what NATO will do if Russia attacks. One expert I met told me an old Estonian joke: “Of course, NATO will come to our defense. They’ll send one instructor.” But not even she seemed particularly worried. Across the board, somewhat surprisingly to me, everyone I spoke to was confident that the alliance would come through. In the event of a gray-zone attack, there might be some questions: would NATO agree that a red line had been crossed, and would relief arrive quickly enough? But no one seemed to doubt that the alliance would eventually deliver.

“It been the guiding principle of our foreign policy since independence,” Mäe explained, “to make sure we never again find ourselves alone.” Officials and independent experts alike pointed to a long list of what they see as reassuring evidence: the NATO contingent of British and French troops stationed at the Tapa Army Base, the air policing mission that operates 24/7 out of Ämari, the NATO forward presence in Latvia and Lithuania, the fact that Finland and Sweden have joined the alliance, aligning all Baltic Sea capitals in a like-minded state of readiness. “And all this is in peacetime,” Vseviov underlines. “The only challenge is making this certainty credible to Moscow—and we work very hard on that.”

Of course, he and others recognize that things are changing within the alliance. “For 80 years,” Vseviov reflects, “America proposed, and Europe reacted. Sometimes we agreed, sometimes we disagreed, or hesitated. But it was all American ideas, implemented by American leadership with American capabilities.” Now things are changing, and Europe finds itself in a new position. Many Estonians are frustrated by the pace of change across the continent—the military buildup and the understanding of the threat from Russia. But they can do only so much to spur other Europeans to fill the gaps left by ebbing American interest.

I press the question at every meeting. “Are you confident that America will come through? And if the U.S. hesitates, can the rest of NATO do what would be needed here?” One Estonian official who declined to be quoted speculated about the theoretical consequences of a U.S. withdrawal from the alliance. “If NATO had to defend Estonia tonight, it would be ready and up to the task. Without the U.S. and Canada, it will be five to 10 years before Europe is ready.”

But no one discussing the situation admitted to any doubt. “Of course,” Mäe concedes, “any crack in NATO unity sends a dangerous signal to our adversaries.” Still, he insists that Washington has repeatedly reassured Tallinn, and he ticks off dates and venues when Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth committed the U.S. to stand by the Baltic states. “We Europeans should focus on what we need to be doing,” Mäe maintains, “how we can strengthen the alliance.”

Ultimately, it’s hard for a visiting American not to marvel at the Estonian determination to look on the bright side. “You don’t understand,” Vseviov tries to clarify for me. “Russia has always been a problem for us or occupied us. But being afraid is no cure. Think about the Japanese living in an earthquake zone. You can’t live in fear. You prepare, as we have prepared by tying ourselves to the European Union and NATO.”

The post Estonia in the Crosshairs appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Looking back, it was a prescient warning. Just the day before the Kremlin sent 19 unmanned aerial vehicles deep into Polish territory, prompting NATO to scramble its most advanced fighter jets and anti-missile air defenses, I met with the commander of a Ukrainian air defense unit protecting the city of Sloviansk from Russian drones. We sat outdoors in a quiet courtyard near the city center, just 15 miles from the front line. The officer, who goes by the name Fin—he worked in the financial sector, running a grain export company, before volunteering for combat duty in 2022—explained how his team of advanced IT technicians and other specialists uses signals intelligence (SIGINT) to intercept incoming Russian drones.

A tall, well-built man with a graying beard, Fin took out his phone to show me a video of a typical intercept. The unit had hacked into the frequencies the targeted Russian drone was using to send video images back to its pilot behind the front line, letting us see the battlefield through enemy eyes. Ukrainian forests and fields floated by, bracketed by the drone’s spinning rotors on the edges of the frame. Then it all went gray. The SIGINT unit, code-named Specter, had used the device’s own navigational signals to bring it down, crashing to earth far short of its target.

“We do this for a fraction of what it would cost Europe and the U.S.,” Fin explained. “No jets, no million-dollar weaponry. And we intercept a large number of drones.” Just the night before, he told me, a routine evening in Sloviansk, the unit brought down 198 enemy UAVs. “Europe and the U.S. should start learning from us before it’s too late,” he warned. “They’ll either learn from our experience, or they’ll learn on their own—the hard way.”

Fin’s unit, a battalion of the armed forces’ 54th Separate Mechanized Brigade, isn’t unique. Electronic warfare is ubiquitous in Ukraine. Virtually every unit, Ukrainian and Russian, uses radio frequencies to jam and spoof the other side’s incoming missiles and drones, and a growing number can also hack into the enemy’s video streams to see what it sees or bring its devices down. But Fin says Specter is one of the most experienced units in the area.

“We jam everything that’s incoming,” he explained, “whatever its task. Without us, no other operations—offense, defense, logistics, infantry, evacuations—are possible.” His broader goals: to protect Ukrainian troops and civilians in Sloviansk, as well as the roads leading into and out of the city. “Other units are the sword,” Fin says. “We are the shield.”

So far this year, Specter has destroyed or disabled 8,000 incoming drones. Although recent months have seen a marked uptick in Russian aerial activity in Sloviansk—more drones and more huge, powerful glide bombs, including on the road that connects the strategically important logistics hub to western Ukraine—the city is still relatively livable.

Specter’s control centers dot the region—in civilian homes near the city center, farmhouses in outlying villages, and even trenches less than two miles from enemy positions. I visit one on the city’s outskirts—a small house, its living room now lined with giant screens. A smaller room nearby—for what the unit calls “research”—features a collection of mangled enemy drones that the team has managed to retrieve and demine. “We take them apart,” explains one man, who, like the others, declines to give his name, “to decipher how they’re built and what frequencies they use.”

Back in the main room, three techs scan the big screens, toggling between images. “We do many things,” says one soldier, “including reconnaissance and research. But our main task is to prevent anything from reaching our guys.” Once operators have intercepted the signals of a Russian drone and can see through its eyes, they work to determine its location. Expensive software would do this electronically, but the unit has a simpler way—comparing the intercepted Russian video to their own satellite image of the area. “It’s coming in over a ravine, see?” one man points out. “That’s this ravine here—the same one in our image.”

This time, the intercept is slower. Instead of crashing immediately, the UAV careens wildly right and left as if it were drunk—we know because we’re watching through its eyes—before the screen goes gray. A few minutes later, another feed shows a grainy image of a Russian pilot’s hands and face—he has turned on his video feed prematurely, before launching his drone. According to one operator, Specter can jam nearly three-quarters of enemy incoming headed for Sloviansk.

Drone warfare is constantly evolving and is different today than just a few months ago. The unit works hard to stay ahead. Among this year’s most significant developments has been the proliferation of UAVs controlled by fiber optic cable rather than radio waves. Ukrainian fighters can’t jam them as they jam ordinary first-person view drones, but they have other tools. “You can shoot the cable with a rifle,” one soldier tells me, “or use a drone of your own fitted with a net to capture the device.” Fin’s goal, which he says is not far away, is to jam the signal coming through the cable, downing the device electronically.

He is also looking for ways to counter AI-enabled drones. While Fin experiments with more sophisticated methods, his preferred tactic today is to intercept and down the device before its AI-powered target recognition kicks in, locking on its quarry. Alternatively, he tries to hack into the algorithm propelling the UAV and predict its course.

Other developments in the pipeline include hacking into the enemy’s most sophisticated UAVs—Orlan reconnaissance drones and Lancet loitering munitions, known for their high-precision pinpoint strikes. Specter can already suppress both devices’ navigational systems, but can’t yet override them. Still another ambitious goal: jamming the satellite signals that direct Russia’s much-feared glide bombs, each capable of destroying the better part of a city block.

The next frontier, the most menacing development Fin sees on the horizon: Russia has started to mix and match drone components, combining the most powerful elements from various systems to create more dangerous, hybrid devices. Ordinary first-person view UAVs, for example, now cheap and plentiful, buzzing everywhere on both sides of the front line, can be equipped with navigational components from more sophisticated Lancet drones, rendering them far more accurate and lethal.

The Ukrainian commander is eager to see more cooperation with the West—for both sides’ sakes. As he sees it, Europe and the U.S. have much to learn from Ukraine’s battlefield experience, particularly with low-cost jamming and interception, while Ukraine could benefit from access to sophisticated Western reconnaissance tools, particularly SIGINT software. Specter is already cooperating with Finland and several Baltic states, and Fin expects that collaboration to expand in the coming months. But he complains that the U.S. lags far behind. “The Americans seem much less interested in low-cost jamming,” he laments, and although the Defense Department is sharing a free demo version of one advanced software tool, it has declined to provide the full package.

When I ask who is ahead in the drone war, Fin answers philosophically. “It’s a pendulum,” he says, “swinging back and forth every day.” Today, the enemy is better at long-range electronic warfare, but Ukrainian jamming and interception are more agile. “Sometimes we’re ahead and they learn from us,” Fin says, “sometimes vice versa. The one thing that’s certain—the U.S. and Europe are way behind.”

The post Downing Russian Drones: “The U.S. and Europe Should Learn From Us” appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Early Wednesday morning, approximately a dozen Russian drones entered the airspace over eastern Poland. Most or all were shot down by Polish and Dutch fighter jets with assistance from German and Italian air defense systems. “It was the first time in the history of NATO that alliance fighters had engaged enemy targets in allied airspace,” reported The New York Times.

The Russians have so far given inconsistent answers to questions about the incursion—saying alternatively that it was an accident and that there is no proof it happened. Donald Trump responded, somewhat inscrutably, on social media “What’s with Russia violating Poland’s airspace with drones? Here we go!” 

Why would Russia have made such a provocative move? What might it mean for Western security? I had a phone conversation about this with a source who has had a decades-long career in the U.S. military and the intelligence community, serving both in and out of government. The source requested anonymity to speak freely. The following Q&A has been edited for clarity. 

What was your immediate reaction to this news?

It’s initial reporting. More information will certainly come out over time. But two things caught my attention. First, the dozen or so drones were launched amidst 450 others that were attacking Ukraine, which is a relatively limited number. Second, this isn’t the first time it’s happened. A few crossed into Poland last week. 

Is there a chance we’ve been doing the same to Russia?

I don’t think so. We typically will approach a country’s airspace and then fly parallel along it but not enter it. Also, we typically fly aircraft loaded with SIGNIT (signal intelligence) and other electronic collectors.  We can collect a lot without violating airspace. In a war time scenario like you see with Russia and Ukraine, we are typically even more restrained, we don’t want to trigger a direct confrontation.

Why do you think Russia is doing this?

This is just classic Russian behavior.  A little probing, looking for a reaction.  It’s part of their campaign to see how far they could push the Poles. Can they violate their airspace with impunity? Or are the Poles going to do something, and if so, what? It’s an opportunity for the Russians to gather intel. Which forces reacted? How quickly? From which air bases? What kind of radars light up? It’s useful information to have in case someday you have a future attack. 

What do you make of how the Poles reacted?

They reacted appropriately. The involvement of the Dutch Air Force was key. It immediately signals back to the Russia “we’re not taking this, it’s serious business, it’s a NATO violation.” The Russians were trying to figure out, would this prompt a NATO response, just a Polish response, or no response at all? They just found out they got a full NATO response—which, in that time frame, with things happening so fast, is impressive. 

What do you make of the U.S. response so far?

A typical C minus out of Donald Trump. He doesn’t know what to do. He’s ambivalent about NATO. He doesn’t have a functioning State Department, NSC, or anything else to advise him. So, he’s shooting from the hip and failing to strongly condemn Russia’s actions. Any previous U.S. president would have said that this was unacceptable aggression, and we stand by Poland. We obviously didn’t get that out of Trump. The Europeans are showing they’re serious about defending NATO. And in the United States, you have the waffler-in-chief. This is all helpful to the Russians.

What do you think comes next?

The ball is in Russia’s court. They got a serious message in response to their incursion. I personally would expect them to lay off for a while, and maybe in a month or six weeks, do it again.

I don’t think they want to go to a war with Poland. They’re not even winning the war they started in Ukraine. In fact, the Ukrainians are getting increasingly proficient at degrading Russia’s oil and gas infrastructure, which basically underwrites the whole Russian economy.  

What Russia is doing is throwing their weight around and seeing what’s going to happen, looking for fissures and cracks, seeing how NATO reacts—and again, kudos to the Poles and the Dutch and in a very strong NATO response. But Moscow got out of the TACO what you’d expect they’d get out of the TACO. 

The danger is that they are really escalating this. For all these decades of the Cold War, both sides were always somewhat restrained with each other. The fear was that things could spiral out of control, and you can have an accident that leads to basically unintended consequences. So, Poland and other Europeans are now telling the Russians, if you do this, you’re going to get a strong response, and you saw it. And is that really what you want to be doing? 

Is it possible that we’ll look back on this and see that Putin made a tactical error here, that the effect of this probe was to put more of a fear of God into the population of Europe and make it easier for its leaders to increase their defense spending?

The European public is already afraid, but this just reinforces it. The Europeans collectively totally have Putin’s number, unlike our president. They are already throwing money at their defense as fast as they can. This is just one more “I told you so,” or one more piece of evidence for EU leaders who are calling for a stronger response to Russia. So, in that sense, that was not a good move by Russia. You helped steel the resolve of the Europeans. 

The post Putin Goes There appeared first on Washington Monthly.

It was already clear at 10:00 p.m. that it would be a tough night in Kyiv. The air alert sounded at 9:24 p.m., blaring outside and shrieking out of the state-supported app on my phone. Like many in Ukraine, I checked a couple of privately run Telegram chats to see what was incoming—the chats use open-source intelligence to give real-time updates, sometimes with a text every few seconds, showing exactly what is in the air and where, pinpointed to the neighborhood. The picture didn’t look good: already two dozen little drone icons on my go-to channel’s schematic map. But none were yet in Kyiv, so I breathed easy for now and went back to my otherwise quiet Wednesday night. 

That day, the news in the Western media was still all about Donald Trump’s efforts to broker a ceasefire a week earlier. Several media outlets were still analyzing what exactly had happened when seven European leaders, including President Volodymyr Zelensky, traveled to the White House on August 18 to try to undo the damage Trump caused at his chummy meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska the week before. Another story revealed European leaders were working to develop security guarantees—perhaps European soldiers at Ukrainian airports and train stations—to be implemented once a peace agreement is signed. Another shocking report detailed ExxonMobil’s secret talks with a state-run Russian energy giant about resuming business as usual when the ink on a deal is dry.  

What world are they living in? I wondered as I toggled between news stories and the Telegram chat describing the Russian drones and missiles hurtling toward me. Do they really think a ceasefire is in the offing? Have they not seen and heard Putin and his team, including Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, just a few days earlier on NBC’s Meet the Press, assuring the world that Russia wants peace even as the Kremlin doubles down on its unmeetable demands to control Ukraine and upend European security?  

Don’t these journalists and diplomats see that we’re just in a new phase of the war, likely to continue for months if not years, where Moscow says the right things about peace but keeps fighting, killing thousands of its own troops as they inch forward on the front and terrorizing Ukrainian civilians? 

Things looked a little worse just after midnight when I started thinking about bed. Everyone in Kyiv has their own way of dealing with the risk. I choose among three nighttime options, depending on how bad I think things look: sleeping in my bed, sleeping on a foam mattress in a windowless room—less danger from shock waves from a nearby explosion that could shatter the windows and send debris shooting into the room—or taking the elevator down 11 floors to the communal shelter in the basement. Tonight felt like a foam mattress night, so I bedded down in the tiny vestibule leading into my apartment. Still, just to be safe, I laid out the essentials I would take with me if I headed to the basement—my passport, my glasses, an envelope of cash—all the easier to throw into a backpack if things got worse. 

At about 2:00 a.m., a loud explosion outside jolted me awake. At first, I ignored it, trying to doze off, but two more came. A glance at Telegram told me that several Russian planes capable of carrying cruise and ballistic missiles—far more destructive than drones, deadly as the drones are—were flying toward Kyiv. I decided it was time to take the next step. 

As I locked my apartment, I glanced down the corridor toward a neighbors’ flat. They’re a multigenerational family: 30-something parents, their elderly parents, and three small children, including a baby born just a few months ago. They often seek safety at about the same time I do, but they don’t go to the shelter—perhaps it’s difficult with the little kids. Tonight, as usual, they had brought blankets and strollers out into the corridor and were preparing a makeshift campsite on the hard linoleum floor.  

I’m in a hurry—the missiles are coming—but I stop momentarily to take in the sight. What made that mother decide to bring a baby into the world in the middle of a war that threatened to wipe not just her family but her nation off the map? And what did little Adriian, 5, and Alisa, 3, make of what was happening on nights like these? Then, as I turn away, Donald Trump floats back to mind. Did he really think this bombardment was somehow equivalent, as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt would maintain the next day, to Ukrainian strikes hitting Russian airfields, oil depots, and military logistics hubs? 

More than three years into Russia’s war on Ukraine, everyone in my tony high-rise apartment building has a drill by now, and about a dozen people sleep in my section of the basement shelter. They come in pajamas and sweatsuits and, in winter, coats. Many bring their cats in travel cases. Some try to sleep on beds constructed in the early days of the war, others on air mattresses or beanbag chairs. Still others tough it out upright on wooden benches or metal chairs, passing the long hours scrolling through their phones. It’s dark, but not pitch dark in the unfinished space, and as a rule, no one speaks. 

At about 3 a.m., I woke up to an explosion louder than I’ve ever heard. One woman lying nearby screams as she wakes, as if from a nightmare, and the big building shakes above us. (Later, I would wonder if I really felt this—though the neighbor association chat confirmed it in the morning.) Still, no one speaks. Like many, I look at my phone for information but can’t find anything—the chats usually don’t report hits until the next day. But nothing else occurs—no visible fire, sirens, or signs of the building collapsing—and the people around me gradually settle down. I toss and turn for an hour, then finally fall asleep. 

When I go upstairs early in the morning, my apartment looks fine—no shattered windows, no rescue vehicles outside, and only the usual morning smoke over the Kyiv hills in the distance. I nap for about an hour before texting a few friends. “Are you okay?” we ask each other. “Is the family safe?” Most seem shaken but unharmed, and I go about my day. 

It’s only in the early afternoon that my landlord texts me. “I read about what happened on the building chat,” he writes. “Are you okay?” What I found when I checked the chat was alarming. One video featured a tracking shot from a car moving slowly along a main road just down the hill from our building: a huge black crater had replaced the gas station that once sat against the hill. CCTV footage from the terrace in front of our building, just 200 yards above, was gray and grainy during the first motionless 20 seconds. Then the sky beyond the terrace lights up—an orange flash—and the screen fills with what looks like confetti or maybe hail. Several still photos capture the debris that hit the building facade and pitted the terrace. Other images reveal broken windows and twisted window frames, though mercifully no worse damage.  

The horrific news reports trickle in later in the day: at least 63 people are injured in Kyiv overnight, and 23 are dead, including four children. Still, life goes on in my building. When I go out to the market in the late afternoon, children are playing on the damaged terrace and squealing with delight. Even as I start to wonder if I should move to a different neighborhood, someone in the house chat reassures me: “I believe we live in a blessed building,” a tenant named Artem writes. “Last year, a ballistic missile buried itself in the yard next door without exploding, and last night was nothing but a scratch.”  

Later in the evening, I meet friends downtown, and we sit enjoying the last days of summer at an open-air café. No one knows how or when the war will end, and we all acknowledge that there will be many more nights like Wednesday. Meanwhile, even as Kyiv mourns its dead, Trump has resumed blaming both sides. Press secretary Leavitt commented that the president was “not surprised” by the attack. “These are two countries that have been at war for a very long time.” 

The post A Deadly Night in Kyiv Makes a Mockery of the Peace Process appeared first on Washington Monthly.

The seven European leaders who accompanied President Volodymyr Zelensky to the White House on Monday made little secret of why they had suddenly interrupted their summer vacations to make the trip. They believed they might need to shield the Ukrainian leader from the disparagement and bullying he had to endure on his last Oval Office visit in February.  

In the end, that wasn’t necessary. Host Donald Trump was jovial and eager to get along with his guests. He complimented Zelensky on his suit-like attire and flattered the seven Europeans— NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and Finnish President Alexander Stubb—each with a personalized compliment. They flattered back with even more lavish and ingratiating thanks and praise, and everyone seemed to go home happy. 

The questions left hanging amid all the smiles and good cheer: what exactly did they discuss—and what issues, if any, were settled? 

In fact, the three big items that should have been on the agenda—the critical issues that should be at the heart of any agreement ending the war in Ukraine—were conspicuously absent.  

There was little discussion at the summit of the question Vladimir Putin has put front and center by proposing what the White House calls a “land swap.” Russia is demanding that Ukraine cede some 6,600 square kilometers of territory—a strategically pivotal area Moscow has failed to conquer in over a decade of off-and-on fighting—in exchange for two other, relatively insignificant chunks that together add up to only 440 square kilometers. Putin says he won’t stop fighting until that deal is done; Zelensky refuses to cede the territory. But somehow, everyone managed to avoid the issue over nearly six hours of meetings at the White House. Zelensky ignored a media question on the subject, and no conclusions were reached behind closed doors. 

Also missing from the agenda was any discussion of what Putin calls the “root causes” of the war—Ukraine’s political independence from Russia, its maturing ties to the West, and NATO’s expansion into the former Russian and Soviet sphere of influence. As Putin has repeatedly stressed, including last week in Alaska, these are the irritants that led Russia to invade in 2022, and he will not accept any peace that does not resolve them, recognizing what he calls Russia’s “legitimate concerns” in Ukraine and “reinstating a just balance of security in Europe.” It’s hard to imagine a more momentous set of issues for the leaders gathered in the White House to discuss—but apparently none of them were addressed in either the public or private segments of the summit. 

Nor—the third missing topic—was the cause that ought to be uniting Western leaders as they shape proposals for a just and lasting peace in Ukraine: how to address the disturbing geopolitical assumptions underpinning Putin’s aggression in Ukraine. How should democratic leaders counter his implicit claims that might makes right and big countries can do as they wish with smaller neighbors? The problem is that Europe and the United States may no longer agree on this essential issue. Remember Trump’s claims on Greenland and Panama. So the topic may never come up among Western leaders—essential as it is to sustaining peace in Europe and elsewhere. 

The three topics that made it onto the White House agenda were as revealing as those left out of the discussion. 

Number one, not surprisingly, was Trump’s obsession: a continuation of the unscripted mano-a-mano diplomacy he thinks he’s so good at and aims to turn into an international norm. The president repeatedly returned on Monday to the idea that Zelensky and Putin should meet face-to-face, followed by what Trump likes to call a “trilat,” or three-way meeting.  

Never mind that Putin has spent over four years belittling Zelensky as a Western puppet with no legitimate governing mandate—anything but a peer of the kind one would want to meet on a world stage. More threatening in Putin’s eyes, a bilateral or trilateral meeting would call his bluff and likely expose his reluctance to stop fighting in Ukraine. No wonder Moscow has responded to Trump’s suggestion with the usual Kremlin two-step: agreeing in principle to a meeting but waffling on what that means and stalling for time. 

The second item on Monday’s agenda, Western security guarantees for Ukraine, was more substantial and meaningful, though perhaps still premature. Putin has openly expressed his desire to restore Moscow’s control over all of Ukraine and several other European countries, including Poland and the Baltic States, which were once dominated by Russia and later the Soviet Union. As French President Macron stated on Tuesday, the Russian leader “is a predator, an ogre at our gate” who “for his own survival, needs to keep eating.”  

No peace deal can hope to stick without robust security guarantees to prevent renewed fighting in Ukraine or on the borders of NATO, and Ukraine will need Western support to stop another Russian attack: a continuing flow of Western weapons, ammunition, intelligence, air defenses, and perhaps boots on the ground.  

Discussing security guarantees now, before a deal is made, might seem like putting the cart before the horse—similar to insisting on a prenup before the romance has fully blossomed. But maybe that’s actually the best time to bring up a prenup—and some progress was achieved in Washington, with the 47th president agreeing to join a European-led deterrent.  

Still, the issue remains unsettled. Complex and contentious negotiations lie ahead. It’s far from clear that any European countries will agree to send troops. Putin has already nixed a peacekeeping force composed of NATO fighters. Ukraine has a long, bitter history of relying on Eastern and Western security guarantees that never materialized, and anyone who trusts Trump—or American voters, for that matter—to stay the course in world affairs is only asking for trouble. Remember the League of Nations, proposed by Woodrow Wilson and agreed to in the treaty that ended World War I, but then rejected by Congress when it refused to ratify that treaty? 

The third item on Monday’s agenda came and went quickly in the public conversation between Trump and Zelensky, but it explains a lot. The Ukrainian leader offered to buy $100 billion of U.S. weaponry and sign a $50 billion deal for U.S.-Ukrainian co-production of Ukrainian drones. Now that’s Trump’s kind of diplomacy—and the truth is it’s the most likely of anything on the summit agenda to come to fruition.  

What’s next? What are the prospects for a meaningful truce? Anything could happen—there’s a lot in the air. But the smart money in both Europe and Ukraine is cautious.  

This may be the beginning of the end—a true peace deal. Or it may just be a new and prolonged phase of the war, as Putin pretends to consider peace but continues fighting, and Trump continues to dither, changing his mind every few weeks, about how to respond. The president still doesn’t seem to understand the man he’s up against in the Kremlin, and until he does, there’s no hope for a just or lasting peace in Ukraine.  

The post Trump, Zelensky, and European Leaders Got Along—Mostly by Sidestepping the Big Issues  appeared first on Washington Monthly.

Trump’s recent summit with Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, ended not in toughness but in capitulation. Despite pledging red lines beforehand, Trump rolled out the red carpet, and has now appeared to endorse Moscow’s demands for the surrender of Ukrainian territory. In this week’s episode of the Washington Monthly politics roundtable, special guest Tamar Jacoby, Director of the New Ukraine Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, shares reaction on the ground in Kyiv to Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine. She also suggests steps Trump should be taking instead to regain the advantage over Putin.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Paul Glastris: On Friday, President Trump had a shameful face-plant of a summit meeting with Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska. He then invited Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to the White House today, along with a team of European leaders—including the European commissioner, the head of NATO, and the presidents of France and Germany—who insisted on coming to back Zelensky and try to persuade Trump to take a tougher line than he certainly did in Anchorage.

That’s what we’re here to discuss. I want to start with you, Tamar. You are the guest of honor. In your story, you explained that in the run-up to the Anchorage summit things were relatively quiet, but in Kyiv and elsewhere in Ukraine, that wasn’t the case last night. Tell us—are you safe, and what’s happening on the ground?

Tamar Jacoby: Yes, I’m safe. Kyiv is well protected by air defense. The scary air alerts do happen, but we haven’t had one in two weeks. Even when they come with great intensity, it’s every other or every third night. Life goes on in Kyiv—people are out in bars and restaurants. It’s a beautiful late summer.

Elsewhere in Ukraine, not so much. Last night was bad in some places, though not here. The week before the Alaska meeting was actually a good week, because Putin was trying to behave, and we all got a full night’s sleep for more than a week. It was noticeable—you realize how much stress people are under when suddenly there’s relief. Everyone was different, much more cheerful.

But you’re right: the most important thing is the shameful concessions Trump is making, pressuring Ukraine hard. It really is back to: give Putin whatever he wants.

Paul Glastris: So we went into this summit on Friday where the Europeans and Zelensky had discussions with Trump about what he would do. What were the red lines, and how were they reversed?

Tamar Jacoby: He agreed to some red lines, including that Ukraine would not have to give away territory Russia hasn’t conquered. Many Ukrainians are reluctantly coming around to the idea that they might have to forego the land Russia already holds. But we’re also talking about an area bigger than the West Bank that Russia has been trying—and failing—to conquer for 10 years.

We went into Alaska with Trump seeming to understand that it was important to get a ceasefire before detailed talks, and that security guarantees for Ukraine were critical. There were many things he seemed to get. But in Alaska, he didn’t seem to remember any of them. Instead, he rolled out the red carpet, stood there laughing with Putin, and even had an air salute overhead—for a man who’s been an international pariah, killing tens of thousands of people for four years.

Two big concessions stand out. First, Trump seems to have agreed with Putin that a ceasefire isn’t important—that Putin can go on killing until a full peace is reached, which only increases pressure on Ukraine. Second, and worse in my view, Trump now appears to be pressuring Ukraine to give up the remaining half of Donetsk—a region Russia has fought over for more than a decade without real success. That would mean giving it away for free, soil watered with the blood of countless Ukrainian fighters.

But the war isn’t really about territory. It’s about whether Ukraine can exist as an independent country, with the political system and alliances it chooses. Putin stood on stage in Anchorage, 15 feet from Trump, and repeated those demands. Trump nodded along. We’re talking about a return to Cold War-style divisions of Europe—except now Russia doesn’t even control that territory with troops, yet we may hand it to them.

Paul Glastris: Let me ask about one detail: a lot of reporters noted the meeting ended very early. There was supposed to be a longer press conference or even a second round of discussions. Instead, it wrapped up abruptly, and Trump’s aides looked ashen-faced—hardly pleased with what they’d heard. What have you heard about that? What do you make of it?

Tamar Jacoby: I don’t have inside knowledge, so I can only speculate. My guess is that Trump initially thought he’d suffered a blow. He went in wanting a ceasefire and came out without one. At first, I think he took that as a failure. But over the weekend, he seems to have decided he could spin it as a win if he simply gave in to Putin.

That’s the point: Trump talks tough but, when rebuffed, capitulates. And at root, he’s always admired Russia as a “great world power.” For forty years, he’s wanted to be Putin’s equal, to do business with Russia. That motive has never gone away.

The press conference was revealing. It was short—twelve minutes—and light on details. But the end was all about business deals, both men talking about opportunities to work together commercially.

Paul Glastris: Before we turn to today’s developments, I want to linger on the fallout here in Washington. Bill, you track this closely. As you watched coverage after Friday, what struck you?

Bill Scher: What struck me is how sterile the coverage has been. Commentators have treated it neutrally, but this is seismic. Trump is trying to turn back the clock to a pre–World War I world, when a handful of leaders drew maps at whim. We fought two world wars to get away from that.

Woodrow Wilson, whatever his flaws, fought for self-determination and the League of Nations. FDR and Truman carried that vision forward, and after World War II the idea took hold: borders couldn’t just be changed by force.

Now it’s the European leaders who want to uphold that order, while Trump is pulling the U.S. in the opposite direction. It’s shocking—he is 180 degrees away from the U.S. position of the last century.

Paul Glastris: I was texting with a national security friend and asked: if you put 100 GOP-aligned military leaders in a room and promised anonymity, how many would back Trump’s policies toward Russia? He said zero. And half would want Trump jailed.

This can’t be what many Republican officials actually believe in. Bill, Matt—have you seen any pushback from elected Republicans or senior party figures?

Matthew Cooper: Some. In recent weeks, when Trump briefly struck a tougher tone on Putin, Republicans showed a little more backbone. The Senate even passed a sanctions resolution with 85 votes. That suggests their innate hawkishness hasn’t vanished.

But it’s inconsistent. For example, Alaska Senator Dan Sullivan has been vocal about Russian and Chinese patrols near Alaska, but overall Republicans seem reactive—they only show toughness when Trump does. They’re not going to push him. And the Europeans know that, which is why they’re pressing him directly today.

The question is whether Trump is a “pillow”—malleable, shaped by the last person in the room—or whether he’s truly in Putin’s camp. Hard to say. Maybe today he’ll swing back toward Kyiv, maybe not.

For context, think back to 1986. Reagan and Gorbachev failed to reach a nuclear deal at Reykjavik, and hawks were relieved. Contrast that with last weekend: many were relieved there was no deal, believing Trump might have held his ground. That relief evaporated when he pivoted over the weekend.

Tamar Jacoby: I agree with Matt—we should see what happens today. But Bill captured the risk best: we could be sliding back to pre–World War I map-drawing, ignoring peoples’ rights.

My impression is that Trump doesn’t even understand that dimension. At the press conference, Putin laid out his vision, and Trump looked like he barely grasped it. Instead, he’s focused narrowly on land-for-security guarantees—whether Ukraine gives up Donetsk in exchange for promises.

That may be all he sees. After all, this is the man who once said, “If I want Greenland, I should have it.” He doesn’t see anything wrong with the very idea that horrifies us. And because he sets the terms of debate, today’s White House meeting will likely focus on the land swap and guarantees—while the bigger issue of Ukraine’s sovereignty, the “root causes” as Putin calls them, may not even be discussed. That’s frightening.

Paul Glastris: I’ve watched Trump’s statements over the last few months. He said he was “very upset with Vladimir Putin,” even used the word “bullshit,” and hinted at tougher sanctions and weapons for Ukraine. Some people thought maybe he’d really changed. Others said he was just lying.

Anchorage proved the cynics right. He told people what they wanted to hear, then sold Ukraine out.

Tamar, especially—you’ve written about what actually needs to be done. Tell us: what are the Europeans trying to get Trump to do, and what do you think really needs to happen?

Tamar Jacoby: We’ll see what the Europeans can do. The challenge is to reframe the conversation without provoking Trump. You can’t just tell him he’s wrong. You have to play to him. The question is whether they’ll be strong enough to hold their ground.

What should happen is clear. There’s an “easy peace” and a “hard peace.” The easy peace is giving Putin what he wants. That’s what Trump is proposing. It would end the war in weeks and win him the Nobel Peace Prize.

The hard peace is forcing Putin to negotiate in good faith by raising the costs of war. That means real military pressure, real economic pressure, and sustained U.S. and European commitment. So far, we’ve helped Ukraine but wavered on the endgame. Every time Trump flips, Putin concludes we’re unserious. He needs to know pressure will continue until he changes behavior.

Right now, he has no reason to believe that. A German think tank recently calculated what the war costs Western countries: less than 0.2 percent of GDP. That’s peanuts. Germany spends more on bus subsidies. It looks like a pet project, not an existential fight. For America, maybe it is—but for Europe, it absolutely is existential.

Matthew Cooper: It’s worth making explicit: even if Ukraine gave up Donetsk, the war wouldn’t end. Putin’s ambitions won’t stop there.

Tamar Jacoby: Exactly. Donetsk is the high ground, the fortified strategic area from which Russia could launch further attacks. If Putin gets it, he’ll be positioned to take more in a few years.

Right now, some in Washington are talking about trading Donetsk for “serious” U.S. security guarantees. But Russia has already signed guarantees with Ukraine and Europe—and thrown them away. And Trump hasn’t delivered a single bullet to Ukraine beyond what Biden already had in the pipeline. Why would anyone trust his word?

Paul Glastris: It feels like once the debate turns to “security guarantees,” we’ve already lost. We’re down to dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on a meaningless piece of paper—peace in our time.

Bill Scher: If I were Ukraine, I’d hold out until the Trump presidency ends. His word is worth nothing. Remember the Iran nuclear deal: Obama struck it, Iran complied, and Trump tore it up anyway. Why trust him now?

If Ukraine can hold out for three years, maybe the American people will throw Trump out and you’ll get a partner you can trust, at least for a while. That’s still risky—but better than cutting a deal with someone who can’t be trusted at all.

Tamar Jacoby: A lot of Ukrainian soldiers feel the same. They’re determined to keep fighting, even if it means revolting against Zelensky should he try to compromise. But they will need U.S. intelligence, and they will need Europe to keep buying American weaponry. If Trump cuts that off, it’ll be very hard to last three years.

Matthew Cooper: Don’t forget Trump’s grudges. The first impeachment was about Ukraine. He still resents that, and he holds grudges forever. That, more than anything, colors his policy.

Paul Glastris: But let me push on that. Is it possible Trump feels humiliated now—like he lost? He’s about to be surrounded by European leaders who will flatter him, tell him he’s the great peacemaker, the one who deserves the Nobel Prize. Could that change his behavior?

Matthew Cooper: Sure. His ego is fragile. The Europeans won’t tell him he lost; they’ll tell him he’s already winning. They’ll remind him Teddy Roosevelt won the Nobel for brokering peace. They’ll feed him praise, call him strong, call him decisive. With Trump, it’s child psychology.

Tamar Jacoby: They’ll even call him “daddy.”

Paul Glastris: [Laughs] And he’ll like it. Tamar, what’s the best realistic scenario coming out of today’s meeting?

Tamar Jacoby: That Trump realizes Putin is demanding far more than he’s taken so far, and that he starts listening to the Europeans instead of swinging back and forth.

The bare minimum would be returning to the status quo from a month ago: the U.S. sells weapons to Europe to give to Ukraine, continues intelligence support, and imposes real economic costs on Russia. That means cutting off oil revenues—40 percent of Russian exports, a third of its budget—and blocking the flow of Western technology that keeps missiles flying.

It’s not rocket science. It’s military force, economic isolation, and resolve. Without that, Putin won’t stop.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

The post Trump Just Gave Putin Everything He Wanted appeared first on Washington Monthly.