President Trump has two goals. One goal is to end the war in Ukraine.
Trump said this over and over during the campaign. He said, “If I’d been president, it never would have started. … I want to stop the death. There’s too much carnage. “
It’s a simple truth. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed on both sides. The number of total dead and wounded is probably over one million at this point, depending on the estimates that you are using. There has been a vast flight of people from places like Ukraine. Seven million people from Ukraine left the country during the ongoing conflict, which has been going on for three years.
But President Trump also has another goal, a larger geopolitical and geostrategic goal here, and that may be to do a sort of reverse Henry Kissinger.
In a famous incident, Henry Kissinger went to China to normalize relations with the U.S. when he served under Richard Nixon. It was an attempt to split the USSR from China in the early 1970s.
It is quite possible that this is something that President Trump would like to do here: Stop allowing Russia to be predominantly used as a Chinese gas station. If we are orienting ourselves toward boxing in China, then a Russian-Chinese close alliance is a bad thing.
The idea could be to reach an end of the war, create a warm relationship with Vladimir Putin, and create a quasi-detente with the Russians in an attempt to pry them out of the waiting arms of the Chinese.
Is that something that’s going to happen? Not likely. The Chinese and the Russians share many interests. The Russians have a long-standing agenda.
And this gets to what Vladimir Putin wants.
What Vladimir Putin wants is not only territorial expansion in Ukraine. What he wants is the capacity to turn the rest of Eastern Europe, as well as Western Europe, into an anti-Atlantic preserve. What Putin would like is for Europe to become a Russian sphere of influence, because the goal of the Russians is not to be a sort of strategic player in the world. They want Russia to be an actual, honest-to-God, quasi-empire.
They would like for the Russian capacity to influence events to spread far beyond its borders. They see themselves as preservers of a deeper Russian ideology that should be spread.
Thus, the war could be the first step toward something like that. Gain a little bit more territory in Ukraine, stall for time, wait for the next president of the United States, and then go after the rest of Ukraine, or put additional pressure on Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, try to formally actually break NATO, try to get all of these countries —because they’re afraid of the West abandoning them — to start treating Russia in friendlier fashion.
Something like that has been happening in Taiwan, where every few years they have a presidential election, and then they decide whether to pursue a closer policy with China, a friendlier policy with China in an attempt to prevent a Chinese invasion, or whether to stand tall and independent of China.
Vladimir Putin’s goal here does not align with the goals of the president of the United States. When it comes to China, if Putin has to choose between siding with China against the United States and siding with the United States against China, the answer is probably the former rather than the latter.
And then there’s the interests of Vladimir Zelensky and the rest of Ukraine. They want to be an independent state. They do not want to be under the Russian thumb. They’re not interested in becoming Belarus. They’re not interested in becoming a Russian proxy state. They don’t want to be Georgia.
They want their independence.
Meanwhile, the Europeans want to have a warmer economic relationship with Russia. They had that before Vladimir Putin’s repeated invasions of Ukraine.
But they would also very much like for Vladimir Putin’s influence to stop at the borders of NATO.
Those are the various interests at play here, and it’s very hard to see a deal that gets made here that enshrines all of those interests and ensures all of these different interests.
This is a very, very sticky situation, and the thing that makes it most sticky is that the history of Russia in conflict is this: Mass casualties do not matter to the Russian regime.
The rest of the West sees mass casualties as a terrible thing. Russia does not. The more Russians who died during World War II, the more Russians can claim Russian heroism.
Vladimir Putin’s losses in Ukraine — which he thought he was going to win easily — have not diminished his standing in Russian circles.
How does all of this end? There are a couple of scenarios posited by The Wall Street Journal in a piece by Marcus Walker.
One is “partition with protection.” He writes: “Ukraine’s leadership has quietly come to accept that it doesn’t have the military strength to get its borders back in full. Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky indicated his willingness to negotiate about territory in video calls with President Trump and European leaders—after a cease-fire that freezes the current front line.”
So the goal there would be to stop the forward momentum that Russia is attempting to pursue while the talks continue.
“Kyiv and European countries say they would never give legal recognition to Russia’s gains, a step that would turn international law into an incentive for further conquest instead of a taboo against it. But they are signaling they would live with the reality of de facto Russian control,” he continues.
What would that look like? It’s unclear. It wouldn’t be a formal recognition of annexation.
“The best-case scenario for Kyiv and its European backers is probably to limit Russia to what its forces already occupy, equivalent to about one-fifth of Ukraine’s land. The Kremlin continues to insist that Ukraine retreat from areas that it claims as Russian but doesn’t control — notably the Ukrainian-held part of the Donetsk region, where Ukraine holds a chain of fortified cities that Russia so far has been unable to conquer,” he writes.
Remember, any sort of territorial acquiescence by the Ukrainians will have to go through a referendum in Ukraine. There’s a constitutional provision in Ukraine that requires that the people vote if they’re going to give up land to the Russians.
“But the biggest question is what happens to the other 80% of Ukraine,” Walker asks. “Kyiv and its European allies want to protect the future security and sovereignty of the remaining rump with a combination of strong Ukrainian military defenses and Western security assistance. A so-called ‘coalition of the willing’ led by the U.K. and France wants to deploy some of its own troops to Ukraine as a further deterrent against a future Russian attack.”
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It’s similar to the way the United States has a trigger force in South Korea to prevent North Korean aggression.
That is possibility number one: Get very, very strong security guarantees. Ukraine makes some sort of territorial concessions. And this conflict comes to a sort of ceasefire, an end point without a full-scale peace agreement. That is the most hopeful possibility.
Then there’s possibility number two. Walker calls it “Partition with subordination,” writing:
Russia’s demands since its 2022 invasion have included shrinking the size of Ukraine’s armed forces, limiting its weaponry and its supplies of Western armaments, and changing its political regime—including its constitution, its leadership, and its policies on language, history and national identity. The greatest danger for Ukraine isn’t just losing its east and south. It is that what remains wouldn’t be able to resist a third Russian invasion, following those of 2014 and 2022.
You can’t imagine a situation in which Ukraine accepts that outcome, not after the second invasion of Ukraine in a decade. There’s no way they’re going to accept full-scale subordination. They’re going to say, “We might as well fight this thing out and slug it out on the front lines, if the idea is that we’re supposed to diminish our military in some serious way.”
So possibility number one looks like the best solution.
Which means Trump will do everything he can to achieve it.
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