Trump Flirts with NATO’s Hardliners
The president should instead outline reasonable peace terms and extricate the U.S. from the conflict.

Multiple reports in Western news media highlight President Donald Trump’s growing dissatisfaction with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Financial Times reported that Trump had encouraged Kiev to punish Putin by striking deep inside Russian territory—perhaps even hitting Moscow—if the U.S. provided it with more long-range weapons. (Trump has denied he supports such strikes.)

In marked contrast to the initial weeks of his second term, Trump has now effectively signed on to NATO’s uncompromising strategy of insisting on Russia’s capitulation with respect to the terms of a peace accord between Russia and Ukraine. The Western demands include Russia’s complete withdrawal from conquered Ukrainian territory (including Crimea) and its acquiescence to Kiev’s possibly joining NATO. 

Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe Admiral James Stavridis expresses the prevailing mentality of hardliners when he contends that sending Ukraine openly offensive weapons might be the most effective way to force Moscow back to the negotiating table.

The ongoing transformation of Trump’s overall approach to the war between Russia and Ukraine has been breathtaking. During the 2024 presidential election campaign, Trump portrayed the Biden administration’s participation in NATO’s policy of using Ukraine in a proxy war against Russia as an expensive, potentially dangerous blunder. Trump led his political followers to believe that he would terminate the Ukraine entanglement as soon as possible, since it was inconsistent with his overall concept of an “America First” foreign policy. On one occasion, he even boasted that he could bring an end to the Russia–Ukraine conflict in 24 hours. Instead, he has now decided to help rearm Ukraine and even escalate Washington’s support by accelerating shipments of Patriot air defense missiles and other munitions to Kiev.

Trump’s attitude toward Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has undergone a similarly radical transformation. In the initial weeks of his second term, Trump seemed to grasp that improving Washington’s relations with Moscow needed to be a high priority, and that the Ukraine conflict was the principal obstacle to achieving that objective. His rhetoric toward Putin was conciliatory, in marked contrast to the openly hostile and contemptuous attitudeof Biden administration officials. At the same time, Trump seemed to regard Zelensky as an arrogant, ungrateful U.S. and NATO client determined to continue pursuing a “wag the dog strategy” toward his Western patrons.

That phase of the trilateral relationship between Ukraine, Russia, and the United States reached its apogee in late February, during a much-publicized session in the White House when both Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance berated Zelensky for a lack of cooperation regarding negotiations for a peace accord and a lack of gratitude for the financial and arms support that the U.S. and its NATO allies had already given to Ukraine.

Almost immediately thereafter, though, Trump’s tone regarding the Russia–Ukraine war shifted dramatically. He became increasingly critical of Putin, now seeing him, rather than Zelensky, as the principal obstacle to a peace accord. Putin’s reluctance to accept a comprehensive ceasefire especially annoyed the White House. Over the succeeding weeks, Trump’s comments regarding the Russian president became ever more caustic and, much to the cheers of Kiev’s supporters in Europe and the United States, the gap between Washington’s policy and that of its NATO allies regarding Ukraine has narrowed dramatically. The White House now is demanding that Moscow accept a ceasefire and commence negotiations for a peace settlement with Kiev within 50 days.

The de facto U.S. capitulation to NATO’s unrealistic position regarding the Ukraine issue is unfortunate. Trump’s demand that Putin conclude a ceasefire is likely a non-starter for Moscow unless NATO members agree to pause their shipments of weapons to Ukraine. Otherwise, the now beleaguered Ukrainian forces would have that entire time to replenish their dwindling arsenals, while Russia, which currently holds the military advantage, would enjoy little or no benefit. Washington’s lobbying for constructive negotiations regarding peace terms is even more fanciful under existing conditions. Kiev and its NATO backers cling as firmly as ever to maximalist demands that ignore even the most basic realities on the battlefield. Without at least some signs from the opposing side of a willingness to compromise, Moscow has meager incentive to participate in talks either during or after a ceasefire.

The maximalist demands that NATO and its Ukraine proxy make might be achievable if Russian forces had been defeated in the war. But the reality on the ground is totally different. Russia is winning the war, albeit in a far costlier, bloodier, and more grinding fashion than Kremlin leaders originally predicted. Russian forces now occupy 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory, and that percentage is increasing, not decreasing.

Western officials have gone to sometimes absurd lengths in their attempts to obscure that fundamental reality. They circulate transparently inflated figures of alleged Russian military fatalities. Secretary of State Marco Rubio was the latest Western official to attempt that ploy, asserting that Moscow had lost 100,000 troops just since January 2025. As one expert pointed out, that estimate was preposterous on its face, since evidence confirmed that the overall size of the Russian force in Ukraine had increased rather than shrunk. The credibility of Rubio’s argument that Moscow could not sustain the drain on its manpower was not enhanced by the continuing refusal of Western analysts even to provide a rough estimate of Ukrainian casualties. Such clumsy attempts at concealment suggest that the actual news on that front is not good.

In addition to Ukraine’s continuing failure to produce the definitive battlefield triumph that Kiev’s NATO backers keep predicting, the broader elements of the West’s strategy to bring Russia to its knees also have faltered. The effort to obtain global support for isolating Russia economically has been a spectacular flop outside the West. Comprehensive Western sanctions have inconvenienced and damaged Russia’s economy to some extent, but Moscow has been surprisingly adept at finding alterative markets for its exports, especially oil, gas, and other raw materials. Moreover, NATO’s European members seemingly have suffered at least as much economic pain from the impact of sanctions as Russia has experienced.

Consequently, neither battlefield conditions nor economic suffering is sufficient to get Moscow to accept a dictated surrender. Yet that is what Ukraine and its NATO sponsors continue to demand. And that is the approach with which the Trump administration now seems to be aligning.

It is an impractical strategy even if one ignores the broader context of the West’s frigid relations with Russia and thus its inability to coax Moscow into diplomatic concessions. When the United States and NATO do not even appear to be offering anything beneficial in return for Russian concessions, they’re not calling for negotiations, they are demanding a great power’s unconditional surrender in a war that it has not lost, much less lost overwhelmingly.

Rather than sign on belatedly to such a worthless strategy, Trump should promptly extricate the U.S. from the Ukraine morass and let Russia and the European members of NATO sort out matters. If he can’t bring himself to make a clean break, he should at least propose terms that do have a plausible chance of leading to meaningful negotiations between Kiev and Moscow.

For example, what if Washington promoted a compromise in which Ukraine agreed not to join NATO, but Moscow was willing to accept Ukrainian membership in the EU, which is supposedly a political and economic body, not a military alliance? How about a proposed territorial compromise in which Russia keeps Crimea—which Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev arbitrarily transferred from Russia to Ukraine—and UN-conducted elections determine the political fate of the oblasts in the Donbas? Such proposals might at least begin a worthwhile discussion and minimize the risk of a catastrophic war between NATO and Russia.

The current strategy is utterly bankrupt. Yet Trump is making matters even more pointless and dangerous by signing the United States onto that manifestly doomed approach.

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         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.