Donald Trump seems poised to change his approach to the Russia-Ukraine war. The United States, he told the press after his meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte yesterday, will sell weapons—including Patriot air-defense systems and missiles—to NATO, which will then transfer them to Ukraine. He also promised to impose so-called secondary tariffs of 100 percent on Russia if Vladimir Putin did not agree to a cease-fire within 50 days.
Trump didn’t offer many more details, and the Department of Defense seems still to be working up options for arms sales. The secondary tariffs appear to mean penalties on India, China, Brazil, and other countries that trade with Russia. How these levies will fit in with Trump’s trade talks with those countries is an open question. Trump is unlikely to allow India’s policy toward Ukraine to determine the future of a U.S.-India deal or a thaw in trade tensions, for example, and likewise with China.
Still, Trump’s announcement appears to mark a major shift in strategy on Ukraine, or at least in his intent. The shift needs to be real and lasting—and not just a symbol that the U.S. president took some action after Putin repeatedly spurned his efforts to bring the war to an end. That means Trump needs to change the dynamics on the battlefield so Putin can’t win. Doing that will require him to overcome his administration’s internal resistance by setting up a mechanism that can be laser-focused on getting this done, has real muscle, and functions with the president’s blessing.
It’s important to remember how we got to this point. Trump proposed a peace deal heavily tilted in Russia’s favor—one that included freezing the battlefield lines, recognizing some of Russia’s gains, lifting all sanctions, and ending U.S. support for Ukraine. But even that was not enough for Putin.
The Russian president will not accept a sovereign, free, and independent Ukraine. He wants a neutered Ukraine with strict limits on its military capabilities and a pliant government in Kyiv. In recent months, Russian officials have demanded that Ukraine give up territory that it currently controls, and Putin reiterated his belief that Ukraine is part of the Russian nation. Ukrainians understand themselves to be facing an existential threat, with no option but to continue to fight.
Putin may well anticipate that if Western support diminishes, ultimately Ukraine will break. Perhaps Russia will finally gain air superiority over Ukraine, or maybe Ukrainian forces on the front will dissolve, allowing for more rapid Russian territorial gains. Russian forces may pay a tremendous price—their casualties have now surpassed 1 million—but Putin is not fazed by that.
The Trump administration has surely understood these dynamics since late spring, but it hadn’t chosen a course of action. The president kept saying that he was assessing Putin’s moves and would respond in two weeks if Russia did not change course. The two-week deadline kept rolling over. In the meantime, the Department of Defense pursued its own foreign policy, halting deliveries of weapons to Ukraine that the Biden administration had already paid for and set in motion. This caught Trump unaware and forced him to decide what to do next.
If he fell in line with the Department of Defense, he would increase the chance of a Russian victory in the war and be blamed for it. Europe would do its best to help Ukraine, but it lacks certain weapons that Ukraine desperately needs, including air defense systems, mid-range rockets, and air-delivered weapons.
Selling Europe weapons to give to Kyiv helps keep Ukraine in the fight, but it needs to be part of a broader strategy to compel Russia to accept a sovereign Ukraine and bring the war to an end. The only plausible way to do this is to convince Putin that he cannot make any meaningful gains on the battlefield, that Russia is being weakened by its losses there, and that the war will continue as long as Putin sticks to his maximalist goals. Neither new arms sales, mainly of air defenses, nor sanctions will suffice to convince Putin of this. Conditions on the battlefield have to make such a conclusion unavoidable. That will require a concerted effort.
Trump has made clear that he does not want to own this war, but he will own Ukraine’s defeat if his inaction allows Russia to win a protracted fight. He can present his policy as one of creating the battlefield conditions necessary to facilitate a peace deal. To do that, he should empower a small team in the White House expressly dedicated to helping Ukraine improve its position in the war.
I was part of the effort to help Ukraine during the Biden administration, and I saw how important the White House’s day-to-day engagement was in generating options and solving problems. In January 2023, when I was serving on the National Security Council, the administration estimated that for a major counteroffensive, Ukraine would need about 750,000 rounds of 155-millimeter artillery. The problem was that the United States did not have anything close to that. The U.S. was producing only about 14,000 rounds a month—enough for a couple of normal days in the war.
The National Security Council set up a small unit to find a solution. It quickly zeroed in on South Korea, which had a robust defense industry and large stockpiles of munitions in case of conflict with North Korea. But there was a hitch. South Korean law does not allow the government to transfer these munitions to Ukraine. They would have to be given to the United States, which would then transfer them to Ukraine.
The South Koreans were worried about how Russia would see their role in such a scheme. At one point Seoul told the Biden team that it would transfer the munitions to the United States, but the U.S. military would need to scratch the Korean markings off every single round—labor that would take months. Eventually the Koreans dropped that demand. Transporting the material to Ukraine also posed problems that Biden’s small group was able to solve
The Ukraine team, which met daily with the national security adviser, surmounted other obstacles, too. Israel agreed to donate a retired Patriot air-defense battery to Ukraine in exchange for Washington’s fast-tracking the delivery to Israel of a more advanced system. A separate arrangement allowed Ukraine to jump the line of customers who had bought air defenses from the United States, with the exceptions of Taiwan and Israel. At the same time, the United States secretly helped kick-start Ukraine’s production of attack drones.
One problem Trump has is that his Defense Department is a conscientious objector to his new policy and will almost certainly drag its feet. His Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, is based at the State Department and focuses more on diplomacy with Kyiv than on shaping the battlefield. Kellogg’s team could be given this new role—but there is another option. A number of pro-Trump and pro-Ukraine “America First” proponents remain outside the government, despite having wanted to join the administration. Factions inside the administration, led by Vice President J. D. Vance, favored a foreign policy of restraint and likely excluded these figures. Now could be a time to bring some of them in.
If Trump had a small team dedicated to strengthening Ukraine’s negotiating position, it could hash out an air-defense megadeal that Trump may have alluded to yesterday: Europe would agree to buy a number of Patriot systems from the United States, on the understanding that these orders would jump to the front of the line when the systems are produced. Then the Europeans would immediately give the Patriot systems they already have to Ukraine. The Trump administration could figure out which of the weapons that Ukraine most needs can be provided in sufficient volume only by the United States. Europe would reimburse Washington for sending those to Ukraine as soon as possible.
Washington could strike an agreement with Kyiv, trading, say, U.S. access to the intellectual property for Ukraine’s new drone technology for Ukrainian access to designs for older American weapons and air-defense systems. The U.S. and Ukraine could then co-produce the drones—including in factories in the United States.
The Trump team could bring South Korea back into the mix and ask Seoul to indirectly assist Ukraine with artillery rounds in exchange for Ukrainian assistance on counter-drone technology. (The U.S. could benefit from Ukrainian counter-drone expertise, too.)
The Trump administration has eased some sanctions on Russia and failed to update others in ways that keep them effective. A dedicated team could put pressure on the Treasury and Commerce Departments to properly enforce the sanctions already on the books and intensify sanctions on Russia’s energy sector. It could also work closely with Europe and Ukraine to figure out how to hold Russia off for the next couple of years if necessary. Europe would be the lead partner for Ukraine, but U.S. support would be helpful.
Trump is not going to get an immediate deal to end the war, but if he steps up support for Ukraine, he could still secure the peace later in his term. Putin wants what he wants in Ukraine, and he will stop only when he’s fully convinced that what he wants is unattainable. The sooner Ukraine and its partners can demonstrate that to the Kremlin, the sooner this war will come to an end.
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