In the last month or so, President Donald Trump’s on-again-off-again relationship with Ukraine — which has ranged from kicking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy out of the White House in early 2025 to promising new air defense missiles this summer — has once again run cold. Trump has excoriated Zelenskyy for successful Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil and gas infrastructure, called for Zelenskyy’s ouster, and gifted Russia a sanctions reprieve.
Trump also hasn’t had much success brokering a ceasefire, much less an end to the war (an announced “energy ceasefire” fell apart-near instantly earlier in October). First Lady Melania Trump, however, has.
She reportedly played a (limited) role in arranging a partial ceasefire for the frontline Ukrainian city of Oleshky, which has been hit especially hard by the war and is currently occupied by Russia.
The pause, which is scheduled to run through the weekend, allows food and aid to get in and for a civilian evacuation. While limited, it also shows that both Ukraine and Russia are potentially willing to come to the negotiating table.
After the Trump-Vladimir Putin rapprochement, though, some critics worry that the US is more likely to take Russia’s side — or at least step away from Ukraine’s — both in the war and in any possible peace talks.
To break down what the Trumps are up to, how serious the concerns of Trump abandoning Ukraine for Putin actually are, and what could come next, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Alex Ward, a national security reporter for the Wall Street Journal.
Below is an excerpt of Sean’s conversation with Ward, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Let’s start with the most unexpected news out of this war in recent days: that Melania Trump brokered a ceasefire.
It’s possible she had a role. I’m going to personally, without too much reporting, say that it was probably more Pope Leo.
Melania stole Pope Leo’s ceasefire?
I think a little bit. Look, this ceasefire is not a small thing. It is a humanitarian ceasefire in the southern Ukrainian city of Oleshky. It allows humanitarian aid to get in. The critics would say this allows the Russians to re-arm and regroup, and I guess at the same time also the Ukrainians.
The question is, does it actually have that much influence over the war? No, it’s a very, very small targeted ceasefire. But it is a potential signal that deals can be made.
The Russians are very much saying, look at Melania Trump, look at how important she was to all this. And if I’m the Russians, I would love to be saying things like that because then President Trump feels like the Russians are being very generous towards my wife and to my family, and therefore I side with them.
It feels very convenient that the Russians are pumping that up and that even the White House is pumping up Melania Trump’s influence. I don’t want to discredit her. I’m sure she did work on this.
When did she become a negotiator in this war?
From the beginning, she has been trying to get children kidnapped by Russia back to Ukraine. That has been a major focus of hers in this war.
Is she the driving force behind this ceasefire? Is she the number one reason it happened? It’s totally possible. There’s just a lot of skepticism out there about whether Kyiv and Moscow were brought to the table and browbeaten by the First Lady. Again, very possible, but both sides, being Ukraine and Russia, have an incentive to play up her role.
The ceasefire is just relegated to one city. How come?
That’s all they could agree to. If we’re looking at this war at a bigger scale, there’s been a massive discussion about how to get an end to the Ukraine-Russia war.
The US last week was able to broker a commitment to have trilateral talks between the Ukrainians, Russians, and the Americans with the goal toward ending the war. And you’ve heard President Zelenskyy of Ukraine say, “We can call it ceasefire. We can call stop the killings. We can call freeze the conflict.”
Putin goes, ‘No, thank you. I would like basically a handover of the territory that I want, even though I’ve been unable to conquer it after nearly five years.’ It’s unclear if they’re even going to get into the room for those trilateral negotiations. Even if they do, it’ll probably be at a lower technical level.
So are we ever going to get to the point that Putin and Zelenskyy and Trump get in a room, all hold hands and say ‘war over’? I highly doubt it, but that is the goal they’re after. You see the Trump administration, the Kremlin, and Kyiv all point to this Oleshky ceasefire as, like, ‘Hey, this could be a model for the much bigger deal.’
I want to be clear that this Oleshky thing is important. It really is aimed at a humanitarian ceasefire since there’s a lot of food that isn’t getting in, a lot of people are suffering and this potentially leads to some relief. But there are a lot of people around Ukraine and many bombed-out cities that are going, “Hey, what about us? We are hungry too. We don’t have certain services.”
Winter is coming, and the Russians have bombed out a lot of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, which is going to make this winter potentially very brutal, as a lot of folks will not have heating or the necessities they need to survive really cold temperatures.
Steve Witkoff called Vladimir Putin a humanitarian, which had a lot of people shook because, famously, Vladimir Putin also started this war.
Yeah, it’s like calling Freddy Krueger a nails enthusiast. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Has Vladimir Putin released Americans that he took hostage? Yes. Has he returned some children that his government, his forces have taken? Yes. I don’t know if that makes a humanitarian. That’s kind of like praising the arsonist for throwing a bucket of water on the house fire.
It’s not just calling him a humanitarian; it’s getting rid of the Lindsey Graham sanctions on Russia, which is essentially like handing Russia billions of dollars, right?
There’s a lot of weirdness here. First of all, on the Graham bill, it’s a weird bill, and frankly it’s a pretty bad bill despite the fact that Democrats and Republicans love it.
What it basically calls for is tariffs on countries that purchase Russian energy. The way that Trump explains it is he waived the economic punishments, because otherwise the Russians would not have returned Stephen Hubbard and there might not have been this Oleshky ceasefire and there might not have been a bunch of other benefits.
Another argument President Trump was making for removing these tariff sanctions on Russia was that it would lower diesel costs here in the United States. Has that actually happened?
The Russians agreed to a diesel deal where they would basically export diesel to the United States. And in President Trump’s mind, that will lower costs because President Trump and political allies of his like Elon Musk of SpaceX say that is the reason diesel prices have skyrocketed across the US.
However, when you talk to analysts and look at the data, it is the Iran war that has had a greater effect on diesel prices. Not to say that the Russia-Ukraine war hasn’t had any, but it’s much less because there is just very little Russian diesel in the American market, but also in the global market.
What the US is receiving from Russia is not nothing, but effectively nothing because it’s just not enough to alleviate the diesel concerns across the country and to lower prices to a meaningful amount. And we can see President Trump is effectively scrambling to make good on his promises of lowering prices as the midterms approach, to the point that he’s willing to make a deal with the invading country in the war he’s trying to end in order to lower gas prices at home.
A lot of people see these developments and think that the United States’ allegiances have shifted, that we’ve maybe abandoned Ukraine at the moment. Is that fair?
I don’t think we can say that with any sense of certainty. President Trump has actually been on Ukraine’s side in certain cases, even rhetorically during a UN meeting, I believe it was last year. President Trump was presented with intelligence about how the Russians have been struggling to invade Ukraine. And then he released a statement saying basically, ‘Go Ukraine, go. Russia, you’re kind of losing here.’ And that made people go, ‘Oh, he’s on Ukraine’s side.’
And of course, after that whole Oval Office blowup with Zelenskyy, that relationship improved. But everyone’s always been kind of like, ‘Well, we know where Trump’s feelings are here. He wants a big deal with Russia. He wants an economic deal with Russia. He wants to improve relations with Vladimir Putin, and so he always returns to the mean, even if he flirts with Ukraine.’
But below President Trump’s unique style of dealmaking, the US intelligence community is helping Ukraine to defend against Russia. The US is selling weapons to Europeans for the Europeans to deliver to Ukraine. It is nowhere near the level of weapons support during the Biden administration, but that intelligence support seems to be at a higher level than during the Biden years.
And it’s not like President Trump has purposefully hampered Ukraine’s defenses a lot. There are some questions about sudden intelligence shutoffs and delays of important weapons. I am not saying President Trump has been a staunch defender and a staunch supporter of Ukraine here. But if you look at the grand totality, Ukraine is still being defended by the United States.
It almost seems like President Trump has an inability to pick a side. He’s playing both. In his mind, he thinks that’s the best way to get them both to the table and get a deal. But this is also the man that said he could do it in 24 hours and we’re nearly two years into his presidency. And right now the best we can get is, ‘Hey, maybe we can get the Russians, Ukrainians, and Americans to meet in a room for technical talks.’
It’s not nothing. And also, hey, we got a ceasefire in a town in Ukraine. It’s not nothing, but it’s nowhere near the big, potentially Nobel Peace Prize-winning deal that he’s searching for.
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