What happened
A planned meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin to discuss a halt to the war in Ukraine was shelved last week, after Russian officials said Putin would not bend on any of his demands. “A ceasefire now would mean only one thing,” said Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, “that a vast part of Ukraine remains under the control of a Nazi regime.” Trump said those comments showed that another meeting with Putin would be “a waste of time.” Trump had earlier suggested that the U.S. might provide Ukraine with long-range Tomahawk missiles, but after a phone call from Putin, he dropped that idea, saying Tomahawks “could mean a big escalation.” Instead, at a combative White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, he reportedly demanded that Ukraine accept Russia’s terms—including surrendering areas of the Donbas region that are currently under Ukrainian control.
After Russia bombarded Ukraine with more than 400 drones and missiles, killing at least six people and causing widespread power outages, U.S. officials said they would allow Ukraine to use British long-range missiles, which require American guidance. European leaders said they would lend Ukraine more than $200 billion in frozen Russian assets, and they called for an immediate ceasefire that would freeze each side’s territorial gains. NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, who met with Trump this week, said he had “total confidence” that the president would reach such a ceasefire, saying “he’s the only one who can get this done.”
What the columnists said
Zelensky deserves “a Nobel Prize for patience” after enduring another Trump tirade, said Edward Luce in the Financial Times. He undoubtedly knows that Putin, whose troops have gained only 0.4% of territory this year at the cost of 100,000 casualties, “has fewer cards in his hand than Trump supposes.” But given that Putin seems to hold a “mesmeric sway” over the U.S. president, we have to wonder if “one of those cards is Trump.”
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Trump sincerely wants to end the war, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial, and the quickest way to do that is to provide Ukraine with Tomahawks. Putin has “tried to use nuclear blackmail for three years to talk the U.S. out of donating this or that weapon,” but it’s just bluster. Kyiv has already damaged or destroyed about 20% of Russia’s oil-refining capacity with the help of long-range strikes, and could knock out even more with the long-range missiles. It was the mere threat of Tomahawks, after all, that persuaded Putin to agree to a meeting—when the threat was called off, so was the meeting.
Putin has no intention of ever reaching a ceasefire, said Eric S. Edelman and David J. Kramer in The Dispatch. His goals have not changed since the day of the invasion in 2022: “to destroy Ukraine, overthrow its government, subjugate its population, and eliminate its hopes for one day joining NATO.” With or without American Tomahawks, the Ukrainian people will fight on. “They have no choice.”
