Putin still holds all the cards in Ukraine, with no reason to fold

Business Standard

16-05-2025

While we anguish over Donald Trump's wars on trade, judges, migrants, aid recipients and universities, spare a thought for Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Every morning when Ukraine's president wakes up, he must ask himself whether this is the day the US will again cut off its lifeline flow of arms to his country.
This week, Zelenskiy expressed his willingness to meet Russia's Vladimir Putin in Istanbul, but the Russian declined, sending only a delegation of Kremlin stooges. Trump then canceled. (The Friday meeting was their first direct talks in more than three years.) The Ukrainian leader, and the world, are left utterly uncertain whether the US president's next move will be to toughen sanctions on obdurate Russia or to pull the plug on hapless Ukraine.
Trump has made plain his impatience with both sides in the war, and especially his lack of sympathy for Zelenskiy. He has nursed a personal grudge since, in his first term, the Ukrainian leader refused to help him skewer Hunter Biden.
The Ukrainians surely felt a surge of alarm on hearing Trump's latest pronouncement, that peace will only come when he and Putin meet face-to-face. If indeed such an encounter takes place, the US president's mountainous conceit could well mean that he will agree to anything, surrender anything, to be able to declare that he has cut a deal.
If — or, in my opinion, when — the US again cuts off supplies, Ukraine can keep fighting for maybe four months before it runs out of key munitions, especially 155mm artillery ammunition and Patriot air-defense missiles. Whatever supportive rhetoric comes out of Europe's capitals, the European Union is incapable of filling the gap. The British have emptied our arsenals and sustain only a trickle of weapons as they come out of the factories.
Meanwhile, Putin sees himself holding the cards, a view Trump has publicly endorsed. Economic sanctions, which since January the US has quietly eased on Russian financial transactions, are nowhere near tough enough to make the Kremlin quit.
Putin buys weapons and ammunition for a fraction of the prices Zelenskiy and his foreign backers pay for Western-made kit. North Korea is estimated to have provided Russia with 6 million artillery rounds, around 40% of its consumption. Mercenaries fill the yawning holes in Russian ranks made by casualties. Meanwhile the Ukrainians struggle to recruit. Many of their young people have fled abroad to escape the front lines. I spoke this week with friends involved in hosting Ukrainian refugees in Britain. Some have prospered here. A common strand, however, is that they show no enthusiasm for going home.
A writer for Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the US Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in 2022 that, even if the Russians can't conquer Ukraine, they can keep it a scary place to live and a rotten bet for investors. This seemed smart then, and remains so now.
Putin gambles that if he hangs on, this transactional US president will sooner or later walk away, because he sees nothing in Ukraine for himself. The country would thus eventually become a failed state, over which Putin can secure hegemony. He has already achieved this with neighboring Belarus, and is on his way to gaining control of Georgia and Moldova.
Putin is a man with an obsession: to rebuild the Russian empire, the old Soviet Union; to revive what he, and a dismaying number of his people, see as their national greatness.
The bigger picture is that Russia is extending its foreign influence while the US is in headlong retreat from overseas commitments.
Even as the US eviscerates the State Department and forsakes the tools of soft power, Russia is steadily expanding its reach, especially in Africa. Putin offers the leaders of such countries as Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali access to Russian thugs who guard their palaces, together with Kremlin indifference to institutionalized corruption, in return for privileged access to natural resources.
Moreover, unless I misread the domestic mood in Trump's kingdom, not many Americans care, or notice, that this is happening. While polls suggest no great love for Putin's tyranny, they show a decline in hostility — an unwillingness to treat Russians as enemies — such as we have taken for granted since 1945.
I met last week a British friend who advises the Ukrainian government. He reminded me of a rueful saying of one of the country's former foreign ministers, Dmytro Kuleba: 'You in the West want Ukraine to win, but you do not want the Russians to lose.' That remark was made before Trump became president. Today, the first bit is no longer true: The US administration seems indifferent to the threat of Ukraine's defeat.
Meanwhile, mutual trust has become fragile. Ukrainians are bitter about the consequences of their 2023 offensive against the Russians, which failed with heavy losses. This was urged upon their generals by senior Western military figures, including General Mark Milley, then chairman of the US Joint Chiefs, and his British counterpart.
Most smart soldiers, both Ukrainian and foreign, have since concluded that the best course for Zelenskiy's forces is to stick to the defensive — to make Ukraine a 'porcupine' — too prickly for the Russians indefinitely to grapple. The Ukrainians excel at asymmetric warfare, launching terror hits deep inside Russia and driving the Russian Navy out of the Black Sea.
Almost every sensible Western military chief agrees that Kyiv must abandon any hope of regaining its lost territories in the east. Moreover, these are so devastated that the Ukrainians couldn't fund their reconstruction.
But Putin remains stubbornly committed to gaining control of the entire country, ousting its government and installing puppets. He wants Ukraine demilitarized and quarantined from the West. The only prospect of changing his mind is to increase the pressure on him, both military and economic. Above all, he needs to be convinced, as today he is not, that the US won't abandon the Ukrainians.
If Trump halts military aid, Ukraine is doomed. Such a move would signal a renunciation of the values for which the US has stood guardian almost since the Founding Fathers. Yet it is unsurprising if Zelenskiy, one of the most remarkable national leaders to emerge from the 21st century, has trouble sleeping at night.