It's Dawning on Trump that Russia's War with Ukraine Can't Be Solved in "One Day"
Under almost any scenario, there will be no lasting peace, only a possible ceasefire. There will be no “let bygones be bygones.” This war's impact will last long after Trump leaves the White House.
Hours after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and Moscow’s army moved within a few dozen miles of Kyiv, the U.S. embassy offered President Volodymyr Zelenskyy an opportunity to flee.
“I need ammunition, not a ride,” Zelensky famously responded.
U.S. officials warned him that Kyiv would fall within days. Almost three years later, Ukraine continues fighting for its freedom and Zelensky persists in asking for ammunition.
That may not be winning, but it certainly isn’t losing.
Russia’s population is four to five times the size of Ukraine’s and its economy — ranked 11th in the world — dwarfs Ukraine.
Trump Wants a Deal in a Day
Most accounts say the Russian and Ukrainian armies are exhausted and have suffered massive losses and casualties. While Russia says it has an estimated 500,000 troops surrounding Ukraine and inside occupied areas, it has sustained that many or more in casualties. Ukraine, too, is struggling with replacing depleted ranks to defend its sovereignty and estimates roughly tally to as many losses as Russia. The battle lines between David and Goliath have barely budged in well over a year.
Russia’s unprovoked invasion leaves an appalling trail of countless war atrocities, civilian hardship and destruction valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars. The accused perpetrators in Moscow have yet to be tried in international criminal courts.
That’s the reality for incoming President Donald Trump who bragged last May that he could end in one day the largest land war in Europe since World War II.
During the September presidential debate with Kamala Harris, Trump doubled down on his peace brokering skills. He claimed that when “I’m president-elect, I’ll get it done before even becoming president.”
Election Day has passed and much of the world is still waiting. The president-elect has yet to lay out just how he’ll “get it done.”
But It’s Complicated
The reality of this war will take more than one day to fix. My bet is this savage mess engineered by Russian President Vladimir Putin and its outcome will be shaping world events for years to come.
Silence from the typically outspoken, chest-thumping Trump may be a tip-off that he suddenly understands the challenges. Stopping Russia’s bloody and ruthless rampage in Ukraine is much more complicated than his gut impulses told him just weeks before his election.
To date, clues about Trump’s thinking mostly come from vague smoke signals and reported anonymous leaks drifting out from the president-elect’s team at Mar-a-Lago.
That may be changing rapidly as he nears his inauguration on Jan. 20 and takes the reins on Ukraine military aid and policy from President Joe Biden.
Trump’s choice for national security adviser, three-term Rep. Michael Waltz of Florida, revealed on Fox News he had been discussing the Ukraine situation with Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, and the NATO secretary general in Europe.
“For our adversaries out there that think this is a time of opportunity, that they can play one administration off the other, they’re wrong,” he said. “We are hand in glove. We are one team with this United States in this transition.”
The former Green Beret and Republican policy adviser to the Pentagon and White House compared the war’s frontlines to World War I trench warfare, saying “it is an absolute meat grinder of people and personnel on that front.”
Any moves toward a ceasefire or peace deal will include U.S. allies and European partners, Waltz added. “We need to bring this to a responsible end. We need to restore deterrents, restore peace and get ahead of this escalation ladder rather than responding to it.”
Junior’s Instagram Diplomacy
Although not a detailed plan, Waltz sketched out a moment of clarity compared to some of the nonsense flowing from Trumpworld denizens ranging from Elon Musk to Georgia Republican, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The president’s son, Donald Trump, Jr., pretty much summed up this brand of reckless blather.
A big-game hunter of rare and endangered animals who worked as a bartender for a year before joining his daddy’s billion-dollar business, Junior recently predicted that U.S. support for Ukraine would be cut off unilaterally once his father is sworn in as president on January 20.
“You're 38 days from losing your allowance,” he cynically posted on Instagram over a video of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
I’m not sure what calendar Junior refers to, but shutting off U.S. weapons supplies would be a death knell to Ukraine. It would allow Putin’s marauding berserkers to push forward and occupy much of the country.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky said as much last week on Fox News. "If they will cut, I think we will lose,” he told correspondent Trey Yingst. “Of course, anyway, we will stay and we will fight. We have production, but it’s not enough to prevail. And I think it is not enough to survive.”
Zelensky, like Waltz did days later, stressed the importance of all Ukraine’s allies and affirmed that negotiations are necessary, but acknowledged that Trump and the United States will be pivotal in forging a negotiated end to the fighting. “Putin is weaker than the United States of America. The President of the United States of America has the strength and authorities and weapons.”
Ignoring Putin’s Inconvenient Horrors of War
Along with Don Jr., most of Trumpworld overlooks the obvious fact: Moscow ordered a savage invasion of a sovereign nation on the front porch of Europe. Russia’s “special military operation” scrambled 6.8 million refugees across Europe and the globe, 4 million internally displaced and 14.6 million in need of humanitarian aid in a country that once had a population over 40 million before the invasion.
An estimated 10,000 civilians have died during this conflict. Ukraine stands by its claim that Putin’s forces have illegally transported 20,000 Ukrainian children into Russia. The International Criminal Court documented hundreds of such child abductions and issued warrants for Moscow officials. Other arrest warrants have been issued for the bombing of civilian targets. Putin is a wanted man on the world stage.
Then there’s the sheer magnitude of destruction – including over a million homes and power plants — caused by Putin’s invasion. The New York Times reported in June that “More buildings have been destroyed in Ukraine than if every building in Manhattan were to be leveled four times over.” The cost for rebuilding that damage is now estimated to be $486 billion.
Will Trump the real estate developer convince Putin to pay for what Russians destroyed and the lives he has wrecked?
Russian rockets, drones and artillery have hit over 1,000 hospitals, including a major children’s hospital in Kyiv. More than 200 medical facilities are destroyed. Some 1,300 educational facilities in Ukraine have been damaged or left in rubble. The daily barrage has obliterated hundreds of cultural centers and religious sites.
An estimated two million Russian landmines now carpet farmlands in Ukraine, a major breadbasket for the developing world.
And let’s not forget the endless reported stories of Putin’s marauding army systemically torturing and murdering in occupied towns and raping women of all ages.
I’ve been there and interviewed the people struggling with these memories and seen evidence of Putin’s predatory strategy. It all took place in areas once swarming with Russian military waving their nation’s flag before Ukrainian forces pushed them out.
And it goes on. Russian drones are now known to be hunting and murdering civilians going about their daily routines – something called Putin’s “human safari.”
Russia is a Terrorist State by Any Other Name
Some call this destruction an act of genocide aimed at eliminating Ukrainian culture and identity. At a minimum, it is state-sponsored terrorism.
It will be telling to hear what Trump’s pick for secretary of state, Marco Rubio, says about his adamant support for the U.S. naming Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism but not including Russia, a strong ally to Cuba.
The son of Cuban exiles, Rubio fully supported Ukraine’s defense at the outset of Russia’s 2022 land grab. He has become lukewarm this year after hooking up with the Trump train.
Last June, he voted against the $95 billion in Ukraine aid at Trump’s behind-the-scenes urging and now backs negotiating an end to its war with Russia. “Ultimately, what we're financing here is a stalemate, and it needs to be brought to an end,” he told NBC Today on November 6. “I believe common sense should prevail.”
Common sense in Putin’s mind is his unwillingness to retreat from nearly 20 percent of Ukraine he has since illegally annexed to Russia. He also consistently demands Ukraine not join the NATO military defense alliance and that Ukraine even be banned from having a standing military force.
If Ukraine loses U.S. aid, what’s to stop Putin from grabbing more of Ukraine? Apparently, nothing if not ammunition, more forceful trade sanctions, giving Ukraine the $300 billion in Russian assets frozen in European and U.S. banks and other retaliatory measures.
Right now, the reporting from anonymous sources in Trumpworld and Trump’s impulsive one-liners point to Trump being ready to allow Putin to keep the occupied territories and block Ukraine’s membership to NATO. It would be an easy deal, a 24-hour deal. A deal that will alienate European allies if they balk at buying into it and discredit any future pledges to allies by the United States.
And that’s why the details will be left to Trump’s secretary of state and his national security adviser to hammer out. Hopefully, they see it much more demanding than a slick New York real estate deal.
Both have long records in Congress for standing up to Russia and voicing their distrust of Putin. They know they will be traveling a complex roadmap to securing Ukraine’s independence and security and addressing the abhorrent trail of carnage and destruction Putin has caused.
We’ll see if they genuinely have sway with the incoming president.
The world sees what the imperialist Putin wants. He wants Ukraine. What we don’t know is what Trump wants although he has rarely said a critical word about Putin.
His strategy may be more complicated than what he has said or more weak-kneed than even he is ready to say publicly, but it is now his call.
Under almost any scenario, there will be no lasting peace, only a ceasefire. There will be no “let bygones be bygones.” The impact of this war may last long after Trump leaves the White House.