Trump offered Putin a tactical victory in Ukraine. It wasn’t enough

A day before Russian President Vladimir Putin hosted members of U.S. President Donald Trump’s latest "peace" delegation at the Kremlin, Ukraine's former foreign minister gave a Kyiv audience his own assessment of where efforts to end the war in his country stand.

Dmytro Kuleba was Ukraine's international face and voice when Russia launched its all-out invasion in February 2022, so his assessment comes from years of insider experience in Ukraine’s government, as well as intense exposure to the hard-realities of international realpolitik.

"Ahead of Ukraine lies a tactical defeat, but a strategic victory," he said at a conference on Dec. 1, calling it a "very, very harsh truth" that his country needs to confront.

The defeat comes from the loss of territory — roughly 19 per cent of the country is now in Russian hands — along with the deaths of tens of thousands of Ukrainians.

But Kuleba said the strategic victory lies in surviving Putin's efforts to "destroy us as a state and erase us as a nation" and he urged Ukrainians to accept the dynamic as the likely upshot of any potential peace efforts.

That binary outcome was essentially what U.S. emissaries presented to Russia's leader when they arrived in Moscow Tuesday bearing the latest incarnation of what began as a 28-point proposal to end the war.

Russia retains Ukrainian territory — but Ukraine retains its sovereignty, including the power to make decisions about its own armed forces, alliances and strategic posture.

But Putin said no.

Kremlin wants more

His aide Yuri Ushakov said Wednesday that with Russian troops holding the battlefield initiative in eastern Ukraine, Russia's negotiating position is strengthened and the Kremlin wants more than what's on offer.

Whether during initial meetings in Istanbul following Russia's 2022 invasion, or the subsequent Trump-led summit in Alaska in August, Putin's war goals and his demands have remained unmovable.

He has demanded Ukraine turn over all of the Donbas region to Russia, even areas Russian troops have not captured. He has insisted Ukraine be denied a path to join NATO, that its armed forces be capped and limited, that it be banned from possessing long-range missiles, that its government enact special provisions for Russian speakers and that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy resign so that new elections can be held.

Despite suffering more than 1.1 million casualties, according to British estimates, Putin appears to believe not only that his main war goal — the elimination of Ukraine as a sovereign state — is still viable, but that Trump can actually help him achieve it.

"An agreement on a peace plan … was never a genuine possibility," posted respected Paris-based Russia analyst Tatiana Stanovaya after Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner left Moscow Tuesday night.

"Putin's aim was … to deliver Russia's red lines directly to the U.S. president, bypassing all intermediaries. Moscow's calculation is simple: Washington must now pressure Kyiv to accept these terms as the only viable route to peace," wrote Stanovaya.

Whereas Trump has spoken often about the many high value commercial opportunities that await Russia once the war ends, there's no indication such economic arguments have even slightly swayed Putin's thinking.

Historic mission

Indeed, Putin, a former KGB agent who has repeatedly lamented the demise of the former Soviet Union, has often framed himself as being on a historic mission to rebuild the rússkiy mir, or "Russian world,"that he argues the West stole from Russia when the U.S.S.R. collapsed in late 1991.

Putin has repeatedly lectured visiting foreign leaders on Russia's historic claims to Ukrainian territory and has portrayed a Western-oriented Ukraine as an existential threat to his country.

He has also characterized Ukraine's leaders, and Zelenskyy in particular, as puppets of the United States, claiming — without evidence — that popular revolutions against Russian-backed Ukrainian leaders in 2004 and in 2014 were coups inspired by the CIA.

While Putin's anti-Ukraine views are shared by many Russians, Levada, the country's best known independent pollster, also reports that a large majority in the country — 66 per cent — also favour peace talks even as they support military actions in Ukraine.

Putin's armies have made significant advances in Donbas and Zaporizhzhia regions over the fall, although those gains have come at an incredible cost, with some U.S. estimates suggesting up to 1,000 Russian soldiers being killed every day.

Ukraine's casualties, while not thought to be as high as Russia's, have nonetheless been severe and of late Russian missile and drone attacks on major population centres have been overwhelming Ukrainian defences, leading to a spike in civilian casualties and accentuating the war weariness.

The country's energy grid is also under immense strain, leading to prolonged blackouts.

Zelenskyy is also facing his worst domestic political crisis of the war, after corruption investigators arrested several top members of his government and searched the home of his chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, prompting him to resign.

Internal pressure

But even though polls suggest a majority of Ukrainians want the war to end, whether Trump or anyone else can pressure Zelenskyy into accepting Putin's maximalist terms is extremely unlikely, say Ukrainian analysts.

"We have to communicate really clearly to those people who really think that if you put more pressure on President Zelenskyy he'll sign — no, no,” said Oleksiy Melnyk, co-director of foreign relations and international security programs at the Razumkov Centre in Kyiv.

Melnik told CBC News he believes Ukrainian civil society — especially people in the military or with military connections — would erupt in protest if they felt Zelenskyy was signing a deal that erodes the country's independence and turns it into a vassal state of Russia.

Where the whole process goes from here, is likely back to Trump.

At a meeting of NATO defence ministers in Berlin on Wednesday, Secretary General Mark Rutte said Trump is the "only person in the world" who can break the deadlock.

The U.S. has the means to arm Ukraine so that it can both defend itself from Russian air attacks and also deliver the offensive punch necessary to hit long-range targets in Russia — as well as hold back Putin's armies on the battlefield.

Trump has also imposed crippling sanctions on Russia's oil sector, including on key producers, its shadow fleet of tankers and even potentially on customers making purchases — efforts that have begun to put intense pressure on its economy.

Zelenskyy's worry though appears to be that when faced with such irreconcilable differences between the Ukrainian and Russian positions, Trump may choose instead to disengage completely.

In an interview on his trip to Ireland earlier this week, Zelenskyy said he believes Putin's aim is to make the U.S. abandon his country.

"We are afraid — if America will be tired (sic) it's not good for us. It's the goal of Russians to withdraw the interest of the Americans from this situation."