Trump swallows Putin’s lies pose a greater threat to Ukraine than bombs | Rafael Behr

wDon’t have to win AR. In popular imagination, total victory is imminent, as these stories are always told to maintain a patriotic feeling. The full version of history is written in a deadlock.

When is it worth remembering Donald Trump meets Vladimir Putin Friday in Alaska. Both leaders have incentives to pretend that Ukraine’s fate can be resolved decisively at the negotiating table without any Ukrainians. That’s not the case.

For the US president, this is a project of personal vanity. He promised to end the war within a few days of returning to the White House. Seven months after the inauguration, the persistence of hostilities condemned his self-image as a world master trader.

Putin also once believed that the war could end quickly. He launched a full-out invasion in February 2022, and Kiev is expected to arrive in a few weeks. When Ukrainian resistance hindered the plan, the Russian president turned to a long game of consumption, relying on superior force numbers and air bombing to devalue Ukraine’s feasibility as a sovereign state. Russia’s industrial base and public opinion have been fired for a permanent war. Kremlin propagandists boasted about the unlimited military endurance of the United States, while Russian commanders promised to break through the enemy’s route and initiate the long-awaited surrender.

Putin must believe in the inevitability of Ukraine’s failure, because any other scenario – even the ceasefire that allowed him to occupy the territory captured so far – prevented him from achieving his historical mission. As long as he will have a complaint of revenge Volodymyr Zelenskyy is the president of a country freely armed and adopts an independent policy that integrates with other European democracies.

In Putin’s eyes, any border or treaty that prevents the Kremlin from deciding on Ukraine’s strategic orientation is illegal. This won’t stop him from signing paper as a tactical expediency. The Russian president recognizes that he has tested the patience of his American counterparts. During the game, he lost Zelenskyy’s stance to shape Trump’s explanation of war in his call for peacetime.

Ukrainian President from his TV humiliation in the White House in Februarywhen he was condemned for his tenacious attitude, he was blamed for inciting the invasion of his own country. The extra diplomacy that promised to pay Kiev’s military bills by NATO leaders has gained some recognition from Trump that it may be much more complicated than previously thought. That Putin is easy to “speak nonsense”;He claimed that his interest in peace conflicted with the bombs he had been falling on Ukrainian civilians.

The Alaska prisoners of war occurred because Trump began setting a ceasefire deadline and threatened Moscow through sanctions. Putin needs to provide some influence on his willingness to compromise. He calculated that the wonders of the summit, coupled with some clever ambiguity surrounding the “land swap”, would attract Trump’s confidence in his charm and believe he has a deal on it.

Putin will use this encounter to construct conflict with Trump’s twisted and historically illiterate reading of the story. It’s a prejudice, criminal Zelenskyy Bamboozles’s faint Joe Biden throwing away American treasures with a crazy, failed bet. Putin said the war almost won. Ukraine is not competent, but can attract its allies to throw good money in bad situations. He will outline the future of profitable business relations between the two major powers, whose potential friendship has been destroyed by a European province of Europe, and is hardly even considered a proper country. He will make weird territorial claims, covering places where Russian troops have not yet conquered and use them as a minimum requirement for reasonable allocation to Moscow. He will insist on Ukraine’s “demilitarization” – which actually guarantees the country’s vulnerability to future invasions – and calls it crucial to Russian security. We know these are demands because Putin has been making it for months. He retelled them earlier this month.

Trump does not have to fall into a whirlwind roar at Putin’s feet to make the summit a Russian success. If he stands out from negotiations and gestures to the key points of speaking from the Kremlin script, it will cause damage. The concern of Ukraine’s European allies is that he would proudly outline the ceasefire proposal with clauses that Zelenskyy could not accept – the injustice, infeasible division of his country, along the boundaries of the tyrant. Putin will then claim that he is trying to talk about peace, and that only Ukrainian uneasiness can prolong the war.

Fewer views are conceivable. Trump’s suspicion of Putin’s new discovery could endure the corruption of flattery. The Russian leader’s confidence in the upcoming battlefield breakthrough may prove false – a symptom of a fragile, authoritarian self that brings only slaves with good tides to the audience. He may have overestimated Russia’s economic resilience to sanctions. He may one day find that the average Russian has lost the will to sacrifice a generation of young people to achieve the goal of national redemption, which has been retreating on the horizon.

Putin will take the ceasefire seriously when domestic economic and political incentives change. The mission of Ukraine’s allies is to speed up the moment with maximum military aid to Kiev and financial pressure on Moscow. Even then, the solution actually puts some of Ukraine’s land under de facto permanent Russian occupation and after a serious situation. It would be a deadlock that would be in a deadlock and with enough deterrence to make the hot war cool. It eventually looked like a demilitarized zone on the Korean Peninsula, still technically on both sides of the state of war, despite the signing of the Armistice Society in 1953

For now, Zelenskyy and his allies’ challenges are dealing with a U.S. president who talks about terms related to any moral, historical or strategic context. Trump does not have any meaningful distinction between solutions, and the settlement allows Ukraine to flourish as an independent country, and Ukraine can satisfy the Russian president’s interest in conquest. He cherishes two kinds of trades – those that make him richer, and those that allow him to enjoy the status of a great trader. If he thinks such benefits can be obtained by giving up American allies and interests, there is no reason to think he won’t do it.

That would be Putin’s goal in Alaska. He had no intention of ending the war just because the White House asked it, but he knew he had to pretend he wanted peace. And he knew that the greatest hope of defeating Ukraine was to manipulate Trump to bully Kiev to surrender while imagining his humiliation against the Kremlin hand was some kind of personal victory.