Political messages don’t get much blunter than the Russian missiles that slammed into an American-owned manufacturing firm overnight Wednesday in western Ukraine, hundreds of miles away from the frontline trenches of a war with no end in sight.
The attack, part of the most intense Russian drone and missile strikes on Ukraine in more than a month, punctuated Moscow’s brick-wall diplomacy, which is grinding President Donald Trump’s peace effort to a halt.
It’s a week since Trump applauded Russian President Vladimir Putin down a red carpet in Alaska. The US president has orchestrated spectacles and statesmanlike photo-ops with European leaders, and the White House has proclaimed stunning breakthroughs. But the underlying realities of the war have barely changed.
Russia is still bombing and droning Ukrainian civilians. It’s erected new roadblocks to Trump’s rush for a quick peace, contradicting US claims that it made concessions. What has been true in the three-and-a-half years since Russia’s invasion is true now. Putin doesn’t want to end the war. A summit between Ukrainian and Russian leaders — with Trump possibly on hand — that the administration predicted could come as soon as the end of this week remains a pipe dream.
Russia’s blocking maneuvers are led by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, a master of the obstructive arts of the Soviet Union, which he learned as a young diplomat before the Berlin Wall fell. On Thursday, Lavrov sought to reopen splits between the US and Europe that Putin pulled at in Alaska, condemning US allies. “I see many signs that this activity is aimed precisely at undermining the progress that began to emerge, clearly emerge as a summit in Alaska,” Lavrov said.
The Russian strategy is clear: Delay the diplomacy for as long as possible in order to allow Putin’s bloody and slogging military strategy to eke out frontline gains.
Ukraine’s reality hasn’t changed either. President Volodymyr Zelensky is still trying to appease Trump by appearing open to whatever he suggests. At least he escaped his trip to the White House on Monday without another disastrous blow-up. But he still can’t accept the poisoned peace Putin offers. Ceding to Russian demands for strategic land handovers in the critical Donbas region would set up Moscow for a new blitzkrieg on Kyiv in future. It’s not clear Trump gets this.
Europe’s top leaders staged an impressive show of unity at the White House on Monday. They desperately tried to peel away Trump from Putin after his flurry of concessions to the Russian leader. But Europe’s plan for security guarantees for a post-war Ukraine looks as wooly as ever. And it can’t happen without Trump.
Any such plan would rest on two stipulations. One, that the UK and France, the leaders of the “coalition of the willing,” would, if it came to it, be ready to go to war — with US help — against Russia to defend Ukraine. And two, that Moscow would sign a peace deal that binds Western troops to Ukraine in a mutual defense arrangement. Both scenarios are fanciful.
Still, Trump deserves credit for injecting energy into the peace effort. He’s the only leader who can talk to both sides and who has the power to summon a Russian president to the US and to convene allied leaders in Washington at the drop of a hat. And while Trump often tilts toward Putin rather than his Western allies, he hasn’t forced Ukraine into the surrender many of his critics feared. His pressure on NATO allies to spend more on defense will help secure Europe’s future. A genuine legacy achievement that could save thousands of lives in Ukraine is not out of the question for a president who craves respect and history’s validation.
And one week is also an absurdly short time to assess a peace effort. Peace drives in places such as Bosnia and Northern Ireland unfolded over months and years of complex diplomacy. But that attention to detail is exactly what Trump lacks. He and his envoy Steve Witkoff, a fellow real estate developer, speak offhandedly about Ukraine making land swaps — without apparently understanding the agonizing choices this would entail, which are rooted in national identity and the blood spilled to defend key regions.
And perennial questions about Trump are cropping up again. Why won’t he impose the US pressure that might force an easing of Russia’s hardline position? And why does he invest trust in a Russian leader whose actions deserve the opposite?
Trump’s faith in Putin was laid bare in a hot mic moment at the White House on Monday.
“I think he wants to make a deal for me, you understand that? As crazy as it sounds,” he told French President Emmanuel Macron.
It’s hard to take Trump’s words at face value
Trump on Thursday seemed to betray frustration with the deadlock, in a cryptic social media post that hinted at support for Ukrainian strikes on Russian soil. “It is very hard, if not impossible, to win a war without attacking an invaders (sic) country,” he wrote. “It’s like a great team in sports that has a fantastic defense, but is not allowed to play offense.”
But one lesson of the past week is that it’s unwise to emphasize any single comment by the president. He’s been all over the map. At one point Monday, for example, he seemed to hint at openness to US troops serving in any post-war reassurance force in Ukraine. He quickly rowed back after uproar on MAGA media.
A week after he met with Putin, however, Trump’s reputation and the strongman image he incessantly cultivates are primed for embarrassment. He was played, again. This undercuts the core rationale of his presidency — that he’s the world’s greatest dealmaker.
It’s one thing to beat up on smaller nations with tariffs and to browbeat Europeans who rely on the US for defense. But Trump’s meeting with Putin and his failure to get the better of China’s leader Xi Jinping in a trade war suggests that the real hard men scoff at his “Art of the Deal” mythology.
Before he took toughened sanctions against Russia off the table — the very threat that probably lured Putin to Alaska — Trump complained that Putin was ready to talk peace but then sent a murderous volley of missiles into Ukraine.
It’s happening again.
Russia overnight Wednesday killed nine civilians as 574 strike drones and 40 missiles targeted Ukraine, including as far west as the city of Lviv near the Polish border. And 19 people were injured in a strike against a US-owned manufacturing firm, Flex Ltd, in the western region of Zakarpattia. Coming from a nation as attuned to symbolism as Putin’s Russia, this is unlikely to have been a coincidence.
“The Russians knew exactly where they were hitting,” Zelensky said in his nightly video address Thursday. “We believe that this was a deliberate strike against American property here in Ukraine, against American investments.”
The White House’s spin this week seems designed to cover up the lack of progress.
“It’s very important to remember that before President Trump’s landslide victory last November, there was no end in sight to this bloodshed,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Wednesday. “Now, there may finally be light at the end of the tunnel and an opportunity for lasting peace. That’s because President Trump is the peace president.”
Leavitt slammed experts who questioned Trump’s approach and accused journalists of sabotaging the process to hurt him.
A failure to objectively assess the impediments to Trump’s peace process is one reason why it risks collapsing. There is also the president’s willingness to concede to Putin’s positions without extracting flexibility in return, as well as the administration’s repeated failure to accurately interpret Russian positions.
One area where there has been progress is in the president’s openness to act as a backup to a European security guarantee for Ukraine after the war, which could see US pilots flying air support missions. Secretary of State Marco Rubio held a call on the issue Thursday with European national security advisers.
Rubio, who also serves as US national security adviser, told his counterparts that the US was willing to play a limited role but that Europe should take the lead, according to a European diplomat on the call.
Trump shifts stances to match Putin’s
Trump went into the summit a week ago bullishly predicting he’d forge the ceasefire that Ukraine and Europe say must be a precursor to serious diplomacy. But after a few hours with Putin, he’d changed his mind, reasoning that a push for a full, final peace deal was better. That just happens to be Russia’s view, too.
Over the weekend, Witkoff insisted on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Putin had signed off on “robust” security guarantees for Ukraine as part of any final deal.
Anyone with knowledge of recent history knew that sounded fishy. And so it proved, with Lavrov confirming Moscow is sticking to its longtime stance that it should be one of the guarantors — a risible suggestion following the invasion, but one that seeks to cement Putin’s aim of making Ukraine a vassal state.
Trump was on Monday speaking confidently about a meeting between Zelensky and Putin by the end of this week. And he said he’d probably join in. But now he’s adopted Russia’s line that a two-way Zelensky-Putin meeting is best. This would be risky for Ukraine: It’s likely the Russian leader would use Trump’s absence to portray Zelensky as intractable and to blame for stalling peace.
And that’s if Putin showed up. He’s made clear he views Zelensky as an illegitimate leader and that he doesn’t see Ukraine as an independent state.
In any case, Lavrov is playing for time. On Thursday, he proposed a laborious sequence of “conversations” between “expert ministers” and “appropriate recommendations” to consider a summit.
One realistic view of where things stand
Not everything that happens in a diplomatic process happens publicly. So despite the unpromising atmosphere, diligent behind-the-scenes work and pressure could begin to narrow some gaps.
But a week after Alaska, Putin is showing he wants to fight on. Zelensky cannot fold, and Europe can’t make peace on its own. It’s up to Trump. Will he toughen up and throw himself into the details to forge a genuine peace process?
The most accurate current diagnosis of the tortuous path ahead is that offered last Sunday by Secretary of State Marco Rubio — one Trump aide not sugarcoating the situation.
“We’re still a long ways off,” Rubio told ABC. “I mean, we’re not at the precipice of a peace agreement; we’re not at the edge of one.”
CNN’s Clare Sebastian contributed reporting.