During the administration of former US president Joe Biden, the most effective tool Russian President Vladimir Putin had to sustain his invasion of Ukraine proved to be his warnings of nuclear escalation, a tactic that prompted Kyiv’s allies to drip-feed its supply of arms for fear of provoking one. That threat lost its power through overuse, but in the era of US President Donald Trump the Kremlin has been handed a still more potent weapon — the peace process.
More than a year into negotiations that Trump said would take him 24 hours to resolve, talks in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, last week produced nothing beyond a prisoner swap — invaluable to the troops and families involved, but irrelevant to a settlement.
Steve Witkoff, the real-estate developer chosen to drive this US-led initiative, gave a short readout from the three-way meeting on social media, in which he could not even declare “progress” on the issues that matter — namely, territorial concessions by and security guarantees for Ukraine.
Illustration: Mountain People
The reality is that while Trump’s peace drive might seem unimpeachable — as would any calls for a ceasefire — it has tipped the scales of war in Moscow’s favor, providing distraction and political cover as the US halted virtually all contributions to Ukraine’s defense, leaving a US$46 billion annual shortfall in Kyiv’s total military and financial aid that Europe has struggled to fill. The US last year even briefly stopped critical intelligence sharing, allowing Russia to recapture territory in the Kursk region that Ukraine had seized to divert Russian forces and to have something to trade in settlement talks.
Putin also avoided the tougher economic sanctions that the US Congress wants and — absent Trump from the White House — would certainly have imposed at a time when the Russian economy was finally weakening. More arms and cash for Ukraine together with tighter trade restrictions on Moscow would very likely have frozen the battlefield, incentivizing a settlement. Instead, Trump’s policies have enabled further monstrous cruelty, as Putin drew the only logical conclusion — keep peace talks alive yet ineffectual, while pressing home the advantages gained.
Take the massive volley of 450 large drones, and 71 ballistic and cruise missiles that Russia fired at Ukraine’s critical energy infrastructure on Tuesday last week, ending a brief US-brokered pause in the air war that runs in parallel with ground offensives. This has been the coldest period for more than a decade in Ukraine, with temperatures below minus-20°C. Russia had hit all five of the major 750-kilovolt electrical substations around Kyiv before the pause, as well as the centralized heating plants on which about 55 percent of the city’s residents survive.
With no heat and little power across much of the capital, these were already life-threatening conditions for the old, sick and very young, but Russia is not done. The attacks that resumed with such ferocity on the eve of the US-led peace talks retargeted those central-heating stations that still had enough residual capacity to keep the capital’s mains water supply at 5°C to 10°C, the level required to avoid water freezing and catastrophic bursts in the pipes in such sub-zero conditions. Should the Russian effort to obliterate all vestiges of central-heating capacity succeed, the city would have to empty the entire network, leaving 3 million people not only without heat, but also water.
There was a further mass strike of 40 missiles and 400 drones on Saturday last week.
“If we don’t get more air defense ammunition and stronger diplomatic support soon, Ukraine’s energy crisis will quickly turn into a humanitarian crisis,” Maxim Timchenko, chief executive officer of Ukraine’s biggest private power company DTEK Group, said in a statement.
However, there is also an air of desperation in Putin’s desire to exploit winter temperatures to inflict maximum misery on the ordinary Ukrainians he is supposedly rescuing from a “fascist” regime. As a Jan. 27 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington lays out, his land campaign is not going well. Over the past year, Russian forces have moved forward at a rate of between 15m and 70m per day along the Donbas front, focused around the so-called “fortress belt” of cities that Putin is demanding Ukraine hand over in exchange for a ceasefire. Even the higher rate is slower than the allied advance at the Somme, the World War I battle that became a byword for static trench warfare.
These marginal gains come at enormous cost, as Kyiv tries to exhaust Russia’s attack by inflicting maximum casualties in a slow retreat. So, when new Ukrainian Minister of Defense Mykhailo Fedorov set out his goals last month, he said his “second strategic objective is to kill 50,000 Russians per month,” up from the current rate of 30,000 to 35,000. Ukraine is struggling to halt Putin’s armies through 1,000 small Pyrrhic victories not by choice, but for lack of better options. Who will “win” in this race to the bottom of human loss is very finely balanced.
That is also because Russia’s remarkably resilient economy is finally showing real signs of strain, meaning that the clock is ticking for Putin, too.
According to a paper by Moscow’s authoritative Center for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Forecasting last month, the economy would enter recession this year unless something changes, with the risk of a banking crisis and possible depositor run by October.
At the same time, Europe is getting ready to move from its sieve-like oil price-cap tool for cutting Russian crude exports to a potentially more effective ban on provision of maritime services, at a time when lower global crude oil prices are already slashing Russian budget revenue. That, in turn, is forcing the Russian government to raise taxes, and cut welfare and health spending. It is getting increasingly difficult for Putin to sell this trade — mass casualties and lowered living standards for tiny slivers of land — as a triumph.
Trump’s peace process might yet succeed. Both populations are exhausted, with opinion polls in Russia and Ukraine alike trending toward acceptance of some sort of settlement. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy revealed after the talks that the US has now set a June deadline for peace, and that Russia has offered Trump a bilateral deal worth (an utterly implausible) US$12 trillion in economic cooperation, no doubt to entice him into endorsing a lopsided accord.
If the White House wants a deal, it has to start piling pressure on the Kremlin to end this invasion of choice and stop gifting Putin advantages that encourage him to fight on. In one hopeful sign, the tech savvy Fedorov last week said that Elon Musk had agreed to limit use of the unregistered Russian Starlink network that had become a vital enabler for attack drones.
All of these measures to persuade Putin he can gain nothing more by fighting should have been taken long ago. The fact that they were not means that when a ceasefire is eventually agreed, as in time it must, this will not be a Nobel Prize-earning feat. It will instead have come after the US first extended the war by taking pressure off the Kremlin, and having forced Ukraine into far greater concessions than it should have had to make.
Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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