The Daily Populous Tuesday November 11st, 2025 evening edition
Authored by theatlantic.com and submitted by theatlantic

Donald Trump is clearly frustrated with his failure to end the Russia-Ukraine war. He thought he could strike a deal with a simple transaction that recognized Russia’s territorial gains and appealed to its economic interests. He did not understand how committed Vladimir Putin was to the destruction of an independent Ukrainian state, or how difficult it would be to compel him to accept anything less.

Recently President Trump tried to change the dynamic: He told Putin he might give Ukraine long-range Tomahawk missiles, and he tried to berate Volodymyr Zelensky into conceding territory, but both to no avail. Trump canceled a planned summit with Putin, explaining to reporters, “We’re going to have to know that we’re going to make a deal. I’m not going to be wasting my time. I’ve always had a great relationship with Vladimir Putin, but this has been very disappointing.”

To hear senior Trump-administration officials tell it, they are very close to settling the war, if only the parties would be reasonable. They appear to view the fundamental conflict as simple and susceptible to compromise: Russia wants the remaining land that it does not control in the Donbas; Ukraine wants robust security guarantees. But in fact the problem is much more intractable and difficult than that.

Early in Trump’s second term, Russia rejected a deal that would have frozen the battle lines, lifted sanctions on Russia, and kept Ukraine out of NATO. If Trump had understood the deeper context of the war, he would have expected no less. Moscow views a free, independent, and militarily capable Ukraine as an unacceptable threat. If the war ends on any terms other than the total subjugation of Ukraine to Russia, an ever more aggrieved and militarized Ukraine will recover economically and rebuild its defenses with Western support. Moscow finds this outcome intolerable, and its only plan to deal with it is to destroy the Ukrainian state. This is what Moscow means by addressing “root causes.”

For Putin, the extraordinarily high cost of continuing the war is worth paying because it prevents Ukraine from ever getting back on its feet. He will not change his mind just because the marginal cost of sanctions increases, or because Ukraine conducts more deep strikes. This is why the Russian position is almost completely unchanged since Trump took office: Russia is making an offer that Zelensky can only refuse. It is demanding concessions that will destroy the Ukrainian president politically, such as the surrender of new territory and the demilitarization of Ukraine.

Indeed, Nate Reynolds, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former U.S. intelligence analyst, has pointed out that the only significant change in the negotiating position of either side during the Trump administration has come from Ukraine. When Joe Biden was president, Ukraine demanded ironclad security guarantees from the United States in exchange for ending the war. After the Oval Office bust-up with Trump in February, Kyiv embraced the idea of an unconditional cease-fire, perhaps to repair relations with Washington. This was a smart move that revealed Russia as the obstacle to peace. But Trump did not follow up with serious pressure on Moscow, and the two sides remain as far apart as ever.

Trump will not be able to end the war in the next few months, but he could start to create the military and diplomatic conditions for a successful negotiation later in his term. Doing so wouldn’t even require a radical shift in direction.

Trump should continue to help Ukraine convince Putin that he has no hope of achieving his objectives on the battlefield. Andriy Zagorodnyuk, who served as Ukraine’s minister for defense before the war, refers to this strategy strategic neutralization—Ukraine would seek to paralyze Russia’s offensive capacities at land, sea, and air, so that even though it can continue to fight, it cannot win.

One year ago, Ukraine was short on manpower and had overextended itself with an incursion into Kursk, Russia. Russian forces were moving slowly forward, at tremendous cost. Time was not on Ukraine’s side. Kyiv worried that if it hunkered down, it would lose slowly. In May of this year, Russia sought to capitalize on this advantage with a big offensive.

The results were underwhelming. A recent study by The Economist showed that Russia took only 0.4 percent of Ukrainian land in its summer offensive. Russian forces recently breached the defenses of the city of Pokrovsk, but this does not change the strategic picture and was in any case predicted for about a year. At the current rate, Russia would need 103 years to conquer all of Ukraine. Meanwhile, according to the same study’s survey of available data, Russian casualties spiked by 60 percent in 2025, totaling somewhere between 984,000 and 1,438,000, including 190,000 to 480,000 dead. One U.S. official told me that Ukrainian casualty numbers are about a quarter to a third of the Russians’.

A Ukrainian soldier launches a surveillance drone toward Russian positions in the Donetsk region.(Roman Pilipey / AFP / Getty)

Russian casualties have risen largely because of a change in the nature of the front lines over the last year. Troops once used stands of trees or other natural barriers to defend themselves against small offensives. Now the frontline consists of a large kill zone where drones strike anything static within minutes. Both sides use drones, but they have made the biggest difference for Ukraine, which uses them to offset its disadvantage in manpower and artillery.

Ukraine’s position is more sustainable than it was. Earlier this year, Kyiv was running short on weapons, as supplies that the Biden administration had set in motion ran out. Trump has partly addressed the shortfall by selling NATO weapons for transfer to Ukraine (more air-defense weapons are still needed, though). Trump also recently imposed sanctions on the Russian energy sector, which will help tighten the financial squeeze on Russia’s war effort.

Read: Ukraine’s plan to starve the Russian war machine

Still, what Trump really seems to want is not to help Ukraine prevail in a longer war so much as to reinvigorate his diplomacy for a peace deal. And to that end, he can do something more: He can globalize his peace push, perhaps by calling for a peace summit, and by pressing other countries to accept an immediate end to the war along current lines.

Ukraine has held and taken part in peace summits before, but it struggled to bring the countries of the global South on board with its proposals for settling the outstanding issues between itself and Russia. The fact that Zelensky now embraces an unconditional cease-fire makes that task a lot easier. Brazil, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Senegal, India, and other nations that have pushed for peace will be hard-pressed to reject a clear prospect for achieving it, especially now that Trump has ruled out Ukrainian membership in NATO.

Trump’s goal could be to rally a majority of the world’s countries to call for an immediate and unconditional cease-fire, with details on implementation to be worked out by the parties. Russia would oppose this but be forced to explain why. The process would highlight the absurdity of Putin’s demands for additional territorial concessions and Ukraine’s demilitarization. As Russia’s closest ally, China would not break with Moscow by endorsing an unconditional cease-fire, but it, too, would be discomfited by having to explain this choice. Trump could chalk up some progress as countries signed on, and Ukraine would get a morale boost at the start of a long and difficult winter.

The war in Ukraine is unlikely to end with a singular, spectacular breakthrough. But these moves and a little patience could help set the conditions for a resolution over time—one that doesn’t involve Russia destroying and subjugating its neighbor.

fheathyr on November 11st, 2025 at 16:15 UTC »

Could it be because he has no interest in a just peace?

Wide-Chart-7591 on November 11st, 2025 at 15:45 UTC »

The West keeps treating this like a problem to solve. They think it’s about territory, pipelines, or power things that can be negotiated away. But for Russia this war isn’t about gain. It’s about being.

Since the fall of the USSR, Russia’s lived with the humiliation of collapse. The myth they tell themselves of sacred resistance, of surviving Western encirclement is how they rebuilt meaning. Ukraine isn’t a front. It’s the ritual reaffirmation of who they are.

That’s why the West can’t reason them out of it. To the West this is politics. To Russia it’s theology

DaySecure7642 on November 11st, 2025 at 15:00 UTC »

Real permanent peace is probably not even an option for Putin. At this point Russia simply cannot afford to stop or lose, otherwise it will collapse. Strategically if Russia can absorb a large population of Ukraine, it can slow down its own demographic decline and also justify the cost of the war to some extent. So it has to and can only go on.

Right now the biggest obstacle to Ukraine invasion is the support of the west. So for Russia, the motives of negotiations are completely different. Putin is probably just trying to reduce or disrupt the support Ukraine is getting by many rounds of "negotiation". The real intent is always about the annexation.