429 - No Giveaways: Let's Construct a Fair Peace Settlement

Amateur Hour and Russians

Putin wants to grab the entire Donbas just like Trump seeks Greenland -- as an emblem of power and to show that he personally still has efficacy and global standing. But Ukrainians hardly wish to be shoved into Russia or sequestered in a no-man’s-zone next to already occupied Luhansk and Donetsk.

Two women in towns near the contested border made their disdain for Putin and Russia clear: “People are very tired and can do little but hope we will not be given to Russia,” said one. The other feared the future: “They should not hand us over like cattle.” About 190,000 Ukrainians live in the section of the Donbas that Putin craves. They would be subject to Russian arbitrary detentions, torture, and extrajudicial executions, plus the loss of fundamental freedoms.

Putin claims that the people of the Donbas are culturally and ethnically Russian, not Ukrainian. But that is blatant nonsense (as very much earlier columns in this Newsletter have demonstrated) just as is his four-year old assertion that Ukraine is really a Russian province. Trump, the panderer-in-chief, need not pander to such calumny. As many as 17 percent of the inhabitants of Ukraine may consider themselves Russians rather than Ukrainians, but that is far less than 90 percent who say they are Ukrainians, through and through.

Yet the danger is real, and not from the advancing Russian forces. Over the course of four years, Russia’s numerically larger army has advanced from its 2014 conquest barely at all. It has taken less than 1 percent since then, advancing at an average rate of 77 yards a day throughout 2025. At that pace, it would be another two years before Ukraine forfeited control over the parts of the Donbas that Trump is trying to give away to Putin.

Trump’s non-diplomatic envoys seem determined, as real estate brokers, to trade a little Ukrainian land -- “what does it matter, after all” -- for a truce between Russia and Ukraine so that Trump can continue posing as a peacemaker on the eve of November’s U.S. election. But neither Trump nor his amateur negotiators consider what Ukrainians really care about. Nor do they appreciate how much world security and allegiance to the rule of law loses by trading away Ukrainian land. Trump wants a quick and easy fix when what is needed is for Trump and truly professional truth-tellers to stand up to Putin -- using language and straight talk that he understands -- and to make it clear that Washington is no longer going to provide cover and an easy escape for Putin.

There is a further problem. As Casey Michel writes so persuasively in Foreign Policy,
“Putin is so saturated in conspiracy theories, historic illiteracy, and obsessions with his own legacy that there is no cost he won’t bear to fulfill his obsession with seizing Ukraine....”

I think we mostly despair that Trump will ever dump Putin. No one really knows why he cossets Putin. Moreover, being a consummate money grubber, Trump could gain cash deals more easily in and with a post-war Russia. He and his son-in-law know that there are abundant riches in Russia’s forests and underground lodes waiting to be exploited -- but only after a peace deal that resonates well in Congress and in the chancelleries of Europe.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky is forthright: “[W]e have defended our independence; we have not lost our statehood; Putin has not achieved his goals.” Indeed, “We have preserved Ukraine, and we will do everything to secure peace and justice.”

This is a clear message. Yet, Zelensky has been forced by Trump to consider giving up what little Ukraine still holds of the Donbas, and to make that land a DMZ possibly patrolled by European troops. This would be a backward step, but Ukraine is exhausted and short of person power to continue to oppose the prisoners and mercenaries that Putin relentlessly throws up against the ingenious Ukraine defenders. Russian loss of life has been twice that of Ukrainian losses, but Russia has a population of 143 million compared to Ukraine’s current 37 million or so.

Russia has been swelling its military ranks with North Koreans, but also -- seemingly as a result of false recruiting promises -- with Africans. This week several African nations argued that their men had been seduced by wages and citizenship promises that were false and demanded the repatriation of an estimated 2,000-plus fighters from forty countries, including Kenya and South Africa, who had been lured to fight for Russia. (They are recruited online, promised legal residency, educational opportunities, and high pay -- but the offers soon vanish and the captives are shunted to the war front. Social media carries many horror stories of recruits abused and sent to the front line with minimal training.) Africans, Russians, and Central Asians are all cannon fodder for Putin’s relentless ambition and Trump’s connivance.

The overall toll of war has been more horrific than most readers realize: Russia has lost more troops in Ukraine than in all of its wars combined since World War II. That is, at least 1.2 million Russians and 600,000 Ukrainian combatants have perished, plus perhaps 70,000 Ukrainian civilians killed by bombings or crossfire. 2025 was an especially deadly year for civilian Ukrainians.

A further 9.6 million Ukrainian civilians have fled the country or become internally displaced. This winter’s Russian destruction of Ukraine’s infrastructure has added to the displacement, given the excessive cold and the loss of heat and power.

Putin cannot easily be appeased. It is entirely up to Trump, therefore, to contain him and to impress upon him (as I wrote on Monday) that the nuclear threat option is unavailable and that his only choice is to take what he has already taken or be permanently defeated by overwhelming U.S. and European military prowess. In other words, Putin’s ambitions need to be contained, not enabled.

But can Trump conceivably rise to the occasion? Or must we continue to stumble badly along a very rutted road to permanent perdition?