3 years of Ukraine war: Zelenskyy stands cornered and betrayed as Trump mainstreams Putin

As the Russian war on Ukraine completes three years on Monday, Ukraine stands cornered and betrayed as the principal backer, the United States, has switched sides under a new leader.

US President Donald Trump has trashed the policy of supporting Ukraine for ‘as long as it takes’ and has instead pushed for a deal at the earliest to end the war irrespective of consequences for Ukraine .

Trump and his top officials have spent the past month berating Ukraine and its leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and cosying up to Russian leader Vladimir Putin. The intention appears to be clear: the ‘New America’ of Trump does not care about geopolitics or doing right by its partners but about making the most money in any situation.

That explains why instead of pressuring aggressor Russia into making concessions, Trump has been pressuring defender Ukraine to give up land, natural resources, and the idea of security guarantees — he is seeking a minerals deal that, experts say, essentially amounts to the US colonisation of Ukraine and looking forward to tapping into the real estate and energy sectors of Russia once the war ends with no tangible safeguard for Ukraine.

Trump wants to make a deal and he will surely do it this year, making this a question of when, not if, says Swasti Rao, an Associate Professor at Jindal School of International Affairs at Jindal Global University.

Rao further says, “The question is what deal he comes up with. He must know that a deal not acceptable to both sides will not stop the war. If he forces a deal, then the war will only stop on paper and little will change on the ground. We may have a situation where they may continue to fight a persistent, low-intensity hybrid war despite a deal on the paper. A bad deal will only change the nature of war, not end it.”

Ukraine’s losing it — but not necessarily on battlefield

Ukraine now appears to be losing the war, but not to Russian advances on the battlefield. The nation is losing the war to Trump’s worldview off the battlefield.

While Trump had always been critical of supporting Ukraine, he has turned completely hostile over the last week. He has falsely called Ukraine the aggressor in the war, dubbed Zelenskyy a dictator and essentially called for his ouster, pushed terms that mean both a territorial surrender to Russia and economic serfdom to the United States, and said that Ukraine does not need to be on the table where decisions about the nation’s fate are made.

“I don’t think he’s very important to be in meetings. He makes it very hard to make deals,” said Trump in an interview with Fox News.

Trump and his allies have changed the entire narrative of the war. For them, standing up to Russian invasion is a crime — not the act of invasion. In interviews after interviews, Trump’s officials have refused to say Russia invaded Ukraine. They have also pushed a narrative that Russia is sweeping across Ukraine and supporting Ukraine’s defence is futile.

Ukraine is in a disadvantaged position on some frontlines, but it’s not in a dire shape. The 80 per cent of the country that remains unoccupied is functional and all major cities —Kyiv, Lviv, Dnipro, and Odessa— are in firm Ukrainian control. Unlike Trump’s claim, millions of people have not been killed and entire cities have not been flattened — except for the likes of Mariupol and some towns obliterated and occupied by Russia in the first year of the war.

Even though Russia has moved dangerously close to some major cities in eastern Ukraine, s uch as Pokrovsk , the advance has slowed in recent months and has come at a massive cost, according to a fact-sheet released this week by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW).

Consider these facts: Russian forces advanced at an average rate of 27.94 square kilometres per day in November 2024, 18.1 square kilometres a day in December, and 16.1 square kilometres a day in January 2025, and Russia is making small territorial gains at massive losses.

In Ukraine, Trump is using the purported destruction of entire cities and dire state of Ukraine as a pretext to force the country into a deal favourable to his ally Putin just like he is using the devastation in the Gaza Strip as a pretext to expel Palestinians from the land and annex it in the name of redeveloping it and bringing peace to that land.

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Trump has given impossible choices to Zelenskyy. He either has to surrender territorial sovereignty to Russia or surrender economic sovereignty to the United States — or both.

Rao, the geopolitical expert at the Jindal School of International Affairs, however, stresses that there is no deal on the table yet and one must not jump the gun in making conclusions.

“We only know things for now. One, the Nato membership is off the table for Ukraine. Two, Ukraine is not getting 100 per cent of its lost territories back. At the same time, the battlefield lines are not going to be frozen as some say because it would mean Russia’s loss of large parts of Kursk that Ukraine has captured. This means that there will be a limited exchange of territories,” says Rao, who is also a Non-Resident Fellow at the French think tank Eastern Circles.

As for Trump’s statements, Rao says he needs to be taken seriously, but not necessarily literally. She further says that the betrayal is not just from the United States.

“Europe knew for three years that the present day may come. Their half-baked proposals show they could not plan for it despite being on the notice for three years,” says Rao.

Trump is making way for Putin’s victory — and helping China

In the name of peace, Trump is making way for Putin’s victory.

For Putin, the Cold War never ended. Since the 1990s, he had been working to undermine the West and recreate the sphere of influence that Russia had lost with the disintegration of the Soviet Union. With Belarus firmly in his grasp and Ukraine fragmented with no possibility of joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato), Putin is looking at a victory.

Unlike popular perception, Putin’s foreign policy is driven by his stand inside Russia and not the other way around, says Kseniya Kirillova, a Russia researcher at the Washington DC-based think tank Jamestown Foundation.

Kirillova says that Putin’s rejection of Ukraine’s nationhood is rooted in his warped view of history and his belief that everyone in eastern Europe leaning towards West is leaning so because of a Western plot and not free will is rooted in Soviet-era Chekist mentality under which an external force —the secret police KGB in case of Soviet Union— controls all spheres of life and people don’t have free will.

By waging a war in Ukraine, Putin was aiming for two things — he appears to be getting both now.

Kirillova tells Firstpost, “Domestically, Putin wanted to rally Russians around him completely and tighten his control. Remember that the Russian invasion of Ukraine happened after 10 years of repression in which all opposition was wiped out . He also wanted to show Russians that he is an equal to the United States — a long-held desire. By negotiating directly with Trump, Putin has already won as he now stands as an equal to the President of the United States. Biden had denied him this victory.

“Internationally, as per this Chekist mentality, he does not see Ukrainians as living people with their own will, desires, and natural reactions. Moreover, as a product of the Soviet Union, he considers the United States the main enemy and waging a war on Ukraine is a way of waging a war on the United States. The false postulate of the United States being the enemy becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy — if the enemy is implacable and relentless, it is impossible to come to an agreement with him which means he must be defeated.”

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Those in Trump’s orbit have said he is seeking the end of the war in Ukraine at the earliest as the war is a distraction from the bigger conflict with China and the China-Russia bloc . They say that Putin’s withdrawal from Europe is part of the broader reorientation towards the Indo-Pacific to tackle the rise of China. As for Trump’s friendly relations with Putin, they explain it as part of a strategy to drive a wedge between Russia and China.

Even if the intention is to pull back resources from Europe to commit to tackling China, the strategies employed are fundamentally flawed .

While Trump is a transactionalist who sees the world in terms of profit and loss, Russian and Chinese regimes are deeply ideological. While Putin is driven by Soviet thinking, the Communist Party drives China. For them, the conflict with the West is not about becoming richer but about the military, economic, and ideological capitulation of the West. This means that the idea of driving a wedge between Russia and China, —joined by I ran that considers the United States ‘Great Satan’ in their bloc— is not realistic.

As for the idea of withdrawing from Europe to focus on the Indo-Pacific, Rao says that Trump must know that’s not a workable approach as the geopolitical competition is now linked across theatres.

“The China-Russia-Iran-North Korea bloc is competing with the West everywhere. In every theatre, one of these partners have taken up lead and others play a supporting role, such as Russia taking the lead in Europe with Iran helping with missiles and drones, China with the economy, and North Korea with weapons and soldiers. Similarly, Iran has taken the lead in West Asia and China in the Indo-Pacific. The withdrawal from any theatre to focus elsewhere is therefore not a realistic approach,” says Rao.

Trump unlikely to bring peace in Europe

Now that it’s fairly certain that Putin is set to win the war, thanks to Trump, peace is unlikely in Europe.

Unlike the popular perception, Russia has suffered huge losses and its economy is no longer resilient but dependent on China now because of the war, says Jamestown Russia researcher Kirillova.

“Putin also needs a break to recover. But once he recovers, he is likely to turn to other European nations — whether it’s Poland or Baltic nations is to be seen. It may be a hybrid war instead of an invasion. If the West returns to business as usual with Russia once war ends in Ukraine, then another war at a later date is almost certain as Putin will surely return with a new war,” says Kirillova.

ALSO READ: Is Trump on a mission to make China great again?

That war may even be on Ukraine to occupy the rest of the country, says Kirillova.

“This is essentially Russia’s third war on Ukraine. The first was in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea. The second was the eight-year-long low-intensity war that Russia fought with separatist and irregular troops in eastern Ukraine until February 2022. Then, three years ago, Putin started the third war. If the world returns to usual business with Russia, then Putin will surely return later for another war,” says Kirillova.

The inaction of the West after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 enabled the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. As Trump is enabling a Russian victory again, he is setting the stage for another war in the coming years.