 "Ukraine cornered, Russia gets upper hand as Trump primes Saudi talks for peace in Europe")
Ahead of talks with Ukrainian negotiators, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that there is “no military solution” to the conflict. What he did not say was that the situation on the battlefield will determine the solution that’s reached in talks and President Donald Trump has strengthened the hand of Russia, the aggressor, and weakened Ukraine, the aggressed, with every decision he has taken since assuming office in January.
Months of gains appear to be getting lost in the battlefield as the US delegation led by Rubio prepares to meet Ukrainian negotiators in Saudi Arabia’s Jeddah to read them the riot act — against the backdrop of the on-camera spat in the Oval Office last month when hosts Trump and his deputy JD Vance looked to pin Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy down on the diplomatic mat, and the guest fought back with a similar zeal. A good TV, as Trump said, but bad diplomacy as the world realised.
The Trump administration’s message to Ukraine is simple: cede territory, don’t call Russian leader Vladimir Putin names, replace Zelenskyy with a new president who listens to Putin as Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus apparently does, and abandon the notion of staying independent of Russia’s influence.
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In talks in Jeddah, Rubio’s mandate is to judge whether Ukraine is willing to cede territory to negotiate the end of the war. To be sure, for months, Ukraine has indicated it is willing to cede territory if the US offers security guarantees safeguarding the nation against future invasions , but the Trump administration has been non-committal.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsThis is the nub of the matter. While the Trump administration wants Ukraine to make all possible concessions under the sun, the country is not being assured anything in return. Moreover, even as Trump and his allies berated Ukraine, a nation defending itself, on a daily basis, there is no pressure on Russia. Instead, Trump and his officials repeat Russian talking points daily — to the extent they have rewritten history to paint Ukraine as the aggressor and said Putin wants peace and it’s Zelenskyy who is prolonging the war.
Ukraine fights 2-front war with Russia & US
Just before Ukrainian negotiators left for Saudi Arabia, Russia launched a counteroffensive in Kursk where large swathes of the province had been captured by Ukraine and, after claiming victories in the province, announced a separate thrust in Ukraine’s Sumy region.
This came as a tactical move by Russia just before Trump’s team was scheduled for holding talks with Zelenskyy’s officials as the Ukrainian leader has often defended his move to invade Kursk by saying that it would be Kyiv’s bargaining chip when Moscow comes to the negotiation table.
Until a month back, even as headlines had been grim for months, Ukraine was not losing the war — it was not winning either to be fair. Even as Trump falsely claimed that millions had been killed in Ukraine and entire cities had been flattened, the fact was that Ukraine remained in control of 80 per cent of the country and Russian progress had slowed.
In a factsheet last month, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) noted that Russian forces advanced at an average rate of 27.94 square kilometres a day in November 2024, 18.1 sq km a day in December, and 16.1 sq km a day in January 2025, and Russia is making small territorial gains at massive losses.
Until a month back, Russia was gradually losing steam in the assault on the strategic city of Pokrovsk and the situation was the same on frontlines in Zaporizhzhya, Kharkiv, Kupyansk, and elsewhere. But that’s not the case now as the stalemate has now turned into an advantageous position for Ukraine — thanks to Trump.
In what may seem as somewhat coordinated moves between Washington DC and Moscow to force Ukraine into accepting Russia’s terms, the suspension of US military aid and intelligence-sharing was accompanied by a renewed Russian push in Kursk and elsewhere in eastern Ukraine. The result has been to Putin’s liking — Zelenskyy has indicated Ukraine would agree to an aerial and naval ceasefire.
In recent weeks, Trump has gone from being critical of support to Ukraine to being almost an outright ally of Russia. With Trump repeatedly expressing intent to work with Putin on a geopolitical level, a picture emerges showing the two strongmen politicians working together to batter Ukraine and corner Zelenskyy into accepting Russia’s terms. It may appear without going much into geostrategic nuances that their plan, if any, is to reclaim as much Russian territory from Ukraine as possible and maximise gains inside Ukraine to negotiate with Ukraine with utmost strength.
The idea behind Ukraine’s incursion in Kursk and neighbouring Bryansk province was to occupy large swathes of territories that could eventually be used as bargaining chips in negotiations to swap territories to minimise the loss of Ukrainian land. Now, the moves by Trump and Putin have minimised this advantage that Ukraine had secured.
While the partial ceasefire in the air and waters would bring relief to Ukraine from constant Russian barrages, it would also free Russia from long-range Ukrainian strikes on oil and weapons facilities that had put severe pressure on Russian war-waging capabilities.
A ceasefire, whether partial or complete, that does not include enforceable security guarantees is just going to give Russia time to replenish its ranks and rearm its military to return to the battlefield later, says Kseniya Kirillova, a Russia analyst at Washington DC-based think tank Jamestown Foundation.
Last month, Zelenskyy was making the same point in White House when Trump and Vance berated him. He was telling them that ceasefires have been reached before as well but nothing came out of them, which means what Ukraine needs are security guarantees so that the peace deal in the making does not become a toothless deal like the Budapest deal of 1994 or Minsk 1 and 2 agreements.
Kirillova tells Firstpost, “Russia needs a break. The gains have come at a huge cost so it needs a break even as it portrays strength. But, if there are no security guarantees in a ceasefire, then Russia will return later to either wage another war to control the rest of Ukraine or attack another country, such as Poland, or turn to the Baltics, just like Russia returned to wage a war in 2022 after invading Ukraine first in 2014 and annexing Crimea.”
Trump pushes for ‘piece deal’ & Russia’s victory
Trump has long maintained that it does not appear that Zelenskyy wants peace. Instead, he believes that Putin, who rejects Ukraine’s right to exist and launched the war in 2022, wants peace. But then that fits the revisionist world view that he shares with Putin.
For Trump, Ukraine started the war, his predecessor Joe Biden and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) provoked Russia, Zelenskyy is a ‘dictator’ (a comment that he later sought to dissociate himself from), and he and Putin are victims of a grand conspiracy by purported Western elite and this shared artificial victimhood has forged a partnership that has upended the world order that had been there since the World War II.
ALSO READ: From Russian invasion to Zelenskyy's election, Trump rewrites Ukraine war's history with lies
Throughout his intervention in the war, Trump has not condemned Russia or threatened Putin — the one odd post on Truth Social about more sanctions barely counts. Instead, he has repeatedly praised Putin, hailed the relationship with him, sympathised with him, repeated Kremlin’s talking points, and become Putin’s principal negotiator.
Trump is saying and doing everything that Putin has said and wanted with the war. Just like Putin justifies the war as a rightful result of Western provocation, Trump blames Biden and Nato for such provocations. Just like Putin says Ukraine should stay out of Nato and should not have security guarantees, Trump says the same. Just like Putin wants Zelenskyy gone, Trump wants him gone as well — he has essentially started a regime change operation against him with outreach to his domestic rivals and his public humiliation.
The kind of peace deal —or ‘piece deal’ as it essentially serves a piece of Ukraine to Russia whereas Putin commits to nothing— that Trump is pursuing has severe consequences for the West. Jamie Metzl, a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council who previously served in the White House National Security Council, says that Europe and Russia are going to be in a race once a ceasefire is reached.
“Europe is great with words and meetings, but not with hard power. It’s going to be a race between Russia’s rearmament and Europe’s rearmament and political will. It’s going to be very difficult for Europe. As European nations’ economies contract, defence spending would come at the cost of welfare programmes, which will lead to internal problems,” says Metzl.
ALSO READ: Ukraine and beyond: 25 years on, Putin is still fighting Cold War — and he’s finally winning
What’s at stake is the future of the Western world. As Trump has aligned with Putin, Russia is on the verge of turning Nato meaningless.
“If Putin gets anything resembling a victory in Ukraine, what he is going to do next is to needle a Nato member, such as Lithuania, and even if Russia goes just 50 feet inside Lithuania, the country is understandably going to invoke Article 5. If Nato fails to mobilise in Lithuania’s support, then the collective defence principle of Nato would be dead and Putin would have defeated Nato with just a minor incursion with perhaps a small contingent of ‘little green men’ that he used in Crimea,” says Metzl.
Kirillova, the Russia analyst at Jamestown Foundation, says Russia is in a position to declare victory. She highlights that Russia’s idea of victory has been flexible.
After realising Russia could not win Ukraine entirely, Putin declared control of eastern Ukraine as the war’s objective.
“Putin has achieved much of what he wanted to. Russia controls large parts of eastern Ukraine and the occupied area is now part of the Russian sphere of influence, Putin has reshaped European borders and upturned the world order, and is talking to the US president as an equal. Importantly, he has rallied the nation around himself. After all, the foreign policy is a reflection of his domestic policy,” says Kirillova.
Putin has an ally in Trump in the sense the Potus also aims to reset the world order. His policies in the areas of trade, diplomacy, economy and multilateralism offer enough evidence for that. With the US and Ukrainian officials gathering in Saudi Arabia to discuss a way or ways to end the three-year war in Europe, the outcome may impact geopolitics with wide-ranging implications.
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