Peace Was Possible. Trump Killed It.

A two-hour call, no new sanctions, and the green light Moscow was waiting for.

Boris Pistorius, German defense minister, whose rise to the post marked Berlin’s shift from barely visible on the Ukraine aid map to sitting near the top of it, had some sharp words to offer yesterday.

He laid the failure to achieve a ceasefire with the Kremlin not at Moscow’s door—but at Washington’s. More precisely, at the feet of the Trump administration.

"I believe that he (Trump) overestimated his negotiating position, his personal power. Trump's first major mistake was right at the beginning, when he promised that Ukraine wouldn't join NATO and even offered Ukrainian territory.

You don't do this. (...) It has created a situation where it is much harder for us to establish a ceasefire or peace.

My expectations were already low, but even those were undercut. Politically, nothing is really moving forward, except that we are running in circles.

100% agreed.

Donald Trump’s all-carrots, forget-the-sticks approach to the Kremlin didn’t bring Putin around. It convinced him he could outlast everyone. Promising Ukraine would never join NATO, asking Kyiv to surrender Crimea, floating the idea of giving up four more regions, even musing about legitimizing the invasion—none of this told Putin to exit.

It told him to dig in.

Even after spending two and a half hours with Putin on Monday—his best shot to shift the dynamics by reinstating pressure—Trump walked out and did the opposite. No new sanctions. Just a line about giving peace a chance.

Now, when the next call happens, Putin won’t ask to end the war. He’ll ask to “give peace a better chance” by removing Rosselkhozbank—the Russian state-owned agricultural bank—from the sanctions list. He will pitch it to Trump as the new beginning of world peace.

This demand—lifting sanctions on Rosselkhozbank—has been a fixture of Russian negotiation tactics since 2023, especially around the Black Sea Grain Initiative. They brought it up again in April 2025. Trump’s team took it to the Europeans. They said no. But the bending-over-backwards trendline hasn’t gone unnoticed in Moscow.

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Even Russian newspapers—once urging Putin to wrap up the war for economic reasons—have changed their tone. Now they think it’s winnable. Thanks to Trump, so does the Kremlin. Two days after the excellent ‘Trump-Putin’ call, this is what the Russian newspapers said.

• Izvestia: It looks like Russia has won the latest round of global poker.

• Kommersant: Donald Trump’s stance couldn’t be more advantageous to Moscow. In effect he backed Russia’s position of ‘Talks first, ceasefire later,’ he refused to strengthen sanctions against Russia and confirmed his determination to develop ‘large-scale trade’ with Russia.

• A Russian social scientist told the Kommersant, “Donald Trump, at least for now, is our ideological partner on certain issues. His views are much closer to Russia’s than to Europe’s”.

• Komsomolskaya Pravda: Moscow and Washington ignored EU ultimatums on a ceasefire in Ukraine. Remember European leaders had demanded that Moscow agree to a 30-day unconditional ceasefire. To those leaders the paper says this: You were warned: don’t wave threats and ultimatums in the face of the bear. Don’t try to impose conditions in talks that have nothing to do with you. Just sit in the lobby and breathe in smell of the new world order. There will be no unconditional ceasefire. We have truckload of conditions.

If Russia has won the latest round of global poker, then who exactly lost on the other side? Because this—all of this—is Trump’s making.

Just a few months ago, these same Russian papers were writing about inflation. Supermarkets locking up butter because it was getting stolen. Eggs skyrocketing. They weren’t calling for an end to the war—no Russian outlet would dare—but the cracks were starting to show. Economic pain was leaking into the narrative.

Now? Silence. No more talk of economic hardship. Just headlines about victory.

And it gets worse.

Trump hasn’t just emboldened the Kremlin—he’s cracked open the door to madness. On May 21, Russian Presidential Advisor Anton Kobyakov declared that the Soviet Union still legally exists. Why? Because, he claimed, the founding body—the Congress of People’s Deputies—never formally dissolved it. Therefore, the war in Ukraine? Just an “internal process.”

That’s not just some fringe revisionist take. It’s a test balloon. Kobyakov is laying the groundwork for the Kremlin to call the entire war an internal Russian affair—off-limits to the West, off-limits to NATO, off-limits in peace talks.

And why would it stop at Ukraine?

Kobyakov’s logic sets the stage to deny the legitimacy of every former Soviet republic—Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and Moldova. One by one. Trump didn’t just weaken Ukraine—he’s now made it possible for Putin to argue that the entire post-Soviet map is up for grabs.

Sounds fairly stupid, right? His economy is in shambles, and he’s still trying to wage an endless war.

But if we lift the hood just a little, it starts to make sense. There’s a reason Putin is sprinting down the road to ruin—and it’s not just pride or paranoia. There’s a structural logic to the destruction.

On April 3rd, 2025, Gen. Christopher G. Cavoli—Commander of United States European Command and NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe—said something during his Senate testimony that never left my brain:

• The Russian economy has been both bolstered and distorted by this war. Specifically, the Russian government has had to turbo-charge their defense sector and in so doing they have created very strong inflationary pressures throughout the economy, but especially in the civil sector. They’ve responded to that with high interest rates to hold inflation down.

• The [head of the Russian Central Bank] Elvira Nabiullina has said the overnight rate, the prime rate, is over 21% right now. That is choking off the viability of the civil economy, so one has a huge, oversized, defense sector, but an anemic civil sector.

• And that defense sector…is not a productive center, not a productive economy for the nation, it’s productive for the fighting of the war, but beyond that it has pretty much swamped things out.

• It appears that it will be very difficult to unwind such an imbalance, and we’ll need to consider that as we go forward.

It’s very clear now: U.S. intelligence has made the assessment that the Russian economy might implode if Putin stops the war.

It could also implode if he keeps going.

That’s the conundrum. And from Putin’s perspective, it’s not really a choice at all. He can stop the war and implode. Or he can keep waging it and implode anyway. Between those two options, a cruel dictator picks the one that buys him more time. More fear. More control.

And that’s exactly what he chose.

Trump, in his genius, has now given Putin the freedom to continue the war. If he had slapped on the sanctions, he could’ve crushed the war machine—maybe even forced Putin to pull his army back to the barracks. And at the very end, Trump could’ve bailed him out, played the dealmaker, and claimed victory.

But instead, with all his talk about “giving peace a chance” and a shipload of nonsense, he’s done the opposite. He’s set the stage for this war to keep going. And Putin will keep going—because now he can.

Europe and Ukraine have a clear choice under these circumstances. They need to use their weapons-buying power to keep pressure on the U.S. defense industrial complex—and use that leverage to make sure the Trump administration doesn’t relax any sanctions on Putin. Because that’s exactly what Putin will push for next.

The sanctions must stay. If Trump wants to sit on the sidelines, fine. But that means staying on the sidelines completely—not stepping in to bail Putin out.

This is a doable task.

And it looks like the defense industrial complex knows exactly what’s at stake. Right after Monday’s dead-end call between Trump and Putin, support surged for the Russia sanctions bill written by Senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal. The number of co-sponsors jumped from 72 to 81.

This is not an accident.

I firmly believe this is happening because the U.S. weapons industry is working the phones—and because the old national security hands inside the GOP haven’t gone quiet. They still know exactly what time it is. So yes, the odds are slim that Trump will succeed in bailing out Putin with sanctions relief.

But Europe needs to make sure that line holds. Take five billion euros. Place the order—now. And while you’re at it, pick up the phone.

Make the call.

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