Zelensky Urges Trump Not to Surrender to Putin and Russia

“Vladimir, STOP!”

These were the feeble words of a cowardly blowhard, whose failure to bring the Russo-Ukrainian War into line with his imagined reality has begun to leave an impression on the one thing that matters most to President Donald Trump: his own ego.

Trump has never understood the war in Ukraine, and as a result he has never had a meaningful plan for ending it.

But for this president, failure is always someone else’s fault. In the Trump White House, the buck stops with Joe Biden. Or the “stolen” 2020 election. Or Hillary Clinton. Or Barack Obama. Or Volodymyr Zelensky.

On Saturday, on the sidelines of the funeral of Pope Francis, the embattled Ukrainian president met with Trump in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

“Good meeting. We discussed a lot one on one. Hoping for results on everything we covered. Protecting lives of our people. Full and unconditional cease-fire. Reliable and lasting peace that will prevent another war from breaking out. Very symbolic meeting that has potential to become historic,” Zelensky wrote afterwards.

The American president enjoys flashy, high-profile meetings that showcase his personal influence. The “impromptu” meeting was clearly engineered, a bit of carefully orchestrated high-stakes unofficial diplomacy that would make a Jesuit like Pope Francis proud. Photos from the funeral show Zelensky, French President Emmanuel Macron, and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer gathered around Trump: All of them have reason to hope they can shift his views and keep America in the game.

Trump has a pathological inability to admit when he is wrong — this is the kind of man who used a sharpie to revise an official hurricane forecast because he misspoke, after all. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that he has been unwilling to gather his courage, face the truth, and change course after his confident promises to end the war in Ukraine in “24 hours” turned out to be nothing more than hot air.

Always keen to claim Russian President Vladimir Putin has all the cards, what Trump sees as a poker game is in fact a knife-fight. And everyone involved gets cut in a knife-fight, no matter what cards they were holding at the table.

If the United States wants to break that fight up, it would be wise to do it wielding a pretty big stick. The White House has the ability to do this — to hit Putin where it hurts, economically and militarily, the only pressure points to which Russia will respond.

Trump could, as he previously threatened, expand economic sanctions against Russia; he could increase U.S. energy exports and cut into the Kremlin’s war chest; he could use Presidential Drawdown Authority to send vital weapons to Ukraine while backfilling American military stocks with new munitions; he could employ the bully pulpit to urge Congress to increase funding for the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, demonstrating to Moscow that America isn’t backing down; he could support European efforts to expand military cooperation with Kyiv.

None of these would cross any red lines; none of these could be construed as escalatory.

But Trump — in his eagerness to ally the world’s most powerful democracy with a tyrannical aggressor — continues to do nothing to stop Russia but stand on the sidelines uttering weak-kneed protestations, and even those sparingly.

How many times must it be explained that Ukraine is fighting for its existence, while Russia is fighting for conquest? Does anyone need to be told that asking Ukraine to surrender is equivalent to telling a neighbor he should let the armed intruder harm just a few of his kids, so that you can get back to your barbecue in peace, without all the screaming and commotion next door?

Ukraine’s dogged resistance mystifies those who are cowards at heart. Why would anyone want to keep fighting when — as Vice President J.D. Vance is always eager to point out — they are clearly losing?

Simple. Because fighting a losing battle is preferable to extinction. The average barista in Kyiv, awaiting mobilization orders as he messages with friends on the frontlines, has a clearer understanding of the desperate situation than do most American politicians. And yet 82 percent of Ukrainians believe they must continue to fight, even if the U.S. withdraws all support.

“Nations that went down fighting rose again, but those that surrendered tamely were finished,” Winston Churchill told his War Cabinet in May 1940. The modern history of Ukraine — the past 150 years of it, and more — is of a people struggling to define their national identity, amid an unenviable strategic position, crushed between great powers.

In April 2022, I was at a forward operating base in Donetsk Oblast, speaking to a Ukrainian Marine about Russia’s claims that only far-right extremists — “Ukronazis” as Moscow’s propaganda called them — believed in a future separate from Russkiy Mir, or the “Russian World.” He found the entire idea laughable, protesting “but no one has done more for Ukrainian nationalism than Vladimir Putin.”

Americans, in general, don’t do nuance and complexity. And Trump, specifically, is so uninformed and convinced of his own genius that it is difficult even to engage with the views that drive his crackpot schemes.

Ukraine started the war? Hogwash. The war is a continuation of one that started in 2014, amid years of lies and broken promises by Putin.

Zelensky is the biggest obstacle to peace? Nonsense. Putin started the war; it is the Russian military that occupies Ukrainian lands and attacks Ukrainian cities.

Russia is a land of untapped economic opportunity, more important than Europe? Insanity. In 2021, before the war started, U.S. exports to Russia were $6.4 billion. That same year the U.S. exported $271.6 billion to the European Union alone.

What can a reasonable person say to such a parade of lies and fallacies? Why entertain such nonsense?

Oh, right. Because the American people elected this chaos monkey, this self-absorbed buffoon, knowing full well that he is all of those things and worse. But even so, part of his appeal was his promise to end this bloody war that has at times taken us to the brink, with open talk of the use of nuclear weapons.

The “final offer” peace plan unveiled by Trump’s minions in Paris last week was shameful idiocy of the highest order, offering Russia nearly everything it wanted and giving Ukraine nothing.

It is the latest non-starter in a bunch of razzle-dazzle bullshit about rare-earth minerals, or trade deals, or whatever else catches the fancy of a man whose sharp business sense and financial acumen resulted in four bankruptcies, and the erasure of trillions of dollars in value from the stock market since he took office on Jan. 20. Trump has promised to walk away from Russia-Ukraine diplomacy if he doesn’t get his way, which he almost certainly won’t. 

“No matter how a war starts, it ends in mud. It has to be slugged out — there are no trick solutions or cheap shortcuts,” said Gen. Joseph Stilwell, the U.S. commander of the China-Burma-India Theater in World War II.

It should be obvious to any serious person that the only way to end the war is to put pressure on Russia and create guarantees for Ukraine’s security. This was obvious to the man Trump originally put in charge of handling negotiations with Russia and Ukraine, special envoy Keith Kellogg. Even before Trump won office again, Kellogg put together an “America First” peace plan that called for decisive leadership and “bold diplomacy,” and continuing “to arm Ukraine and strengthen its defenses to ensure Russia will make no further advances and will not attack again after a cease-fire or peace agreement.”

It was obvious to Trump’s National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, who in April 2022 wrote in an opinion piece for Fox News: “The Ukrainian people have shown spirit, heart, and productiveness. They now need all the guns, tanks, and planes capable to defeat Russia militarily, and retake Crimea and the Donbas to restore their borders.”

Where are such voices now?

The MAGA apparatchiks have been silenced. The party line inside the Trump administration now is to portray support for Ukraine as warmongering, and friendship with Russia as the overriding priority for American foreign policy. Creating robust alliances, taking principled stands against tyranny and aggression, supplying military equipment through drawdowns — this is all woke nonsense, used by corrupt effete foreigners to take advantage of honest red-blooded Americans, or whatever.

It was obvious that the culture wars had come for the real war in Ukraine back in January 2024, when the U.S. Congress shirked its responsibilities as representatives of the American people to block approval of a funding bill under Biden for Ukraine.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) led the charge in kowtowing to Trump, the megalomaniac who holds a mesmerizing influence over his party, the man every Republican politician fears, knowing that if they act against his will, he will unleash the rage of his red-hatted cult with a poorly spelled social media post, rife with Teutonic capitalization of nouns.

There are no checks on Trump. So when he says, as he did last week, that if Russia and Ukraine don’t accede to the deal he has offered, “We’re just going to say, ‘You’re foolish, you’re fools, you’re horrible people,’ and we’re going to just take a pass,” there is every reason to believe him. Likely, he will once again cut off military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine, moves that would effectively provide support to Russia.

That will be tragic. There are conflicts in which Washington has little interest or leverage, such as the civil war in Sudan, or where it has twisted itself into such intricate Gordian knots of ethical compromise and geopolitical intrigue, such as with Israel’s war in Gaza, that it is difficult to discern where America’s interests lie.

Ukraine is more straightforward. That the United States has a constructive role to play in this conflict is not a matter of justice, it is one of pragmatic self-interest — which just so happens to align with some of the highest values our nation espouses: liberty, democracy, and the rule of law.

With an eye on Ukraine, the world has already begun to re-arm, investing trillions of dollars on tools of death and destruction as the perceived threat of future conflict grows. Leaders who have previously eschewed nuclear programs have begun to rethink their position.

Will the world be a safer place if dictators are given free rein to pursue schemes of territorial expansion? Will the world be more stable if the only guarantee of survival for smaller nations is to acquire nuclear arsenals?

There are already over 12,000 functioning nuclear weapons in the world, the bulk of which are held by Russia and the United States. Do we want to see more nuclear proliferation, with ever more borders regarded as violable? As I embedded with Ukrainian military units and watched Russian missiles rain down across the country in the first weeks of the war, it was easy to see that a Pandora’s Box of instability and conflict was opening — one which had the potential to spiral into the destruction of humanity.

“A battle is won by those who firmly resolve to win it!” as Leo Tolstoy’s Prince Andrei observes about “the so-called Battle of the Three Emperors” in War and Peace: “Why did we lose the battle at Austerlitz? Our casualties were about the same as those of the French, but we had told ourselves early in the day that the battle was lost, so it was lost.”

The defeatists in the Trump administration believe Ukraine’s battle is lost, and want nothing further to do with helping to secure the peace. Ukrainians will continue to resist regardless. It isn’t just shameful for Trump to walk away from this fight against the tyranny and chaos that threatens to engulf us all.

It is a disastrous error which will have dire consequences.