Trump Could Get a Ukraine Deal—But Not the One Washington Wants: U.S. President Donald Trump may be able to secure a deal with Ukraine. The catch is that it probably will not look much like the deal Washington has spent the last several years imagining.
Too much of the debate assumes that a successful negotiation must settle the war. Borders agreed. Security guarantees nailed down. Russia and the West are arriving at some new understanding about European security. That would be nice. History suggests it is also asking a great deal.
Tim Murry, a foreign threats compound contractor, drives a T-72 battle tank into position to serve as adversary targets for a joint service exercise, Emerald Flag, at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., Nov. 30. Emerald Flag is a multi-service exercise aimed to unify information sharing across joint domain platforms. (U.S. Air Force photo/1st Lt Karissa Rodriguez)
Statesmen of an older school understood that some conflicts can be managed without being resolved, and that the most one can hope for is to stop the shooting before the next generation inherits a larger catastrophe. The question facing Trump is not whether he can make peace between Russia and Ukraine. It is whether he can create conditions under which both sides stop trying to improve their position on the battlefield.
Those are not the same thing.
Ukraine: The War Nobody Wants to End
The case that Russia is finally cracking is stronger than it was a year ago, and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than waved away.
The numbers are real. CSIS puts Russian casualties near 1.2 million since February 2022, the heaviest losses any major power has absorbed in any war since 1945. The gains bought with those men are minute. The drive from Avdiivka to Pokrovsk took nearly two years to cover under fifty kilometers, about seventy meters a day, slower than the British advance at the Somme. The economy is straining under guns-versus-butter pressure, growth has fallen to around one percent, and the 2025 budget deficit ran five times the original forecast.
The deep-strike campaign gives the optimists their best argument. Ukrainian drones have driven Russian refining capacity to its lowest level since 2009. By late May, Reuters reported that plants accounting for roughly a quarter of national capacity had cut or halted output, and Moscow had banned gasoline exports to protect the home market. This is not harassment. It is sustained pressure on the machinery that funds the war.
So why not expect Putin to fold?
Because pain and surrender are connected by politics, not arithmetic. The question is never how much a regime is suffering. It is whether the man at the top believes holding on still beats the alternative. There is very little evidence that Vladimir Putin has reached the second conclusion.
Russian forces keep grinding forward, however slowly. The Kremlin has spent four years adapting to sanctions, reorganizing production, and reshaping its trade toward China and the global south. None of this means Russia is comfortable. It suggests the leadership still judges the costs bearable and still believes Western attention will fade before Russian resolve does.
A U.S. Army driver assigned to Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 67th Armor Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division standbys in the drivers hull of an M1A2 SEPv2 Abrams waiting for further guidance prior to the start of Table VI Tank Gunnery at McGregor Range, New Mexico, Sept. 29, 2023. Gunnery Table VI evaluates crews on engaging stationary and moving targets while utilizing all weapons systems in offensive and defensive positions, ensuring our crews are trained and ready for any mission. (U.S. Army photo by Spc. David Poleski)
North Vietnam is the cautionary case. American planners spent years certain that one more increment of punishment would break Hanoi’s will. The bombing tonnage was staggering, the regime’s room for maneuver looked impossible, and Hanoi outlasted the patience of the power dropping the bombs. Governments do not capitulate because the spreadsheet turns red. They capitulate when they decide tomorrow looks worse than a deal today, and Putin has not decided that.
Trump’s Different Advantage
Trump’s supporters point to his personal style. His critics point to the same thing. Both may be looking in the wrong place.
His real advantage is that he sounds less attached to absolute outcomes than other Western leaders. He has never shown much interest in the ideological dimensions of the conflict. He talks about costs, burdens, and ending a war he thinks has run too long. That posture opens options that have been politically impossible for governments committed to total Ukrainian victory.
A negotiated ceasefire. A fortified line of contact. Continued Western support for Ukraine’s defense without resolving the territorial question. None of this would satisfy the loudest voices on either side. That does not make it unrealistic. Many wars have ended with exhausted armies staring at one another across lines nobody accepted as permanent. The political disputes survived. The fighting did not always.
President Donald Trump poses for a photo with Russian president Vladimir Putin in the Billy Mitchell Room at Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, Friday, August 15, 2025. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)
President Donald Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin walk on the tarmac at Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, Friday, August 15, 2025. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)
The Deal That Does Not Exist
Trump cannot negotiate away Russian claims to Crimea or the territories Moscow now treats as its own. He cannot negotiate away Ukraine’s insistence that those lands remain Ukrainian. He cannot dissolve the larger confrontation between Russia and the Atlantic alliance. Those questions may stay unsettled for decades.
A deal can still freeze them. A line of control can function as a border without being called one. Korea has held that arrangement for seventy years with no peace treaty, no agreed frontier, and an armed standoff nobody mistakes for friendship. It is ugly, and it has kept several million people alive.
The hard part is not the diplomacy. It is the enforcement. A frozen line means somebody garrisons it, somebody keeps Ukraine armed well enough to make a second Russian offensive look unprofitable, and somebody decides what happens to the long-range strikes a ground ceasefire would not automatically cover. That burden now falls mainly on Europe, and Washington has been quietly handing it over since January 2025.
A More Modest Ambition
The argument over Ukraine is trapped between two illusions. One holds that military victory will settle everything. The other holds that a single meeting between strong men can dissolve years of bloodshed.
Trump may find that Putin has no interest in stopping. That is entirely possible, and no amount of personal rapport will change it. He may instead find that the only available bargain leaves every major political issue open.
President Donald J. Trump and President Zelenskyy in the Oval Office. White House Photo.
Washington reads that as failure. The history of great-power conflict suggests otherwise. The decisive moment is rarely when old enemies agree. It is when they stop believing another offensive will buy a better answer.
Getting there takes more than goodwill. It takes keeping Ukraine armed, and Europe committed during the talks, so that the bearable costs Putin is counting on stop looking bearable. If Trump can manage that, he will not have brought peace to Ukraine.
He may simply have found a way to stop the war before the next round begins.
About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham
Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. You can follow him on X: @aakatham.
dozy don
June 8, 2026 at 8:27 am
Iran and Israel have started hurling missiles at each other, during the last 48 hours, and trump can only watch.
Pretty much the same thing’s taking place in ukraine today.
So, russia must today, now, seize the chance to hurl air-launched burevestnik missiles at all the ukro frontline positions and also their rear strongholds.
It will brew up a huge storm of protests, howls of anger and massive threats from starmer, macron, and merz, but who cares about these people.