Alexander Gabuev
In the lead-up to the summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska this month, things did not look good for Ukraine. Characterizations of the summit oscillated between a “new Yalta,” in which the U.S. president might agree to the Kremlin’s demands for a Russian sphere of influence over Ukraine, and a “new Munich,” in which Trump would throw Ukraine under the bus and withdraw U.S. support for the country’s defense. In other words, expectations in Ukraine and among Kyiv’s allies were low.
Yet the summit didn’t end in a major disaster for Ukraine. Trump didn’t negotiate with Putin on Kyiv’s behalf; he didn’t agree to start normalizing relations with Russia before the war in Ukraine was resolved; and on August 18, he received Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and a phalanx of European leaders at the White House, where they collectively managed to throw the diplomatic ball back into Putin’s court. “This was very much a day of team Europe and team U.S. together supporting Ukraine,” Finnish President Alexander Stubb said afterward.
But although Putin now knows that his aspirational Plan A, in which Trump would simply impose a deal on Kyiv written in Moscow, is unlikely to materialize, he has shifted to his more workable Plan B, in which Trump will lose patience and significantly reduce U.S. assistance to Ukraine. In the Kremlin’s calculus, this still counts as winning, and Putin’s diplomatic strategy is still following the three-pronged approach that my co-authors and I outlined in Foreign Affairs a few months ago. Moscow is holding the U.S. president’s attention, forestalling a new round of painful U.S. sanctions, and keeping the fighting going.
This is because, in the Kremlin’s assessment, time is on Russia’s side. Moscow has the upper hand on the battlefield: it has maintained a significant numerical advantage in personnel and equipment, and despite mounting casualties, it has continued to gradually gnaw through the fortified lines in the Donbas. Moreover, Russia is catching up in drone warfare, denying Ukraine its competitive edge. Moscow doesn’t want a cease-fire to stop the war right now—unless, of course, all of its political demands are simply met.
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