Russia Was Loosing Trump Could Not Stand it Thus He Enters
Opinion Columnist
New York Times
It’s horrible to have to type these words, but the president of the United States is throwing Vladimir Putin a lifeline. He is turning the American government against Ukraine, funding Russia and — perhaps worst of all — playing directly into Putin’s theory of victory.
There’s no other way to understand President Trump’s actions since Friday. There’s a lot to cover, so hang with me. But the bottom line is that a sequence of events that began with his announcement on Oct. 9 that the United States had agreed to purchase potentially millions of tons of diesel fuel from Russia may be culminating in a near-total betrayal of the Ukrainian people.
The purchase, justified by Trump as bringing down diesel prices in the United States, isn’t nearly enough to meaningfully move America’s immense diesel market. It could, however, put roughly $4 billion into the Russian treasury — cash that it can use to fund its war in Ukraine or to help prop up its ally Iran.
What came after the deal was even worse than the deal itself. On Sunday, Trump decided to protect his investment. He declared — all on his own — that Russia and Ukraine had agreed to an “energy cease-fire.” Ukraine had been conducting a remarkably successful series of strikes deep inside Russia aimed at Putin’s oil industry. The attacks have been so effective that they’ve raised doubts as to whether Russia would even be able to deliver the agreed upon amount of fuel to the U.S.
In fact, Trump blamed Ukraine for rising fuel prices, not his own war with Iran, and said that Ukraine needed a “new president.”
Trump’s cease-fire announcement came as a surprise to both nations. He wasn’t announcing an agreement; he was trying to coerce compliance — including, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, by also threatening to cut off intelligence sharing.
Consider that for a moment. Trump wasn’t announcing a deal at all. There was no deal. He made it up and then demanded that both nations do what he said.
How did the two nations respond? Ukraine complied with Trump’s demands. It paused its successful energy strike campaign. Before that, Zelensky had even offered to hold new presidential elections if Russia agreed to a 60-day cease-fire.
Russia had different ideas. On Monday night, Russian munitions slammed into six Ukrainian energy sites, plunging parts of the city of Izyum into darkness. And then on Tuesday night, Russia struck Ukrainian energy sites once again, this time deluging Kyiv with missiles and hitting Kyiv’s Combined Heat and Power Plant 4, one of Kyiv’s “key energy facilities,” according to Zelensky.
Russia also rebuffed Ukraine’s cease-fire offer. “I don’t think he deserves a respite,” said Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister.
Most ominously, on Monday and Tuesday night, ballistic missiles slammed into Kyiv, with no meaningful warning at all. Zelensky said that Ukraine had not received the usual warnings that it gets from its partners, most notably the United States.
The Trump administration says that it is still sharing intelligence, and the Ukrainian foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, also said intelligence sharing was continuing.
But an anonymous official told Politico, “They told Ukrainians no warning happened because of bad weather conditions, which is seen as not an adequate reason in Kyiv. Thus many are getting increasingly worried this might not have been the case.”
And then, to make matters worse, news emerged on Wednesday that the Pentagon-funded version of Starlink, called Starshield, was being throttled for Ukrainian forces. It was dropping connectivity for objects moving at speed, crippling its use by many Ukrainian drones.
The message to Ukraine is clear: You are at our mercy.
If we want to understand what is really going on, we can’t look at these events in isolation. They’re occurring just as Russia has escalated its so-called gray zone attacks on our NATO allies. Gray zone attacks are acts that are just below the threshold for open war. The aim is to frighten and destabilize allies (and alliances) without triggering a direct conflict with NATO that Russia would almost certainly lose.
In July the Council on Foreign Relations issued a report chronicling a staggering array of Russian gray zone attacks. For example, the International Center for Counterterrorism and Globsec has documented “151 confirmed Russian-directed industrial sabotage incidents in Europe between February 2022 and February 2026.”
In addition, “Russian-linked drones have forced repeated airport closures across Europe and even penetrated Estonian and Polish airspace in September 2025.” Russia has also used a Baltic Sea shadow fleet to damage “Nord Stream pipelines, the Estlink 2 power cable and at least 11 undersea telecom cables.”
On Sunday, The Financial Times reported that spy agencies are warning that Russia may attempt to kill European defense chiefs and that Russia “has ordered an expansion of sabotage and ‘hybrid’ operations in Europe as it seeks to fatally weaken support for Kyiv in the coming months.”
How do all these events fit together? First, we have to understand Russia’s evolving theories of victory in its war against Ukraine.
Russia began with a failed blitzkrieg — an attempt to take Kyiv in a matter of days, if not hours. The initial attack resulted in a stunning Russian defeat. It suffered catastrophic losses on the outskirts of Kyiv, and a Ukrainian counteroffensive later in 2022 clawed back much of the territory that Ukraine lost in the opening days and months of the war.
Then Russia changed tactics. It tried to turn the battlefield into a kind of meat grinder — a war of attrition designed to slowly but surely destroy the Ukrainian Army and capture the entirety of the Donbas region of Ukraine. This was Russia’s obvious next move and the one that worried me the most. How could a much smaller Ukraine withstand the sheer numbers and relative industrial might of Russia?
And for a time, it seemed that the Russian approach might work. Slowly but surely, Russian troops advanced west. At a snail’s pace, yes, but they advanced.
Then something surprising happened: The Ukrainians revolutionized warfare with their drone operations, and Ukraine started grinding down Russian forces, to the point that Russia is now losing more soldiers than it can easily replace, and — as the Institute for the Study of War reported on Tuesday — “Ukraine has retaken significant territory from Russia in 2026, and at the theater level has nearly zeroed out Russian gains for the year.”
In fact, according to the institute, “Russian forces have only made a net gain of about 100 square kilometers thus far in 2026, thanks to Ukrainian counteroffensives, which have liberated at least 1,046 square kilometers.”
“Russia’s summer offensive has failed,” the institute reported, and “Russia’s fall offensive is likely to fail as well.”
A war that began with Russia trying to replicate the fall of France in 1940 has transformed into something else entirely — a bloody stalemate more like the drone war version of World War I’s Battle of Verdun, where the lines barely move and both sides bleed for every inch of ground they take.
Several days ago (before Trump’s diesel fuel announcement), I spoke to Gen. David Petraeus about the course of the war so far. Petraeus is a former director of the C.I.A., and he commanded coalition forces during the surge that turned the tide in Iraq. He pointed not just to Ukraine’s extraordinary success with drone warfare on the front lines but also to Ukraine’s success at striking deep into the Russian heartland.
“Ukraine is taking away its fuel,” Petraeus said. Russia is “one of the world’s largest oil producers,” and yet “increasingly, that doesn’t mean that Russians can find gasoline.”
In addition, Ukraine’s strike campaign has been so effective that it has sunk roughly 300 Russian vessels in the Black Sea and surrounding areas, and it has isolated Crimea so effectively that “they’re essentially starving Crimea of fuel, refined fuel products and other important commodities,” Petraeus said.
And Ukraine has done all this while developing a surprisingly robust defense industrial base that’s producing drones by the millions, as well as Ukraine’s own cruise and ballistic missiles.
But Ukraine still needs Western support. American interceptor shortages have left Ukraine vulnerable to Russian ballistic missile attacks, and the country still depends on European aid, on American intelligence and on American weapons it’s able to purchase with European funds.
Remove that support, and Russia has a chance to win the war. It may well be Putin’s last hope, short of total national mobilization, to defeat Ukraine.
So now you see the game and the part that Trump is playing. Everything he’s doing now is exactly what Putin wants. Putin has brilliantly manipulated Trump using a meaningless injection of diesel fuel into the American market (designed to play well in the midterms) to portray himself as Trump’s friend and to drive an even bigger wedge between Trump and Zelensky.
But that’s not all. As my colleagues in the newsroom reported this month, Trump’s negotiations to end the war also include lucrative oil deals that “would benefit Middle Eastern business executives with ties to the two main U.S. negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.”
And there’s something else in play. Trump has long held a grudge against Ukraine and Zelensky — for the dumbest reason imaginable.
It’s easy to forget the 2019 Trump-Ukraine scandal that led to Trump’s first impeachment. There have been so many scandals since that it hovers at the edge of our memories and can feel small compared with, say, Jan. 6.
But it wasn’t. It was a big deal then, and it’s a big deal now. If you recall the conversation between Trump and Zelensky that led to Trump’s impeachment, Trump made two requests. First, he pressured Zelensky to investigate the Biden family.
That’s what made headlines, in part because the concept of weapons for political favors is so easy to understand.
The second request was much stranger and more important. In the reconstructed transcript of the call between Trump and Zelensky, Trump referred to a CrowdStrike server and said, “They say Ukraine has it.” He then demanded that Zelensky “get to the bottom of it.”
But why? Trump gave a cryptic explanation.
“As you saw yesterday,” Trump continued, “that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine.”
What the heck was Trump talking about?
He was referring to a wild and thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election. In other words, Trump blames Ukraine for all or part of what he calls the “Russia hoax.”
As a result, when Putin appeals to Trump, he can not only dangle lucrative business deals in front of Trump’s team but also exploit existing animosity that is rooted in the fever dreams of Trump’s bizarre imagination. Zelensky is an enemy; Putin is a potential friend.
And what of the gray zone attacks against Europe? As Petraeus told me, “These are probes. They are intended to intimidate, disrupt, test individual countries and the alliance collectively.”
The purpose, according to Petraeus, is to “complicate the flow of assistance to Ukraine and even discourage it and create public anxiety, test to see where the alliance’s real red lines are. Perhaps drive a wedge between some of the countries that are a bit soft on Russia, if you will.”
In addition, Putin is trying to “undermine those governments that have been Ukraine’s staunchest supporters,” Petraeus said, and he pointed to upcoming elections in France, Germany and Italy.
If Putin can turn Trump against Ukraine and frighten or otherwise influence European countries into withholding aid to Ukraine out of fear of Russian attacks or out of greater sympathy for Russia (a number of far-right parties in Europe have long been more friendly to the Kremlin), then Ukraine would truly stand alone.
In Trump’s second term, the United States is far worse than unreliable. It’s becoming unhinged. It threatens its allies and begins trade wars with its closest friends, and now the combination of corruption and conspiracy drives an American president into the arms of one of our most dangerous enemies.
This is not America first; it’s Trump first. If Putin prevails, rest assured that it will not be Ukrainians alone who pay the price.
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