Ukraine’s best security guarantee is the peace NATO sabotaged
As Trump drops his demand that Putin accept a ceasefire, Zelensky and allied proxy warriors cling to a backdoor NATO commitment that could be used to "strike Russia."
In recent high-profile meetings with Russian, Ukrainian, and European counterparts, the most significant breakthrough on the path to ending the Ukraine war came from President Donald Trump himself. After threatening Vladimir Putin with punishing new sanctions unless he agreed to a ceasefire, Trump dropped that demand and accepted the Kremlin leader’s insistence on negotiating a final settlement.
Trump’s shift reflects the battlefield reality. As Russian forces continue their advance in Ukraine, Putin has no interest in freezing a conflict that his much larger army is winning, albeit at a slow pace. Trump, by contrast, ran on a pledge to end the war, and his administration has continued to promise, as Vice President JD Vance recently put it, that “we're done with the funding of the Ukraine war business.”
Trump’s stance has created a new quandary for Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, who was enticed by the US and UK to abandon a peace deal with Russia three years ago in Istanbul with tens of billions of dollars in funding for the Ukraine war business.
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