Opinion | Trump has an opportunity not to get played by Putin, for once - The Washington Post

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Oct 20, 2025, 12:21:28 PM (3 days ago) Oct 20

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/10/20/trump-putin-russia-ukraine/

Trump keeps getting played by Putin. Will Budapest be different?
A Russia-Ukraine ceasefire might be possible if only Trump would apply more pressure on Putin.
Max Boot
October 20, 2025 at 6:00 a.m. EDTToday at 6:00 a.m. EDT
Only that eminent student of human psychology, Charles Schulz, could possibly do justice to the strange relationship between President Donald Trump and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
One of the tropes of Schulz’s long-running comic strip, “Peanuts,” was the tale of Lucy and the football. Every autumn, for decades, Lucy van Pelt would encourage Charlie Brown to kick the football — and every time she would yank it away just before his foot connected, sending him sprawling. Charlie Brown would remonstrate with Lucy, and the next year insist that he wasn’t going to fall for her tricks again. But he always did.
In case you haven’t guessed by now, Putin is Lucy, Trump is Charlie Brown, and peace in Ukraine is the football. Ever since Trump returned to office in January, he has repeatedly insisted — most recently on Friday during his Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — “I think President Putin wants to end the war.” Trump’s faith has been severely tested by Putin’s actions: If the Russian strongman is interested in ending the war, why does he keep it going?

At various points, Trump has shown a Charlie Brown-like awareness that his quest may be futile. Last April, after another big Russian drone and missile strike on Ukrainian cities, Trump acknowledged: “It makes me think that maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along.” Trump then threatened to impose sanctions on Russia unless Putin agreed to a ceasefire. But, to ward off that danger, Putin convinced Trump to meet him in Alaska in August. Suddenly sanctions were off the table, save for tariffs designed to punish India for buying Russian oil.

Follow Trump’s second term

This month, we’ve seen a replay of the same tired old script. Trump flirted with sending Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine, enabling Kyiv to strike deep into Russia. Alarmed, Putin called up Trump on Thursday and convinced the U.S. president to meet him in Hungary. The Tomahawk sale has been postponed indefinitely. Trump reportedly browbeat Zelensky behind closed doors on Friday, with the Financial Times reporting that he told the Ukrainian leader his country would be “destroyed” if it didn’t accept Putin’s terms.

What reason is there to think that the Budapest summit will be any more successful than the one in Alaska, where, also according to the Financial Times, Putin annoyed Trump with a lengthy historical rant about how Ukraine belongs to Russia? There is no indication that Putin is willing to make any new concessions — in their phone call last week, Putin repeated his demands for Kyiv to turn over territory the Russian army hasn’t conquered — yet Trump just can’t say no to his Russian counterpart.

Trump’s infinite gullibility in dealing with Putin makes it impossible for him to achieve his cherished dream of ending the war in Ukraine — and winning a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. His failure to apply more pressure on Russia is all the more frustrating because Ukraine is making good progress in applying pressure on its own.

Putin’s summer offensive stalled without achieving any of its objectives. The Economist estimates that this year Russian forces gained just 0.4 percent of Ukrainian territory at a cost of more than 100,000 dead soldiers. Since the start of the war, Russia has lost more than a million troops killed or wounded. Ukrainian casualties, while substantial, are much lower.

The conflict is exacting not only a human but also an economic toll on Russia. According to Reuters, long-range Ukrainian drone strikes knocked out 21 percent of Russia’s oil refining capacity in August. That has resulted in higher oil prices and sporadic gasoline shortages in Russia, while cutting the Kremlin’s oil revenue to one of the lowest levels since the start of the invasion in 2022. To Trump’s credit, he authorized intelligence sharing with Ukraine to facilitate its drone attacks inside Russia, but that’s one of the few things he has done to help.

The good news is that, though America is stepping back, Europe is stepping forward. This year, European defense aid to Ukraine for the first time surpassed U.S. contributions. The few weapons systems that the United States is still sending aren’t a gift; they’re purchased by the Europeans.

The Europeans are now moving forward with plans to send Ukraine more than $200 billion in frozen Russian funds as a no-interest “loan” that will not need to be repaid unless Russia provides Kyiv with war reparations (which is highly unlikely). That’s a massive windfall — roughly the same amount that Ukraine has received in cumulative aid from Europe and the United States since the start of the war — and it would allow Ukraine to keep fighting for years.

These efforts are raising the pressure on the Russian dictator to stop his war of aggression. But clearly Putin still thinks he can win the war on the ground. Just as clearly, he is deeply worried about the United States imposing sanctions on Russia or sending Tomahawks to Ukraine. If Trump were to stop dithering on social media and start turning the screws, it just might convince Putin that he no longer has a path to victory and that he had better negotiate in earnest — or else.

But every time it looks like Trump is starting to get it, he allows himself to be sweet-talked by the former KGB agent in the Kremlin. Trump clearly knows, at some level, that Putin is “tapping” him along — and yet he falls for it every time.