On April 30, 2025, the US and Ukraine signed the US-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund in Washington. US President Donald Trump described the agreement as “payback” for what the US had spent on Ukraine’s defense. “Rare earth is called rare for a reason,” he added, “and we made a deal where our money is secure.” US Vice President JD Vance had already called Ukraine a “sinkhole” and, days before Russia’s full-scale invasion, said he didn’t “really care what happens to Ukraine, one way or the other.” In April 2026, he boasted that the administration had stopped sending U.S. weapons to Ukraine and was telling Europe to pay if it wants them.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. That framing – Ukraine as a deal, an expense, a sinkhole, a recoupment – is not a strategy. It is the public face of a private fear: that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear threats are not a bluff. And that fear, more than anything else, explains why Ukraine could win this war militarily and still lose the country it is fighting for. Two ways to lose a war Russia began this war with an imperial lie. I spent years inside the Chornobyl exclusion zone, watching the Soviet apparatus rewrite its own catastrophe. The techniques have not changed: Putin characterized the invasion as “denazification”… because, well, empires always need moral masks. Ukrainians tore that mask off in blood. The country did not collapse. It did not kneel. It proved again that a nation is not an administrative unit on someone else’s map but a people willing to suffer for the right to remain themselves.