Vladimir Putin has not changed his war aims a jot since 2022 and remains determined on fighting on. Donald Trump has no new plan for peace other than bringing the Ukraine war to an end on Putin’s terms. And Kyiv is running out of money and men to defend itself, just as surely as it has already run out of Patriot interceptors to defend its skies against the Kremlin’s barrages.
Those are the three depressing takeaways from the latest round of shuttle diplomacy in Moscow and Kyiv by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy Steve Witkoff.
On the eve of their departure, Trump said his boys would be presenting ‘a new plan’ for Ukraine. It quickly became clear that no such initiative existed. Instead, a grinning Putin simply cycled through his old talking points about liberating all of Donbas and insisting that Ukraine still needed to be ‘demilitarised’ and ‘denazified.’
Trump’s people continue to focus on the commercial upside of ending the war
Objectively, talking is better than not talking – especially in a war that has become a grinding battle of attrition on the ground, and where both sides have switched their strategic efforts to a long-range battle where they vie to destroy each other’s cities and vital infrastructure. Jared Kushner was mocked by some pro-Kyiv commentators for his upbeat insistence that Trump is seeking to end the war using his business background. ‘War is negative sum. Everyone loses from war,’ Kushner told a press conference in Kyiv. ‘Business and peace is positive sum.’ Kushner also spoke of Putin’s ‘aspirations’ for his country that could also be achieved once the war is concluded. Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s Politburo-faced foreign policy advisor, confirmed that ‘economic issues and potential major, mutually beneficial Russian-American projects were discussed in considerable detail.’
