Can Trump Bring Peace Between Russia and Ukraine?

President Donald Trump has been in office for less than one month. He has spoken with both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine President Vologymyr Zelenskyy, and he says that both of them desire peace. According to Victor Davis Hanson, there is a “scent” of a deal in the air. We might help bring about peace if all of us just took a deep breath and let the diplomats work on the Russia-Ukraine issue. 

… there has been some commentary about the outlines of the deal. And it’s exactly what everybody’s been talking about, that Ukraine will not be in NATO. Ukraine will be armed and protected. There’ll probably be a demilitarized zone. The Donbas that was stolen 11 years ago by Putin – I’m not sure that’s the right verb – absorbed, and Crimea, it’ll be institutionalized, but he’ll have to go back to the Feb. 24 invasion point.

So, what do both sides get out of it? Ukraine says, “Ou heroic defense of Kyiv saved the country. We’ve gone from 41 million to 28 million. We’re going to get our population back. We proved to the world we stopped this Russian juggernaut. We were never going to get back Donbas and Crimea.

And there hadn’t been one administration – not Barack Obama, not the first Trump administration, not the Biden administration – prior to February of 2022, that ever said they were going to arm Ukraine with enough offensive weapons to militarily invade those areas and take them back. They were written off….

So, let’s be realistic. We know the outlines of the deal. I want to say a couple of final things to put this all in perspective. Vadimir Putin invaded during the Obama administration because he thought that Russian reset under Hillary Clinton and Obama was rank appeasement. And he knew they wouldn’t do anything.

He invaded under Joe Biden and tried to decapitate Kyiv because he knew that Biden had said our reaction would hinge on whether it was a minor invasion. And he knew that Joe Biden had suspended offensive weapons for Ukraine, and he saw what happened in Kabul.

He invaded in 2008 into Ossetia and Georgia because George W. Bush had said he looked in the eyes of Putin, he saw a soul, kindred soul. And he knew that the Bush administration was a lame duck and weakened by the Iraq and Afghanistan imbroglios. OK.

He did not invade during Donald Trump. And we know why, because he thought Trump was too unpredictable, too dangerous, and it wasn’t worth it in a cost-to-benefit analysis.

We should remember that. We should remember that it was Donald Trump’s administration that he did not go into….

What did Donald Trump do when he came in? He started giving offensive weapons to Ukraine. He killed 300 to 400 of the Wagner Group in Syria. Nobody had ever done that in the Cold War, killed that many Russians. He got out of an asymmetrical missile deal. He sanctioned the oligarchs at a higher level. He started flooding the world with cheap oil that could bankrupt Russia.

He was the best friend that Ukraine ever had. He wasn’t Putin’s asset – Putin’s puppet, as they said. This hatred of Donald Trump and this accusing him of appeasing Russia was very deleterious. It turned up in Russian collusion hoax. Disinformation hoax….

Let’s get real. There’s going to be a deal based on what everybody expects. Is it going to be perfect? No. Is it going to stop the greatest slaughter in Europe since Stalingrad? Maybe 1.6 million dead, wounded, and missing, on aggregate, on both sides? Yes.

So, let’s just calm down and let Donald Trump see if he can cut a deal that is satisfactory – not good, but satisfactory for both sides – and stop the bloodletting.