President Donald Trump was at the center of engineering a remarkable ceasefire in Gaza last weekend, finally achieving freedom for the last of the living hostages Hamas took from Israel on October 7, 2023. He has had less success achieving a peace deal in Ukraine after Russia’s invasion in February 2022.
The August summit in Alaska didn’t work, but Trump is undeterred. On Thursday, Trump had a phone call with Vladimir Putin in the latest bid to get the old Soviet to back off from his deadly war. So far, the Ukrainian military has endured roughly 50,000 deaths, while the invading Russians have lost perhaps 200,000 (accurate numbers are difficult to come by because neither nation is honest about reporting).
The phone call did not seem to change much.
“I did actually say, would you mind if I gave a couple of thousand Tomahawks to your opposition? I did say that,” Trump told reporters.
On Friday, Trump hosted Volodymyr Zelensky for what reports indicate was a tense closed-door meeting that devolved into a shouting match. It wasn’t the high-profile disaster like February, but neither was it the pleasant camaraderie of August.
Either way, Trump did not offer Tomahawks, though Zelensky also noted, “He didn’t say no.”
Later, Trump posted on Truth Social, “Enough blood has been shed, with property lines being defined by War and Guts. They should stop where they are. Let both claim Victory, let History decide! No more shooting, no more Death, no more vast and unsustainable sums of money spent. This is a War that would have never started if I were President.”
He’s right about that last part.
It seems that the main reason Trump didn’t award Tomahawks to Zelensky is that he plans another in-person meeting with Putin this week in Budapest. The threat of Tomahawks may give Trump some leverage; the promise or delivery of Tomahawks would chase Putin away from a meeting.
“Hopefully we’ll be able to get the war over without Tomahawks,” Trump said.
Ukraine has a different view. “I think they are afraid of the Tomahawks,” Zelensky said of Russia. “They understand the weapons we have, and they understand the combination with Tomahawks. We need the combination, and they are afraid of this combination and what we can do.”
And he’s right about that.
Still, asked about whether he’s hopeful about receiving the weaponry, Zelensky simply said he is “realistic.”
What finally drove Hamas to accept a ceasefire — albeit a tenuous one, as usual — was overwhelming and relentless military force from Israel. Hamas is not a nuclear power like Russia is, so it’s a very different calculation when considering how the U.S. can or should help Ukraine or pressure Russia. On the other hand, strongmen like Putin use basic math: strength beats weakness. If he concludes Ukraine is weakening, he’ll continue throwing Russians into the grinder to achieve his grand objective of Soviet glory. If he decides Ukraine is growing stronger, he may be more willing to cut his losses and, as Trump said, stop where he is.
Meanwhile, the Leftmedia spent most of the last eight years spreading the delusional lie that Trump is somehow beholden to Putin, so the reporting over the last few days is generally all about how Putin changed Trump’s mind again, or that Trump “deferred” to Putin. Don’t mistake Trump’s apparent erraticism for Putin’s persuasion.
“I’ve been played all my life by the best of them, and I came out really well,” Trump noted. “I think that I’m pretty good at this stuff.”
Even The Washington Post editorial board — I can hardly believe I’m about to type this — gets it, writing, “The idea that Trump is easily swayed by Putin, let alone manipulated or controlled by him, does not hold water.” Memo to the Post’s news desk.
That said, there’s no doubt that the Russia-Ukraine conflict has proven to be a tougher nut to crack than Trump expected. “I thought this would be very quick,” Trump mused last week. “Who would think I did the Middle East before I did this?”
