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Given Vladimir Putin’s well-documented penchant for bubbly, it is hard to calculate how many bottles he’s gleefully uncorked from the Kremlin’s elaborate network of cellars since Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
The Putin-Trump discussions on the fate of Ukraine must be particularly satisfying (“Bring out some plates of Beluga with those buckets of cuvée Brut!” one can imagine the Russian dictator ordering his minions). For, in the past three months, Trump has intensified his long-standing hostility toward Volodymyr Zelensky even beyond expectations from the first term and the 2024 election. And on the few occasions when Trump has said nice things about Ukraine’s president or spoken harshly about Russia’s, he has backpedaled to customary form very quickly.
The latest of these quick switches occurred on Friday after a meeting in Paris made it clear (as if it hadn’t been already) that Putin has no interest in peace talks unless they involve Kyiv’s surrender. Leaving the hall, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that the Trump administration would decide “in a matter of days” whether or not it’s possible to end the war in Ukraine within the next few weeks, and if it turns out to be impossible, “we need to move on.”
It’s not entirely clear what Rubio meant by the “need to move on,” but context provides clues. Even before the disastrous Oval Office meeting of Feb. 28, where Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance yelled at Zelensky like he was a Mafia client who’d missed his latest payment, Trump had depicted Ukraine as a bigger obstacle to peace than Russia and parroted Putin’s false history that Ukraine had started the war. The Oval Office blowup, after which Trump sent Zelensky and his team packing before they signed a minerals-revenue deal, bolstered this picture.
But then, over the next several days, two things happened. First, under coaching from a few European leaders, ...
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