Four Years In, Putin’s Ukraine Conquest Is Still Stalled – But He’s Still Got Trump On His Side

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WASHINGTON – Four years after launching an invasion to seize neighboring Ukraine in a matter of days, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin can no longer replenish the tens of thousands of soldiers he is losing per month, has watched his ground offensive grind to a halt and has escalated a war-crime campaign to instead kill civilians. None of it has convinced President Donald Trump to drop his tacit approval of the invasion.

Rather than resume defensive weapons shipments to Ukraine that had existed under predecessor Joe Biden or further pressure Putin economically to end the biggest and deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II, Trump is instead still leaning on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to give up the territory that Putin wants.

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“Ukraine better come to the table fast, is all I’m telling you,” Trump told reporters Monday night on the flight back from his South Florida country club, Mar-a-Lago. It was a repeat of the warning he gave Zelenskyy Friday as he left for his three-day golf weekend: “Well, Zelenskyy is going to have to get moving. Russia wants to make a deal, and Zelenskyy is going to have to get moving, otherwise he’s going to miss a great opportunity. He has to move.”

In reality, Zelenskyy has repeatedly accepted U.S. calls for a ceasefire while negotiators work out a final peace agreement, while Putin has rejected that concept as he continues to kill and maim Ukrainian civilians with missiles and drones.

Those attacks and deaths have surged dramatically in the year since Trump took office last January. In Biden’s final year in the White House, there were 13,897 missiles and drones launched at Ukraine by Russia, or 38 on an average day, according to figures compiled by the Institute for the Study of War. In Trump’s first year back in office, there were 57,333 missiles and drones, or 157 per day – a 300% increase. The escalation coincided with the cutoff of new U.S. military aid to Ukraine under Trump.

To experts and analysts, Trump’s choice to pressure Zelenskyy rather than Putin is simple: He sees Ukraine as weaker and therefore easier to coerce.

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“Trump wants any kind of deal he can get that results in a ceasefire, hoping this will be evidence for his Nobel Peace Prize campaign,” said John Bolton, one of Trump’s national security advisers during his first term and now a target of Trump’s Justice Department. “He doesn’t care about the substance of an agreement, just getting one.”

Jim Townsend, who has worked at both the Pentagon and NATO and is now an analyst with the Center for a New American Security, said Putin knows Trump will never truly pressure him.

“Putin will keep stalling until he gets his way, either by Trump forcing Zelenskyy to the table or by some battlefield victory, which doesn’t look likely either,” Townsend said. “So he will always demand his maximalist position, knowing Zelenskyy will never agree and that irritates Trump, who squeezes Zelenskyy even more.”

To Russia With Love

Trump White House aides did not respond to HuffPost queries. At a news briefing on Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, asked about Zelenskyy’s comment that it was unfair to demand concessions of Ukraine but not Russia, repeated Trump’s frequent lie that the U.S. was bankrolling Ukraine’s defense under Biden.

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“The president views this entire situation as very unfair, not just for Russians and Ukrainians who have lost their lives, but also for the American people and the American taxpayer who were footing the bill for this war effort before President Trump put a stop to it,” she said.

In fact, America’s allies in Western Europe have provided more in both military and financial assistance to Ukraine since the invasion started four years ago.

Trump’s statement Monday night was in keeping with numerous other remarks Trump has made since returning to office. During the infamous visit by Zelenskyy to the Oval Office a year ago, Trump essentially blamed Ukraine for getting invaded and chided Zelenskyy for starting a war against a larger and more powerful neighbor.

Last June, in response to a Ukrainian attack on a Russian airfield, Trump again sided with Russia.

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“They gave Putin a reason to go in and bomb the hell out of them last night,” he told reporters.

Trump, who at the time of the invasion called Putin a “genius” and “savvy”  and later claimed while campaigning for office that his great relationship with Putin would let him end the fighting on his first day back in the White House, has instead failed to convince the dictator to make any concessions.

Heading into an August meeting with Putin in Alaska, Trump claimed there would be “consequences” for Putin if he did not agree to a ceasefire. Trump literally rolled out a red carpet for Putin and honored him with a flyover of military jets. Putin did not agree to a ceasefire and suffered no consequences.

And last month, Trump boasted that Putin had agreed to his request not to attack Ukrainian cities and towns for a week because of the extreme cold weather. Putin continued the attacks throughout the entire period, after which Trump claimed Putin had honored his pledge.

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Trump, nevertheless, continues to boast of his “relationship” with the murderous dictator whose actions in 2023 led to war crime charges by the International Criminal Court. In late August, he showed off a photo of himself and Putin that Putin had sent him. More recently, he has hung a large photo of the two of them in the West Wing.

“Trump looks more and more impotent,” said Fiona Hill, a Russia expert who served on the White House National Security Council in Trump’s first term. “Which is more why he wants Zelenskyy to give it up, to capitulate.”

The de facto tilt away from Ukraine and toward Russia was tacitly acknowledged by Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit to the Munich Security Conference last weekend, where he skipped a meeting to discuss Ukraine with traditional U.S. allies. His visit there was highlighted by a speech in which he emphasized a “blood and soil” Christian nationalist message regarding the bonds between the United States and Europe, rather than the one of shared values of individualism and freedom that sprang from the European Enlightenment that American leaders have historically praised.

That new approach was then punctuated by visits to Hungary and Slovakia, which are currently led by the most pro-Russia leaders in Europe. Rubio, who seven years ago warned about Hungarian leader Viktor Orban’s turn toward autocracy, on Monday gave him the endorsement of the U.S. government in his coming election.

His remarks and his itinerary worried Europeans and their leaders, who see Russia’s invasion of Ukraine not as a faraway problem, but a potential preview of what might happen to their own countries.

In response to a query, State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott insulted HuffPost but did not address why Rubio had visited only pro-Russia leaders after his Munich visit and why he had endorsed Orban.

“S.V. Date is a low IQ, anti-Trump clown masquerading as a blogger,” Pigott wrote in a statement. “The secretary met with dozens of leaders from all across the world last weekend in Munich, including Volodymyr Zelenskyy. To claim they were all pro-Russian is an idiotic and bizarre claim. In addition to his historic speech at the Munich Security Conference, Secretary Rubio visited European allies in the region.”

It was not immediately clear what made Rubio’s speech “historic.”

Putin’s Four-Year-Old Quagmire

Ironically, Trump’s continued insistence that Ukraine give away its territory to get a ceasefire comes as its army has increased the lethality of its strikes against Russian troops in Ukraine. According to both Zelenskyy and outside analysts, Ukraine’s military is now killing and injuring more invading soldiers each month than the 35,000 or so that Putin is able to conscript to replace them.

“Increased losses on the battlefield and declining, expensive recruitment likely contributed to the loss rate finally exceeding recruitment rate,” said Kateryna Stepanenko, a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of War.

In a report last month, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that Russia, since the invasion began in 2022, has suffered 1.2 million military casualties, including as many as 325,000 deaths. In contrast, the United States lost 47,434 service members over a decade in Vietnam and 6,897 over two decades in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As a result, Putin has implemented an involuntary draft in some areas of Russia as well as increased his reliance on mercenaries from Central Asia, Cambodia, Pakistan and Africa, among other places.

“There are all kinds of people who are getting press-ganged into going to the front,” Hill said.

Leaders of several African nations, in fact, have publicly called for Putin to stop recruiting young men — who are frequently getting killed quickly after deployment — from their countries.

Last week, Kenya’s Foreign Minister Musalia Mudavadi, who called the recruitment of Kenyan nationals “unacceptable and clandestine,” announced a trip to Moscow to discuss the matter.

Experts also doubt that Putin’s decision to increase his attacks on civilians in their homes and workplaces will have the intended effect of wearing down their will.

“This is like the blitz bombing campaign… he wants to punish them and pummel them,” Hill said. “What it does do is make the people under bombardment more willing to resist.”

“His offensives don’t take much ground and the price is high for what he does take,” Townsend said of Putin. “So hitting Ukrainian civilians and the energy grid is his weapon to hit Zelenskyy domestically, hoping to get the people riled up and moving against Zelenskyy. That tactic didn’t work for Hitler against the Brits and I don’t think it will work with Ukraine either.”

Trump’s affinity for Putin, now manifesting itself in his war of conquest, is decades old. Trump publicly tried to befriend the dictator in 2013 and spent years, including the period when he ran for president in 2016, trying to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

In that election, Trump willingly accepted and used Russian assistance as he campaigned against Democrat Hillary Clinton, even though he knew it was coming from Russia. He later stood beside Putin at a news conference in Helsinki and said he believed Putin’s denials of interfering in the election over his own intelligence agencies’ analysis.

To this day, Trump continues to call the investigation into that election interference a “hoax” that has also unfairly impugned Putin’s good name.

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