Trump’s peace push arms Russia while Ukraine pays the price: Marc Champion

Key topics:Trump’s peace process shifted leverage to Russia, halting US aid to Ukraine.Russia’s winter attacks target Kyiv’s heat and power, risking humanitarian crisis.Slow Russian advances strain their economy, but Ukraine suffers heavy losses..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.By Marc Champion.During the Biden administration, the most effective tool Russia’s President Vladimir Putin had to sustain his invasion of Ukraine proved to be his warnings of nuclear escalation, a tactic that prompted Kyiv’s allies to drip-feed its supply of arms for fear of provoking one. That threat lost its power through overuse, but in the Trump era the Kremlin has been handed a still more potent weapon: the peace process.More than a year into negotiations that President Donald Trump said would take him 24 hours to resolve, talks in Dubai last week produced nothing beyond a prisoner swap — invaluable to the troops and families involved, but irrelevant to a settlement. Steve Witkoff, the real-estate developer chosen to drive this US-led initiative, gave a short readout from the three-way meeting on the social-media platform X, in which he couldn’t even declare “progress” on the issues that matter: namely, territorial concessions by and security guarantees for Ukraine.The reality is that while Trump’s peace drive may seem unimpeachable — as would any calls for a ceasefire — it has tipped the scales of war in Moscow’s favor, providing distraction and political cover as the US halted virtually all contributions to Ukraine’s defence, leaving a $46 billion annual shortfall in Kyiv’s total military and financial aid that Europe has struggled to fill. Last year, the US even briefly stopped critical intelligence sharing, allowing Russia to recapture territory in the Kursk region that Ukraine had seized to divert Russian forces and to have something to trade in settlement talks..Putin also avoided the tougher economic sanctions that the US Congress wants and — absent Trump from the White House — would certainly have imposed at a time when the Russian economy was finally weakening. More arms and cash for Ukraine together with tighter trade restrictions on Moscow would very likely have frozen the battlefield, incentivizing a settlement. Instead, Trump’s policies have enabled further monstrous cruelty, as Putin drew the only logical conclusion: Keep peace talks alive yet ineffectual, while pressing home the advantages gained..Read more:.Ukraine, US resume Berlin talks on peace plan and security guarantees.Take the massive volley of 450 large drones and 71 ballistic and cruise missiles that Russia fired at Ukraine’s critical energy infrastructure on Feb. 3, ending a brief US-brokered pause in the air war that runs in parallel with ground offensives. This has been the coldest period for more than a decade in Ukraine, with temperatures below -20 degrees Celsius (-4 Fahrenheit). Russia had hit all five of the major 750-kilovolt electrical substations around Kyiv before the pause, as well as the centralized heating plants on which about 55% of the city’s residents survive.With no heat and little power across much of the capital, these were already life-threatening conditions for the old, the sick and the very young. But Russia isn’t done. The attacks that resumed with such ferocity on the eve of the US-led peace talks retargeted those central-heating stations that still had enough residual capacity to keep the capital’s mains water supply at 5-to-10-degree-Celsius, the level required to avoid water freezing and catastrophic bursts in the pipes in such sub-zero conditions. Should the Russian effort to obliterate all vestiges of central-heating capacity succeed, the city will have to empty the entire network, leaving 3 million people not only without heat, but also water. On Saturday, there was a further mass strike of 40 missiles and 400 drones. “If we don't get more air defence ammunition and stronger diplomatic support soon, Ukraine's energy crisis will quickly turn into a humanitarian crisis,” Maxim Timchenko, chief executive officer of Ukraine’s biggest private power company DTEK Group, warned in a statement.But there’s also an air of desperation in Putin’s desire to exploit winter temperatures to inflict maximum misery on the ordinary Ukrainians he’s supposedly rescuing from a “fascist” regime. As a Jan. 27 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington lays out, his land campaign is not going well. Over the past year, according to the report, Russian forces have moved forward at a rate of between 15 meters and 70 meters per day, along the Donbas front, focused around the so-called Fortress Belt of cities that Putin is demanding Ukraine hand over in exchange for a ceasefire. Even the higher rate is slower than the allied advance at the Somme, the World War I battle that became a byword for static trench warfare..These marginal gains come at enormous cost, as Kyiv tries to exhaust Russia’s attack by inflicting maximum casualties in a slow retreat. So, when Ukraine’s new Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov set out his goals last month, he said his “second strategic objective is to kill 50,000 Russians per month,” up from the current rate of 30,000-35,000. Ukraine is struggling to halt Putin’s armies through 1,000 small Pyrrhic victories not by choice, but for lack of better options. Who will “win” in this race to the bottom of human loss is, in fact, very finely balanced.That’s also because Russia’s remarkably resilient economy is finally showing real signs of strain, meaning that the clock is ticking for Putin, too. According to a January paper by Moscow’s authoritative Center for Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Forecasting, the economy will enter recession this year unless something changes, with the risk of a banking crisis and possible depositor run by October.At the same time, Europe is getting ready to move from its sieve-like oil price-cap tool for cutting Russian crude exports to a potentially more effective ban on provision of maritime services, at a time when lower global crude oil prices are already slashing Russian budget revenue. That, in turn, is forcing the government to raise taxes and cut welfare and health spending. It’s getting increasingly difficult for Putin to sell this trade — mass casualties and lowered living standards for tiny slivers of land — as triumph.Trump’s peace process may yet succeed. Both populations are exhausted, with opinion polls in Russia and Ukraine alike trending toward acceptance of some sort of settlement. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy revealed after the talks that the US has now set a June deadline for peace, and that Russia has offered Trump a bilateral deal worth (an utterly implausible) $12 trillion in economic cooperation, no doubt to entice him into endorsing a lopsided accord.If the White House wants a deal, it has to start piling pressure onto the Kremlin to end this invasion of choice and stop gifting Putin advantages that encourage him to fight on. In one hopeful sign, the tech savvy Fedorov said last week that Elon Musk had agreed to limit use of the unregistered Russian Starlink network that had in recent months become a vital enabler for attack drones. .Read more:. Putin’s global allies are helping Russia upend the US-led world order.All of these measures to persuade Putin he can gain nothing more by fighting should have been taken long ago. The fact that they weren’t means that when a ceasefire is eventually agreed, as in time it must, this won’t be a Nobel Prize-earning feat. It will instead have come after the US first extended the war by taking pressure off the Kremlin, and having forced Ukraine into far greater concessions than it should have had to make..© 2026 Bloomberg L.P.

Trump’s peace push arms Russia while Ukraine pays the price: Marc Champion

Key topics:

Related Stories