The dilemma is that, as far as the war is concerned, Putin is guided by a sense of historical mission. Of course, he would like to see Western sanctions lifted and Russia capture the whole of the Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, a key aim that Russia’s military, despite nearly five years of fighting, has been unable to fulfill. (“No news is bad news,” a source in Russian defense circles told me. “There’s little movement on the ground, the troops are exhausted, and everything is being done ass-backwards.”) But even these objectives are part of a larger ambition: righting a set of geopolitical grievances that the Kremlin refers to as the “root causes” of the war. “Putin wants to determine Ukraine’s geopolitical orientation and have a say over security in Europe,” Tatiana Stanovaya, a political analyst at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said.
The Kremlin initially hoped that Trump could deliver on a grand geopolitical bargain, which meant bending not just Kyiv’s arm but Europe’s, too. But Trump proved incapable of meeting that expectation. Last month, Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign-policy adviser, noted that, when Trump and Putin met in Alaska, in August, 2025, it looked as if “the U.S. administration might be able to dictate something and force Kyiv to comply.” But, Ushakov said, “This hasn’t really worked out.”
However, Trump’s previous attempts to pressure and cajole Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky—such as his Oval Office blowup aimed at Zelensky, in February of that year—led to an outcome that Trump himself called for: European countries have taken the lead in backstopping Ukraine’s defense. “After that meeting, a new model emerged,” Balázs Jarábik, a former European diplomat with extensive connections in Kyiv, said. “The Europeans provide the money”—the E.U. has committed ninety billion euros in loans, but U.S. aid has fallen to several hundred million dollars, a fraction of earlier levels—“which keeps the Ukrainian state afloat and buys U.S. weapons.”
In recent weeks, Trump tried a different approach: he began offering Moscow incentives not as rewards to be delivered upon a peace settlement but as benefits granted before one has been reached. The shift is consistent with Trump’s long-standing logic: the quickest route to ending the war lies in accommodating Russian interests and pressuring Ukraine to accept the result. But it was also a reflection of the political fallout from Trump’s war with Iran. Ahead of last week’s midterm elections, he grew even more sensitive to rising gas prices, up by fifty per cent since the start of the war, seventy per cent in the case of diesel. He singled out Ukraine’s campaign to strike Russian oil refineries and other energy infrastructure. “We told him, do whatever you want, but don’t hit the diesel fuel,” Trump said last month, of Zelensky. “And what does he do? He goes and hits the diesel fuel.” On October 9th, Trump announced a diesel deal with Putin, under which Russia would release hundreds of thousands of tons of diesel into American and global markets, while the U.S. temporarily lifted sanctions restrictions on Russian energy exports.
For both sides, the deal was more about messaging than substance. The U.S. is a net exporter of diesel, and the amount that Russia can credibly export will barely affect global prices. “It won’t bring that much diesel to the U.S. market nor all that much money to the Russian budget,” Sergey Vakulenko, an energy analyst at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said. The move didn’t yield much benefit for Republicans in last week’s election, either. But, for Russia, it was an example of how Western sanctions can be dialled back for the sake of political expediency. “The cordon sanitaire has been breached,” Vakulenko said. (That breach, however, may prove more in word than in deed: in early November, two tankers carrying Russian diesel turned around at sea amid warnings that imports of Russian fuel could violate U.S. law.)
More consequently, for ten days in October, Ukraine faced sudden and unexplained speed limitations when operating drones using Starshield, a military application of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite-based communication technology. The de-facto speed cap of a hundred miles per hour meant that Ukraine’s new generation of jet-powered interceptor drones could not catch Russia’s increasingly fast jet-powered drones in the Geran family, which fly at speeds of more than three hundred miles per hour. At the same time, the restrictions hampered Ukraine’s campaign of so-called middle-strike drone operations, which target the Russian military’s logistical rear and have been crucial in disrupting and slowing Russian advances across the front.
