Despite the administration’s apparent interest in a negotiated settlement, those efforts are going nowhere. Ukraine and Russian officials met in Istanbul last week for a bit over an hour. They reached a prisoner swap deal, but little else.
Trump’s indifference to Ukraine’s fate is likely adding to Putin’s perception that he can wait out the United States, and the West more broadly, and win this war outright. That’s not a guarantee, especially considering Russia has failed to achieve its aims in more than three years of war.
But the United States is influencing the conflict, and as Trump shifts the U.S. stance on Ukraine, first in rhetoric, and potentially in more meaningful material support, it will continue to transform the war. Exactly how will depend on what the U.S. does, and how significantly Trump might pull back from Kyiv.
“Whatever way you turn, it’s not good for Ukraine that the U.S. is not there anymore as a big supporter,” said Simon Schlegel, director of the Ukraine Program at the Center for Liberal Modernity, a Berlin-based think tank.
The Same War of Attrition, Just Featuring a Lot of Drones and a Show of Peace Talks
Russia has repeatedly bombarded Ukraine throughout this war, sometimes far from the front lines, often targeting critical and energy infrastructure across the country. What is different about the latest strikes is their concentration – heavily attacking one or two cities, and sometimes with hundreds and hundreds of drones.
In May, Russia launched an unprecedented 4,000 drones into Ukraine, and will likely exceed that in June, according to the BBC. Some of those drones have explosives, some are decoys, but the sheer mass is designed to overwhelm Ukraine’s air defenses. Moscow often follows up behind with ballistic or cruise missiles that Ukraine can’t take out with its own air defenses, which opens the potential for Moscow to hit more sensitive targets.
Russia is now manufacturing about 300 long-range drones per day, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said Russia wants to churn out 500. Many of these are Geran-2 drones, based on Iran’s Shahed-136 drones. Russia is now able to mass produce them locally thanks to Iran sharing its tech.
Ukraine has innovated just as much in the drone war, although Kyiv uses its long-range drones to hit the critical targets and logistics that Russia needs to wage war. That includes oil refineries and weapon production facilities. This week, a Ukrainian drone hit a plant in Chuvashia that manufactures electronic navigation equipment used in drones and missiles. Operation Spider Web also fit into this, although Ukraine smuggled drones into Russia, controlling them remotely to attack Russia’s strategic bombers.
Yet Ukraine is on the defensive. Russia is making territorial gains, and the Kremlin’s summer offensive is now underway with increased ground assaults. These advances have come at a huge cost for Russia, whose troops are suffering very high casualty rates. But Russia, so far, is able to sustain these attacks at levels that Ukraine, short on manpower and unwilling to engage in these “meat grinder” tactics, cannot.
“Putin really wants this to be is a war of attrition that is quick on the Ukrainian side and slow on the Russian side – and the Ukrainians want to do it the other way,” Schlegel said. “But I think the Russian calculus is really that Ukraine is smaller, and that eventually its population and its Western supporters will grow tired of it asking for more, and therefore Russia, on the long run, can win, even if it has very high costs in treasure and blood presently.”
Ukraine is trying to do the opposite, imposing higher and higher costs on Russia with audacious moves like Operation Spider Web. But all of it makes it difficult to see the possibility of a real breakthrough in any U.S.-backed peace talks.
Ukraine is seriously investing in talks like those in Istanbul, sending top officials and proving its willingness to engage with Moscow, not because it believes Russia is serious, but because it will do what it needs to keep Trump on side. Russia sent lower-level officials (although sometimes the bureaucrats hash things out before the big guys come in) and reportedly delivered Ukraine a memo with their war demands, which are as maximalist as they have ever been.
Ukraine has already accepted a 30-day unconditional ceasefire, but Russia says it will accept a ceasefire on one of two conditions: Ukraine withdraws from four provinces that Russia illegally annexed in 2022, including those Russia does not fully control even now; or Ukraine can halt mobilization and stop Western arms deliveries and end martial law and hold elections and then Russia will consider a long-term peace agreement. That long-term peace agreement would involve international recognition for those four provinces and Crimea, Ukrainian neutrality — which means no NATO membership — and limits on Ukrainian armed forces. In other words, Russia would like to get everything it wants and then it will sign a treaty that gives it everything else it wants. These terms are impossible for Ukraine to even consider.
U.S. officials told ABC News they were “disappointed but not surprised” at Russia’s demands, which even the Trump administration couldn’t hang with. Yet despite Trump’s rather lackluster threat of increased sanctions – and that was before Ukraine’s drone strike inside Russia – the administration has done little to get Russia to even minorly shift its position.
Instead, Trump just seems annoyed that complex, entrenched conflicts are not easy to solve. It makes it more likely that he will lose patience – but that disinterest might itself benefit Russia.
The Many Possible Shades of the U.S Walking Away
In May of last year, U.S. military aid was again flowing to Ukraine after Congress passed a long-delayed supplemental military aid package in late April. But Russia exploited Ukraine’s lack of equipment in the early months of 2024, leaving Kyiv at a disadvantage on the frontlines. Kyiv tried to shift the balance with a remarkable incursion into Russian territory near Kursk last August. Ukraine held onto much of that area until earlier this year, which coincided with the moment the United States abruptly cut off intelligence sharing with Ukraine.
The United States’s partnership with Ukraine is critical – but truly critical for Ukraine alone. Europe is ramping up weapons production, but it will struggle in the short-term to make up for the arms the United States provides. And even as Europe begins to do so, they don’t have the capacity to replace the U.S. on intelligence-sharing, which Ukraine needs to defend itself and hit strategic Russian targets.
Air defense – like U.S. Patriot batteries – are also vital for Ukraine to defend against ballistic missile strikes, especially as Russia seeks to overwhelm its air defenses. President Zelenskyy has offered to spend billions to pay for more Patriot systems, an offer Trump has derided. “You don’t start a war against somebody that’s 20 times your size, and then hope that people give you some missiles,” Trump said, again refusing to acknowledge that Russia invaded Ukraine.
European leaders have also discussed buying more American weapons and handing them over to Ukraine in an effort to keep the arms pipeline uninterrupted. Europe is also trying to find ways to increase the economic costs on Russia in the immediate term, including lowering the price cap on Russian oil.
The Group of Seven economies had agreed to the $60 price cap in late 2022, an effort to reduce Russia’s ability to fund its war machine without further straining oil prices and messing with the global economy. But global oil prices are now below that $60 threshold, so European leaders want to bring it down to $45, something they are likely to take up at the G-7 summit later this week.
“The Europeans are going to try to put that on the agenda, and try to get the G-7 countries to agree to it. And the big question is, what does the United States say? Does the United States support that? I think it’s – right now there’s no indication that we’re going to support that, but I think they’re going to try to press the U.S. on that question,” said Max Bergmann, director of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on a G-7 press call this week.
European leaders are almost certainly going to the G-7 meeting to try to persuade Trump to stay engaged in Ukraine and in Europe. A little bit later this month, they’ll get a reprise at the NATO summit in The Hague.
Ukraine and its Ukraine backers have no choice but to push for the best-case, if perhaps delusional, scenario: one where the U.S. remains committed to Ukraine, and Trump suddenly recognizes that Putin is mostly playing him. The next-best scenario is diminishing the damage of a less-engaged U.S. — maybe Washington isn’t sending weapons tranches, but it also isn’t blocking Europe from handing Ukraine U.S. weapons and continues to provide intelligence support to Kyiv. Anything to stave off the worst-case: a U.S. that cuts off on Ukraine, but continues to engage or shift closer to Russia.
“The question for Ukraine is,” Menon said, “ will the U.S. make a decision that, on net, benefits Putin – or on net benefits Ukraine?”
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