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On Wednesday — in classic Trump fashion — the president turned the tables on the reporters gathered in Ankara to question him and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during the NATO summit.
Trump asked the press pool what question he should ask Putin.
A Ukrainian reporter shouted back: “When will he end this war?”
Trump smiled and paused. “Good question,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever asked him that.”
And that is the crux of it.
Russia can and must end the war it started in 2014 and escalated in 2022. Ukraine cannot do this, for it isn’t waging one. If Ukraine were to stop defending itself, there would soon be no Ukraine to defend, and Russia’s appetite for war, already fed by stolen land, would only grow.
This is the lesson World War II burned into history.
The summit at Ankara delivered a noticeable change in rhetoric that American voters, who overwhelmingly support Ukraine and condemn Russia’s barbarism, have waited for.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio described Kyiv’s deep strikes inside Russia as an escalation that can help end the war. What sounds paradoxical on the surface is indeed the most clear-eyed assessment of the path to peace any senior American official has offered in a long while.
Russia’s talent for starting and losing wars is vastly underrated. It lost to Japan in 1905 after assuming a smaller Asian power would be easily crushed. In 1989, it lost in Afghanistan.
When Russia is given an off-ramp, it escalates. We need to give it a dead end.
Putin could halt the war today. There is no permission to seek, no parliamentary vote to fear. He could purge half his generals and the rest would swear ever greater loyalty. He could announce “mission accomplished” — the motherland is safe again — on any given Tuesday. The crowds would cheer and parades follow.
On March 11 last year, the Trump administration put a cease-fire proposal on the table. Ukraine said yes within 24 hours. Russia has spent nearly 500 days saying no, punctuating their response with missile strikes on Kharkiv, hunting the elderly with killer drones in the streets of Kherson and murdering Ukrainian children with heinous regularity in Kyiv.
Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko captured the moral divide: “Ukraine attacks Russian resources to stop death. Russia attacks Ukrainian people to stop life.”
In 2026, Russia’s war on Ukraine has come home to the aggressor. No major oil refinery was left un-struck by Ukrainian drones. Fuel rationing in Crimea is in place, and mile-long queues are forming at gas stations far and wide. The Economist calculated that Russian oil-refinery production this spring was down 15% and fossil-fuel revenues are billions below what oil prices would normally predict.
And now that Trump has promised to give Ukraine the license to make Patriot missiles, the outlook for Moscow’s terror campaigns grow grimmer.
Russia is now losing eight soldiers for every Ukrainian killed. Some 450,000 Russian troops are dead, nine times the Soviet and Russian toll of every war combined since World War II. Monthly losses have surpassed monthly recruitment.
At a Ukraine briefing, Trump repeated that Tehran will never have nuclear weapons. Fair enough. But one wonders whether a few Ukrainians in the room raised their eyebrows. Kyiv, under pressure from the United States, gave up the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal in 1994 in exchange for security assurances. The worth of those assurances has been tested over the last decade.
Every dictator weighing whether to build a bomb, Iranian ayatollahs among them, and every nation weighing whether to give one up, is watching Ukraine and wondering about America’s credibility.
Beijing is watching too. Peace across the Taiwan Strait hinges on the same question: Does America mean what it says? Ukraine gives Washington a rare chance to answer without putting a single U.S. soldier in the line of fire.
Trump’s words in Ankara are a step forward. A robust policy of peace through strength must now follow. Restore aid to Ukraine, enforce sanctions on Russia and add new ones where needed. Make Putin learn that his war will grow more costly with every passing day.
Andrew Chakhoyan is an academic director at the University of Amsterdam and previously served in the U.S. government at the Millennium Challenge Corporation
English (US)