How President Trump Can Bring The Ukraine War To A Successful Close

Forbes

10-07-2025

People gather near a nine story residential building in Solomianskyi district, where an entire building's section from the 1st to the 9th floor was destroyed by a Russian ballistic missile strike on June 17, 2025 in Kyiv, Ukraine. (Photo by Oleksandr Gusev/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images) Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images
President Trump can bring the Ukraine war to a successful close. Vladimir Putin respects and responds only to power. He'll say and promise whatever he thinks will advance his agenda of conquest.
President Trump is chagrined that Putin hasn't acted on the President's proposal for a ceasefire as a preliminary step to ending the war. He rightly suspects the Russian dictator has been stringing him along. As a result, he says the U.S. will send Ukraine a Patriot missile system and perhaps other defensive weapons as well.
To reach a genuine peace, Washington must pour in needed weapons—both defensive and offensive. The Europeans should increase their assistance as well.
The Ukrainians know how to fight. But from the war's beginning Kyiv has been short-changed on what the country needs to throw out Putin's invaders. Incredibly, the Biden administration acted in fear, thinking that Putin might get really mad and use nuclear weapons. Putin played the timid souls of these make-America-weak policymakers like a violin. He wasn't about to cross the nuclear threshold. But such threats achieved his aim, preventing Ukraine from getting what it needed to win the conflict. This involved not only weaponry, but also crippling restrictions on hitting targets inside Russia.
When Donald Trump began his second term, Vladimir Putin believed Russia was about to win its war of conquest against Ukraine. He felt the U.S. and NATO were tiring of the fight and would force Ukraine to a disastrous agreement that would make Kyiv a vassal of the Kremlin. Then Putin would effectively end Moldova's independence and, far more ominously, seek to undermine NATO by chipping away at the independence of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Moscow had seized these small countries in 1940 and made them part of the Soviet Union. They regained their freedom in the early 1990s. Putin would hit them through relentless cyber attacks and increasingly aggressive military moves on their borders. Poland, now the crucial linchpin for European independence, would face similar assaults. Putin dreams of not only restoring the Russian empire but also becoming the master power of Europe.
Here's what must be done to shatter Putin's nightmarish fantasies once and for all: President Trump and NATO should unleash a torrent of weapons for Ukraine and remove all restrictions on targets inside Russia, expect for the Kremlin itself. To pay for Ukraine's armaments, the U.S. and Europe should seize the $300 billion in frozen Russian bank assets.
At the same time, harder sanctions on Russia should be imposed. The Kremlin's economy is weakening, in no small part because of sanctions slapped on after the initial invasion. The alleged growth of the past two years has come from massive military spending and money printing, hardly the ingredients for genuine prosperity. Inflation is rising, consumers are cutting back and manufacturing is weakening.
Putin has serious manpower problems since he won't conscript men in politically sensitive places like Moscow and St. Petersburg. North Korea is tripling the number of front-line troops it's providing Putin to 30,000.
Putin's position is vulnerable. Ukraine doesn't have to seize all of the territory Russia now holds. It needs only to thwart Putin's summer offensive, pushing back the Russians a good bit. The message would then be clear: The Russian tyrant won't break Ukraine. His ugly ambitions would be shattered. Putin would have to negotiate a peace that would undergird a truly independent Ukraine. That would save both Ukraine and Europe.
It would also undermine China's dangerous delusion that the U.S. is a declining power.