It’s been said that Russians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Thankfully for Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s shambolic autocracy has been doing its best to live up to the saying.
After Putin convinced President Donald Trump to hold a head-to-head summit in Budapest, it took less than a week for it to fall apart.
The collapse appears to have been triggered by Monday’s call between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who said Russia won’t agree to a ceasefire along current battle lines.
His rationale was revealing: “You see, if we just stop, it means forgetting the root causes of this conflict,” Lavrov said.
Those “root causes” are indeed at the core of Russia’s intransigence, just as they have been since the dead-end Alaska summit, and really since the full-scale invasion in 2022. Russia doesn’t want Ukraine to retain its sovereignty or receive meaningful security guarantees from its Western partners.
In Alaska, Trump appears to have suggested territorial concessions in exchange for Ukraine getting robust security guarantees.
Though the summit was tense, with Trump reportedly irritated by Putin’s interminable lectures about ancient history, both Trump and his envoy Steve Witkoff walked away optimistic that there was a path to peace along those lines. The Russians, however, quickly balked, so talks went nowhere.
Since Alaska, Ukraine has been stepping up its attacks on Russian oil refineries and other energy infrastructure, aided by detailed U.S. intelligence.
This effort has measurably hurt Russian oil output — at a time when oil prices are at five year lows.
As Trump started opening the door to sending Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, Putin and his cronies became increasingly anxious and squirrelly.
“The topic of Tomahawks is of extreme concern,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
Putin himself underlined the gravity by calling Tomahawks a “qualitatively new stage of escalation.”
That Putin picked up the phone to call Trump last Thursday underscored how spooked he was about the possibility of Kyiv getting missiles that can deliver precision strikes more than 1,000 miles away.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reacted to the Budapest meeting being called off by saying that Russia “became less interested in diplomacy” after Tomahawks appeared less likely to materialize.
“This is a signal that this very issue — the issue of long-range capabilities — may be the indispensable key to peace,” Zelensky said Tuesday evening in his daily address to Ukrainians. “The greater Ukraine’s long-range capabilities, the greater Russia’s willingness to end the war.”
The lesson is obvious: Pressure works on Russia.
