The ugly truth is at last dawning on the White House that Vladimir Putin has no interest in settling in Ukraine. Mr. Putin is not a crafty Western-style pol angling for pecuniary and political advantage. After weeks of browbeating Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky and portraying Mr. Putin as reasonable, the administration managed to extract from the Russian dictator exactly nothing. Less than nothing, actually. Mr. Putin now wants more, not less. Mr. Putin fully embraces the centuries-old myth of Russia as the victim of betrayal and exploitation. In minds like Mr. Putin’s, Russia must fight foes stealing its wealth.
The ugly truth is at last dawning on the White House—or let’s hope it is—that Vladimir Putin has no interest in settling for a tie in Ukraine. The administration has spent weeks lamenting the pointlessness of the war. “Stop the killing” and “stop the bloodshed,” President Trump has said repeatedly to the combatants in press gaggles and on social media.
The phrases, coming from him, sound disingenuous. They would sound credible if Mr. Trump were a typical Western liberal who believes killing and bloodshed happen mainly when people fail to appreciate the benefits of stability and prosperity. But Mr. Trump doesn’t think that way and never has, which is why he also doesn’t offer similar laments over the bloodshed happening in Haiti, Myanmar, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan and other places.
The Russian army’s refusal to stop launching attacks on Ukrainian civilians, Mr. Trump pronounced on April 26, “makes me think that maybe he”—Mr. Putin—“doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along.” Plainly Mr. Trump knows his Russian counterpart is a one-eyed jack, but he concluded that statement with another seemingly credulous appeal to liberal values: “Too many people are dying!!!”
Mr. Trump understands cutthroat opportunism, but not honor-based savagery. The people advising him—notably the real estate investor Steve Witkoff and Vice President JD Vance—seem to take Mr. Putin for a crafty Western-style pol angling for pecuniary and political advantage.
That is precisely what he isn’t. As Gary Saul Morson explained in a superb 2023 essay, “Do Russians Worship War?,” Mr. Putin fully embraces the centuries-old myth of Russia as the victim of betrayal and exploitation. The Mongols in the 13th century, the Turks in the 18th, the British and the French in the 19th, Germany in the 20th—always, in minds like Mr. Putin’s, steeped in the myth, Russia must fight foes bent on stealing its wealth and destroying its people.
May 9, the day Nazi Germany surrendered to the Soviet Union in 1945, is, for Russians, “the most important holiday of the year, consecrated by the Russian Orthodox Church,” Mr. Morson writes. “They sense their kinship with the mystical body of the people, past and present.” War in Russia, he explains, is a kind of civic sacrament: Newlyweds frequently place flowers on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Moscow, and criticizing the military is often considered blasphemous. In American war movies, “the true heroes (or most of them) survive. By contrast, countless Russian war movies and novels feature as much death as possible. The story is not complete if anyone beside the one reporting the events survives. The more death, the greater the heroism.”
Mr. Trump’s lamentations about all the killing and destruction in Ukraine will likely have the opposite of the intended effect on Mr. Putin. That, at any rate, is a reasonable conclusion from Mr. Putin’s latest pronouncement that any agreement to end the war must include Russian control of four territories not currently under full Russian control: Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia. So after weeks of browbeating Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky and portraying Mr. Putin as a reasonable man—“a straightforward guy,” as Mr. Witkoff called him in an interview with Tucker Carlson—the administration managed to extract from the Russian dictator exactly nothing. Less than nothing, actually. Mr. Putin now wants more, not less.
It is a useful exercise to ask how a government’s behavior will be perceived by readers of history a century later. If, in the end, Mr. Trump listens to Mr. Vance and Donald Trump Jr. and cuts off aid to Ukraine, the outcome will invite comparisons to the allies in 1939. I’m not referring to the Munich Agreement, which happened the previous year, but to the failure of Britain and France to support Poland, as both had pledged to do, in its courageous but doomed stand against the German Wehrmacht.
The reasons for the allies’ nonintervention seemed sound at the time. Halik Kochanski, in her book “The Eagle Unbowed” (2012), writes that Britain and France moved from “a reluctance to take any action in support of Poland that might lead to German retaliation against them” to “deluding themselves that there was nothing they could do in any case because their armed forces were not ready for war, to the final justification that there was no point in taking any action because Poland was being so rapidly overrun.” The allies’ excuses in 1939 echo in the rhetoric of Mr. Zelensky’s despisers in 2025: Russia might retaliate with nukes, NATO is too weak to fight, Ukraine can’t win.
In fairness to Britain and France, they would have had to confront Hitler in Poland with their own soldiers and airmen. Yet the disgrace is real, and every informed Briton and Frenchman knows it. America need only send weapons, not men, to Ukraine. If we can’t manage that, we will deserve the scorn of our grandchildren.
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