Yes, it is but only because because the West allowed it to get to one. I don't understand how anyone can say there is no selling out when Putin would gain even more of Ukraine than he had after taking Crimea in 2014, as clearly if he does gain more land and it's looking he will, then, like it or not, naked illegal (who cares, eh. Illegality means virtually nothing where Putin and Trump are concerned) aggression will have been rewarded.
Heh, "an utter embarrassment for Putin and Russia", well, i doubt if Putin is concerned at all about embarrassment, while he is much more now on the world stage than he was before his invasion, and you know of course he will present any peace deal as a victory. Which it will be for him, if and when he ends up with more of Ukraine.
Anyway, here is one more expert view: How the war in Ukraine changed Russia’s global standing
Angela Stent April 2, 2025
Editor's note: This piece is part of a series of policy analyses entitled “The Talbott Papers on Implications of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine,” named in honor of American statesman and former Brookings Institution President Strobe Talbott. Brookings is grateful to Trustee Phil Knight for his generous support of the Brookings Foreign Policy program.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s immediate aim was regime change in Kyiv and Ukraine’s subjugation to Russian domination. But Putin had much broader goals too. He viewed victory over Ukraine as the first step in undoing the post-Cold-War order which had deprived Russia of its Soviet republics and sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. He sees the Ukraine war as a battle between Russia, NATO, and the “collective West.” Moscow’s victory over Kyiv would, he is convinced, start the process of dismantling an international order that he believes has ignored Russia’s national interests and belittled its position in the world.
Three years after Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin has yet to achieve these goals. But Russia has increased its influence in parts of the Global South and has allied itself with three revisionist powers—China, Iran, and North Korea—which share its commitment to a “post-Western” order. The advent of the second Trump administration—which is committed to upending America’s alliances and robustly engaging in great power politics—has introduced a new element of uncertainty about how Russia might parlay its war with Ukraine into raising its global standing. From Putin’s point of view, the reestablishment of U.S.-Russian relations under President Donald Trump and the prospect of restoring economic ties are bonuses that were not available before November 2024 and could offer new opportunities for him on the global stage. [...] The Biden administration came in determined to establish a “stable and predictable” relationship with Russia so that it could focus on what it regarded as more important international challenges, foremost China. The June 2021 Geneva summit between Putin and President Joe Biden appeared to have stabilized ties and established the guardrails that the U.S. administration sought. However, a few months thereafter, relations began to deteriorate when U.S. intelligence agencies detected large-scale Russian troop movements on the Russian-Ukrainian border, indicating that a full-scale invasion of Ukraine was being planned. The United States began briefing its European allies in October 2021 about the planned Russian attack, but many of them were skeptical and refused to believe that Russia would embark on a full-scale invasion of its neighbor. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his advisors were equally skeptical.
In November 2021, CIA Director Bill Burns traveled to Moscow. Confronting the Russians with evidence of their planned invasion, he warned Putin in a telephone conversation about the consequences of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He later described Putin as “stewing in a combustible combination of grievance and ambition for many years. … He’s created a system in which his own circle of advisers is narrower and narrower. … And it’s a system in which it’s not proven career enhancing for people to question or challenge his judgment.” After that, contacts between the U.S. and Russian administrations further deteriorated.
One of the last high-level Western engagements with Russia prior to the outbreak of war came in December 2021, when Russia presented the United States and NATO with two draft security treaties. The United States and its allies decided to take Russia at its word and engage with the Kremlin with a serious response to Russia’s sweeping demands. These included NATO withdrawing to where it was in May 1997, before Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic joined, and eschewing any further expansion. But the Russians were not serious about negotiations and, two months after they ended, Russia invaded Ukraine. Moscow’s relations with Washington had already fallen to a low ebb.
In contrast, prior to the invasion, Russia’s relations with Europe were more complex and varied.
[... to end ...]
The return of Donald Trump
Despite Russia’s military setbacks during the war, its failure to achieve its original goals in Ukraine, and the tremendous loss of life (it is estimated that at least 800,000 Russians have been killed in action or severely wounded), Putin has believed from the beginning that he could prevail. He has waited patiently for Ukraine to weaken as war fatigue sets in among Ukrainians suffering from three years of relentless bombing and a lack of electricity and heat. He has also calculated that the West would become war-weary and more divided over whether to continue supporting Ukraine’s war effort. Given the high casualty rate, he will only end the fighting if he can present the war termination to his population as a victory for Russia. He has waited for Trump to return to power, given Trump’s repeated assertions on the campaign trail that the war would not have started had he been president and that he could end it in 24 hours.
As of early 2025, it appears that Putin’s calculations may have been correct. Ukrainians are increasingly tired of war and favor peace talks, even as they remain very anti-Russian after all that they have suffered. It is becoming more difficult to recruit young men to the armed forces and Ukraine is running out of soldiers. Relentless Russian bombing of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure has destroyed most of Ukraine’s electricity supply. Nevertheless, there is a limit to the number of concessions to Russia that Ukrainians are willing to make.
Europe is also divided over continued support for Ukraine, given its own economic challenges and the rise of populist parties that oppose supporting Ukraine and tend to be pro-Russian. This is particularly true of the far-right German AfD, which came second in the February 2025 federal elections, and the French National Rally. The major EU governments (with the exceptions of Hungary and Slovakia) and the U.K. still support Ukraine, but their ability to continue military and financial support is limited, and they cannot replace what the United States has provided.
Nevertheless, discussions about reevaluating energy and economic ties with Russia have reemerged since talks about negotiating an end to the war began in 2025. Some companies—especially in Germany, which has abandoned nuclear power and depends heavily on imported gas—have begun to talk about resuming gas imports from Russia. Some argue that offering Russia this carrot of revenues from gas exports would be an effective strategy to induce Russia to negotiate an end to the war. These arguments neglect the historical record of Russia “eating the carrots” it has been offered in a variety of situations without any quid pro quo. Indeed, the German premise of “Wandel durch Handel” (change through trade) assumed that closer economic and energy ties with Russia would moderate its political behavior, a belief that ignores the reality that Russia—and before it the Soviet Union—always seeks to separate economic from political relations.
Trump’s return to power has upended the trans-Atlantic alliance’s unity on Ukraine and Russia and may represent the ultimate success of Putin’s game plan. The Trump administration has revived U.S.-Russian contacts and reengaged the Kremlin in order to reach a settlement in Ukraine. Trump announced that he had had a long, productive call with Putin on February 12 and claimed that Putin also wanted to end the war. On February 18, U.S. and Russian negotiators met in Riyadh to talk about reestablishing U.S.-Russian political and economic relations and negotiating an end to the war. In late March, Trump’s negotiators met with their Ukrainian counterparts in Riyadh, and Ukraine agreed to a one-month total ceasefire. Trump and his negotiators are now seeking Russia’s agreement to a total ceasefire but so far Russia has refused. Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, has met twice with Putin and has repeated the Russian narrative about the war’s origins. Witkoff says Putin is willing to make a peace deal.
Putin’s isolation from the West is coming to an end. The normalization of U.S.-Russian ties has so far come with no concessions from Russia and while it continues relentlessly bombing Ukraine. Moreover, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth initially said that Ukraine would have to accept the loss of all occupied territories to Russia, eschew NATO membership, and that U.S. troops will not be involved in providing security guarantees or maintaining the peace after the war is over. However, while negotiations to implement a ceasefire and eventually end the war continue, these terms could change.
Trump has repeated the Kremlin’s claim that the war was caused by Biden’s promise that Ukraine could join NATO and has advocated that Russia rejoin the G7. He has termed Zelenskyy a “dictator” because he did not stand for reelection in 2024 while the country was under martial law and blames him for starting the war. In an unprecedented public argument with Zelenskyy when he was in the Oval Office, Trump and Vice President JD Vance accused Zelenskyy of not expressing gratitude for all of the assistance that the United States has provided Ukraine, and Trump told him that Russia holds all the cards in this war while Ukraine holds none. This reversal of fortune in favor of Russia is stunning. Putin welcomes the opportunity to meet with Trump. It will bestow on him the legitimacy as a leader of a great power that he desires. He may be suspicious of the United States, but he nevertheless craves its validation. He has ceased to criticize the United States and has praised Trump. Peskov, Putin’s press secretary, has said, “The new administration is rapidly changing all foreign policy configurations. This largely coincides with our vision.”
After Zelenskyy’s contentious Oval Office meeting with Trump and Vance, Europe is stepping up to ensure its role in the peace process and to continue backing Ukraine. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer hosted an emergency meeting with European leaders at which he announced that a “coalition of the willing” would work with Ukraine and the United States to end the war. Macron has pledged that a European military contingent made up of NATO members will provide security to Ukraine after the war ends. Once the war ends, Europe will likely become the main Western backer of Ukraine as U.S. support recedes, providing that Putin does not succeed in blocking a European military presence in Ukraine.
The rupture between Europe and the United States since Trump came into office represents the fulfillment of another of Putin’s goals.He would like to marginalize Europe and, like his Soviet predecessors, split Europe from the United States and undermine NATO. Moreover, the prospect of a bilateral U.S.-Russian “deal” over Ukraine holds tantalizing possibilities for a Yalta-type “post-Western” order. Since Trump’s inauguration and his outreach to Putin, talk of a multipolar world order has subsided and Putin has returned to a theme he has reiterated since his 2015 speech to the U.N.: “The Yalta system was actually born in travail. It was won at the cost of tens of millions of lives and two world wars. … Let us be fair. It helped humanity through turbulent, at times dramatic, events of the last seven decades. It saved the world from large-scale upheavals.” Putin favors a tripartite Yalta, whereby Russia, the United States, and China divide up the world into spheres of influence.
Is it possible that the United States might be willing at some point to agree with Putin that the world should be divided by the great powers into spheres of influence once again? It is unclear how China would be included in what would have to be a tripartite division, but with the current world order in disarray, anything is possible.
Every U.S. president since 1992 has tried to reset relations with Russia, believing that, unlike their predecessors, they can find the key to a more constructive relationship with the Kremlin. Each of these reset attempts has ended in frustration and disappointment largely because the United States and Russia have fundamentally different understandings of the drivers of world policies. Trump, however, might break this mold, since his understanding of the drivers of global politics is more akin to that of Putin than to that of his predecessors as president.
It would indeed be ironic if, three years after launching this brutal war with the devastating loss of life and property and the destruction of so much of Ukraine’s cultural and religious heritage, Putin emerges triumphant with a war economy in full swing, a largely quiescent population, and a seat at the table with the U.S. president.
Angela Stent Nonresident Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Center on the United States and Europe
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
