Why Russia and Ukraine Keep Resisting Trump's Art of the Deal

On November 10th, in Abu Dhabi, a familiar set piece will resume after a nine-month hiatus: direct, three-way talks between the United States, Russia, and Ukraine. The U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff said that the meeting would cover “post-war security arrangements, de-escalation, humanitarian efforts, and steps toward peace.” The agenda sounds awfully similar to efforts made by the Trump Administration during the past two years. Is there any reason to think that this round of diplomacy could produce a different result?

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Under Donald Trump, the U.S. approach toward the war has appeared to swing wildly—for example, sanctioning Russian oil companies, only to ease restrictions on Russian fuel exports; or encouraging Ukrainian deep strikes inside Russia and later condemning them. These inconsistencies mask a set of remarkably durable assumptions. Above all, Trump wants to end the war quickly, an achievement in itself: a demonstration of his singular powers as a peacemaker and a means of unlocking what he imagines as a fruitful and profitable relationship with Russia.

That is, he is less concerned with the how than with the what. One doesn’t have to believe in kompromat to understand why Trump, time and again, ends up favoring Vladimir Putin’s position and interests. He believes that Russia, with its larger economy, population, and Army, is destined to prevail—“At some point, size will win,” Trump said last year—and so applying pressure to the weaker party can seem like the quickest path to a settlement. Moreover, as Trump sees it, relations with Russia, given its oil and gas and valuable mineral reserves, offer more economic upside than relations with Ukraine would, both for the U.S. and for Trump’s own family members and associates. “It’d be great for business,” Trump said, in September, of the prospect of an end to the war. “Russia’s got great land, very valuable land.”

From the outset, Witkoff and his partner in the Russia-Ukraine talks, Jared Kushner , have projected a similar set of motives onto Putin. Beyond extravagant praise—last month, Witkoff called Putin a “humanitarian”—their tactic has rested on a transactional proposition: surely getting rich together is preferable to continuing the war, and whatever political problems remain can be resolved by deciding which side gets which piece of real estate. “They seem to have the idea that you can essentially buy him off,” a European intelligence official said, of Witkoff and Kushner. “If you can just figure out a way to pay him enough, make it worth his while, whether with land or money, then you can get him to agree to a deal.”

The dilemma is that, as far as the war is concerned, Putin is guided by a sense of historical mission. Of course, he would like to see Western sanctions lifted and Russia capture the whole of the Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, a key aim that Russia’s military, despite nearly five years of fighting, has been unable to fulfill. (“No news is bad news,” a source in Russian defense circles told me. “There’s little movement on the ground, the troops are exhausted, and everything is being done ass-backwards.”) But even these objectives are part of a larger ambition: righting a set of geopolitical grievances that the Kremlin refers to as the “root causes” of the war. “Putin wants to determine Ukraine’s geopolitical orientation and have a say over security in Europe,” Tatiana Stanovaya, a political analyst at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said.

The Kremlin initially hoped that Trump could deliver on a grand geopolitical bargain, which meant bending not just Kyiv’s arm but Europe’s, too. But Trump proved incapable of meeting that expectation. Last month, Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign-policy adviser, noted that, when Trump and Putin met in Alaska, in August, 2025, it looked as if “the U.S. administration might be able to dictate something and force Kyiv to comply.” But, Ushakov said, “This hasn’t really worked out.”

However, Trump’s attempts to pressure and cajole Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky—such as his Oval Office blowup aimed at Zelensky, in February of that year—led to an outcome that Trump himself called for: European countries have taken the lead in backstopping Ukraine’s defense. “After that meeting, a new model emerged,” Balázs Jarábik, a former European diplomat with extensive connections in Kyiv, said. “The Europeans provide the money”—the E.U. has committed ninety billion euros in loans, but U.S. aid has fallen to several hundred million dollars, a fraction of earlier levels—“which keeps the Ukrainian state afloat and buys U.S. weapons.”

In recent weeks, Trump tried a different approach: he began offering Moscow incentives not as rewards to be delivered upon a peace settlement but as benefits granted before one has been reached. The shift is consistent with Trump’s long-standing logic: the quickest route to ending the war lies in accommodating Russian interests and pressuring Ukraine to accept the result. But it was also a reflection of the political fallout from Trump’s war with Iran. Ahead of last week’s midterm elections, he grew even more sensitive to rising gas prices, up by fifty per cent since the start of the war, seventy per cent in the case of diesel. He singled out Ukraine’s campaign to strike Russian oil refineries and other energy infrastructure. “We told him, do whatever you want, but don’t hit the diesel fuel,” Trump said last month, of Zelensky. “And what does he do? He goes and hits the diesel fuel.” On October 9th, Trump announced a diesel deal with Putin, under which Russia would release hundreds of thousands of tons of diesel into American and global markets, while the U.S. temporarily lifted sanctions restrictions on Russian energy exports.

For both sides, the deal was more messaging than substance. The U.S. is a net exporter of diesel, and the amount that Russia can credibly export will barely affect global prices. “It won’t bring that much diesel to the U.S. market nor all that much money to the Russian budget,” Sergey Vakulenko, an energy analyst at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, said. The move didn’t yield much benefit for Republicans in last week’s election, either. But, for Russia, it was an example of how Western sanctions can be dialled back for the sake of political expediency. “The cordon sanitaire has been breached,” Vakulenko said. (That breach, however, may prove more in word than in deed: in early November, two tankers carrying Russian diesel turned around at sea amid warnings that imports of Russian fuel could violate U.S. law.)

More consequently, for ten days in October, Ukraine faced sudden and unexplained speed limitations when operating drones using Starshield, a military application of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite-based communication technology. The de-facto speed cap of a hundred miles per hour meant that Ukraine’s new generation of jet-powered interceptor drones could not catch Russia’s increasingly fast jet-powered drones in the Geran family, which fly at speeds of more than three hundred miles per hour. At the same time, the restrictions hampered Ukraine’s campaign of so-called middle-strike drone operations, which target the Russian military’s logistical rear and have been crucial in disrupting and slowing Russian advances across the front.

For days, neither Ukrainian military leaders nor top officials could get a direct answer what had happened or why. “The worst thing was that there were absolutely no official explanations—nothing, zero,” a political source in Kyiv said. In mid-October, Ukraine appeared to pause its targeting of Russian refineries; by the end of the month, the speed restrictions were lifted. Trump and Elon Musk , the C.E.O. of SpaceX, both tried to deflect responsibility, but the message was sent. “They suddenly switched it off, then just as suddenly switched it back on,” the Kyiv source said. Jarábik said, “It was a way for the U.S. to try to reassert influence, to show what it’s still capable of doing in Ukraine.”

The Starshield episode was an illustration of the Trump Administration’s undeniable levers of influence. But it also revealed the Administration’s limits. On October 30th, Ukrainian strikes against Russian refineries resumed. The Kyiv political source said that Zelensky had made an offer to Trump: if you want us to stop hitting Russian oil infrastructure, either we should reach a mutual agreement that stops Russian strikes on Ukrainian electricity sites, or the U.S. and its partners should provide Ukraine with Patriot air-defense interceptors for the period during which Ukraine refrains from its strikes. “The Americans said no,” the source said. “So, then, we don’t feel bound by any restrictions.”

In recent weeks, Zelensky has allowed himself a new degree of open disagreement with Trump. He called Trump’s diesel deal “not fair and not honest” and a birthday present for Putin. Later, he said that he felt betrayed, that it’s “painful when President Trump chooses one side, not our side,” and that Trump was putting himself on the wrong side of history. But, for all of the bubbling animus between Zelensky and Trump, the U.S. remains the only player with the diplomatic reach and leverage to wrangle the relevant parties and broker a deal. “It turns out that the U.S. is replaceable to a large extent when it comes to money and weapons,” Jarábik said. “But not in terms of diplomacy and big strategic questions.” Last month, the Finnish President, Alexander Stubb, and the Norwegian Prime Minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, tried to break this dynamic, placing a joint call to Putin, the first between Putin and a European head of state in more than a year.

On November 5th, while hosting Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, at the White House, Trump said that a “big, beautiful agreement” could be close and suggested that it might involve not only Ukraine but “all of Europe.” That same day, Kushner announced a new framework for negotiations that would provide “practical arrangements that address the security concerns of all sides.” Such a notion may prove attractive to Moscow, depending on how serious the U.S. is Kushner’s pledge that “no country would have a veto over another’s sovereign choices” and that “NATO will remain central to European collective defense.”

Ultimately, all sides remain at odds: Ukraine wants a ceasefire first, followed by negotiations over a larger settlement; Russia wants to silence the guns only once its fundamental demands have been met; and Trump wants something fast—an end to the war that doesn’t address its core causes. Europe remains divided. Among E.U. members, the Stubb-Støre call drew as much skepticism and criticism as support, and European governments have yet to agree on who should represent them in negotiations, let alone what their common red lines should be.

In the meantime, a terrible winter awaits Ukraine. On November 2nd, in the Zaporizhzhia region, Russian glide bombs struck a school being used to distribute humanitarian aid to civilians, killing more than fifty people. This month has also seen Russia’s largest attack of the year on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. In Kyiv, residents have faced electricity blackouts lasting up to sixteen hours a day and more than twenty-four hours without running water. “Given the intensity of the enemy’s devastating attacks, without air-defense systems protecting key facilities, their restoration, stable operation, and very existence are seriously in doubt,” Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said. The grim paradox persists: Putin has little reason to abandon diplomacy and even less incentive to stop fighting. He can pursue a settlement on his own terms while counting on continued misery to make his argument for him. ♦