Putin, Aron added, cannot afford to come back to the Russian people after some 600,000 of their compatriots have been killed and wounded in Ukraine, and say, “Oops, sorry, we are not going to control Ukraine after all.” Putin cannot let this war end in defeat. But Trump cannot accept a peace that looks like a defeat for the West. Then he would look like a loser.
If there is any chance of a mutually acceptable deal on Ukraine — a long-term cease-fire roughly on existing battle lines in return for some lifting of sanctions on Russia and accelerated membership for Ukraine in the European Union along with security guarantees but not formal NATO membership — it will most likely happen only after Putin suffers more defeats there and Trump makes clear that he would arm Ukraine even more heavily if Putin would not relent.
The fact that Putin had to effectively hire 10,000 North Korean forces to help fight his reckless war in Ukraine shows two things: how afraid he is to stop without a visible victory “and how afraid he is of a societal backlash if he is forced to send into the trenches raw 18-year-old ethnic-Russian conscripts, especially from Moscow and St. Petersburg where the Russian elite lives,” said Aron, author of “
Riding the Tiger: Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Uses of War.”
“Putin is not in a position to have a forever war,” concluded Aron. “He is running out of people.” All of which is to say that if Trump is capable of sustaining Ukraine in its current battlefield position for 12 more months, he might get the deal to end the Ukraine war in a year that he promised in the campaign to deliver
in a day.
…