It’s Morning in Ukraine Again

By Jim Geraghty

Tuesday, August 19, 2025

 

Three good things came out of yesterday’s high-profile summit with President Trump, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Finland’s President Alexander Stubb, France’s President Emmanuel Macron, Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. (You almost never see that many major Western leaders in one room outside of G-7 summits.)

 

First, it’s much better to see Zelensky and Trump shaking hands, smiling, and joking around in the Oval Office, compared to the shouting match from earlier this year.

 

Second, and much more consequentially in the long term, Trump expressed a willingness to participate in security guarantees for Ukraine:

 

Q: Your team has talked about security guarantees. Could that involve U.S. troops? Would you rule that out in the future?

 

Trump: Uh, we’ll let you know that maybe later today. We’re meeting with seven great leaders of great countries also and we’ll be talking about that. They’ll all be involved, but there’ll be a lot of uh there’ll be a lot of help when it comes to security. There’s going to be a lot of help. It’s going to be good. They are first line of defense because they’re there. They’re Europe, but we’re going to help them out also. We’ll be involved.

 

At a broadcast press briefing after his meetings, Zelenskiy said, “Security guarantees will probably be ‘unpacked’ by our partners, and more and more details will emerge. All of this will somehow be formalized on paper within the next week to ten days.”

 

If this comes to pass, it will be one of the biggest game-changers to the region imaginable, an outcome that is not just good enough for the remaining 80 percent of Ukraine that is independent, but one that would effectively shut off the possibility of further Russian aggression in the long term. In fact, because this is such a huge win for Ukraine, it’s fair to wonder if it will come to pass, or what the catch is.

 

As our Mark Wright observes:

 

President Zelensky is right that such an offer by President Trump would be a “significant change.” Such talk has been a non-starter among the so-called restrainer wing of the Trump coalition for years. But iron-clad security guarantees from the West (preferably inside the NATO alliance) are, of course, one of Ukraine’s biggest goals. The delta between the two positions has repeatedly put Ukraine, its supporters in the West, and the restrainers at loggerheads.

 

On Sunday, U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff appeared on CNN and described the guarantees as such:

 

We agreed to robust security guarantees that I would describe as game- changing. We didn’t think that we were anywhere close to agreeing to Article 5 protection from the United States, legislative enshrinement within the Russian Federation not to go after any other territory when the peace deal is codified, legislative enshrinement in the Russian Federation, not to go after any other European countries and violate their sovereignty.

 

So we agreed to — and there was plenty more.

 

Later in the interview, Witkoff elaborated:

 

JAKE TAPPER: In terms of Ukrainian security guarantees, you mentioned the Article 5 guarantee of NATO, an attack on one is an attack on all. Russia would allow that to happen, that any more — any further incursions into Ukraine, Russia would understand would be seen as an attack on all NATO members?

 

WITKOFF: No, Jake, that’s not what I said. What I said is that we got to an agreement that the United States and other European nations could effectively offer Article 5-like language to cover a security guarantee. So, Putin has said that a red flag is NATO admission.

 

TAPPER: Right.

 

WITKOFF: And so what we were discussing was, assuming that that held, assuming that the Ukrainians could agree to that and could live with that — and everything is going to be — is going to about what the Ukrainians can live with.

 

But, assuming they could, we were able to win the following concession, that the United States could offer Article 5-like protection, which is one of the real reasons why Ukraine wants to be in NATO. We sort of were able to bypass that and get an agreement that the United States could offer Article 5 protection, which was the first time we had ever heard the Russians agree to that.

 

In case you’ve forgotten, Article Five of the NATO treaty states:

 

The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defense recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.

 

“Article 5-like protection,” as Witkoff describes it, is the “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” of military alliances.

 

In a matter of months, we’ve gone from some of the worst possible outcomes for Ukraine — Trump furiously confronting Zelensky with the world watching, and a short-lived, non-presidentially informed halt to military aid to Ukraine — to the potential of one of the best possible outcomes for Ukraine. Would Ukrainians prefer to have all their conquered territory back? Sure. But when it comes to consolation prizes, a serious military alliance with the United States and knowing the 82nd Airborne would parachute in if Russian forces ever tried to invade again is pretty sweet.

 

Did Putin really agree to this? Or is this some sort of ruse?

 

If Putin really is willing to acquiesce to a U.S. security guarantee for Ukraine, allow me to float another explanation. If you’ve been getting your news from the likes of Douglas Macgregor, you’ve been hearing that the Ukrainian military forces are on the verge of collapse, and Russian forces will be breaking through the lines and rolling into Kyiv, for more than three years now.

 

I’ve tried to not be excessively optimistic in my assessments of how the military campaign is going for Ukraine; war is hell, and the Ukrainian military has paid a terrible price in its defense of its homeland. In June, the U.S. Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that Ukrainian fatality rates are also high at between 60,000 and 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed, with a total of 400,000 casualties, which include both killed and wounded. (You can read about my talks with some of those wounded soldiers here.)

 

For perspective, the Pentagon’s official count of in-theater deaths for the Vietnam War was 58,220.

 

But all of us can notice that the battle lines have barely moved in several years. The Ukrainians may not be winning the war, but they’re not losing it, either.

 

In this war of attrition, yes, the Russian forces have crept forward. But at an exceptionally slow pace and paying a jaw-dropping price in blood and equipment. In June, Riley McCabe of CSIS wrote a spectacular illustrated op-ed in the Washington Post laying out how between January 2024 and June 2025, Russia advanced an area less than the size of the state of Delaware. At the same time, more than 950,000 Russian soldiers have been killed and wounded since the war began, with an estimated 200,000 to 250,000 killed in action.

 

If you’re wondering how Russia could be suffering significantly higher casualties than the Ukrainians, I’ll refer you back to my first conversation with national security analyst Kyle Orton:

 

“It’s a very Russian war,” Orton summarized succinctly. “It started catastrophically badly. Nothing worked at the start, but then, over time, the Russians did improve. They found what didn’t work, and stopped doing so much of that, and more to the point, through artillery, and a willingness to bear unimaginable human sacrifices, they’ve turned it around. They can’t win in a sense that they can’t take Kyiv. But they can grind down Ukraine to accepting something that really is unacceptable.”

 

(The term “human meat waves” also came up in that conversation.)

 

In other words, since the start of the war, Russia has endured anywhere from 3.4 to 4.3 Vietnams’ worth of killed in action. And remember, Russia didn’t have the healthiest demographics before the war started.

 

There’s been this mentality that Russia can endure endless casualties, that the Russian economy can endure any number of sanctions, that the elites of Moscow and Saint Petersburg will endure any inconvenience, and the poor of Russia will endure any hardship and any number of buried sons in pursuit of total victory in Ukraine.

 

But what if those are finite? As Bloomberg recently reported:

 

Growth in the Russian economy is stalling. Oil revenues have slumped. The budget deficit has widened to the largest in more than three decades. Inflation and interest rates remain painfully high. Behind the walls of the country’s banks, some insiders are sounding alarms about a looming debt crisis.

 

What if Putin’s bargaining position is much weaker than the public perception — shaped in large part by propaganda efforts like the bot farms — and what if Putin is looking for a way to end the war and spin it as a glorious victory?

 

Third, Putin and Zelensky will, reportedly, be meeting face to face in the near future, at least if President Trump has something to say about it.

 

This represents Putin de facto recognizing Zelensky as the legitimate head of state of an independent country, no matter how much Putin calls Zelensky “illegitimate,” “toxic,” and head of a “neo-Nazi regime.” (Lot of Jewish Nazis out there, Vlad?)

 

Finally, this morning, Politico writes: “A potential MAGA split over security guarantees for Ukraine would mark the third such foreign policy fissure in recent months, following disagreements about the military strikes aimed at Iran’s nuclear capabilities and U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza. Both of those bent Trump’s coalition, but didn’t break it.”

 

Did those actions really bend Trump’s coalition all that much?

 

Have you seen a lot of MAGA folks up in arms about the bombing of the Iranian nuclear program lately? Yes, Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon were really irate about it, but did you see a lot of rank-and-file Trump supporters genuinely upset about it? Didn’t the polling indicate that MAGA voters were the demographic most supportive of Trump’s decision to launch the strike?

 

Remember how bombing Iran’s nuclear program was supposed to start World War III, and we were going to lose? Remember how it didn’t?

 

The military strike on Iran was 60 days ago, but it feels like 60 years ago.

 

ADDENDUM: Semafor reports:

 

Jerusalem Demsas left The Atlantic in recent weeks to launch The Argument, a new publication that aims to push back against the populist right by strengthening the ideas and arguments of modern liberalism and convincing readers of their legitimacy.

 

You keep hearing that the left is growing more opposed to Israel and antisemitic these days, so it’s a good sign that they’re going to get a new magazine featuring a writer whose first name is “Jerusalem.”

 

It’s good to see a new left-of center magazine, because the magazine rack at your local Barnes & Noble only features the New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, Rolling Stone, Harpers, Mother Jones, the New Republic, Esquire, New York magazine, the American Prospect, maybe a stray copy of Dissent and Jacobin, and I’m sure I’m forgetting at least one or two others. It’s an underserved market!

 

I kid, I kid. It’s always good to see new magazines getting started. Semafor also reports:

 

The publication will also launch with solid financial backing: Demsas told Semafor The Argument raised around $4 million at a $20 million valuation. The company’s investors include Arnold Ventures, Open Philanthropy, Susan Mandel, Gaurav Kapadia, Rachel Pritzker, Simone Coxe, John Wolthuis, and Patrick Collison. The organization also said it received a grant from Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures.

 

You know why National Review runs webathons and ask readers like you for money? Because we don’t have billion-dollar foundations throwing multi-million-dollar donations at us. The upside is we never hear, “Hey, you can’t write that. This billionaire donor of ours won’t like it.”

 

For example, Rachel Pritzker is Illinois Governor JB Pritzker’s cousin. Somehow, I think it will be a long time before The Argument runs a column or essay laying out Governor Pritzker’s flaws and contending he should not be the 2028 Democratic presidential nominee.