By Jim Geraghty
Monday, December 29, 2025
The president of the United States, offering an
update on his efforts to end the Russian invasion of Ukraine, after meeting
with Ukrainian President Zelensky on Sunday at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla.:
Q: So, in
your conversation with President Putin, did you discuss what responsibility
Russia will have for any kind of reconstruction of Ukraine post an agreement?
President Trump:
I did. They’re going to be helping. Russia’s going to be helping. Russia wants
to see Ukraine succeed once — it sounds a little strange, but I was explaining
to the president, President Putin was very generous in his feeling toward
Ukraine succeeding, including supplying energy, electricity, and other things
at very low prices. So, a lot . . . of good things came out of that call today,
but they were in the works for two weeks with Steve [Witkoff] and with Jared
[Kushner] and Marco [Rubio] and everybody.
Got that? Vladimir Putin and Russia want to see Ukraine
succeed, the president assures us. (Zelensky, standing beside Trump at the
press conference, attempted to keep a poker face but gave a brief “oh, really?”
head tilt and smiled when Trump said, “It sounds a little strange.”)
This is not the first time President Trump has stood
before the world and assured everyone about the good faith efforts and good
intentions of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
In February, Trump told the world from the Oval Office, “I think
President Putin wants peace and President Zelensky wants peace and I want
peace.” He
added, “I believe he wants peace. . . . I think he would tell me if he
didn’t.” In August, Trump contended, “President Putin, I believe, wants
to see peace.”
Despite what must be the most gentle and dulcet tones
imaginable in his phone conversations with Trump, Putin has taken no action to
indicate he wants peace this year. From January through October, Russia dropped about 40,000
bombs on Ukraine. In October alone, Russia dropped 5,328 bombs on the positions
of Ukrainian forces and frontline cities, according to the Ukrainian military.
Russia’s bombing targets in 2025 have included
340 schools and educational facilities and, between January and June, at least 198 hospitals and medical
facilities. (The Russians eventually bombed the hospital in Sumy Oblast that I visited in
February. When I visited that hospital, located about an hour from the
front at that time, Ukrainian medical staff were treating Russian senior
citizens who had been victims of errant Russian bombs over on the old Russian
side of the border.)
According to the United Nations, through October, Russian
attacks had killed 12,062 civilians, significantly higher than the total
through the same period in 2024. From the beginning of the war to October,
there have been more than 53,000 civilian deaths.
For there to be peace, all Putin would have to do is
issue the order, “Stop bombing and stop shooting,” and peace would occur.
One of the reasons Trump is apparently convinced that
Putin wants peace is that Russian military forces have not yet bombed the
Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant . . . which Russian military forces seized way back in March 4, 2022.
President Trump yesterday:
It’s one of the
things I discussed with President Putin, and they were talking about the
nuclear plant that’s probably the biggest in the world. Just about the biggest
anywhere in the world. Can you believe that? And President Putin’s actually
working with Ukraine on getting it open. He’s been very good in that sense. He
wants to see that open, and he hasn’t hit it with missiles, hasn’t hit it with
anything. It’s a big danger to do that for everybody, but they’re working
together to try and get it. It can open very quickly. It’s in pretty good
shape. And the people there have been there for years. The people there running
it. You know, they have 5,000 people in that plant. Can you believe it? I
learned that today — 5,000 people. It’s the biggest plant of its kind in the
world. And they’re working together to get it open. They could maybe get it
open quickly. That’s a big step when he’s not bombing that plant. It’s a big
step.
“Vladimir Putin has not bombed a nuclear power plant that
his forces have occupied for nearly four years” is a remarkably low bar for
qualifying as “a big step.”
Whether or not Trump actually knows next to nothing about
the Russian invasion, he keeps speaking as if he knows next to nothing about
the Russian invasion. There are people who will characterize this as attacking
Trump, yet another display of my “TDS.” No, this is quoting President
Trump. Don’t get mad at me for noticing what Trump is saying; get mad at our
79-year-old president for saying it.
Some might argue that Trump’s effusive praise for Putin
is a negotiating tactic, buttering up Putin and flattering him in hopes of
making the Russian dictator more conciliatory. But Trump has been at this for
almost a year, hosting Putin at a summit in Alaska, and, so far, this
flattery-and-concession-heavy approach has gotten nowhere.
Every couple of weeks or months, Trump stands before the
cameras and gives a stream-of-consciousness monologue about how much he wants
peace, and how close his negotiators are to a deal to bring peace to the
region. He offers a supremely implausible tale of Putin’s desire for peace and
his willingness to compromise. Trump always reiterates, often at length, that
if he had been president in 2022, the war never would have started. (Whether or
not this is the case, it is moot; the question is what to do in the here and
now.) Trump makes demands of the Ukrainians, and the Ukrainians play ball.
(Remember the mineral deal? Remember how that was supposed to be this
important and consequential agreement, tying together U.S. and Ukrainian
interests?) Then Trump and his team turn to Putin in hopes of a corresponding
act of good faith, and they never get it. Then Trump gets frustrated and turns
to other issues for a while.
“Time is a flat circle,” warned the
television series True Detective. “Everything we’ve ever done, or
will do, we’re gonna do over and over and over again.”
Trump never gets mad enough at Putin to throw his support
to the Ukrainians. He also never gives up on the belief that next time, the
negotiating process will turn out differently, and Putin will be more
reasonable in a few months. Way back in April, Trump publicly fumed that Putin was “just
tapping me along,” delaying and making excuses. Here we are at the end of
December, and the tapping never stopped. Trump has fallen for Putin’s trick,
every time, over and over again.
Meanwhile, the war grinds on. Back on December 9, the
Washington-based Institute for the Study of War updated its assessment of
how much territory Russia had gained in the calendar year, and how much that
gain had cost the Russian military in terms of casualties:
ISW continues to
assess that the Russian campaign to militarily seize the rest of Donetsk
Oblast, including Ukraine’s heavily fortified Fortress Belt, would likely take
at least two-to-three years, pose a significant challenge, and result in
difficult and costly battles that the Russian Federation may not be able to
sustain. . . .
Russian forces
have gained 0.77 percent of Ukrainian territory since the start of 2025 while
suffering disproportionately high personnel costs. ISW has observed
evidence to assess that Russian forces have seized roughly 4,669 square
kilometers since January 1, 2025. Data from the Ukrainian General Staff
indicates that Russian forces have suffered a total of 391,270 casualties in
that time – or about 83 casualties per square kilometer.
For those of us living in
Washington’s dream, 4,669 square kilometers is about 1,802 square miles, or
about two-thirds the square mileage of the state of Delaware. Month after
month, the Russian military continues to pay an astoundingly high price for
exceptionally modest territorial conquests. Total Russian casualties since the
start of the war — this includes killed, wounded, and missing in action — are
now estimated to be above 1.2 million.
ADDENDUM: Over in that other Washington publication, an appreciation of former Senator Ben Sasse, while he’s still
around to read it. I was appalled by the reaction of certain leftist Americans to the assassination of
Charlie Kirk and revolted by the Luigi Mangione fan club; I was similarly disgusted by President Trump’s reaction to the brutal
murder of Rob Reiner and his wife. The comments section over there suggests
there are a whole lot of people in this country who can’t muster a moment of
sympathy for a 53-year-old father of three — whose wife had already suffered
multiple strokes and a brain aneurysm in the past, after she was diagnosed with
epilepsy — who gets diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer.
There are a whole bunch of Americans out there who like
to see other people suffer, because they politically disagree with them.
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