The Administration Isn’t as Blind to Putin’s Ambitions as They Pretend

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, December 17, 2025

 

Their protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, the remarks Trump administration officials provided to Vanity Fair reporter Chris Whipple in his profile of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles certainly are candid.

 

Among the many revelations the administration’s principals let slip that undermine its official narratives, its members’ assessment of Vladimir Putin’s true objectives is particularly damning.

 

“The experts think that if he could get the rest of Donetsk, then he would be happy,” Wiles said in an effort to justify the administration’s sordid muscling of Volodymyr Zelensky’s government into ceding vast swaths of highly defensible Ukrainian territory to Russia that its military could not capture on the battlefield. It would be interesting to know just who these experts are. After all, the outlook Wiles describes is underrepresented among those who talk, write, and think about national security policy in the post-Soviet space.

 

Wiles’s fallacious appeal to authority, however, did not convince the president. “Donald Trump thinks he wants the whole country,” Wiles conceded back in February. If the president or his administration’s thinking on the matter evolved over the last year, it would have to have evolved quite recently. As Whipple notes, Secretary of State Marco Rubio seemed to share Trump’s outlook from February in an October interview:

 

“There are offers on the table right now to basically stop this war at its current lines of contact, okay?” he said. “Which include substantial parts of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, which they’ve controlled since 2014. And the Russians continue to turn it down. And so . . . you do start to wonder, well, maybe what this guy wants is the entire country.”

 

So, to recap, both the president and his chief diplomat agree that Putin cannot be appeased, and his objective is to subsume the whole of Ukraine into the Russian Federation by force (as Putin himself occasionally admits). And yet, with that apprehension in mind, the administration has forged ahead with an effort to give Putin a springboard from which he can launch a third invasion of Ukraine.

 

That enterprise has so far floundered as a result of Ukraine’s objection to its own dismemberment and consignment to an inevitable third war, as well as Putin’s refusal to countenance Western security guarantees that might frustrate his obvious goals. And yet, the administration seems bereft of any other ideas. It has repeatedly charged headfirst into the same brick wall. Its members seem wholly disinclined to acknowledge its existence. It would be tempting to attribute this behavior to naïveté, but Vanity Fair has robbed us of that charitable explanation.

 

If the administration knows what Putin wants, why is it so eager to give it to him?