Putin’s (Possible) Last Chance

By Noah Rothman

Friday, August 08, 2025

 

With the possible exception of Israel and its ongoing war against Iran’s terrorist proxies, no foreign pressure point seemed to loom as large in the minds of Trump administration figures as Russia’s war of conquest in Ukraine. From the outset of Trump’s second term, administration officials mounted an urgent diplomatic offensive aimed at securing something the White House could plausibly call a peace deal.

 

At first, the president and his subordinates applied immense pressure to Kyiv and Volodymyr Zelensky as though Ukraine were the aggressor. It was the result of a bewildering misapprehension of the conflict, its combatants, and the region’s history. As such, many of this war’s observers (ahem!) noted that it was doomed to fail. Indeed, after a depressingly disastrous Oval Office meeting between Zelensky and JD Vance — Trump was there, too, but he played a bit role — the U.S. cut off weapons and intelligence sharing to Ukraine, contributing to Kyiv’s retreat from the tiny sliver of Russian land it briefly occupied in Kursk Oblast. Why making Ukraine weaker and sacrificing a bargaining chip at the negotiating table would somehow dissuade Russia’s aggressors from pressing their advantage, perhaps only Tulsi Gabbard knows.

 

The misplaced muscle that was applied to Zelensky was a costly waste of political capital, but the president has been making up for it of late. The Trump administration has since reauthorized the sale of offensive weapons to Ukraine, directly and through European intermediaries. In mid-July Trump threatened to impose penalties on Moscow if it did not consent to at least a cease-fire agreement within 50 days. Just under two weeks later, he shortened that timeline to just ten to twelve days. After all, “I think I already know the answer what’s going to happen,” he said.

 

The deadline is upon us, and there has been a flurry of activity in advance of it. Trump’s all-purpose conflict negotiator, Steve Witkoff, traveled to Moscow this week to meet with his counterparts. As fits the emerging pattern, all parties came away from that process satisfied, at the very least, with Steve Witkoff. The Kremlin described the conversation as “useful” and “constructive.” But only a few hours after the meeting concluded, Trump announced his intention to substantially hike tariffs on Indian goods as a punishment for “buying Russian oil, they’re fueling the war machine.”

 

Notwithstanding the distinctions between tariffs and sanctions — distinctions Trump himself may regard as cosmetic — Trump’s move raises the prospect that the U.S. will impose “secondary sanctions” on the nations that purchase Russia’s already-sanctioned energy exports. One White House official told the New York Times that they are “expected to be implemented” as soon as today.

 

India is one of the biggest buyers of Russian energy, along with China and Turkey. “India’s oil purchases from Russia grew nearly 19-fold from 2021 to 2024, from 0.1 to 1.9 million barrels a day, while China’s rose by 50% to 2.4 million barrels a day,” Deutsche Welle reported. New Delhi has bristled at the president’s maneuver. Narendra Modi’s government protested, quite correctly, that the Biden administration “actively supported its oil purchases from Russia” to “help stabilize global oil prices.”

 

That’s not inconceivable, though the former president said otherwise publicly. Biden was terrified of the inflationary effect that increased crude oil costs would have on America’s already overheated economy — hence the “Putin price hike.” Oil prices have already increased by 1 percent following Trump’s imposition of tariffs on India. They will rise further still if Trump pursues a broader secondary sanctions regime against Russia, and American consumers would feel that pain.

 

But it would be felt more acutely by the targets of those tariffs — at least, initially. The sanctions on India, for example, are “threatening Indian companies’ access to the US financial system and exposing banks, refineries, and shipping firms to serious repercussions given their integration into global markets,” one analyst told DW. Accordingly, India’s state-run oil refiners abruptly halted “spot purchases” of Russian crude, Bloomberg reported Thursday.

 

Curbing Turkish and Chinese consumption of Russian energy is another matter. Beijing is a particular challenge. The People’s Republic regards the preservation of its relationship with Moscow as both an economic and geopolitical imperative, and it would certainly take retaliatory measures against the United States if it were targeted with punitive sanctions or tariffs. But the Russian bear on Beijing’s back has become an increasingly heavy burden.

 

Oil exports account for roughly one-third of Moscow’s government revenues, according to the central bank, and those revenues are declining rapidly. “Russia’s oil and gas revenues fell sharply for the third consecutive month in July, driven by weaker oil prices and a stronger ruble,” the Moscow Times reported. “Gas-related revenues more than halved.” That condition has contributed to sluggish Russian GDP growth, which underperformed expectations last quarter.

 

That’s a problem for a country with an economy on a wartime footing, in which the equivalent of 6 percent of GDP is devoted to defense, and where inflation is running officially at 9 percent. To the extent that inflationary pressure has eased modestly in recent months, that is attributable to the central bank’s tight monetary policy. But with interest rates set at a staggering 20 percent, Russian consumer spending has declined commensurately, forcing Moscow to rely even more on its state-subsidized arms industry for economic growth. This is not a sustainable situation.

 

Moscow is burning through cash, inviting inflation, and killing off a sizable portion of its adult male population on Ukraine’s battlefields, contributing to a worker shortage (which doesn’t help to cool inflation). That may be why, perhaps for the first time since the outset of his second invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the autocrat in the Kremlin may be genuinely looking for an offramp. Trump is still as eager as ever to provide him with one.

 

On Wednesday the president told his European counterparts that he is prepared to hold an in-person meeting with Vladimir Putin as soon as next week. It would be the first episode of bilateral U.S.-Russia summitry since April 2021, when Joe Biden held a similar meeting with Putin aimed at dissuading him from invading Ukraine for a second time. One imagines the conversation in the Oval Office mirroring a classic sequence from Arrested Development: Oh, rewarding land-hungry despots with summits never works, even though so many peace-loving Westerners convince themselves it will — but it just might work for us! Still, Trump is set on rolling the dice. The risk in it is that it could be Trump who gets rolled.

 

“If [Putin] gets a summit with Trump without Zelensky, and without a Ukraine ceasefire deal — that’s a Kremlin dream come true,” the Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov wrote. Beyond the semiotics of summitry, which the Kremlin would trumpet as evidence that its diplomatic isolation is over, Putin is promulgating the notion that he is open to trading some of his battlefield gains for temporary peace. “The most important thing for Putin is NATO and these ironclad guarantees that Ukraine will not be in NATO and that NATO countries will not develop a military presence inside Ukraine, plus a set of political demands on Ukraine itself,” Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center fellow Tatiana Stanovaya told the Times.

 

Of course, it is. Why wouldn’t Putin trade the battle-scarred moonscape he’s created in Kyiv for diplomatic structures that isolate a rump Ukrainian state — a state that Moscow can subvert internally until, eventually, he wages a third campaign to subjugate a people he doesn’t believe should exist?

 

Yet, if Russia is finally feeling the pressure, Ukraine is feeling it more intensely. The aerial bombardment of Ukraine’s cities over the last several weeks has been the most intense and deadliest of the war. In fact, Russian attacks on Ukraine’s cities have doubled since Trump took office. And Moscow’s forces continue to advance in the East, albeit at a snail’s pace, as they attempt to envelop population centers “to facilitate Russia’s long-standing objective of seizing the remainder of Donetsk Oblast,” the Institute for the Study of War reported. And if the latest Gallup survey of Ukrainians is close to accurate, morale in the embattled country is collapsing. Today, “69% say they favor a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible, compared with 24% who support continuing to fight until victory.” That’s a “complete reversal” from 2022, when nearly three-quarters of Ukrainian respondents favored holding out for victory over the Russian invaders.

 

Someone in this dynamic is going to break. We can only hope that Trump is steadfast enough to ensure that it is Moscow. Either way, next week looks like it could be a pivotal one for Russia’s three-year-long expansionist war in Ukraine.

 

ADDENDUM: The Trump White House announced its intention to conduct a new census to account for the errors in 2020 that led to population overcounts in blue states (save Ohio and Utah) while a handful of red states got shafted. In addition, Trump said that he intends to alter the census methodology to ensure that states do not count illegal residents as part of their populations.

 

This sounds uncontroversial unless you’re MSNBC’s Steve Benen. “As for the legality of such a move, there’s no reason to think such an effort would pass constitutional muster,” he wrote, “not only because the plan would deliberately exclude people living on American soil, but also because there’s no legal mechanism to allow for a mid-decade process.”

 

There’s nothing unconstitutional about the government collecting data, mid-decade or otherwise. Where it would run into legal trouble is if state governments used that data “for apportionment of Representatives in Congress among the several states” or “prescribing congressional districts.” If that becomes the GOP’s plan, Democrats will have a real case on their hands. So far, though, the reaction to Trump’s still vague census plan looks like yet another expression of general Democratic anxiety.