By Noah Rothman
Tuesday, February 03, 2026
From the outset of his second term in office, the
president and his subordinates committed themselves to a peace offensive aimed
at securing, if not a durable modus vivendi, at least a cease-fire between
Russia and Ukraine. On Friday, he got one, but it barely survived the weekend.
If you missed it, it’s already over.
Late last week, Trump announced that Russian President
Vladimir Putin had “agreed” to stop bombing Ukrainian civilian infrastructure,
which Putin had been doing to make the Ukrainian people suffer as much as
possible in the unusually frigid temperatures that have lingered for weeks in Eastern
Europe.
That truly generous dispensation from Moscow expired
after about 96 hours. Today, Moscow “broke the truce” with renewed strikes on civilian targets,
including apartment blocks and energy infrastructure such as thermal power
plants:
Undeterred by one failure after another, the
administration is promoting the outlines of yet another cease-fire plan hashed
out between U.S. and European officials and their Ukrainian counterparts. In
exchange for Ukrainian capitulation in the country’s east, at least, the plan
is to secure Ukrainian sovereignty through NATO-member-state military
commitments.
“Under the plan,” the Financial Times reported,
“a Russian ceasefire violation would trigger a response within 24 hours,
beginning with a diplomatic warning and any action required from the Ukrainian
army to halt the infraction.” If hostilities continued, European Union members,
as well as Turkey, Norway, Iceland, and the U.K., would be deployed to turn
back Russian forces. “If the violation turned into an expanded attack, 72 hours
after the initial breach, a coordinated military response by a western-backed
force involving the US military would take effect,” the FT report
continued.
Moscow is unlikely to agree to anything like this, and
Kyiv is certainly going to be skeptical of any Western commitment to engage in
direct hostilities with Russian forces. It’s almost as if we’re negotiating
against ourselves.
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