Could This Time Be Different on Ukraine?

By Daniel Foster

Thursday, October 22, 2026

 

I don’t expect the current sorry state of the U.S.–Ukraine/Russia relationship to endure, if only because President Trump has already occupied most of the possible positions on the matter and so I suspect he’ll come to occupy different ones in the future — or to occupy old ones once more.

 

But I do wonder if Trump’s latest lurch toward Russia is importantly different from the previous several. Not because Trump has changed, but because the political and strategic circumstances surrounding him have.

 

There are a few reasons to think so.

 

First, Trump has managed to tie his Russia policy to his unpopular war with Iran. The latest Pew polling finds that 65 percent of Americans disapprove of the president’s handling of the conflict, with support deteriorating even among Republicans. This includes people whose foreign-policy instincts are otherwise quite hawkish, but who share the MAGA aversion to “forever wars” and other entanglements in the Middle East.

 

By presenting the relaxation of Russian sanctions as a solution to the energy shock brought about by the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, Trump has invited an assessment of his Ukraine policy against the costs of what even many of his most ardent supporters regard as a war of choice in Iran. An added wrinkle here is that Trump’s own intelligence officials say Russia has supplied Iran with intelligence for targeting American military assets in the Mideast.

 

Second, there’s no fiscal argument this time. On the right, Ukraine skeptics have frequently fought with Ukraine hawks on the comfortable intramural ground of American fiscal prudence. That argument was central to JD Vance’s flamboyant performance during the February 2025 Oval Office meeting with Zelensky. But the circumstances have changed dramatically since then. Though intelligence sharing certainly costs money, direct American fiscal and matériel support has all but ended. As I suggested on The Editors last week, this is probably why Zelensky himself has taken a harder rhetorical line against Trump this time around.

 

Third, and relatedly, Europe’s position is now substantially less hypocritical. The White House got its wish, and European governments have taken up the burden of fiscal and military support for Ukraine. At the same time, they have reduced their own dependencies on Russia. For years the obvious rejoinder to European lectures about solidarity with Ukraine was that Europeans were themselves financing Putin’s war by purchasing Russian energy.

 

But according to the European Commission, Russian oil’s share of EU imports has fallen from roughly 27 percent at the beginning of 2022 to just 2 percent. Europe has substantially reduced dependence on Russian natural gas as well, while further restricting other imports.

 

Against that backdrop, the United States now finds itself making special arrangements to facilitate Russian petroleum sales just as Europeans have incurred considerable expense to move away from them.

 

Fourth, the administration’s actions are unusually cowardly. The respectable restrainer argument has been that America has limited strategic interests in Ukraine and plenty of reason to husband our finite resources elsewhere. But degrading Starlink and Starshield, withholding early warning of ballistic strikes, and possibly pausing other intelligence sharing are widely and correctly understood as purely punitive measures. Punitive measures that produced more dead Ukrainian civilians. The latest version via the Wall Street Journal is that Musk himself ordered the Starlink slowdown after discussions with unnamed administration officials, while Secretary Rubio has gone from insisting that nobody ordered it to explaining that it was a commercial decision for SpaceX to make. Meanwhile, Zelensky says ballistic-missile early warnings have resumed following a call with Rubio, who insists that intelligence sharing was never interrupted in the first place. The White House’s vagueness, finger-pointing, and evolving story about who made the decisions and why only added to the dirtiness of an already dirty business.

 

And at least anecdotally, even some of the hardnosed America-Firsters have appeared to be repelled by the combination of treachery and passive-aggression.

 

Fifth, we have a substantial record of failed détente with Russia against which to judge the latest effort. There is probably no number of times that Trump will not fall for Putin’s shtick. But each time it happens, we get a clearer and stronger record of the folly inherent in it.

 

In March 2025, the U.S. briefly suspended American military assistance and intelligence sharing. Ukraine subsequently accepted an American proposal for a 30-day ceasefire. Putin declined. Then came the useless Alaska summit. Then came the American 28-point peace proposal, drawn from a document supplied by Moscow. That too went nowhere.

 

Sixth and last, everyone seems to understand that waiving Russian sanctions and importing Russian diesel is not going to do anything for Americans.

 

The math isn’t there. Trump announced an initial Russian contribution of 300,000 metric tons of diesel to American and global markets. But the global diesel market consumes approximately 120 million tons per month. That initial volume amounts to about one-quarter of 1 percent of monthly consumption.

 

The United States is the world’s largest exporter of diesel. Its problem is not domestic supply, but global prices driven up by energy shocks. Russian diesel already reaches the market at a discount imposed by sanctions and honor. There’s no reason to think this drop in the bucket will have any effect on prices at the pump in Peoria, much less in the mere days left before the midterm elections that seem to be driving the policy.

 

The Zombie Hawks of the Legacy GOP have gotten up in arms about Trump’s Ukraine policy before. But never against such division and unhappiness in the MAGA ranks. Congressional Republicans have already joined a bipartisan demand that Trump reverse the arrangement. More materially, some House Republicans are reportedly threatening to block the administration’s proposed $350 billion in additional Pentagon funding unless Trump changes course on Russia.

 

Nobody ever made much money betting that Trump would stop iterating on his own bad instincts. But if things keep going this way for him politically and geopolitically, it may not be up to him.