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With every day that passes with progress toward a Ukraine cease-fire stalled, it’s ever more obvious that Vladimir Putin is the obstacle to peace, not Volodymyr Zelensky and not the Ukrainian people
US envoy Steven Witkoff had his third sitdown with Putin on Friday, to no more apparent success — even as President Donald Trump pointedly posted, “Russia has to get moving.”
So how to get Russia — Putin — moving?
For starters, up the recognition — privately and publicly — that Vlad is the problem.
Trump himself has signaled his growing frustration with Putin, especially after Russia tanked negotiations in the first week of April with last-minute demands.
But our president has multiple other issues to focus on, from tariffs to tax cuts to Mideast diplomacy, even as a forceful and official pushback to Putin is needed.
For starters: Why not a barnburner speech from Veep JD Vance?
He’s been one of the loudest doubters about the wisdom of US support for Ukraine, even as he’s rightly warned of the very real authoritarian threat to European values from within Europe, via its own intrusive governments.
So he’d be the perfect vehicle to deliver a message of equal clarity around external versions of those threats — disabusing Putin of any idea that surrendering Ukraine has real support at the highest US levels.
Trump has also rumbled recently about big-time sanctions on Russia if a peace deal fails to materialize; on Friday the administration bruited the same idea if Putin doesn’t cave by month’s end.
What new sanctions? One move would be a push to dramatically cut the Biden-era price cap on Russian crude sales, now set at $60 per barrel, especially since global oil prices have fallen anyway — and to hit trade partners who try and sneak around Russian energy sanctions with their own sanctions.
Then there is the dead-right idea, also part of the administration’s general theory of the case, of getting Europe to take a bigger hand in defending Ukraine.
Every nation that talked big about boosting Ukraine support in the days after the Feb. 28 Zelensky-Trump-Vance blowup should be now delivering that much and more.
Washington can help by avoiding clear snubs like having Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth participate only virtually in a gathering of his European colleagues on the Ukraine situation even as Witkoff went to Moscow.
That kind of half-hearted approach hobbles getting Europe more seriously onside for defense by injecting uncertainty about the United States.
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It hands massive leverage to Putin in exchange for (as far as we yet know) zip — not very “Art of the Deal.”
So find the soonest and best moment to send Hegseth on a grand, physical European whip-cracking tour.
And for that matter: How about no more Witkoff chats until Putin agrees — and stays agreed — to start moving on a framework?
The Ukraine conflict is an endless meat grinder that Putin keeps turning.
Getting him to stop requires upping the hard pressure on Vlad’s interests and rallying our allies in the region.
To make peace, Trump is going to have show Putin more strength.