🔴 Website 👉 https://u-s-news.com/
Telegram 👉 https://t.me/usnewscom_channel
Say what you will about President Trump’s methods, but his wish to end Russia’s war is genuine.
The problem is Moscow doesn’t want peace in Ukraine, it wants Ukraine in pieces.
A panicking Vladimir Putin dispatched Kirill Dmitriev with a “peace plan” so absurd it would shame a mid-level propagandist.
Every time the White House offers an olive branch, the Kremlin torches it and commits more heinous war crimes.
Washington floated a leaders’ summit in October, but Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov wiped his shoes with it, demanding Ukraine stop resisting and the West ignore kidnapped kids and beheaded prisoners.
Well, Trump pulled the plug on Budapest, signaling he might punish the Kremlin, and a panicking Vladimir Putin dispatched Kirill Dmitriev with a “peace plan” so absurd it would shame a mid-level propagandist.
To make sure no one mistook this kabuki for compromise, Moscow murdered children in Ternopil with a Wednesday strike hundreds of miles from the front — a grim reminder Russia’s goal remains unchanged: kill Ukrainians for the crime of being Ukrainian.
Putin cannot win on the battlefield, but he still lusts after “all of Donbas.”
With lies and cruelty as his only cards, the aging KGB operative throws sand in our eyes and prays someone falls for it.
Ukrainians would pay the price under Russian occupation, which by now the world should know is nothing but rape, torture and mass graves.
So what’s really going on?
Either envoy Steve Witkoff is playing games he learned in New York real estate — shifting goalposts so far into insanity that capitulation looks “reasonable” — or this plan is a classic Russian psyop, hoping to make America negotiate with itself and walk away looking humiliated and untrustworthy.
This circus distracts from the real question. Why is Russia so desperate to keep the war going? Putin faces a binary choice every single day: continue the killing or end it. So why not lock in the gains and quit?
Pundits point to a wartime economy or propaganda-fed expectations of victory.
Those factors matter, but they are derivatives of deeper forces: a cold geopolitical calculus; a regime that needs the spectacle of power to mask looting and decay at home; and the very nature of an empire in denial stretching over 11 time zones.
Consider the calculus from Moscow’s perspective. Lenin advised, “Probe with the bayonet: If you meet steel, stop; if you meet mush, push.”
Today, Moscow’s probing is hesitant, almost weary, yet the mush it encounters in the West is so tantalizingly soft, it cannot help but press on.
In pure cost-benefit terms, Putin concludes more aggression will yield more gains. What we call “escalation management” is, in effect, escalation encouragement.
By refusing to send a clear, unambiguous stop now signal — pass crushing sanctions, close the skies over Ukraine, transfer Russian central-bank assets to Ukraine’s defense, terminate crude-oil purchases, send Tomahawk missiles — we create the very vacuum that keeps pulling Russian violence westward.
The second factor is the regime’s mandate — strange as that may sound in a dictatorship.
For two decades, the promise of a Russia “rising from its knees” has required the sacrifice of rights and the postponement of prosperity.
The state’s security apparatus, court oligarchs and propaganda bureaucracy all derive purpose from conflict; peace would expose their irrelevance.
Putin let the mask slip at his 2024 year-end press conference: “When everything is calm, measured, stable, we are bored,” he said. “This is when everyone wants action.”
The third force is the imperial Russian system’s legitimacy itself.
For the Kremlin, colonial conquest is not an abstraction — it is a virus woven into the state’s DNA.
Moscow’s domination over its internal colonies, from the Caucasus to Siberia, depends on the constant performance of power.
A Russia at peace would face an unbearable question: Why should its so-called federal subjects remain under Moscow’s rule at all?
The invasion of Ukraine is not only an attempt to recolonize it but also a way to reassure the Russian peoples of their place within the imperial hierarchy.
Defeat in Ukraine would be bad for Putin, but defeat in Russia would be catastrophic.
No American strategy will be effective until officials fully recognize these and calibrate policies accordingly.
The calculus of costs and benefits is entirely within our control. We know how to change it; but we’ve lacked the resolve.
The second — the regime’s preservation — is not our problem.
This is a terror enterprise that commits too many war crimes to count and actively works to weaken America.
Most egregiously, the Kremlin toys with nuclear threats — stoking chaos and undermining nonproliferation — while knowing full well it is bluffing.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, to whom Putin now effectively reports, has ruled nukes out.
The third — imperial software powering the Moscow-centric operating system — is the hardest.
But we cannot expect Russians to confront it until America purges its own discourse of Moscow’s false narratives.
Putin needs a reason to end Russia’s war, and America must give it.
The Kremlin will spin retreat into triumph, but only when pressing on becomes riskier than stopping.
As Trump said, Ukraine can and should restore its borders.
But peace will not come from begging the Kremlin.
It will come when the men who murdered children in Ternopil learn that America’s patience with their crimes has finally run out.
Andrew Chakhoyan is a University of Amsterdam academic director and served in the US government at the Millennium Challenge Corporation.