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Trump has taken up his campaign promises regarding the war in Ukraine.
President Trump has been ratcheting up the pressure on Vladimir Putin in his first days in office, trying to get the Russian leader to come to the negotiating table to reach a deal to end the war in Ukraine. Just over 48 hours after returning to the White House, Trump said that Putin was “destroying his country” with his nearly three-year war against Kyiv and threatened to increase sanctions on Russia if a deal is not reached quickly.
Trump's threat to Putin is the first step in Trump's attempts to show that his policy of "peace through strength" can end the largest land war in Europe in almost a century, according to Laura Kelly, a foreign policy reporter for The Hill newspaper.
The president has already achieved his first diplomatic successes in the Middle East. But Trump has said that resolving Russia's war in Ukraine is a more difficult task than in the Middle East.
If Trump wants to leverage Russia, he will need unity with Europe, said Sam Green, director of democratic sustainability at the Center for European Policy Analysis, a Washington-based think tank. That could prove difficult if he follows through on his promise to impose high tariffs on the continent.
“I think the reality is that Trump doesn’t have — the United States as a whole doesn’t have — huge leverage over either side of this conflict. It’s possible that Trump, Waltz, and Rubio — and whoever else is important in foreign policy — will sit down at the negotiating table, identify all the intersecting interests, and start prioritizing,” Green said, referring to National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Green also believes that Putin can probably “sell” the deal to the Russian public, but he will still have a hard time agreeing to end the war.
Kelly adds that Putin may have been hurt by the war, but he “didn’t break.” After all, the Russian leader used domestic military production to prop up the economy and relied on a network of countries to circumvent international sanctions — such as China, India, Iran, and North Korea.
