Trump and NATO just changed the Ukraine War

Now the Russian dictator Putin must be forced to choose

Hard as it is to take Donald Trump at his word, he and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte this week gave Vladimir Putin something to focus his mind. Their announcement of a new NATO-backed weapons corridor into Ukraine, routed through European allies and structured around arms sales rather than grants, ends for now the prospect of a wholesale American abandonment of Ukraine.

That’s actually something, and the Russian dictator must be pissed. Even if the new arrangement is cloaked in political deniability for Trump with his Ukraine-skeptical and Putin-appreciating MAGA base, and though it reinforces Trump’s shamefully transactional nature, it does also mean, if you cut through all the nonsense, that the US-European alliance to support Ukraine is in a way back on.

In their Oval Office meeting Monday (video below), Trump and Rutte repeatedly referred to a staggering figure: 100,000 Russian soldiers killed since January alone. It marked a rare moment of strategic clarity from Trump. He’s trying to rattle Putin having apparently noticed he’s in no rush to settle for a mere slice of eastern Ukraine, as candidate Trump clearly had expected he would. What Putin wants is a puppet in Kyiv so that Russia can control all of Ukraine.

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This suggests that Putin really is serious about trying to reestablish the former Soviet Empire. This cannot be allowed. On the other hand, however, Putin’s regime has shown a willingness to engage in nuclear blackmail, and a cornered Kremlin may not be bluffing. That’s a problem too. Either way, the new NATO structure for arming Ukraine grants Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky time, and it also places NATO — which Trump once disparaged as obsolete — back as the centerpiece of a Western alliance that might actually still exist. That too should alarm Putin, who, like Trump, made his own miscalculation that there is no limit to his ability to manipulate the simpleton in the White House.

What now? Well, to end the war without another three years of attrition, more is needed — and Trump, ironically, is uniquely suited to deliver it.