In the months leading up to February 24, 2022, the day Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Joe Biden warned that such an action would trigger “the most severe sanctions that have ever been imposed”—a threat that many European leaders echoed.

To Daleep Singh, the White House’s top international economic adviser at the time, Biden’s threat could mean only one thing: freezing Russia’s central-bank reserves. The Central Bank of Russia held more than $630 billion in assets, making it the largest sanctions target in modern history. If any entity was too big to sanction, this was it. Maintaining the bank’s teeming coffers was Putin’s attempt to “sanctions-proof” his economy, ensuring that Russia could prop up the ruble and pay for imports even under financial attack. Yet about half of the bank’s reserves were in dollars, euros, and pounds, which in practice left them vulnerable to Western sanctions. At the stroke of a pen, U.S. and European leaders could order their banks to block the accounts of Russia’s central bank, rendering much of Putin’s cash pile inaccessible.

This essay has been adapted from Edward Fishman’s new book, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare.

“Big nations don’t bluff”: This mantra, which Biden was fond of reciting, rang in Singh’s ears the day after Putin invaded Ukraine. Sanctions on the Central Bank of Russia, Singh believed, would put Biden’s credo into action. The option was so extreme that it had never received thorough vetting on either side of the Atlantic. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was concerned that freezing the central-bank reserves would push other countries away from using the dollar as their go-to reserve currency. The dollar’s global dominance allows America to absorb economic shocks, borrow cheaply, and run large deficits. Yellen was uncomfortable risking these privileges for the sake of punishing Putin.

But in Europe, a momentous political shift was under way, with street protests against the Russian invasion drawing out hundreds of thousands of people. Singh’s European counterparts assured him that if the White House was ready to sanction Russia’s central bank, their governments would follow. Yellen was hard to convince until a phone call from Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, her old colleague from his tenure as head of the European Central Bank, persuaded her to relent. Within hours, the United States was on board.

Just two days after the invasion began, the members of the G7 issued a statement committing to target Russia’s central bank. “You heard about Fortress Russia—the war chest of $630 billion of foreign reserves,” Singh told reporters in a background briefing. “This will show that Russia’s supposed sanctions-proofing of its economy is a myth.”

Three years on, the sanctions against Russia’s central bank stand as both a triumph and a warning. In narrow terms, they worked exactly as Singh hoped: They caught Putin off guard and deprived him of his deepest pool of hard currency. The frozen reserves, valued at nearly $300 billion, have also helped underwrite tens of billions in Western aid to Ukraine. As Donald Trump embarks on his much-anticipated peace negotiations, they will provide important leverage—Putin will be desperate to recover them, while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will press to redirect them toward his country’s reconstruction.

[Read: The sanctions against Russia are starting to work]

But the sanctions failed in one crucial way. The fact that Moscow was blindsided by them suggests it grossly underestimated the severity of the penalties it would face. Although the U.S. and its allies had developed an extensive menu of possible sanctions before the invasion, they never reached consensus on how far they were willing to go. They left Putin to divine the meaning of “the most severe sanctions that have ever been imposed,” and Putin—as he so often did—read Western ambiguity as weakness.

If Biden and other world leaders had committed ahead of time to the actions they would eventually take, they might have had a much better chance of staving off Putin’s invasion. Deterrence can’t work if your adversary underestimates your ability or willingness to act. Putin never saw the sanctions coming—and that was precisely the problem.

“The acme of skill,” Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, is not “to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles,” but “to subdue the enemy without fighting.” Economic warfare has always offered nations a way to advance their interests without resorting to violence.

For most of history, imposing serious economic pressure required the deployment of military forces: ships blockading ports, armies laying siege to cities. As recently as the 1990s, the United Nations embargo on Iraq relied on warships patrolling the Persian Gulf. But over the past two decades, America has pioneered a more potent and nimble style of economic warfare. In a world where finance and supply chains are deeply globalized, Washington learned to leverage economic chokepoints—such as the U.S. dollar and advanced semiconductor technology—against rivals. Now, by merely signing documents in the Oval Office, the president can impose economic penalties far more severe than the blockades and embargoes of old.

This new age of economic warfare began innocuously enough: with Stuart Levey, a little-known lawyer who led a brand-new division of the Treasury Department from 2004 to 2011, trying to prove President George W. Bush wrong. Iran’s nuclear program was racing forward in the mid-2000s, and Bush lamented that America had “sanctioned ourselves out of influence” with the country. The only options, seemingly, were to go to war or let Iran join the ranks of nuclear-armed states. Levey set out to show there was another way.

In the years that followed, Levey and his colleagues overhauled U.S. sanctions policy. They drew on their legal expertise and their understanding of the financial sector’s risk calculus to conscript multinational banks into a campaign to isolate Iran from the world economy. Prodded by Congress, they tested the limits of their new economic weapons—they even found a way to freeze more than $100 billion of Iran’s oil money in overseas escrow accounts. Over time, this economic pressure helped spur political change in Iran and opened a path to the 2015 nuclear deal. The United States had managed to put Iran’s nuclear aspirations on hold—as Barack Obama boasted, “without firing a shot.”

The Iran deal had its critics, but one thing was beyond dispute—sanctions worked. In fact, the deal’s toughest opponents argued that America had traded them away too soon: The pressure was working so well that if the U.S. had just kept it up, the Iranian regime might have permanently relinquished its entire nuclear program or, better yet, collapsed. But a key reason the sanctions were so successful—winning grudging acceptance even from the likes of China, India, and Russia—was that Obama expressly deemed them a means to an end. They were intended to pressure Iran to concede to nuclear constraints and then be lifted. This is just how things played out.  

As the Iran deal was being negotiated, Putin shocked the world by sending “little green men” into Crimea and swiftly annexing the territory. Determined to punish Russia for this flagrant imperial land grab, but unwilling to risk war with a fellow nuclear power, U.S. officials again reached into their economic arsenal. Russia was a trickier target than Iran: It was much bigger and more integral to the world economy. European countries depended on Russian oil and gas. If sanctions wreaked too much havoc on Russia, the fallout would quickly reach Europe and then the United States. As a result, the Obama administration stitched together a sanctions coalition with the European Union and the rest of the G7. This alliance imposed sanctions that, surgical though they were, quickly sent Russia’s economy spiraling. The collapse of world oil prices in the second half of 2014 supercharged their impact, and by early the following year, Putin was eager for a truce.

Up until that point, the United States had used its economic arsenal wisely. But then it made a costly error. The unexpected severity of Russia’s economic crisis frightened European leaders, who feared it would spill over into their own countries. Instead of insisting that the West press its advantage, Obama endorsed a European-brokered cease-fire to freeze the Ukraine conflict and refrained from ratcheting up pressure—even after Russia violated the cease-fire and interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Putin drew a lesson from this experience: Western leaders lacked the stomach to sustain real economic pressure on Russia—and even if they proved him wrong, he could just wait them out.

[Watch: ‘War and cheese’]

That assumption held up when Trump came to power. Far from strengthening sanctions on Russia, he allowed them to atrophy. Meanwhile, he ripped up the Iran deal and tried to bludgeon Tehran with “maximum pressure” sanctions, leading Iran to restart its nuclear program. Trump’s policies on Russia and Iran gravely undermined the strategic value of American sanctions. Putin had done little to concede to U.S. demands, yet he was rewarded with a reprieve. Iran, by contrast, had complied with a deal to dismantle core parts of its nuclear program—only for the U.S. to reimpose penalties two years later. World leaders drew another troubling lesson: Even if they did exactly what Washington asked of them, they might still face the brunt of America’s economic arsenal.   

U.S. sanctions policy grew more arbitrary under Trump. With the exception of Russia, he was as sanctions-happy a president as America has ever had. He levied so many sanctions—against Iran, Venezuela, China—that countries all over the world took steps to shield themselves. The Russian central bank traded most of its dollars for euros and gold. China sought new ways to promote its own currency internationally, releasing a digital version of the renminbi and creating a homegrown financial-messaging-and-settlement platform.

U.S. officials often initiate sanctions campaigns in the heat of a crisis and scramble to react to unfolding events. The latest iteration of American economic warfare, following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, has been different: U.S. officials knew months ahead of time that Russia was gearing up to invade. They had the opportunity to use sanctions to deter Russian aggression rather than punish it after the fact. But following years of deploying economic weapons in an erratic and incoherent manner, the opportunity went to waste.

After the central-bank freeze that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, subsequent sanctions were a disappointment. If Moscow didn’t foresee the one big sanction that might have deterred the invasion, it certainly did foresee the smaller ones that were coming—and had plenty of time and resources to prepare.

[Read: What makes Russia’s economy so sanctions-resistant?]

In December 2022, months after the move against the central bank, the United States and its allies made their first serious attempt to target the lifeblood of Russia’s economy: oil sales. Under the new regulations, known as the “price cap,” U.S. and European firms could no longer ship, insure, or finance cargoes of Russian oil sold for any price above $60 a barrel.

The price cap was not as extreme as the central-bank freeze, but it packed a punch. A typical barrel of Russian oil was shipped aboard a European tanker whose insurance was British and whose cargo was paid for in U.S. dollars. The West had a near-monopoly on maritime insurance, in particular: Its insurers covered more than 95 percent of all oil cargoes. Now Western governments were exploiting this dominance to stem the flow of petrodollars to the Kremlin.

But as with the central-bank sanctions, America and its allies were too worried about economic blowback to act decisively. They took nearly 10 months after the start of the invasion to impose the price cap. As a result, Russia raked in a whopping $220 billion from oil exports in 2022, contributing to the highest single-year energy revenues the Kremlin has ever collected. Perversely, this was almost as much hard currency as the West had frozen when it sanctioned Russia’s central bank. To make matters worse, the West also built loopholes into the policy to avoid even the slightest possibility that it could cause an oil-supply crunch and exacerbate inflation. Russia took full advantage, amassing a “shadow fleet” of secondhand oil tankers and designing state-backed insurance schemes—and the impact of the price cap eroded. Today, with Trump back in the White House, the prospects of strengthening the policy look slim.

The United States uses sanctions a lot, and yet it has hardly perfected the art of economic warfare. Compared with the way the Pentagon prepares for conventional war—including recruiting and training professional troops, devising plans, and rehearsing them repeatedly—the U.S. agencies responsible for economic war are still playing in the minor leagues, using ad hoc processes and a rudimentary policy apparatus.

Sanctions are like antibiotics: They work well when used correctly but cause a host of problems when used excessively or inappropriately. For some purposes, they’re simply the wrong tool; sanctions didn’t change the regimes in Iran or Venezuela, despite the best efforts of the last Trump administration, nor could they be expected to.

In other cases, sanctions have the potential to work, but only if they’re administered in strong enough doses over a long enough period to avoid resistance. This is the problem the United States has faced in confronting Russia: Washington and its allies ratcheted up sanctions incrementally, giving Russia time to adapt and build resistance along the way. As a result, Biden failed to deliver a knockout blow to Russia’s economy—and Putin, yet again, seems confident he can get a reprieve, no matter what he does in Ukraine.     

This article has been adapted from Edward Fishman’s new book, Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare.

Out of all the ugly and dishonest things that Donald Trump said about Volodymyr Zelensky last week, the ugliest was not dishonest at all. “I’ve been watching for years, and I’ve been watching him negotiate with no cards,” Trump said of Zelensky. “He has no cards. And you get sick of it.”

Sick of it. Stop and think about that phrase. Trump inserted it into a stream of falsehoods, produced over several days, many of which he must have known to be untrue. He has been lying about the origins of the war, about Zelensky’s popular support, about the levels of U.S. funding for Ukraine, about the extent of European funding, about the status of previous negotiations. But sick of it—that, at least, has the ring of truth. Trump is genuinely bored of the war. He doesn’t understand it. He doesn’t know why it started. He doesn’t know how to stop it. He wants to change the channel and watch something else.

Also, he has no cards: That probably reflects Trump’s true belief as well. For Donald Trump, the only real cards are big money and hard power. Players, in his world, are people whom no court can block, no journalist can question, no legislator can oppose. People whose money can buy anything, whose power cannot be checked or balanced.  

But Trump is wrong. Zelensky might not have money, and he might not be a brutal dictator like Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. Yet he does have other kinds of power. He leads a society that organizes itself, with local leaders who have legitimacy and a tech sector dedicated to victory—a society that has come, around the world, to symbolize bravery. He has a message that moves people to act instead of just scaring them into silence.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Incompetence leavened with malignity]

Today, on the third anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion, stop and remember what happened on the night it began. I’d had plane tickets to Kyiv that week, but my flights were canceled, and on February 24, 2022, I stayed up and watched the war’s start on television, listening to the sounds of explosions coming from the screen. That night, everyone expected Russia to overrun its much smaller neighbor. But that capitulation never came. Six weeks later, I made it to Kyiv and heard and saw what had happened instead: the hit squads that had tried to kill Zelensky; the murders of civilians in Bucha, a Kyiv suburb; the Ukrainian journalists who had driven around the country trying to tell the story; the civilians who had joined the army; the waitresses who had started cooking for the troops.

Three years later, against all obstacles and all predictions, the civilians, journalists, soldiers, and waitresses are still working together. Ukraine’s million-man army, the largest in Europe, is still fighting. Ukraine’s civil society is still volunteering, still raising money for the troops. Ukraine’s defense industry has transformed itself. In 2022, I saw tiny workshops that made drones out of what looked like cardboard and glue. In 2024, Ukrainian factories produced 1.5 million drones, and this year they will make many more. Teams of people in underground control centers now use bespoke software to hit thousands of targets every month. Their work explains why Russia has taken territory only slowly, despite being on the offensive for most of the past year. At the current rate of advance, the Institute for the Study of War estimates, Russia would need 83 years to capture the remaining 80 percent of Ukraine.

Russia doesn’t have the resources to fight indefinitely against that kind of organization and determination. Putin’s military production is cannibalizing his country’s civilian economy. Inflation has skyrocketed. The only way Putin wins now—the only way he finally succeeds in destroying Ukraine’s sovereignty—is by persuading Ukraine’s allies to be sick of the war.

He wins by persuading Trump to cut off Ukraine, because Zelensky has no cards, and by convincing Europeans that they can’t win either. That’s why Putin’s money bought American influencers in Tennessee and probably many other places, too, and it’s why his propaganda supported the pro-Russian far right in Germany’s elections yesterday, along with other pro-Russian parties across the continent. Putin can’t win on the ground, but he can win in his enemies’ heads—if we let him.

[Robert Kagan: Trump is facing a catastrophic defeat in Ukraine]

Europeans and Americans, Democrats and Republicans, can resist the temptations of boredom and distraction. We can refuse to give in to the cynicism, nihilism, and lies of Russian propaganda, even when they are repeated by the president of the United States. And we can refuse to believe that Ukraine has no cards, that we have no cards, and that the democratic world has no sources of power other than Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Three years into this war, the stakes are the same as they were on the night it began. Putin, who yesterday launched one of the largest attacks of the entire war, still seeks to destroy Ukraine’s sovereignty, civil society, democracy, and freedom. He still wants to show the world that the era of American power is over, that America will not defend allies in Europe, Asia, or anywhere else. He still wants to nullify the rules and laws that kept Europe peaceful for eight decades, to create instability and fear, not only in the countries that border Russia but across the continent and even around the world.   

The war will only end, truly end, when Putin gives up these goals. Don’t accept any peace deal that allows him to keep them.

During a visit to Brussels, Vitali Klitschko stressed the need to stand united behind Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky amid criticism from the United States.

The prime minister called Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky for the second time in four days.

For eight decades, America’s alliances with other democracies have been the bedrock of American foreign policy, trade policy, and cultural influence. American investments in allies’ security helped keep the peace in formerly unstable parts of the world, allowing democratic societies from Germany to Japan to prosper, by preventing predatory autocracies from destroying them. We prospered too. Thanks to its allies, the U.S. obtained unprecedented political and economic influence in Europe and Asia, and unprecedented power everywhere else.

The Trump administration is now bringing the post-World War II era to an end. No one should be surprised: This was predictable, and indeed was predicted. Donald Trump has been a vocal opponent to what he considers to be the high cost of U.S. alliances, since 1987, when he bought full-page ads in three newspapers, claiming that “for decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States.” In 2000, he wrote that “pulling back from Europe would save this country millions of dollars annually.”  

[David Frum: A cautionary tale for Trump appointees]

In his first term as president, Trump’s Cabinet members and advisers repeatedly restrained him from insulting allies or severing military and diplomatic links. Now he has surrounded himself with people who are prepared to enact and even encourage the radical changes he always wanted, cheered on by thousands of anonymous accounts on X. Of course America’s relations with allies are complex and multilayered, and in some form they will endure. But American allies, especially in Europe, need to face up to this new reality and make some dramatic changes.

This shift began with what felt at first like ad hoc, perhaps unserious attacks on the sovereignty of Denmark, Canada, and Panama. Events over the past week or so have provided further clarification. At a major multinational security conference in Munich last weekend, I sat in a room full of defense ministers, four-star generals and security analysts—people who procure ammunition for Ukrainian missile defense, or who worry about Russian ships cutting fiber optic cables in the Baltic Sea. All of them were expecting Vice President J. D. Vance to address these kinds of concerns. Instead, Vance told a series of misleading stories designed to demonstrate that European democracies aren’t democratic.

Vance, a leading member of the political movement that launched the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, had to know what he was doing: flipping the narrative, turning arguments upside down in the manner of a Russian propagandist. But the content of his speech, which cherry-picked stories designed to portray the U.K., Germany, Romania and other democracies as enemies of free expression, was less important than the fact that he gave a speech that wasn’t about the very real Russian threat to the continent at all: He was telling Europeans present that he wasn’t interested in discussing their security. They got the message.

A few days before the Munich conference, the U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went to Kyiv and presented President Volodymyr Zelensky with a two-page document and asked him to sign. Details of this proposed agreement began to leak last weekend. It calls for the U.S. to take 50 percent of all “economic value associated with resources of Ukraine,” including “mineral resources, oil and gas resources, ports, other infrastructure,” not just now but forever, as the British newspaper The Telegraph reported and others confirmed: “For all future licenses the U.S. will have a right of first refusal for the purchase of exportable minerals,” the document says.

Europeans have contributed more resources to Ukraine’s military and economic survival than the U.S. has—despite Trump’s repeated, untruthful claims to the contrary—but would presumably be cut out of this deal. The Ukrainians, who have suffered hundreds of thousands of military and civilian casualties, whose cities have been turned to rubble, whose national finances have been decimated, and whose personal lives disrupted, are offered nothing in exchange for half their wealth: No security guarantees, no investment, nothing. These terms resemble nothing so much as the Versailles Treaty imposed on a defeated Germany after World War I, and are dramatically worse than those imposed on Germany and Japan after World War II. As currently written, they could not be carried out under Ukrainian law. Zelensky, for the moment, did not sign.

The cruelty of the document is remarkable, as are its ambiguities. People who have seen it say it does not explain exactly which Americans would be the beneficiaries of this deal. Perhaps the American government? Perhaps the president’s friends and business partners? The document also reportedly says that all disputes would be resolved by courts in New York, as if a New York court could adjudicate something so open-ended. But the document at least served to reiterate Vance’s message, and to add a new element: The U.S. doesn’t need or want allies—unless they can pay.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Incompetence mixed with malignity]

Trump made this new policy even clearer during a press conference on Tuesday, when he made a series of false statements about Ukraine that he later repeated in social-media posts. No, Ukraine did not start the war; Russia launched the invasion, Russia is still attacking Ukraine, and Russia could end the war today if it stopped attacking Ukraine. No, the U.S. did not spend “$350 billion” in Ukraine. No, Volodymyr Zelensky does not have “four percent” popularity; the real number is more than 50 percent, higher than Trump’s. No, Zelensky is not a “dictator”; Ukrainians, unlike Russians, freely debate and argue about politics. But because they are under daily threat of attack, the Ukrainian government has declared martial law and postponed elections until a ceasefire. With so many people displaced and so many soldiers at the front line, Ukrainians fear an election would be dangerous, unfair, and an obvious target for Russian manipulation, as even Zelensky’s harshest critics agree.

I can’t tell you exactly why Trump chose to repeat these falsehoods, or why his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, once made a TikTok video of herself repeating them, or why they directly echo the Russian propaganda that has long sought to portray Zelensky, along with the nation of Ukraine itself, as illegitimate. Plenty of Republicans, including some I met in Munich, know that these claims aren’t true. American allies must draw a lesson: Trump is demonstrating that he can and will align himself with whoever he wants—Vladimir Putin, Mohammed bin Salman, perhaps eventually with Xi Jinping—in defiance of past treaties and agreements. In order to bully Ukraine into signing unfavorable deals, he is even willing to distort reality.

In these circumstances, everything is up for grabs, any relationship is subject to bargaining. Zelensky knows this already: It was he who originally proposed giving Americans access to rare-earth metals, in order to appeal to a transactional U.S. president, although without imagining that the concession would be in exchange for nothing. Zelensky is trying to acquire other kinds of leverage too. This week he flew to Istanbul, where the Turkish leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, reaffirmed his support for Ukraine’s sovereignty, in defiance of the U.S.

Europeans need to act in the same spirit and acquire some leverage too. At the start of this war, international financial institutions froze $300 billion of Russian assets, mostly in Europe. There are sound legal and moral arguments for seizing these assets and giving them to Ukraine, both to reconstruct the country and to allow Ukrainians to continue to defend themselves. Now there are urgent political reasons too. This is enough money to impress Trump; to buy weapons, including American weapons; and to spook the Russians into fearing the war will not end as quickly as they now hope.

Europeans also need to create, immediately, a coalition of the willing that is prepared to militarily defend Ukraine, as well as other allies who might be attacked in future. Deterrence has a psychological component. If Russia refrains from attacking Lithuania, or indeed Germany, that is in part because Putin fears a U.S. response. Now that the U.S. has become unpredictable, Europeans have to provide the deterrence themselves. There is talk of a defense bank to finance new military investment, but that’s just the beginning. They need to radically increase military spending, planning and coordination. If they speak and act as a group, Europeans will have more power and more credibility than if they speak separately.

Sometime in the future, historians will wonder what might have been, what kind of peace could have been achieved, if Trump had done what he himself suggested doing a few weeks ago: keep up military aid for Ukraine; tighten sanctions on Russia; bully the aggressors, not their victims, into suing for peace. Perhaps we might also someday find out who or what, exactly, changed his mind, why he chose to follow a policy that seems designed to encourage not just Russia but Russia’s allies in China, Iran, North Korea, Belarus, Cuba, or Venezuela. But now is not the moment to speculate, or to imagine alternate storylines. Now is the moment to recognize the scale of the seismic change now underway, and to find new ways to live in the world that a very different kind of America is beginning to create.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

This week, Donald Trump falsely accused Ukraine of starting a war against a much larger neighbor, inviting invasion and mass death. At this point, Trump—who has a history of trusting Russian President Vladimir Putin more than he trusts the Americans who are sworn to defend the United States—may even believe it. Casting Ukraine as the aggressor (and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a “dictator,” which Trump did today) makes political sense for Trump, who is innately deferential to Putin, and likely views the conflict as a distraction from his own personal and political agendas. The U.S. president has now chosen to throw America to Putin’s side and is more than willing to see this war end on Russian terms.

Repeating lies, however, does not make them true.

Russia, and specifically Putin, launched this war in 2014 and widened it in 2022. The information and media ecosystem around Trump and the Republican Party has tried for years to submerge the Russian war against Ukraine in a sump of moral relativism, because many in the GOP admire Putin as some sort of Christian strongman. But Putin is making war on a country that is mostly composed of his fellow Orthodox Christians, solely based on his own grandiose fantasies.

The most important thing to understand about the recent history of Russian aggression against its neighbors, and especially against Ukraine, is that Putin is not a product of “Russia” or even of Russian nationalism. He is, in every way, a son of the Soviet Union. He is a man of “the system,” the kind of person who, after the fall of the U.S.S.R., was sometimes called a sovok, which translates roughly into “Soviet guy”—someone who never left the mindset of the old regime. (This is a man who, for example, changed the post-Soviet Russian national anthem back to the old Soviet musical score, with updated words.)

Some in the West want to believe that Putin is merely a traditional player of the game of power politics. This is nonsense: He is a poor strategist precisely because he is so driven by emotion and aggression. His worldview is a toxic amalgam of Russian historical romanticism and Soviet nostalgia; he clearly misses being part of an empire that dared to confront the West and could make the rest of the world tremble with a word from Red Square. (This Sovietism is one reason for his bone-deep hatred of NATO.) He sees himself as the heir to Peter the Great and Stalin, because the greatest days of his life were the mid-1970s, when he was in his 20s and the Soviet Union he served so faithfully looked to be ascendant over the declining United States.

Putin’s Soviet nostalgia prevents him from seeing the other nations that emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet collapse as actual countries. He knows that their borders were drawn by Stalinist mapmakers in Moscow (as were those of the current Russian Federation, a fact that Putin ignores most of the time), and he resents that these new states fled from the Kremlin’s control as soon as they were able to leave. He is especially stung by the emergence of an independent Ukraine; back in 2008, he made a point of telling President George W. Bush that Ukraine was not a real country.

For years, Putin claimed that he had no interest in reconstituting the U.S.S.R. or the Russian Empire. He may have been lying, or he may have changed his mind over time. But when Ukrainians deposed a pro-Russian leader in 2014 and drove him out of the country, Putin lashed out in fury, ordering the seizure of Crimea, a Russian-majority area that was historically part of Russia but was transferred to Ukraine during the Soviet period. This was the true beginning of the Russian-Ukrainian war.

The Russians camped on these territories for years, “freezing” the conflict in place while Ukraine and the West tried carrots and sticks, eventually realizing that Putin was never going to cede any of the ground he’d stolen. The situation might have remained in stasis forever had Putin not decided to try to seize the entire Ukrainian nation of some 40 million people and almost a quarter of a million square miles.

Why did Putin throw the dice on such a stupid and reckless gamble? Trump and many of his supporters answer this question with chaff bursts of nonsense about how the Russians felt legitimately threatened by Western influence in Ukraine, and specifically that Ukraine brought this nightmare on itself by seeking to join NATO. The Russians, for their part, have made similar arguments. NATO membership has for years been an aspirational goal for Ukraine, one that NATO politely supported—but without ever moving to make it happen. (Once Putin invaded, NATO and Ukraine sped up talks, in another example of the Russian president bringing about events he claimed to be stopping.)

Putin himself tends to complicate life for his propagandists by departing from the rationalizations offered by the Kremlin’s useful idiots. Trump and other Western apologists would have an easier time of explaining away the war if the man who started it would only get on the same page as them; instead, Putin has said, many times, that Ukraine is Russian territory, that it has always been and will always be part of Russia, that it is full of Nazis, and that it must be cleansed and returned to Moscow’s control.

One possibility here is that Putin may have dreamed up a quick war of conquest while in COVID isolation, where only a tight circle of sycophants could regularly see him. These would include his defense and intelligence chiefs, along with a small coterie of Russian clerics who have for years been trying to convince Putin that he has a divine mission to restore the “Russian world” to its former greatness, a project that dovetails nicely with his constant anger about the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

In any case, the Russian president’s decision to go to war was his own, a plot cooked up in the Kremlin rather than being the unforeseeable result of some kind of ongoing geopolitical crisis. Here, Putin was the victim of his own form of autocratic government: No one around him had the courage (or perhaps even the proper information) to warn him that his military was in rough shape, that the Ukrainians had improved as fighters since the seizure of Crimea, and that the West would not sit by the way it did in 2014. Western experts got some of this wrong too—back in 2022, I was very worried that Russia might win the war quickly—but Putin was apparently fed a farrago of reassuring lies about how Russian troops would be greeted as liberators.

All anyone needs to know about “who started it” is in the conflict’s timeline: In 2014, Putin vented his rage at Ukrainians for actually choosing their own form of government by seizing large swaths of eastern Ukraine—thus ensuring that the remainder of the country would become more united, pro-Western, and anti-Russian than ever before. Eight years later, the Russian dictator came to believe that Ukraine was ready to fall into his hands, and he embarked on a war of conquest. When Ukraine held together in the face of the 2022 Russian invasion and began to inflict severe casualties on the Russians, Putin resorted to war crimes, butchering innocent people, kidnapping Ukrainian children, and attacking civilian targets as a way of punishing Ukraine for its insolence.

This is the reality of the Ukraine war. Some Republicans, such as former Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Roger Wicker, the chair of the Armed Services Committee, know all this, and have told the truth. If only Donald Trump knew it too.

Related:

The party of Reagan is selling out Ukraine. Listen closely to what Hegseth is saying.

Today’s News

The Trump administration rescinded federal approval of New York’s congestion-pricing program, which went into effect last month. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Trump lives in a Russian-constructed “disinformation space.” In response, Trump called Zelensky “a Dictator without Elections.” A federal judge held a hearing about U.S. prosecutors’ attempt to dismiss the corruption charges against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Trump could start a new pipeline fight, Zoë Schlanger writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

More From The Atlantic

Trump hands the world to China. New York belongs to Trump now. Intimidating Americans will not work. The NIH memo that undercut universities came directly from Trump officials. Eliot A. Cohen: Incompetence leavened with malignity

Evening Read

Illustration by Julia Rothman

Flaco Lives

By Kaitlyn Tiffany

Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl that escaped from the Central Park Zoo in 2023, is still with us (even though he’s dead).

He spent about a year roaming New York City—hunting in the park, hooting from fire escapes—and in that time, he became a celebrity. Then he flew into a building while disoriented by rat poison and pigeon herpes. It has been a year since Flaco’s untimely death, and now the New York Historical is hosting an exhibition memorializing his life. I went on opening day, in the middle of business hours, and found the space packed with Flaco fans.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

Hélène Blanc

Read. Haley Mlotek’s new book is a divorce memoir with no lessons, Rachel Vorona Cote writes.

Watch. The third season of Yellowjackets (streaming on Paramount+). The show is more playful and ridiculous than ever before, Shirley Li writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Here’s a warning story for the patriotic Americans who have gone to work for President Donald Trump.

President Richard Nixon recruited an eminent Republican lawyer, William P. Rogers, as his secretary of state. Over the ensuing four years, Nixon humiliated Rogers again and again and again.

The worst of the humiliations involved the negotiation of peace in Vietnam. While Rogers nominally presided over U.S. diplomacy, Nixon opened secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese. Rogers was kept completely in the dark. His only role came at the end, when it fell to him to sign the documents that doomed South Vietnam.

[Eliot A. Cohen: Incompetence leavened with malignity]

That sad history now appears to be repeating itself. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is in Saudi Arabia pretending to be in charge of negotiations between the U.S. and Russia over the fate of Ukraine. Rubio is the perfect fall guy for this assignment. Confirmed as secretary of state by a 99–0 vote, he’s won praise from all sides for his commitment to American institutions and values.

Meanwhile, the real decisions are being made elsewhere. Trump yesterday blamed Ukraine for starting the war with Russia. From the Oval Office, he is preparing a deal to give Russia the victory over Ukraine that it failed to win on the battlefield. The contemplated Trump deal would surrender Ukrainian territory to Russia and bar Ukraine from ever joining NATO. Trump wants an early end to sanctions on Russia, another unilateral U.S. concession to Putin. Yesterday, Trump accepted the Russian position that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky should have to face reelection before peace talks begin. Again, no such demand is being made of Putin.  

Trump has demanded half a trillion dollars in economic concessions from Ukraine. If Ukraine says yes, its economic recovery will be wrecked before it starts. If, more realistically, Ukraine refuses, then Trump has gained his pretext for cutting Ukraine off from future U.S. security assistance. Meanwhile, Vice President J. D. Vance has scolded America’s NATO allies for trying to police the disinformation pumped out by Trump’s largest donor and de facto co-president, Elon Musk. Both Vance and Musk are outspoken opponents of Ukraine’s fight for survival. Trump is even considering a Russian invitation to join Putin in Moscow to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Russian “Victory Day” over Nazi Germany, which will now also symbolize Putin’s own victory over Ukraine and NATO.

This morning, Trump condemned Zelensky as a “dictator” and wildly exaggerated U.S. contributions to Ukraine’s self-defense by 400 percent, while also denying and denigrating Europe’s larger contributions.

Trump is surrounded by more normal Republicans trying to ingratiate themselves into his pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine inner circle. When Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination, then-Senator Rubio abruptly reversed his previous support for Ukraine aid. In February 2024, Rubio numbered among the 29 senators voting against an aid package to Ukraine and Israel—a vote he justified in Trump-style language that falsely claimed that aid to Ukraine came at the price of enforcement efforts along the U.S. southern border. Then-Representative Michael Waltz, who is now Trump’s national security adviser, turned his coat at almost exactly the same time.

Both men may have imagined that they were exercising a tactical retreat to serve a bigger cause, preserving their credibility with Trump in order to protect America and its allies from Trump’s worst instincts. Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special adviser on Ukraine, may entertain a similar hope.

But the evidence of past days suggests they are all deluding themselves. Trump wants to abandon Ukraine more than he has wanted to do anything as president, except possibly protect and pardon the January 6 criminals. His aides are playing the part of William P. Rogers, even as the real action is occurring all around them.

[Read: The party of Reagan is selling out Ukraine]

If that’s not how they want to be remembered, they have to act fast. They have to begin by recognizing that this president wants to destroy Ukraine—and is surrounded by enablers who want to help him.

Perhaps Trump can be corralled, but if the pro-American faction within this administration wants to make itself felt, it has to be prepared to play as tough and rough as the pro-Putin faction from the president on down.

William P. Rogers was eventually fired by Nixon for his unwillingness to say and do all that Nixon wanted to defend Nixon during the Wagergate scandal. That’s the fate hanging over all those who joined this administration hoping to make it better. Trump is determined to make it worse. He’s the president, and he’s backed in his anti-Ukraine views by the people he most cares about. The noisy resignation is the ultimate weapon of the political appointee, and people inside this administration who care about America’s good name had best be prepared to use it. Otherwise, they will be used as fools and fronts in an administration that seems to be placing Russian interests ahead of America’s own.

America’s president calls Ukraine’s president “a dictator”

A year ago this week, Senator John Thune and 21 of his Republican colleagues defied Donald Trump and voted to send $60 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine as it tried to ward off Russia’s invasion. “America cannot retreat from the world stage,” the South Dakota senator later said, explaining his vote. “American leadership is desperately needed now more than I think any time in recent history, and we need to make sure that Ukraine has the weaponry and the resources that it needs to defeat the Russians.”

The vote was gutsy: It drew a rebuke from Trump, who was then heavily favored to capture the GOP presidential nomination. And it was taken even though the bipartisan bill faced uncertain odds in the House, until Speaker Mike Johnson backed it two months later. The measure passed, and assistance continued to flow to Kyiv.

Twelve months later, Ukraine’s future is even more imperiled. Over the past week, the Trump administration has made clear that the United States will no longer be Kyiv’s largest and most crucial supporter, and that it might sideline Ukrainians from negotiations meant to bring an end to the war. But the response from Republicans has been noticeably different. Thune, now Senate majority leader, has remained silent, as have many of his GOP colleagues. He did not respond to interview requests this week.

[Read: The accidental speaker]

Republican capitulation to Trump is a familiar story line, but the moment is nonetheless worth marking. With a few, mostly timid exceptions, the party that once prided itself on standing up to Moscow—the party of Cold Warriors Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush—has bowed to a president who himself is bowing to an adversary. And as Trump officials yesterday embarked on negotiations with their Russian counterparts that could reward Vladimir Putin’s gamble on seizing territory from a sovereign neighbor, Republicans faced a new, extraordinarily high-profile test: whether to prioritize their long-held national-security beliefs or their loyalty to the president.

“The founders intended Congress to be first among equals of the three branches of government, [but] you’d be hard pressed to know it though looking at today’s Republican-controlled Congress,” Richard Haas, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, told me. Haass, who worked in three previous Republican administrations, said that Republicans have been “not just subservient but invisible,” while “not holding hearings or otherwise challenging the Trump administration’s unconditional embrace of Putin’s Russia, the dismissal of Europe’s interests and Ukraine’s demands.”

No representatives from Ukraine or other European nations were present at a hurriedly arranged meeting between U.S. and Russian officials yesterday in Saudi Arabia. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters afterward that Russia and the United States had agreed to work on a Ukraine peace deal and to explore “the incredible opportunities that exist to partner with the Russians” both geopolitically and economically. The message amounted to a dizzying change from President Joe Biden’s isolation of Moscow after the Ukraine invasion, which many Senate Republicans broadly supported.

Last week, Trump’s White House signaled a fundamental shift in relations with both Europe and Russia by stridently dismissing longtime democratic allies while looking to re-establish ties with the nuclear-armed autocracy to the east. The president prioritized a call with Putin over one with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and invited the Russian leader, and not the Ukrainian one, for multiple summit meetings. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ruled out Ukraine joining NATO or receiving substantial future American security guarantees as part of the negotiations to end the war. Vice President J. D. Vance upbraided European leaders for freezing the far right out of government in their nations. And then yesterday, at a Mar-a-Lago news conference, Trump chided Ukraine for the conflict, snapping, “You should never have been there,” and ignoring that it was Russia that invaded.

[Read: The day the Ukraine war ended]

Some Republicans in the Senate offered outright support for Trump’s Putin-friendly view of American security. “I don’t think anybody really believes Ukraine should be in NATO now,” Senator Eric Schmitt told reporters last week. “Unless you want World War III.”

Others took a more measured approach, expressing the wish that the U.S. would still support Ukraine—or at least not yield to Putin—while still avoiding outright criticism of Trump. Senator John Cornyn, who voted for the aid package last year, told reporters after Trump’s call with Putin, “Ukraine ought to be the one to negotiate its own peace deal. I don’t think it should be imposed upon it by any other country, including ours. I’m hopeful.” But he added: “I can’t imagine President Trump giving up leverage. I don’t know what his strategy is for negotiating, but he’s pretty good at it. I think it surprises people, including me, sometimes what he’s able to pull off.”

Few represent the Republican Party’s evolution more than Senator Lindsey Graham, who spent years as the late Senator John McCain’s wingman, earning a reputation as a globe-trotting national security hawk. But he has since become one of Trump’s most obsequious supporters, often offering over-the-top praise of the president in a way that McCain would not have recognized. Over the weekend, Graham highlighted Trump’s plan to seize half of Ukraine’s rare earth minerals as payment for the United States’ support of Kyiv in the war, praising the scheme as “a game-changer.”

Zelensky immediately declined the proposal. But only a few Republican senators—including Mitch McConnell and Susan Collins—publicly opposed Trump’s concessions to Russia. “This was an unprovoked, unjustified invasion,” Collins told reporters. “I appreciate that the president is trying to achieve peace, but we have to make sure that Ukraine does not get the short end of a deal.” Senator Roger Wicker criticized Hegseth’s declaration last week that Ukraine would not recover its territory, deeming the statement a “rookie mistake” on the world stage. But the White House believes those voices of GOP dissent will stay in the minority, a senior administration official told me under the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy.

[Read: Trump is remaking the world in his image]

Trump has been eager to strengthen ties with Putin and asked aides to schedule a summit with the Russian leader in the weeks ahead, the official said. The president has told aides he believes that resetting relations with Russia reduces the chances of a nuclear war and will allow the U.S. new economic opportunities. American officials who spoke to reporters after the Riyadh meeting suggested that Biden-era sanctions on Russia could be lifted, and they did not spend much time in their briefing with reporters discussing Moscow’s violation of international law in invading Ukraine or the war crimes allegations against Putin for the attacks.

Instead, Rubio, whose own views have seemingly evolved since his time in the Senate as a Russia hawk who supported NATO, made a point to repeatedly praise Trump’s approach to Russia. “For three years,” Rubio said, “no one else has been able to bring something together like what we saw today, because Donald Trump is the only leader in the world that can.”

Thom Tillis, another Republican senator who strongly supported the funding bill a year ago, has continued to support Kyiv even though he cast the deciding vote to confirm Hegseth. Tillis, in fact, made a trip to Kyiv on Monday with two other senators, pledging support for the war effort even as the Trump team was landing in Riyadh to begin negotiations without Ukraine.

“I believe, first, we should understand that this is just the beginning of a dialogue. There is no specific framework that’s been mapped out yet,” Tillis said. “We expect that that will come to pass very quickly, we hope, and that Ukraine has to be front and center as a part of the negotiations to make sure that it’s something sustainable.”

Tillis then turned to his colleagues for validation. Both assented. But both were Democrats.

“After a long illness, the world as we know it has passed away,” a European friend recently said. A slightly premature obituary, perhaps, but not by much. The world has changed in fundamental ways, of which the Trump administration is both symptom and cause. There is no greater evidence than its emerging policy of imposing a cease-fire, which it incorrectly believes will bring peace, on Ukraine.

To a degree surprising for those who think of the Trump administration as a mere composite of malice, nihilism, and chaos, its Ukraine policy seems orchestrated, with three big pieces dropping yesterday alone.

The first was a speech from Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth at the 50-nation meeting of the Ukraine-defense-support group. Uncharacteristically, perhaps, his words deserve careful parsing, particularly because they have caused spasms of despair—some justified, most not—among supporters of Ukraine.

[Read: The day the Ukraine War ended]

He began by uttering the uncomfortable truth that it is unrealistic to expect a return to Ukraine’s 2014 borders. That is unfortunate but ineluctable, given the balance on the battlefield and the unwillingness of both the Biden administration and the current one to pour in the military resources that would give Ukraine a chance of defeating Russia. Unfair, tragically unnecessary, but true.

Hegseth ruled out NATO membership for Ukraine as part of a negotiated settlement—also unfair, but also inevitable. Ascension to NATO membership is a long process, and in any case, Russia’s surrogates in NATO—Hungary and now Slovakia—would almost certainly block Ukraine. Hegseth’s statement matters less than many suppose, however, because a new administration could just as easily reverse this policy.

The peace deal—which he insisted would be brokered by the United States but not, apparently, with Europeans as part of the negotiation—would have to be guaranteed by “European and non-European” military forces in Ukraine; U.S. forces, he emphasized, would not be stationed there. Left unsaid was whether, say, American combat aircraft and missiles might be permanently based in neighboring countries.

In one of the more interesting sections, he said:

To further enable effective diplomacy and drive down energy prices that fund the Russian war machine, President Trump is unleashing American energy production and encouraging other nations to do the same. Lower energy prices coupled with more effective enforcement of energy sanctions will help bring Russia to the table.

To European ears, it was probably blotted out by what came soon after:

Safeguarding European security must be an imperative for European members of NATO. As part of this, Europe must provide the overwhelming share of future lethal and nonlethal aid to Ukraine.

Not unreasonable, although, in fact, Europe has provided almost as much military aid to Ukraine as has the United States, and more humanitarian aid.

This was not a speech about abandoning Europe or, for that matter, Ukraine. Rather, Hegseth insisted that the United States has to focus on securing its own border and meeting the challenge posed by “Communist China”:

Our transatlantic alliance has endured for decades. And we fully expect that it will be sustained for generations to come. But this won’t just happen.

It will require our European allies to step into the arena and take ownership of conventional security on the continent.

The United States remains committed to the NATO alliance and to the defense partnership with Europe. Full stop.

The bottom line is that the administration will broker, and possibly coerce, a deal that is bad for Ukraine: a cease-fire along current lines, the deployment of European and other forces, and no chance of NATO membership in the near future. There was, however, talk of economic pressure on Russia, of security arrangements for Ukraine, and of an American interest in seeing the war end permanently. What was not mentioned, however, is also important. There was no talk of regime change in Ukraine or of limiting Ukraine’s armed forces and their development. There was no talk of abandoning or fundamentally restructuring NATO and the European security system. All of these contradict Vladimir Putin’s stated war aims.

None of this will assuage the fears of those who believe that Donald Trump is eager to sell Ukraine to Russia, bend to Putin’s every whim, and destroy NATO. But that view disregards some important evidence.

[Charles A. Kupchan: Trump is right that Pax Americana is over]

The second big piece of the Trump peace initiative was the president’s statement—a blurt rather than a formal release—on Truth Social declaring that he had had a long conversation with Putin and that they would at some point meet with each other. Reading it, one is reminded, once again, that Trump is a politician who is cunning but semiliterate and ignorant. The statement, unfortunately, assumes a commonality of interests and experiences that simply does not exist between Russia and the United States.

In a meeting, one has to expect that Putin, a former KGB case officer, will be far better at manipulating the vain and erratic Trump than the other way around. Moreover, when Trump said that he was just about to call Volodymyr Zelensky to brief him on the conversation, he revealed that he had already violated what should be a cardinal principle: no attempt to make a deal on Ukraine without Ukraine. His mistake is dangerous, possibly disastrously so. That said, however, it is clear from other statements (including Hegseth’s) that Trump believes that he is the one with economic leverage (true), that the war is stupid (true), and that Russia is in substantial difficulty (true).

The third initiative—curiously missed by much of the American press—was the first visit of a Cabinet-level official to Kyiv. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent presented a deal, the outlines of which are unclear, to give the United States access to Ukrainian minerals, and the Ukrainian government, unsurprisingly, responded positively. Crass and unworthy, no doubt, but a good thing. The United States has strong interests in securing a supply of rare earths from a friendly, aligned country rather than from China. If a deal goes ahead, the U.S. will have large security as well as economic interests in an independent Ukraine. And the mood music was good: “By increasing our economic commitment through a partnership with the government and people of Ukraine, that will provide—once this conflict is over—it will provide a long-term security shield for all Ukrainians,” Bessent said.

There were always two possible Trump Ukraine policies: the bad and the catastrophic. At the moment, this seems bad—but not yet catastrophic. A peace deal that leaves Ukraine with 80 percent of its territory and its independence, economic stability, and military potential unimpaired, and that stations European troops inside its territory while giving the U.S. a large economic interest in its future, is an acceptable if unfortunate and avoidable outcome.

Responsibility for this war arriving at a bad outcome rests with the Trump administration, which is nakedly transactional and, worse, either does not understand or does not care that this war is about a Russian bid to restore its imperial status. But others are to blame as well.

The Biden administration warned of the war but botched the provision of aid to Ukraine. It held back the quality and quantity of weapons needed for victory, decided to have no strategy for success other than “standing by Ukraine,” and inexcusably failed to explain to the American people why this war was, and is, central to American security interests. The Biden administration set the conditions for the current situation.

[From the March 2025 issue: Europe’s Elon Musk problem]

The other players responsible for this situation are America’s European allies. Not all of them, to be sure—the Nordic and Baltic states and Poland have stepped up, as Hegseth openly acknowledged. For more than a generation now, American leaders have insisted to Europe as a whole that Americans will not indefinitely bear the burden of Europe’s security. By and large, their European counterparts have smiled politely and ignored them. No wonder then, that the secretary of defense said:

The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress—and in the American body politic writ large—to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense—nations apparently willing and eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in European defense budgets.

Indeed, if current trends in the decline of European defense capabilities are not halted and reversed, future U.S. political leaders … may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.

Pete Hegseth? No, Robert Gates—who served as secretary of defense more than 14 years ago in the Obama administration—diagnosing the illness that has brought about this crisis. The good news, such as it is, is that the patient needed, and may yet respond to, the blunt truths about its condition that Secretary Hegseth expressed. Sometimes shock therapy, however inexpertly administered, can be part of the cure.