HAS TRUMP CHANGED HIS MIND ON RUSSIA?
Trump has always been mercurial and enjoyed surprising observers. This week’s U-turn fits that pattern. It’s possible Trump’s staff have convinced him that Russia is weaker than it appears, will not resort to nuclear weapons to win, and is economically vulnerable to threats of semi-permanent isolation and sanction.
All of this is correct. Russia is large enough compared to Ukraine that it can likely win a limited victory – carving off about 20 per cent of Ukrainian territory in the east – through sheer mass. And it is also true that Ukraine cannot militarily re-take much of what it has lost. But the cost to Putin and Russia of this limited victory has been enormous and will worsen if Russia cannot normalise its relationship with the rest of the world.
It is this vulnerability that Trump now seems to sense. Russia’s economy is on war footing, which generates the crushing mass necessary to make gains on the ground in Ukraine, but which comes with obvious costs. Civilian investment is starved as production is diverted to military needs. Financing for research, education, infrastructure, repair, and so on is cut. The population must endure shortages as civilian production dries up. Elevated military spending over the medium term generates economic stagnation.
Sanctions only make these pressures worse. Foreign inputs and technologies are lost. Many observers have noted, for example, that Russia is mostly using last-generation technologies in the Ukraine war because it either lacks the most cutting-edge ones or the components to manufacture them.
Russia is now dependent on China for all sorts of inputs it cannot produce itself or acquire from the West. Russia is increasingly a junior partner to China, without whose support Putin could not continue the war.
In short, Russia is winning what increasingly looks like a pyrrhic victory. The economic, diplomatic, and military costs are enormous compared to the small territorial gains made.
Trump seems to grasp, at last, that he can push not just Ukraine, but also Russia, into concessions to end the war.
