DONALD TRUMP HAS ASSUMED from the start of the war in Ukraine that Russia will win. “You have no cards,” the president told Volodymyr Zelensky when he ambushed the Ukrainian leader in the Oval Office in February, and he repeated the point recently on Air Force One. Asked why the latest U.S. peace proposal would give Russia a huge chunk of land it has been unable to win on the battlefield, Trump told a reporter, “Look, the way [the war is] going . . . it’s just moving in one direction. So eventually that’s land that over the next couple of months might be gotten by Russia anyway.”
Vladimir Putin rushed to underscore the point, boasting when Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, visited Moscow last week that Russian forces had captured the frontline city of Pokrovsk. Many Western observers parrot Putin’s claims about the contested rail hub in eastern Ukraine, arguing that the battle there is a major turning point, giving a Russia a “gateway” to the west and, before long, conquest of all Ukraine. In fact, it’s not clear that Russia has yet taken Pokrovsk—Kyiv maintains it’s still holding on. But even if the town falls in the coming weeks, it hardly means Ukraine is losing the war.
