Donald Trump’s Gaza win has Vladimir Putin worried about Ukraine getting Tomahawks
Trump’s vague threat to supply Ukraine with the deadly long-range Tomahawk missiles which could strike deep into Russia has culminated in a second planned summit between the two leaders in Budapest.
This, of course, does not mean that Trump will actually supply Tomahawks to Ukraine and he may rule it out as early as Saturday (AEDT) when he meets with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House.
But the combination of Trump’s re-energised interest in ending the Ukraine war – fuelled no doubt by his peace deal in Gaza – and the threat of selling Tomahawks to Ukraine has caught Putin’s attention.
The lesson from the Gaza peace deal is that peace is usually only achieved when an opponent – like Hamas – is under severe pressure. Likewise, having failed in the past to flatter Putin to the negotiating table, Trump’s Tomahawk quip was aimed to pressure him to restart peace discussions.
And yet it is hard to read Putin’s desire to meet again with Trump as anything more than yet another attempt to string the US president along and delay any notable progress towards peace. This is what happened after the Alaska summit between the two men in August when Putin promised to meet with Zelensky and then immediately backed away from that commitment. It is also the tactic which Putin has used time and time again in lower level negotiations where Russia has agreed to attend talks only to ensure their failure by refusing to offer any concessions towards a peace deal.
Putin will have used his two hour phone conversation with Trump this week to try to soften the president ahead of his Saturday meeting with Zelensky in Washington. According to Trump’s summary, Putin flattered him about the Gaza peace deal, thanked First Lady Melania Trump for her campaign for the protection of Ukrainian children and talked at length about potential trade deals between the two countries once the war is over.
It sounds like classic Putin – appease Trump sufficiently so that he won’t sell Tomahawks to Ukraine and he won’t rush to implement the direct and secondary sanctions regime he and Congress have prepared against Russia.
Yet the truth of the matter is that barring a ‘road to Damascus’ moment for Putin, the only way to force him to negotiate seriously about peace is to dramatically ramp up the military, political and economic pressure against him.
The best way to do this would be for Trump to follow through with his threat to supply Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine and remove the current limits on the use of the US-supplied ATACMS long-range missiles.
The Pentagon should scrap the restriction on the offensive use to ATACMS deep inside Russian territory. These limits were placed on the missiles by Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden amid concerns that their use deep inside Russian territory risked escalating the war. But these restrictions are part of the reason why Ukraine has been unable to shift the current military stalemate and why it has been unable to apply sufficient pressure on Putin to make him interested in peace.
Meanwhile Russia is firing its own long-range missiles into Ukraine at will, terrorising and killing civilians every week.
It is past time for Trump to frighten Putin by supplying and permitting the operation of serious long-range weapons by Ukraine which will give the Russian dictator reason to think twice about prolonging this conflict.
But by agreeing to another face-to-face meeting with Trump, Putin seems determined to continue to play his diplomatic pantomime with the president in order to delay any retribution against Russia. Let’s hope that Trump takes the lessons from his success in Gaza and now applies them to Putin.
Harry’s security review could pave way for UK return
It took one word, ‘Tomahawk’, to bring Vladimir Putin back to the negotiating table as Donald Trump tries to play the same decisive personal role to end the war in Ukraine as he has done in Gaza.