The verdicts are already written. President Donald Trump has sold out Ukraine, the critics were right all along: Trump, the Russian asset, finally showed his hand. We have been here before—almost exactly here.
In February 2025, Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in front of the cameras, and the administration spent weeks advancing terms the Kremlin might as well have drafted. Ukraine's obituaries were written then too. Seventeen months later, the two presidents stood together in Ankara joking about Ukrainian drones over Moscow, after a year in which Kyiv was granted what no previous administration had given it: the freedom to choose its own targets inside Russia.
That is reason enough to hold the verdict a while longer. On October 9, Trump announced Russia would ship diesel to global markets—300,000 tons immediately, over three million more to follow—with Treasury waiving sanctions through April 2027. Two days later he declared an “energy ceasefire”. Kyiv agreed to suspend refinery strikes, and Zelensky said within days that Russia had already broken it. Last week he accused Trump of pressuring Ukraine to capitulate and offered to trade the refinery campaign for Patriot interceptors. Trump told him to take a deal or watch it “get worse.” That refinery campaign was the most consequential thing this administration did to Russia—I said so in August—and it is now a chip on the table.
But Trump's Russia policy has never run on a theory of Russia. It runs on whether the present course is working for him. In early 2025, appeasement looked like a fast win, so he tried it. Within months, it was clear Moscow would take nothing short of surrender, so he dropped it and handed Kyiv the targeting map. Now, diesel is $6.28 a gallon, up nearly 80 percent since January, and the midterms are two weeks out. Russian barrels look like relief, or at least the mirage of relief.
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Which is why it will not hold. Goldman Sachs puts the relief at one to two dollars a barrel wholesale, and the deal covers less than two weeks of American demand. Futures barely moved and Brent rose anyway, to nearly $108. Russia stopped exporting in the first place because Ukrainian drones had wrecked a quarter of its refining capacity, so Trump has bought volume that Russian President Vladimir Putin may not physically have. Nor have Russia's terms shifted in three years: all of Donbas, Ukrainian neutrality, a permanent bar on NATO enlargement, recognition of the annexations. Putin reportedly told U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner he intends to hold all of Donbas by year's end and will not discuss the front line until he does.
This week's breakthrough fits the pattern. After meeting Witkoff in St. Petersburg on Wednesday, Putin agreed in principle to three-way talks—after November 10, no date fixed, nothing conceded. The Kremlin says the agenda is a security architecture for “after the conflict ends,” which presumes the ending rather than negotiating it. Three rounds of these talks this year, in Abu Dhabi and Geneva, produced a prisoner exchange.
Underneath the dealmaking, Trump works from a premise his critics rarely engage: Russia is not a superpower.
A superpower holds a dominant position in the world and can project force globally—militarily, economically or technologically. Russia does none of it. Its economy is roughly the size of Italy's, and nobody calls Italy a superpower. In technology, it trails not only the United States and China but also South Korea, Japan and Israel. Militarily, it has spent years failing to defeat a neighbor with a fraction of its population and economy. It holds the largest nuclear arsenal on earth—but France, North Korea, and Pakistan have nuclear weapons, and no one mistakes them for superpowers. Nuclear weapons buy deterrence. They do not buy global influence.
Russia's neighbors have reached this conclusion and begun saying it out loud. At his party's congress on October 3, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev named the world's two superpowers, the United States and China, and pointedly added: “there is no third.” The more revealing half came next, when he described Azerbaijan as a middle power—a country self-sufficient enough economically and militarily to defend its own sovereignty. That is the settled aim of Azerbaijani policy now, and versions of it are being voiced from Astana to Tashkent. Russia's failed war has bought the former Soviet space a measure of independence it has not had in generations.
None of which makes Russia harmless. A second-rate power can still be a first-rate nuisance. Moscow is reported to be sending Iran upgraded munitions, satellite imagery used against American forces and help developing supersonic and hypersonic cruise missiles—the 2022 drone trade running in reverse, under a 20-year treaty. France is the most targeted country on earth for Russian information operations after Ukraine, with 107 incidents last year. Russia cannot win a war on its own border. It can still raise the cost of everything America does.
The larger problem is what the war is making of Russia. China now accounts for roughly 35 percent of Russian foreign trade and supplies 90 percent of the sanctioned technology it imports. The Kiel Institute calls it not a coalition of equals but a captive supplier taking deep discounts because it has nowhere else to sell. That dependency comes not from the fighting but from a Russia that is sanctioned, broke and friendless. A settlement that lifts sanctions on Putin's terms and leaves him Donbas does not reverse it; it locks it in, with Washington's leverage spent. The question was never whether this war ends, but what Russia looks like when it does—and a diesel waiver running to April 2027 answers that badly. China is the competitor Trump ranks first, and a dependent Russia is not China's rival. It is China's asset.
So the forecast. Putin will not deliver—not the volumes, not a durable ceasefire, not a deal stopping short of capitulation. When that becomes plain, likely after November 3, the course stops paying and Trump drops it, as he dropped the last one. He is not subservient to Moscow. He has never thought Russia important enough to build a doctrine around, which is exactly what makes his policy reversible in both directions.
Watch whether Putin stays useful to him. Right now, for about two more weeks, he is.
Joseph Epstein is the director of the Turan Research Center.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.