Ukraine: a win-win for Trump?
By Richard North - September 25, 2025
It was back in August that a Ukrainian Blogger wrote that Trump’s statements are no longer taken seriously.
That view very much came to mind when, three days ago, the US president wrote on his Truth Social platform that, after seeing the economic trouble the war was causing Russia, he thought that Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, “is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form”.
He went on to say that Russia has been fighting aimlessly for three and a half years a war that should have taken a “Real Military Power” less than a week to win. This, he averred, was not distinguishing Russia: “In fact, it is very much making them look like a paper tiger”.
When one recalls that, during that fateful meeting with Zelensky at the end of February, Trump told the Ukrainian president he didn’t have any cards, it is hardly surprising that the BBC and others see this latest statement as marking a “major shift” in Trump’s position on the war with Russia.
Via the Kyiv Independent we learn that the Russians were less than impressed. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov brushed aside the “paper tiger” jibe, adding that Trump’s shift followed his talks with Zelensky and was driven by “business interests”.
“Russia is by no means a tiger”, he said. “After all, Russia is more commonly associated with a bear. There is no such thing as a paper bear and Russia is a real bear”.
But perhaps the cruellest put-down came from Russian deputy in the state Duma, Oleg Matveychev, who dismissed Trump’s words as meaningless. “It’s a random number generator, a random phrase generator”, he said, adding: “And there’s been a saying that Trump says exactly what the last person in his office told him to say”.
Going for the jugular, Matveychev snapped: “Do you really think he’ll say something momentous? Or will his words change anything? Nothing depends on them, nothing will change”.
A lot of people might agree with that sentiment, but the Telegraph, at least, is able to divine some sense from the pronouncement in a piece headed: “Trump is washing his hands of the Ukraine war”, with the sub-head telling us: “What may appear at first glance as stunning U-turn may actually be bad news for Volodymyr Zelensky”.
Rob Crilly, the paper’s chief US correspondent, counsels us to look beyond the headlines, whence the statement becomes a “lesson in messaging”. Rather than pledging fresh support to Ukraine or loading up action on Russia, Trump appears to be handing things over to Europe and Nato.
There is no suggestion, Crilly writes, of extra support for Ukraine, or that he will punish Moscow further. His only commitment is to keep selling weapons to allies. Hardly a game changer.
After staking so much of his own reputation to bring Putin to Alaska for talks and putting himself at the heart of negotiations, Trump has learned a difficult lesson: ending a war is hard. And now. says Crilly, “it sounds as if he may have had enough”.
In The Times, we see a similar line taken in a piece that notes that Trump’s claim has delighted Kiev but left Moscow calculating that America is stepping aside, leaving Europe to bear the burden of the war.
Foreign correspondent Marc Bennetts suggests that, in Moscow, Trump’s comments were widely seen as a sign that the US leader no longer intends to try to resolve the war in Ukraine. If that is true, and Trump does not simply flip his stance again in the coming days or weeks, he says, then the Kremlin will have achieved one of its major policy goals in its relations with the United States.
To support his thesis, Bennetts quotes Konstantin Malofeyev, a Russian media tycoon who has been an enthusiastic support of the war. He says: “The United States is washing its hands [of the war]”, adding: “The EU will pay for everything. To put it even more simply: Trump sent Ukraine and Europe to fight against Russia, [with] weapons that they buy from the US”.
Turning to the New York Times one can see a consensus emerging as this paper runs its report on the statement, with the sub-head that declares: “President Trump’s pivot could give him room to distance himself from a conflict that he once promised to solve in days or weeks”.
This paper notes that Trump provided no rationale for his “stunning turnaround”, this time having “several European officials” suspecting that by distancing himself from the war, the president was washing his hands of the conflict.
In his eight months in office, it says, Trump has ricocheted from one position to another on Ukraine and, of his latest statement, it records that much of what he is saying about the war was true before the meeting in Alaska.
With that, Trump has not explained why he now believes that Ukraine, which has continuously lost modest amounts of territory to Russian troops over the past year, would suddenly be able to seize it back. By contrast, a senior Nato military officer noted that Ukraine had not been able to gain ground when American aid to the country had been at its peak and, since then, the Russians had not massed a larger force.
Nor, as other commentators have noted, had Trump offered to restore the tens of billions of dollars in American military aid, saying simply: “We will continue to supply weapons to Nato for Nato to do what they want with them”.
A straightforward reliance on Nato, though, is rather more complex than it sounds. Nato military forces are commanded by an American general who also has the title Supreme Allied Commander Europe, a post currently held by Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich.
Nevertheless, the NYT thinks that decisions about how much to spend on arming Ukraine will be influenced heavily by the largest European powers in the Nato alliance – led by Britain, France and Germany – and the secretary general of Nato, Mark Rutte.
Looking at this in the round, Trump – having failed to broker peace in the region – has dumped the problem in the lap of the Europeans and left them to get on with it. And in setting a wildly optimistic objective, so extravagent as to be wholly unrealistic, he is setting up Europe to fail, whence he can distance himself from that failure and dump the blame on the Europeans.
The Telegraph, however, seems to agree with Trump that Ukraine can win, arguing that Europe has the collective power to back Ukraine and settle this conflict on the country’s own terms.
On paper at least, the paper says, Europe possesses the geopolitical throw-weight to give Zelensky all the support he needs to settle the conflict on Ukraine’s chosen terms.
Europe also has plenty of concrete options to change the strategic balance in Ukraine’s favour, it adds. Germany could, for example, supply Ukraine with the Taurus cruise missiles that Friedrich Merz promised in opposition. European governments could allow Ukraine to use the weapons that are already being supplied to hit a greater range of targets inside Russia.
In this context, the paper points to “one vital yet little-noticed development” – Ukraine’s sustained attacks on the oil refineries and associated infrastructure, on which Russia’s economy and war effort depend. Already, fuel shortages are being reported.
About 30 of these plants account for 80 percent of Russian refining capacity: half are within 600 miles of Ukraine, well inside the range of killer drones. Europe, the Telegraph says, should do its utmost to help Ukraine identify and strike this kind of Russian Achilles Heel.
Above all, Europe should seize the £200bn of Russian assets lying frozen in financial institutions across the continent, mainly Euroclear in Brussels, and transfer them to Ukraine. That kind of money – about 140 per cent of Ukraine’s GDP – could have what generals call “strategic effect”.
Ironically, the paper then concludes with an assertion as wild as Trump might make, arguing that Starmer should now lead a renewed European effort to back Ukraine’s struggle. But, although Europe has the collective power, the question is, the paper suggests, whether it can summon the will.
I think we all know the answer to that but, whatever the outcome, Trump could possibly have manoeuvred himself into a win-win position.
