The Fallacy of the Trump-Putin Pact

Precisely three years into Russia’s war on Ukraine, we’re right back where we started in many ways. “At some point, American ambitions will collide with Russian realities,” one Republican foreign policy insider told me, “which is to say, the same story we have watched about a half-dozen times before.”

In some ways, Trump is continuing a storied tradition of American presidents declaring their intention to reset relations with Putin where all their predecessors had failed. Photo: Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images

Julia Ioffe

February 25, 2025

It’s been three years since Vladimir Putin sent nearly 200,000 troops across the border into Ukraine to finish what he’d started in 2014: ending Ukraine’s drift toward the West. In the months directly preceding the full-scale invasion in 2022, very few people thought it would actually happen. Russians believed that their troop buildup on the border was just a negotiating tactic; Washington and Moscow were involved in furious negotiations to head off a possible war; and other Western leaders, like France’s Emmanuel Macron, were making sojourns to the Kremlin to persuade Putin not to pull the trigger.