With a brittle ceasefire in the Middle East, President Donald Trump secured the headlines he wanted, and he has now set his sights on Ukraine. Meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House on October 17 to discuss the possibility of further cooperation between the United States and Ukraine, Trump had previously indicated a potential willingness to send Ukraine Tomahawk missiles to allow for strikes deep within Russia’s home territory. Ultimately, the U.S. president declined to supply Tomahawks to Ukraine, at least for now.
Trump has seemingly switched loyalties several times during the course of this war, and just prior to his meeting with Zelensky took a phone call, and arranged a future in-person meeting, with Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin. Since Trump took office in January, Putin has masterfully evaded further U.S. sanctions and placed in doubt America’s previously unwavering support for Ukraine through a determined campaign of personal flattery and dangling hypothetical business deals in front of the American president.
U.S. support has been key to the Ukrainian war effort. Still, Trump is the definition of an unreliable ally. In just the latest example of this, it took less than a month for Trump to go from saying Kyiv can “win all of Ukraine back in its original form” and get back “the original borders from where this war started,” to saying, “Let [Ukraine] be cut the way it is. It’s cut up right now. I think 78% of the land is already taken by Russia. You leave it the way it is right now.”
Unfortunately, such contradictory nonsense matters when the 79-year-old dotard uttering it is the president of the United States. But peace will not be had based on territorial concessions to Russia. As long as Putin is in charge, a Russia in possession of seized territory will always be the proverbial mouse given a cookie.
If Trump wanted a real, lasting peace in Ukraine, he’d be better served to let the disastrous economics of how Russia is conducting this war run their course. While Russia’s economy has proven surprisingly resilient to international sanctions, Moscow has reported a budget deficit of $51 billion for the first eight months of this year, and its own central bank has issued warnings over depleted production, labor, and financial reserves. With Russia’s economy now almost wholly reliant on discounted long-term energy sales to India and China, the Kremlin is proposing significant defense budget cuts.
Russia’s misuse of its military resources was on full display during its recent bombardment of Lviv. Five people were killed — four of these innocent victims were a whole family whose house was flattened — with terrorism being the only apparent purpose of the attack. Yet, the people of Lviv were not at all terrorized. The bombing took place early in the morning on a Sunday. By that afternoon, there were more people sitting out convivially on the sidewalk patios of Lviv’s numerous cafes and bars than there had been the previous day. That night, an impromptu street dance sprang up in a historic Old Town square. Nobody was cowed.
Russia spent at least $200 million to accomplish nothing beyond murdering five noncombatants. According to the governor of the Lviv region, Maksym Kozytskyi, the Russians struck Lviv with 140 Shahed kamikaze drones and about two dozen cruise missiles. Earlier versions of the Shahed drones imported by Russia were significantly more expensive, but now that Russia is increasingly producing them domestically, costs have fallen to an estimated $70,000 per unit. That’s still almost $10 million worth of drones alone.
Ten million dollars spent on drones is a pittance compared to the cost of the cruise missiles. Although Ukrainian authorities did not delineate the exact number of each type of missile that was fired into Lviv, we do know some of them were Kalibr cruise missiles launched from the Black Sea (cost: $6.5 million apiece), at least one was a Kh-101 cruise missile ($13 million) and some were Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missiles (with a whopping sticker price of $15 million per unit). Even if you assume that the majority of the missiles were of the cheapest variety, Russia was well past $200 million spent on military hardware alone in this bombing, to say nothing of all the other costs like fuel and personnel.
Russia is indeed occupying some Ukrainian territory (though nowhere near 78% of it — possibly Trump was thinking only of the Donbas region with that figure). The tactics Russia now must resort to are unlikely to win it any more large territorial gains. Literally burning $200 million worth of weaponry over the skies of Lviv to demoralize no one bleeds Russia’s struggling wartime economy, and these are the types of attacks Russia now routinely launches.
Trump cannot secure a real peace in Ukraine by offering Ukrainian land to Russia. What he could do to end the war is hasten the economic ruin that Russia has brought upon itself with this invasion. Russia cannot sustain the level of waste it is engaging in indefinitely. When the Russian economy finally breaks, it will be forced to withdraw its forces, for good.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.
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