Ukraine Has Cards

If Trump wants to side with strong winners, he should embrace Zelenskyy and Ukraine and drop Putin and Russia.

President Trump likes to claim that President Zelenskyy and Ukraine “have no cards” in their negotiations with Putin’s Russia. In Trump’s view, Putin has all the cards. Zelenskyy, therefore, has to capitulate to Putin, or so Trump thinks. Trump admires strong leaders. As early as 2015, Trump called Putin a “strong leader”—a pattern of admiration that has now persisted for years. After Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, Trump called him a “genius.” Trump also likes “winners” and detests “losers.” Shamefully, Trump even called Senator John McCain a loser because he allegedly allowed his plane to be shot down. This analytic framework of strong and weak leaders and winners and losers has a profound influence on how Trump sees the world.

Hopefully, Ukraine’s successful, audacious attack on Russian bombers at five different airfields last Sunday will prompt Trump to reassess his view of who is strong and weak and who are winners and losers in the Russia-Ukraine war. It should. Operation Spiderweb was a spectacular success. Though not yet confirmed by independent analysts, Ukrainian officials reported that they destroyed 41 Russian aircraft, or roughly 34% of Russia’s total long-range bomber force. These are the kinds of planes that are used to attack Ukrainian targets, including civilian targets. These are also the kind of aircraft that can be armed with nuclear weapons and used against the United States.

Screenshot from the footage Ukraine’s security service released on Wednesday, detailing its attack on Russian war planes at multiple airbases across Russia. Watch here.

How these Russian bombers were destroyed was equally impressive. Ukraine's leading intelligence agency, the SBU, planned the attack for 18 months, strategically placing containers filled with drones on truck beds near the targeted airbases. Amazingly, 117 drones were then launched remotely and simultaneously at five different locations—all without losing a single Ukrainian soldier or intelligence officer in the operation. (Watch some footage of the Operation Spiderweb here.) Perhaps the United States and China also have the capability to pull off such an operation, but they have never attempted to do so. To date, Russia does not possess such a capability, as Putin would have utilized it already. Many analysts called Operation Spiderweb not just a new moment in the history of the Russia-Ukraine war, but a revolutionary turning point in the history of warfare.

Because Putin has erected a totalitarian dictatorship even more repressive than that of the late Soviet era, we are unlikely to ever know with certainty how the Russian people are reacting to this successful attack deep into their country—one of the targeted bases is located in Siberia! Of course, Russian state media is suppressing coverage of the attack, but this news is slipping out. On social media, Russian nationalists are reportedly furious. The blame game has begun. How could such an operation take place in “mighty” Russia? Russian propagandists constantly portray Ukrainians as weak losers who are holding on “just because” of American and NATO weapons. Yet, Operation Spiderweb relied solely on Ukrainian-made weapons, and to the best of our knowledge, did not involve U.S. intelligence support.

In fact, according to independent reporting, Ukrainian officials did not brief their American counterparts on the operation ahead of time; they feared that Trump might warn Putin about it. Eventually, these facts will seep into Russian society and fuel a deeper sense of vulnerability— not unlike the mood in Russia after the Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, the first invasion of Russian territory since Hitler’s army crossed into the Soviet Union in 1941, or after the Wagner Group’s mutiny in June 2023, which threatened to march into Moscow.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has not made Russians more secure. Just the opposite. This needless, barbaric war has exposed Russia's weakness and resulted in one million Russian casualties, including roughly 250,000 dead. The failure to protect the homeland and this giant loss of life are signs of weakness, not strength; evidence of losing, not winning. I hope Trump begins to see the same.

Ukraine still has cards. Yes, Russia’s army continues to inch forward in Ukraine. Yes, Putin has restructured his economy to allocate significantly more resources to Russia’s military-industrial complex. Trump’s refusal to even discuss new military assistance for Ukraine helps Putin’s army and hurts Ukraine’s army. But the assumption that Ukraine is losing the war and, therefore, Zelenskyy has to capitulate to a peace agreement dictated by Putin and blessed by Trump is flawed. Zelenskyy wants a ceasefire. He has repeatedly committed to an unconditional ceasefire; however, Putin continues to refuse to discuss it seriously. Even without new U.S. military assistance, Zelenskyy, the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and the Ukrainian people are prepared to keep fighting.

One of Russia’s preconditions for a ceasefire—Ukrainian forces voluntarily abandoning their positions in the four Ukrainian regions Putin annexed on paper in September 2022–shows just how weak Russia’s position on the battlefield is today. They must make this demand because, after more than three years of fighting, they have still not been able to capture and subject these territories to complete control. As former Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba wrote recently in Foreign Affairs (an article I highly recommend you read), “…the country [Russia] supposedly holding all the cards, gas gained just 1,650 of Ukraine’s 233,000 square miles over the last 16 months. Put differently, Moscow has gone from occupying about 18 percent of Ukrainian territory in late 2023 to roughly 19 percent today.” That’s winning?

If Trump truly likes winners and despises losers, he should abandon his support for Putin and Russia and embrace Zelenskyy and Ukraine. He could do so most immediately by signaling support for the new bill on Russian sanctions circulating in the U.S. Senate, championed by Trump’s ally, Senator Linsay Graham. Next, Trump could transfer the Russian Central Bank assets still frozen in U.S. accounts to Ukraine, enabling Zelenskyy to use these funds to purchase new U.S. weapons, particularly air-defense interceptors for Patriot systems, which are currently in short supply. Third, Trump could signal his support for future U.S. military assistance to Ukraine, which could eventually be repaid through revenues from the new mineral deal that the U.S. and Ukraine recently signed. All of these actions would help convince Putin that he cannot win, thereby accelerating the end of the war.

In the long run, Ukraine’s highly successful Operation Spiderweb should also convince Trump and the American public of the importance of having Ukraine as an ally. They are winners. They are innovators. (American entrepreneurs should be lining up for new opportunities to invest in Ukrainian drone companies.) The Armed Forces of Ukraine are the best fighting force in Europe. The group that meticulously planned and flawlessly executed that operation last weekend are friends that I want on our side. They are winners. Putin is a loser.