Uncertainty is the soul of war. While hostilities continue, nothing is final, neither victory nor defeat. Ukraine had regained the initiative before the summer, to the point that Trump acknowledged at the last NATO summit that “Zelensky was doing an extraordinary job.” The efficiency of its drones, its ability to hit distant energy installations, the resistance on the frozen Donbas front, even some small Ukrainian advances, revealed an improvement in its negotiating position. It may have seemed that Trump began to like a winning Zelensky, but it didn't take long for the wind of war to change with Putin's counteroffensive, which is not only military, but above all diplomatic and economic, aimed at obtaining the complicity of the White House.
With the Iranian regime consolidated after surviving the war and the Strait of Hormuz still closed, everything began to turn in August when the 60-day truce between Tehran and Washington expired without the fighting ever stopping. The swelling of the price of oil, two months before the midterm elections, and Trumpism in free fall in the polls provided the opportunity for Putin. First, there was a mysterious trip by CIA Director John Ratcliffe to Moscow. Then, a long and discreet meeting of the Russian president with the presidential son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Trumpist business partner, Steve Witkoff. Much was said about what they were up to, but until now the substance of the negotiation has not been known.
Thanks to Trump, Putin has lost his plagued status. First he invited him to the G20 summit, from which he had been absent for seven years. He then urged Zelensky to end attacks on Russian refineries, held him responsible for both the war and the increase in energy prices, and demanded his replacement by an obedient president. Now it has lifted the sanctions approved by Congress, after signing a multi-million dollar purchase contract for Russian diesel. Following the example of the United States, an oil embargo that would lead to secondary sanctions on third countries no longer makes sense.
As a direct result of the Trumpist turn, the Kremlin will have more liquidity to finance its bombings. As if by chance, Elon Musk's satellites that warn of the arrival of Russian ballistic missiles do not work either. The meaning is clear and tragic, in the increase in civilian casualties and the certainty of a winter of hunger and cold for Ukrainians. All so that American drivers pay less for a full tank of their cars six weeks before the elections.
Trump has always sought peace separately, behind the backs of the Europeans and at the expense of Ukraine. He told Zelensky that 'he had no cards', and when he does, he takes them away. He wants to see him on the ropes, in accordance with his art of negotiation that requires subduing the weak and partnering in business with the rich and the strong. From the former he demands resignation, which means accepting the conditions demanded by Putin. And from the latter he expects the personal benefits that he plans to extract from Russia's reintegration into the Western financial system.
There is little politics and a lot of business in the package negotiated by Kushner and Witkoff with the Kremlin. They count on BlackRock, the huge American investment company, for the reconstruction of Ukraine and the management of the $250 billion in Russian assets seized in Belgium. They propose the reopening of gas connections between Russia and Europe through Ukraine. They intend for an Arab-American consortium, in which the families of the two Trumpist special envoys participate, to buy the assets of Lukoil, Russia's first private energy company.
These movements confirm the worst fears. Trump would like to close the case before the constitution of the two chambers after the midterm elections. Since he did not manage to end the war in the first 24 hours of his second presidency, as he had promised, he now intends to do so in the few days he has left before becoming the 'lame duck', the figure of the weakened president, typical of someone who has lost the majority and cannot run for election again.
Putin has an uphill battle in the electoral battle in the United States on November 3, but he has others to fight in Europe, where he knows how to deploy his skills in hybrid warfare. The first and most decisive will be between April and May, when he hopes that France will fall on his side. Today politics is the continuation of war by other means, Clausewitz in reverse. With Trump, politics and war are all the same, business. And thanks to the presidential show, the greatest of all businesses.
