The New Yorker:

With Ukraine drained by more than three years of fighting, time is on the side of Vladimir Putin.

By Joshua Yaffa

Last Friday, President Donald Trump hosted Vladimir Putinfor a bilateral summit in Alaska and then, on Monday, received Volodymyr Zelensky and a half-dozen European heads of state at the White House. It was the latest attempt by Trump to bring the war in Ukraine to a close through diplomatic intervention. “While difficult, peace is within reach,” he said, on Monday. “The war is going to end.” Zelensky and Putin, he went on, “are going to work something out.” Trump, famously, has made such promises before—on the campaign trail, he declared that he would end the war within twenty-four hours of taking office—but is there reason to think that it might be different this time?

To answer that, one has to return to the question of why Russia invaded Ukraine in the first place, and why the war has continued for three and a half years since then. Territory, an issue that Trump and his special envoy, Steven Witkoff, have returned to time and again, most recently when talking of unspecified “land swaps,” is actually not the primary concern for either side. “They’ve occupied some very prime territory,” Trump said, of Russia’s invasion force. “We’re going to try and get some of that territory back for Ukraine.”

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