Feb. 23, 2026, 3:01 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON – Donald Trump has taken extraordinary action when it comes to confronting authoritarians in places like Venezuela, where U.S. forces captured leader Nicolas Maduro, and Iran, where he bombed nuclear sites in June and is now threatening a new attack.
But there’s one strongman Trump has consistently refused to accost: Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose intellect and iron grip the former reality TV star has long admired.
The Russian leader has convinced Trump and U.S. negotiators, including presidential envoy Steve Witkoff, that he wants to cut a deal to end his long war – even as Moscow rains missiles and drones on Ukrainian cities, cutting heat, water and power to thousands.
The war that Trump repeatedly swore he could end in a single day is now four years old, and on the eve of the Feb. 24 anniversary of Russia’s invasion – and his coinciding State of the Union address – there is still no peace deal.
Is the president getting played?
“Putin is an incredibly talented KGB officer. That’s who he is,” said Uriel Epshtein, the CEO of the Renew Democracy Initiative, a group providing humanitarian support in Ukraine. “He is incredibly effective at manipulating people and getting them to do what he wants.”
Ukraine skeptics and advocates alike say that only Trump can force Putin into a deal. But Trump has often taken a harder line with Ukraine than with Russia, the war’s clear aggressor, demanding that Kyiv give up territory Moscow has been unable to conquer by force in exchange for an American-brokered peace.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “is going to have to get moving, otherwise he’s going to miss a great opportunity,” Trump told reporters on Feb. 13. “Ukraine better come to the table fast,” he reiterated a few days later.
Putin ‘buying time’ with talks
Ukraine backers, lawmakers and former U.S. officials say Putin is playing for time while his army ekes out incremental gains in eastern Ukraine. U.S.-mediated talks on Feb. 18 in Geneva ended after just two hours.
“This may be the problem, that President Trump is believing that they are getting somewhere, and Russia is using another round of negotiation as a way of buying time, as a way of avoiding any final decisions from the U.S. in order to push harder in Ukraine,” Radoslaw Fogiel, vice chair of the Polish parliament’s foreign affairs committee, told USA TODAY.
In his bid to keep negotiations alive, Trump has used his influence to thwart crippling U.S. financial sanctions on Russia that have widespread support from Democratic and Republican lawmakers.
He has dramatically scaled back America’s support for Ukraine − at one point halting Kyiv’s access to intelligence after a dramatic altercation with Zelenskyy − and ended the flow of free U.S. weapons. Trump has said several times he believes Ukraine is to blame for Russia’s invasion.
“Trump’s view was to pivot and try to achieve peace by essentially bullying Ukraine and forcing it to realize that it can’t achieve its aims and should make concessions,” said Phil Gordon, a former national security adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris. “That’s very different from the massive amounts of aid we were giving.”
That approach has not succeeded. Trump came home empty-handed from a pomp-filled Alaskan summit with Putin last year. But the administration and close Trump allies say it can still work.
Trump sanctioned Russia’s largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil, last October, noted Andrew Peek, a former staffer at Trump’s National Security Council who now works at the Atlantic Council.
“That’s a big shot,” Peek told USA TODAY. “So the pressure is not just on Ukraine. I think the president’s set up this dynamic where the two parties are basically competing with each other for progress towards a peace.”
Ivanna Klympush, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, said the oil company sanctions explain why Russia “started this old pretendence that they are participating in the negotiations.”
“And that actually shows you that Russia is vulnerable to pressure, is responding to pressure as opposed to being indulged and continued talking-to after these massive attacks on Ukraine,” she said.
Russia has signaled an openness to some limited concessions, such as allowing Ukraine to join the European Union, senior officials on the U.S. side have said.
But Russia’s demand for the entire eastern Donbas region, including areas it does not currently control, has been a nonstarter for Ukraine, which has been willing to accept an agreement that freezes the conflict along the current lines. Russian forces occupy almost 20% of Ukrainian territory.
“The Americans often return to the topic of concessions,” Zelenskyy said in a Feb. 14 speech at the Munich Security Conference. “Too often those concessions are discussed in the context only of Ukraine – not Russia.”
Negotiators met several days later for a third round of talks in Geneva, led by Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy Witkoff.
White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement that Trump had been successful at bringing both sides together in three rounds of talks and his approach “has continued to generate meaningful progress.”
“Both parties agreed to update their respective leaders and continue working towards a deal. None of these discussions occurred under incompetent Joe Biden, whose weakness brought on this brutal war. President Trump and his team are working hard to stop the killing,” Kelly said.
Trump set a June deadline to reach a deal, Zelenskyy said earlier in the month. He also said Russia had offered the U.S. a $12 trillion economic proposal.
The White House denied the summer deadline. It did not address the economic proposal in response to questions posed by USA TODAY. It also argued that Trump has expressed frustration with Putin in the past and put pressure at various points on both leaders.
The idea that the U.S. could get a $12 trillion windfall from a country whose economy generates an estimated $2.2 trillion a year − less than the GDP of Italy − is “nonsense,” said Mark Montgomery, a retired Navy admiral who worked for the late Republican Sen. John McCain.
Still, he said, Trump could find it tempting.
“President Trump doesn’t admire democracies. He admires power. If a democracy is powerful, he admires them,” Montgomery said. “What he’s attracted to are authoritarian leaders like Putin and Xi, who he thinks he can make deals with,” he added, referring to China’s president.
Fogiel, the Polish politician, said the Russians probably hope they can squeeze something out of Trump with such a lucrative offer. “I do not believe that this is the case,” he added.
In Ukraine, Trump appears to be motivated by other interests, Fogiel said.
“Whether it’s the Nobel Peace Prize or the true care of people who are dying there,” he said, “I do believe that he wants part of his legacy to be that he ended the war in Ukraine.”
Trump has said he just wants the killing to stop, while complaining loudly over not receiving the Nobel.
Ukraine and the midterms
Zelenskyy has suggested Trump has another goal: scoring a political victory before the November midterm elections. But the White House dismissed that and Peek, the former Trump national security aide, noted Trump has talked about ending the war since 2024.
“On this issue, he’s not like a political operator. It’s (that) he really doesn’t like the war, doesn’t like that everything keeps blowing up, he hates the posturing about the war by Europeans, by the Russians, by the Ukrainians,” Peek said. “He always has.”
Russia has made few territorial gains since the 2022 invasion. Putin’s army is losing as many as 8,000 soldiers a week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Bloomberg News.
With support from the Europeans, who are now buying weapons from the U.S. on behalf of Kyiv, Ukraine can still hold on, experts say.
“I don’t see any signs that Zelenskyy is willing cave or that Ukraine is going to collapse,” said Gordon, an Obama and Biden-era official. “Unfortunately, that probably means the war is going to go on for some time.”
Montgomery, who was in Kyiv recently training the Ukrainian military, said it was highly unlikely negotiations will succeed with Trump leaning mostly on Zelenskyy.
“The failure in the United States to leverage any pressure on Russia has left Russia feeling unrestrained in the talks. There’s no leverage on them. So they’re making no concessions,” he said. “And I think we’re at the point where Ukraine will not give any more at the table, and they won’t give on the battlefield. So we’re headed to another year of war.”
Klympush, the Ukrainian politician, said it’s a “wrong assumption” that Russia can be cajoled into peace.
While Trump’s talks – and talks about talks – continue, Ukrainians are hunkering down.
As many Ukrainians shiver in the dark, “we understand that this is still better than Russian gulag,” Klympush said. “That’s what Russia can offer on the occupied territories.”
Recalling the mass graves and torture chambers discovered in areas liberated from Russian forces and the abduction of thousands of Ukrainian children, she described what many in her country view as a systematic effort to extinguish Ukraine’s culture, history and language.
“We know what we are fighting for,” Klympush said.
