Strip away the theories about Putin’s hold on Trump and what remains is a doctrine set out in two US strategy papers that treats Russia as a manageable problem for Europe to solve US President Donald Trump has settled on a carrot-and-stick approach to ending the war in Ukraine. In international diplomacy, that can be a good strategy, but the trouble here is the distribution. Russian President Vladimir Putin has been handed the whole carrot, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is getting the whole stick and Russia is, in effect, being paid in advance for a deal it has not yet agreed to. That is the backdrop to today’s talks in Oslo. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy, stepped onto a red carpet at Oslo Airport shortly before noon. He is meeting Zelenskyy, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre and Finnish President Alexander Stubb, with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and fellow envoy, joining remotely. Witkoff is then expected to fly to Moscow with proposals the Americans say they are drafting with Kyiv and its European partners. The meeting was Zelenskyy’s idea. Støre speaks of putting diplomacy back on a more constructive track, but let’s be honest about what that polite phrase covers. Ukraine has endured eleven days of hostile acts and hostile rhetoric from its erstwhile ally, and Zelenskyy’s journey to Oslo is an attempt to salvage some kind of working relationship with Washington before Witkoff sits down with Putin. Putin's carrot On October 9, Trump announced an agreement with Putin to bring Russian diesel back on to world markets, eased by a US Treasury sanctions waiver. A week later he used a national-interest waiver to shelve the additional sanctions and tariffs in the Russia sanctions law championed by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, told reporters on Saturday that the president wanted “to take the 60-day period of time to sort of analyze what imposing both sanctions and tariffs will mean” for the American and global economies. In return, as far as anyone can tell, Moscow has offered nothing: no ceasefire, no withdrawal and no softening of its territorial demands. Zelenskyy's stick Ukraine’s fortnight has looked rather different. Trump wants Kyiv to stop striking Russian oil refineries, arguably the most effective economic weapon it has, and last week told Newsmax the strikes were “a disgrace.” Zelenskyy offered a 30-day pause in exchange for American Patriot interceptors, an offer Witkoff and Kushner reportedly showed no interest in. Meanwhile, Patriots bought by European allies through NATO’s PURL scheme still await sign-off from Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary. Reuters reports that the order to throttle Starshield, the military satellite network on which Ukraine’s drone units depend, came from inside the White House. Kyiv also says it has repeatedly failed to receive the usual warnings of incoming Russian missiles. “All of this suggests that some political decision has been made to slow down support for us,” Zelenskyy said on Monday. Washington denies that any of this amounts to a pressure campaign. Rubio blames the missed missile warnings on a software fault, and the Pentagon insists its policy on allied weapons transfers is unchanged. Yet the denials have not convinced everyone in Washington. Republican Senator Thom Tillis and Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen are leading a bipartisan call for an inspector general’s investigation into the satellite disruptions. Nor do Trump’s own words suggest much even-handedness. On Monday, the same day Russian ballistic missiles struck a metro station in Kyiv, he said Russia “has been fine on Ukraine” and suggested Zelenskyy might want to get somebody else to negotiate. Method, not madness The internet is awash with theories about what hold Putin might have over Trump. I have no intention of adding to them, and frankly they are not needed, because America's actions can be explained perfectly well without them. Trump’s National Security Strategy, published last December, names the restoration of “strategic stability” with Russia as an American objective. The National Defense Strategy that followed in January goes further, saying that Europe is to take primary responsibility for its own conventional defense, Washington will concentrate on the homeland, the Western Hemisphere and China, and Russia is cast as a persistent but manageable threat. Ending the war is the precondition for all of it. Add fuel prices driven up by the war with Iran and midterm elections on November 3, and the dual-track carrot-and-stick approach has a certain terrible logic. What follows from that logic is fairly mechanical. If you want a war over quickly, you lean on the party you can move. Washington has little leverage over Putin short of sanctions it is reluctant to impose and weapons it is reluctant to send, whereas over Zelenskyy it holds the satellites, the intelligence and the interceptors. We have watched this cycle before. After his Alaska summit with Putin in August 2025, Trump pressed Kyiv to give up the rest of Donbas. That October he swung the other way, toying with sending Tomahawk missiles and sanctioning Rosneft and Lukoil, Russia’s two largest oil companies. That interlude is over, and the stick has gone back to Kyiv. Putin keeps raising the price The difficulty with paying in advance is that the seller has little reason to deliver, and Putin is behaving accordingly. On Friday he declared that a Russian “security zone” along Ukraine’s north-eastern border, which the Kremlin says runs for 660 kilometers, would be excluded from any negotiation. The zone reaches into the Sumy and Kharkiv regions, which Moscow has never even claimed to have annexed. He has also floated a three-way summit with Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping at next month’s APEC meeting in Shenzhen. Stability on credit From Warsaw, the flaw in all of this is hard to miss. A settlement that hands Russia more territory, eases sanctions and leaves Ukraine without credible security guarantees would not end the confrontation with Moscow. It would pause it on terms that let Russia rebuild its army while Ukraine's military strength erodes. Should Ukraine eventually buckle, Russian forces could reach Poland's eastern border in greater strength, while the Baltic states would face an emboldened Moscow. Unlike Ukraine, these are NATO allies. A Russian attack on them would trigger Article 5 and confront Washington with the obligations of collective defense. There is another contradiction here. The Trump administration's own National Security Strategy declares: “We will need a strong Europe to help us successfully compete” and to “prevent any adversary from dominating Europe.” That includes Europe's industrial strength, particularly as Washington concentrates on its competition with China. Ukraine has become a major European defense-industrial power. Zelenskyy says its industry now has the capacity to produce $60 billion worth of weapons annually, including the drones and other technologies that are transforming modern warfare. Surely Washington has no interest in seeing that capacity lost to Europe, let alone potentially falling into Russian hands.
