Trump has backed himself into a corner on Ukraine

He now has fifty days to reach agreement on Ukrainian neutrality

Apologies for recent radio silence, I have been extremely busy with work that pays the bills (i.e. not writing geopolitics articles). Please see below my latest piece on the corner Trump has backed himself into, on Ukraine. Let’s hope he invests more personal time into unlocking a solution, corralling European leaders with as much determination as he showed when pushing NATO spending up to 5%. Not convinced that he will though.

One year after he undertook to end the Ukraine war in one day, and just past six months into his Presidency, Donald Trump has kicked the peace can down the road by fifty days. The ultimatum to President Putin to make peace or face sanctions has practically no chance to changing Russian aims in Ukraine. Backed into a corner, Trump may finally be forced to address Russia’s underlying concerns.

In televised remarks on 14 July during his meeting with NATO Secretary General, Mark Rutte, President Trump said, ‘if we don’t have a [peace] deal in fifty days, we’re going to be doing very severe tariffs, tariffs at about a hundred percent, you’d call them secondary tariffs.’

As he was in 2017, Trump also now finds himself hemmed in by beltway politics and unable to deliver a reset in US-Russia relations that he instinctively seems to want.

The Sanctioning Russia Act of 2025 would put in place so-called secondary sanctions on Russia by imposing stiff tariffs of up to 500% against countries such as China and India that inter alia import Russian energy. US lawmakers want to strong arm Trump into forcing President Putin to back down in Ukraine via the back door. But there is a yawn-inducing sense of déjà vu here.

The 2017 Countering American Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, signed into law on 2 August 2017, had no impact on Russian policy towards Ukraine, but led to a huge collapse in US-Russia relations. This was illustrated most clearly by the decision to cut US diplomatic staffing in Russia by 755 personnel, meaning among other things, that today it is practically impossible for a Russian citizen to apply for a US visa inside of Russia itself; the US Embassy simply doesn’t have enough staff.

To avoid a repeat of 2017, Trump now appears to be buying himself fifty days in DC to reach peace in Ukraine before he is forced by the Senate to impose secondary sanctions on Russia. The 14 July announcement was therefore about domestic US politics more than about foreign policy.

But what Trump has in fact done is to set a clear ultimatum on Russia to reach a peace deal with Ukraine, with no clear commitment to meeting Russia’s specific demands, the key demand being Ukraine’s neutrality and revocation of its NATO aspiration.

As an ultimatum, this won’t work, because the additional military support that the US is now offering to Ukraine, paid for by European NATO allies, won’t be sufficient to tip the military balance in Ukraine’s favour.

Additional Patriot missiles and interceptors may well reduce the overall impact of Russian drone and missile strikes on Ukrainian cities. But the military facts on the ground are that Russia continues to gain ground. At several points along the front line, around Pokrovsk, and Kupiansk, towards Konstiantynivka and Siversk, there have been significant recent Russian gains, by the slow attritional standards of this war.

As reported by the Guardian in the UK, even some Ukrainian politicians and bloggers have come out to say that fifty days will simply allow Russia to occupy further Ukrainian land. The most interesting point about that report is the revelation that a British mainstream media outlet is reporting oppositionist views from Ukraine, rather than the narrative from Zelensky’s propaganda machine.

So, fifty days favours Russia more than Ukraine, militarily.

And the so-called secondary tariffs are only secondary to Russia. To countries like China they would be actual tariffs, taxing Chinese goods and those from other affected countries at an additional 100% on top of exist rates.

Yet, when the US last hiked tariffs on China at a rate of 145%, Trump was quickly forced to back down as China simply increased their tariffs against US goods by a proportionate rate. If Trump believes that China would not do so again, then I’m afraid he is deluded.

Even in the (frankly) unlikely event that China did not respond to ‘secondary’ tariffs in kind, it is far from clear how President Xi Jinping would force President Putin to change his war aims in Ukraine, without himself appearing to lose face in China, which would be politically damaging to him.

Which brings us back to Trump’s ultimatum. One commentator remarked that he has managed to ‘back himself into a corner in the Oval Office’, which is not an easy thing to do.

The chances of President Putin backing down without any concessions from Ukraine or from their European sponsors are so low as to be almost non-existent.

Donald Trump, who appears largely to have sub-contracted resolving the Ukraine war to Marco Rubio and Keith Kellogg (where has Steve Witkoff disappeared to?), may now be forced to invest more personal time to bringing the war to an end.

Yes, he has engaged directly with President Putin in talks which is to be welcomed, in a diplomacy-starved war. But his real problem is his inability to encourage Ukraine and its European sponsors to address Russia’s underlying concerns about the war.

The most significant concern is, and has always been, about the need for Ukraine to adopt neutrality and revoke its aspiration to NATO membership. There has been absolutely no sign of compromise on this key underlying concern in Kyiv, Brussels, Berlin or London.

Offering Ukraine more weapons, however well-intended, will simply encourage Zelensky, Mark Rutte, Ursula von der Leyen, Friedrich Merz and Keir Starmer, in their view that Ukraine’s NATO aspirations remain alive and well. And, unfortunately, Russia will not silence its guns until, at the very least, a deal on Ukrainian neutrality is reached.

That leaves Trump with only one place to go. He must now invest personal time into urging Ukraine and Europe to accept neutrality for Ukraine as part of a ceasefire deal and longer-term peace process. If he doesn’t, the politics of Washington DC may force him to impose tariffs on China in a way which will, more than anyone else, hurt American people, and hurt his reputation.