Trump pledged to end Ukraine war in 24 hours. How's that working out?
National Post, 19 August 2025
Putin pines for the glory days of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, the man in the White House is no Ronald Reagan
U.S. President Donald Trump never did specify in which 24-hour period he would end the Ukraine war. Eventually, the war will end, and he will brag that THE DAY HAS COME. After all, the First World War ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. Given that bombing continued even that very November morning, it ended in one hour!
Trump’s much-promised day was not in February when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visited the White House at the end of a month-long campaign by Trump and Vice-President JD Vance to force a Ukrainian surrender, in which they blamed Ukrainians for starting the war in the first place by not pre-emptively surrendering.
The day did not come last week in Alaska, when Trump literally rolled out the red carpet for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump had demanded a ceasefire from Putin, promising severe consequences otherwise. Putin instead continued bombing even while Trump capitulated to him in Anchorage. The “severe consequence” was the honour of a military flyover and a ride in the presidential limo.
What would have happened had Putin ordered a ceasefire? Perhaps we were spared the osculatory intimacy of the late Soviet period, when Leonid Brezhnev and East Germany’s Erich Honecker creeped out the world with the socialist fraternal kiss. That is not Trump’s style, but for Putin his affection is extravagant.
Putin pines for the late Soviet period. He wants Ukraine back, he has de facto got Belarus back and Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia know he wants them back, which is why they joined NATO the first chance they got. His foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, arrived in Alaska wearing a white “C.C.C.P.” sweater — the Cyrillic spelling of U.S.S.R. Somewhere in China, President Xi Jinping’s factories are making “Make the U.S.S.R. Great Again” hats to ship to his ally in Moscow.
Trump had planned a lunch for Putin, but the meeting was cut short. The Russian bear was likely already full, having gorged himself on the TACOs already provided. TACO stands for “Trump Always Chickens Out,” but in Alaska it meant “Trump Abandons the Ceasefire Obligation.”
Alarmed at what further severe consequences Putin will be granted for continuing to bomb Ukraine, Zelenskyy and all of Europe — the leaders of NATO, the European Union, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Finland — rushed to Washington on Monday.
It was an unprecedented diplomatic display, a united front desperately trying to persuade Trump to abandon last week’s position on Ukraine — TACOs are served! — in favour of his ceasefire position of the previous week. It’s now wholly impossible to determine what Trump’s Ukraine policy is, so rapidly does it change.
Perhaps Putin abbreviated the meeting because he got all that he could reasonably imagine getting — no ceasefire, no additional sanctions, no confiscation of frozen assets, no severe consequences, implied American approval for the annexation of Ukrainian territory.
The only apparent concession Putin made — claimed by the Trump administration — was a promise to accept American security assistance after the most strategic parts of Ukraine are sacrificed. But Russia and the United States made security assurances to each other, and to Ukraine, in 1994. Twenty years later, Putin began his 11-year war against his neighbour.
Had Trump even a fraction of the moral courage and diplomatic competence of former U.S. president Ronald Reagan — whose motto he mimics, while understanding neither “peace” nor “strength” — he would have insisted that Putin return at least some of the 20,000 Ukrainian children he has kidnapped.
The forced removal of Ukrainian children — some indoctrinated against their own homeland and forced into Russian military service — is the grounds on which Putin was indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court. TACO again: “Trump Absent on Children’s Outrage.”
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