Remember when the New York Times led the mainstream media pack in painting Donald Trump as hopelessly compromised as a tool of Russian intelligence? Good times, good times. Today, Trump threatened to levy massive sanctions against Vladimir Putin's regime if he didn't get serious about ending the war in Ukraine, and ... this was the only headline on the front page about it as of 2:45 pm ET (the black oval):

If you squint really hard, you'll see this as an update on their live blog. In between the main headline over Elon Musk's criticism of Trump's AI deal and the revocation of LBJ's executive order on affirmative action, you get this headline: "Trump pushes Putin to end war in Ukraine, threatening Russia with tariffs and sanctions."

Seems newsy, no? Threatening Russia with punishing tariffs over a war with an American ally? Even if readers can barely find it, their report actually does a decent job of covering the basics:

President Trump on Wednesday threatened to impose tariffs and sanctions on Russia if President Vladimir V. Putin does not reach a deal to end the war in Ukraine.

Mr. Trump has yet to unveil a detailed strategy to end the war, which he promised on the campaign trail to do in 24 hours.

In a post on social media, Mr. Trump said he was “not looking to hurt Russia” but warned that if Mr. Putin did not make a deal “soon” that he had no choice than to put “high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States.”

Trump may not have unveiled a "detailed" strategy to end the war, but he certainly displayed his opening move within the first 36 hours of his presidency. In fact, as the NYT points out, Trump started off even earlier than that, calling for Putin to stop destroying his own country in this pointless war:

Hours after he was inaugurated on Monday, Mr. Trump issued some of his most critical comments he had ever made about Mr. Putin when he said the Russian president was “destroying Russia” by waging war in Ukraine. The comments were notable given Mr. Trump’s history of speaking warmly about Mr. Putin, and in 2018 he accepted the Russian leader’s word over his own intelligence agencies at a summit in Helsinki.

Worst. Intel. Asset. Ever.

It's fair to say that Trump has made it clear that he wants an end to the war, and that he's prepared to use both carrots and sticks to get it. His full statement on Truth Social goes out of the way to praise the Russian people, and also to send Putin a clear warning. He's destroying Russia for no good reason, and Trump wants Putin to think seriously about making concessions that will put an end to it:

I’m not looking to hurt Russia. I love the Russian people, and always had a very good relationship with President Putin - and this despite the Radical Left’s Russia, Russia, Russia HOAX. We must never forget that Russia helped us win the Second World War, losing almost 60,000,000 lives in the process. All of that being said, I’m going to do Russia, whose Economy is failing, and President Putin, a very big FAVOR. Settle now, and STOP this ridiculous War! IT’S ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE. If we don’t make a “deal,” and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries. Let’s get this war, which never would have started if I were President, over with! We can do it the easy way, or the hard way - and the easy way is always better. It’s time to “MAKE A DEAL.” NO MORE LIVES SHOULD BE LOST!!!

This is good advice and a welcome approach by Trump to this conflict. The US guaranteed Ukraine that it would keep its territorial integrity if it surrendered its stock of Soviet nuclear weapons, left over from the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR. That helped solve a frightening scenario of having those weapons on the black market, but it committed us -- at least morally -- to oppose any effort by Russia to seize Ukraine in whole or in part after removing its defenses. Whether or not subsequent efforts to have Ukraine join the EU and/or NATO were provocative or simply expressions of Ukrainian self-determination, we put them in a position that left Ukraine vulnerable to a brute-force effort by Russia to return Ukraine to a Muscovite empire. 

With that said, though, it has become clear that neither side can actually win this war. It looks like the trench warfare of World War 1, with lines wiggling but only occasionally moving in any significant degree. The only thing either side is accomplishing now is killing people, without any appreciable strategic gain. The war is mainly being fought in ground actions where ethnic Russians lived in Ukraine, where the populace used to have the political strength to keep the ever-corrupt Ukrainian government oriented toward Moscow. Volodymyr Zelensky wants those regions returned to Kyiv, but he'd have the same problem of keeping them as Putin would have in swallowing the rest of Ukraine. It's a recipe for endless war.

The solution here would be to cut a deal that ends the fighting, gives the opportunity for self-determination to those areas in the Donbas (and Crimea, unless something significant changes) in exchange for hard security guarantees that can be enforced against Putin. He's already lost in the sense that NATO expanded anyway, with Finland and Sweden adding an 850-mile border directly between Russia and the West. Putin has come under the thumb of Xi Jinping too, a development that should worry both Russians and the US. Ukrainians would have better control of the country without the ethnic Russians attempting to tie Kyiv to Moscow, and they can focus on repairing what has been lost and stanch the literal bleeding that neither side can sustain but which hits the Ukrainians harder. 

Notably and rationally, Trump is applying public pressure on Putin rather than Zelensky, and for good reason. Zelensky has already acknowledged that a negotiated outcome is the only real solution at this point, while Putin's still demanding a Greater Russia that his military clearly cannot support. In that sense, Trump is holding closer to the position that Joe Biden held, only with more pressure added to a short-term opportunity. 

Given all of the very bad options left at this point, Trump has wisely chosen the least bad for everyone. Whether Putin recognizes that is another question, but at least Trump is making clear that he's not going to go along with a Munich 1938 approach to solving this conflict.

Update: Apparently, this point was too subtle: "In that sense, Trump is holding closer to the position that Joe Biden held, only with more pressure added to a short-term opportunity." Biden had imposed strong sanctions and had steadily increased them; now Trumop is threatening to increase them more rapidly. The point was that Trump hasn't flipped the US to Putin's side, as his opponents kept claiming he would. He knows where the problem lies, but also knows that the solution will not be regime change in Moscow or a complete pullout before a settlement either.