President Donald Trump says he’s agreed to another in-person meeting with Russia’s Vladimir Putin in coming weeks with an eye to ending the Ukraine war; we expect the prez will heed the lesson of his own Middle East diplomacy — and quietly pin down the autocrat in advance.
Give Kyiv a few dozen Tomahawk missiles now, with more to follow if necessary, and let Moscow and the world know that secondary sanctions will kick in if this Budapest sitdown doesn’t yield an immediate cease-fire.
Setting a hard deadline for tariffs to soar worked to get world leaders rushing to ink trade deals with the United States; official notice of serious sanctions pain can force Putin’s hand now.
Yes, Putin may already be bending: The Kremlin reached out to the White House to set up Thursday’s Trump-Putin phone call, where Vlad plainly lobbied against sending Tomahawks to Kyiv, the game-changer that would force Russia to finally embrace peace.
Trump himself says “it’s possible” that Putin’s just stringing him along — and pointedly warns, “I’ve been played all my life by the best of them, and I came out really well.”
Yet the prez generously continued, “I think that he wants to make a deal.”
Privately, he should agree with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s comment at the White House on Friday: “Putin is not really, I think, not ready, but I think I’m confident that with [Trump’s] help, we can stop this war.”
One test: Our president conditioned any sitdown with Putin on this week’s high-level Washington-Moscow talks going well.
“Going well” should mean major concessions, ones that Russia can’t walk back without punishing consequences.
No repeat of the August meeting in Alaska, where Putin didn’t commit to what his diplomats had implied he would agree to, and whatever sweet talk he gave Trump got walked back in the following days.
Russia has only escalated since then, regularly mounting ever-larger missile and drone assaults on Ukrainian civilians.
But Kyiv, with US intelligence helping out, has answered by targeting Moscow’s energy industry.
And Tomahawks (perhaps Barracuda cruise missiles as well) would allow Zelensky to devastate Putin’s oil and gas facilities — crushing his main source of the income for his war machine.
Our president is already wielding the oil weapon: His policies have already brought global oil prices tumbling, a win for US consumers as well as a loss for Russia’s military, and he says he has India moving toward ending its purchases of Moscow’s oil.
The obvious next step is official notice that secondary sanctions, making China pay big for supporting Russia, will kick in if Putin doesn’t agree to a cease-fire in Budapest.
Since returning to the White House, Trump has successfully brokered the Gaza peace deal and a cease-fire between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, among six or seven other conflicts settled.
All of that involved tariff threats, trade negotiations, sweet-nothings and old-fashioned jawboning — with hard power in the background.
And for his biggest score, the Gaza peace initiative, Trump only took the stage in person after the key agreements were in place.
The president plainly understands that Putin is desperate to not lose face over his disastrous Ukraine debacle, a venture the Russian’s generals assured him would be a one-week walkover that’s instead become a 3½-year quagmire.
But the carnage and waste needs to end, and that requires Vlad knowing his only practical choice is to cut a deal he can pretend is victory before everything comes crashing down.
It’s time to up the ante by sending in some Tomahawks.
Our president holds all the cards here; the Russian would be a fool to make him play them all.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
