In his usual bluster, U.S. President Donald Trump at numerous hustings in 2024 promised to get a deal to end the fighting in Ukraine in just one day if elected president. In fact, he boasted that President Vladimir Putin wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, starting the largest and deadliest war in Europe since World War II if he was the president.

That invasion became a major escalation of the conflict between the two countries which began in February 2014 when Putin not only annexed Crimea, but also ordered Russian paramilitaries’ war in the eastern Donbas region against Ukraine’s military. But Trump was dead wrong. More than four months after his inauguration, his self-avowed goal of securing a peace deal is dead, virtually.

The U.S. President was wrong in his characterisation of the brutal war because he misread Putin from the onset, believing that the Russo-Ukrainian War was an attempt by Putin to stop Ukraine from joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, NATO, an intergovernmental transnational military alliance of 32 member states — 30 European and two North American.

Ukraine had always had relations with NATO dating back to the early 1990s following its declaration of independence on August 24, 1991. She subsequently joined the North Atlantic Cooperation Council same year and the Partnership for Peace programme in 1994. Relations were further strengthened with the signing of the 1997 Charter on a Distinctive Partnership, which established the NATO-Ukraine Commission and further enhanced in 2009 with the Declaration to Complement the Charter, which reaffirmed the decision by NATO Leaders at the 2008 Bucharest Summit that Ukraine will become a member of NATO. In fact, until 2006, the Ukrainian Armed Forces worked with NATO in Iraq.

Granted, most Russian officials, including President Putin, believed it would be too risky to allow Ukraine join NATO, but that was not the reason for the invasion. Putin wilfully invaded Ukraine because he never believed it should be an independent state. The NATO spin was, therefore, a mere subterfuge, a smokescreen.

So, Trump couldn’t have stopped Putin from invading Ukraine in 2022 even if he was president because it was a premeditated action and the conditions Russia is giving for peace – Kyiv gives up big new chunks of territory and accepts limits on the size of its army – bear that truth out.

According to a memorandum published by the Russia-owned Interfax news agency on June 2, Putin said a settlement of the war would require international recognition of Crimea and four other regions of Ukraine – Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – that Moscow is claiming as its own territory and Ukraine withdrawing its forces from all of them. Russia also restated its demands that Ukraine becomes a neutral country – ruling out membership of NATO, and ceases all military redeployments and limitations on the size of its armed forces, a halt to foreign provision of military aid, satellite communications and intelligence. Moscow is also insisting that Kyiv lifts martial law and holds presidential and parliamentary elections within 100 days, and Ukraine to abandon its demand for war reparations to be paid by Moscow.

Contrastingly, Ukraine is demanding a full 30-day ceasefire during which time peace negotiations can take place. Zelenskyy also said ahead of Monday’s meeting that Kyiv wants the release of all prisoners and the return of 400 Ukrainian children forcibly taken to Russia. The Russian delegation agreed to work on returning only 10, claiming that they were moved from war zones to protect them.

As if to confirm the widely held belief in Kyiv that Putin has no genuine interest in peace, despite Moscow’s participation in the US-brokered talks in Istanbul, Turkey, Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian president and prime minister now serving as the deputy chairman of the country’s Security Council, wrote on Telegram on Tuesday that the talks “are not meant to achieve a compromise peace based on some imaginary and unrealistic conditions invented by others, but rather to secure our swift victory and the complete destruction” of Zelenskyy’s government.

Of course, these demands are non-starters for Ukrainians, who insist that acquiescing to Russia’s conditionalities is tantamount to surrender, a point reemphasized by the Ukrainian ambassador to Nigeria, Mr. Ivan Kholostenko, in an exclusive interview with TheNiche on Wednesday: “The document Russia presented during the second Istanbul meeting did not show any meaningful evolution. Despite promising the United States to bring more constructive proposals, Russia returned with the same outdated ultimatums and maximalist demands that mirror its positions from 2022. There was no flexibility, no realism, and no genuine will to move toward peace. This demonstrates how disconnected the Russian leadership remains from both the needs of the Ukrainian people and the broader international consensus.”

Accepting such terms, Kholostenko said, will “amount to surrender, legitimisation of aggression, and a green light for further expansionism.” Ukraine “has consistently made it clear that peace must be just, durable, and based on international law. Capitulation is not an option, nor would it bring lasting stability to the region or the world.”

So, the negotiations which lasted barely an hour failed; the reason why the international community must be worried. Moscow’s hope of securing swift victory and the complete destruction of Zelenskyy’s government has become forlorn. Three years into a war Putin thought would end in just two weeks, Russia has made no substantial progress. Its hitherto fabled military capabilities has been exposed as grossly overrated and ineffectual when it mattered most.

But therein lies the danger. A frustrated, deflated and highly embarrassed Russia may resort to the use of nuclear arsenal in its desperation, more so as Ukraine continues to display a strategic edge as exemplified in its attack on Russian nuclear-capable long-range bomber planes at airfields in Siberia and the far north of the country on Sunday when it launched 117 drones in an operation codenamed “Spiderweb” deep inside Russia and thousands of miles from the front lines.

Western military analysts described the strikes as audacious. And it was. When the dust settled after the drone attack on airfields stretching from Siberia in the east to Murmansk in the north, 41 Russian warplanes, about one-third of its strategic bomber fleet, were reportedly destroyed causing over $7 billion in damage.

But war is an ill wind that blows nobody any good. The Russo-Ukrainian War is no exception. It has brought about immeasurable loss of human lives, both military personnel and innocent civilians. The destruction of infrastructure and resources is staggering.

A study published on Tuesday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said almost 1.4 million troops – nearly one million Russians and close to 400,000 Ukrainians – have been killed or wounded since the war of attrition began. “No Soviet or Russian war since World War II has even come close… in terms of fatality rate,” the study said. Besides, Russia has reportedly lost nearly 11,000 tanks and almost 23,000 armoured infantry vehicles since the war began. Today, the United Nations is predicting that Ukraine’s reconstruction may cost $486 billion — roughly two and a half times her GDP.

Yet, despite these humongous losses – human and material – at the beginning of 2025, the Russian military controlled only about 18 per cent of Ukraine’s territory. All through 2024, it added only 1,500 square miles, which amounts to less than one per cent of Ukraine. Now, military experts aver that Ukraine’s ability to hold out as long as it has and launch offensive operations in Russia, as it did last Sunday, has punctured the global image of Russia’s military might.

Now, a bolstered Zelenskyy is talking tough. On Tuesday, two days after the blistering attacks on Russian airfields, he said Ukraine will neither surrender nor give in to any ultimatums, even as he affirmed that: “But we do not want to fight, we do not want to demonstrate our strength – we demonstrate it because the enemy does not want to stop.”

And he is correct. Neither he nor Ukraine started this “war of blame.” Putin is the aggressor and this aggression started with the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014. This is Putin’s war and it will stop today if the man who started the war by invading another sovereign country decides to put an end to the madness.

In case he fails to appreciate the precariousness of the situation and the futility in his aggression, his friend, the ultimate deal maker, Donald Trump, should help in nudging him to genuine truce rather than threatening that the U.S. is ready to walk away from its mediation efforts unless the two sides demonstrate progress towards a deal. That is no way to make a deal.