The Simple Ugly Truth Behind Trump’s Ukraine Deal

The war in one plain paragraph without earlier context

Under earlier provocation Russia crossed the border in February 2022 and drove toward Kyiv. It failed to take the capital, pulled back and settled into an artillery war in the east and south. Ukraine pushed it out of some areas in 2022 but stalled in 2023. Since then Russia has regrouped, expanded its industry and begun to push again. Ukraine is still resisting but now fights with less ammunition and less foreign enthusiasm than before, while both sides live under a constant swarm of drones.

Operation Midas in simple terms

Operation Midas is an investigation by Ukraine anti corruption bureau into a large racket at the state nuclear company Energoatom. Investigators say that managers and middlemen inflated contracts, took generous cuts and used shell firms even while the country was under full invasion.

• It ran for more than a year, with dozens of searches and many hours of recorded calls.
• The alleged organiser is businessman Timur Mindich, a long time associate and former business partner of President Zelensky from the Kvartal 95 days.
• Two ministers have already been pushed out or moved aside as a result.

The bureau has even released fragments of the recorded conversations in edited video form, turning the scandal into a kind of public theatre that keeps the story alive.

Why the Midas scandal matters now

At one level Midas is exactly what Western governments said they wanted. Ukraine received huge sums in budget aid and in military support. In return its leaders promised that the old system of padded contracts and quiet kickbacks would be torn out.

The details from Midas tell a different story. They describe energy deals during the war where contracts were steered to favoured companies and a generous cut was skimmed off as a normal fee. They describe businessmen talking casually about controlling ministries. They show that the serious money did not vanish with the first Russian missiles. It simply adjusted to the circumstances and kept moving.

The problem for Zelensky is not only that this is happening on his watch. It is that the central figure named by investigators, Timur Mindich, is not some distant oligarch. He is the man who helped build Zelensky pre political career. He is part of the original circle. That makes it much harder to claim that everything bad happened far away from the presidency in forgotten offices.

• Foreign taxpayers now have proof that real money was being skimmed during the war.
• The bodies that uncovered it are themselves funded and backed by Western partners.
• Each new leak weakens the claim that Ukraine can be trusted with endless support on its own terms.

When the same capitals that bankrolled your state also control the tools that can expose your friends, their bargaining power increases. Your freedom of manoeuvre decreases.

What the Trump plan really does

• It writes Russia main achievements into a draft settlement.
• It gives the United States a way to reduce its role and its spending.
• It places Europe in the position of paying for reconstruction without having written the first draft.
• It confronts Ukraine with a formal choice between territorial loss and continued war with less support.

It is not a neutral blueprint. It is a political instrument that reflects where power and patience currently sit, and it assumes that Europe, NATO and the wider financial system will quietly do what is written for them.

Why this plan fails before Moscow says no

On paper the twenty eight point outline is a United States Russia framework. In reality many of its clauses explicitly require action by Europe, by the European Union, by NATO or by the World Bank. It calls for non aggression agreements that bind Europe, for changes to NATO practice on enlargement, for staged lifting of European sanctions, for the use and then unfreezing of Russian assets held in the European system, for an ambitious reconstruction package built around European and Bretton Woods money.

None of that can be delivered by the White House on its own. European parliaments would have to vote for it. NATO governments would have to accept it. World Bank shareholders would have to back it. That is why this plan is likely to fail before it reaches the point where Russia is asked for a final yes or no.

European leaders have already set public lines. They say that borders cannot be changed by force, that Ukraine as a sovereign state cannot have its armed forces capped by outside powers, and that any settlement for Ukraine must be anchored in an order where the European Union is not just a cashier but a central political actor. Their own draft plan mirrors those points even as Ukraine loses ground.

For a leader in Berlin or Paris there is another calculation. To sign a document that clearly looks like a Ukrainian capitulation is to accept personal ownership of the defeat. To resist a settlement, and then watch Ukraine collapse because Washington and Moscow have moved on, is to blame that collapse on Trump or on Washington and to keep the story of Russian threat alive for domestic use. From that point of view it is safer to talk about maximal outcomes and resist compromise than to put a name under an ugly peace.

From Moscow this is comfortable. Russia can say that it has talked to the United States, that it has accepted a framework, that it has agreed general points, and that it is the Europeans who cannot live with the realities that their own war has created.

Drones, the new equaliser

The biggest change in this war in the past two years is that it is no longer simply a contest of artillery shells and tank numbers. It is a contest of cheap drones and the people who fly them.

Ukraine has turned itself into a vast workshop for unmanned aircraft. Domestic factories, volunteer groups and foreign suppliers now deliver hundreds of thousands of small first person view drones and quadcopters to the front every month. These machines cost a few hundred dollars, carry a grenade or a shaped charge, and are flown straight into tanks, guns, trucks or dugouts. Long range Ukrainian systems hit refineries, depots and airfields deep inside Russia, forcing Moscow to pull air defences back to cover its own territory.

Russia has responded in kind achieving drone superiority in numbers but has been unable to escape the Ukrainian drone strikes while its troops advance, It has sharply increased production of its own small strike drones, continued to use and copy the larger Iranian designs, and created dedicated unmanned units inside its army. It uses mass swarms to hit power plants, rail nodes and Ukrainian positions, and floods the front with electronic warfare to jam or hijack Ukrainian drones.

Serious studies now agree that a clear majority of battlefield losses on both sides are caused by drones rather than by classic shellfire. A cheap plastic airframe kills an expensive tank. A quadcopter hovering silently above a trench can drop a small bomb through a hatch and destroy a crew that never saw it coming. This has turned the front into a permanent ambush from the sky.

Because so many Russian units are now being hit by Ukrainian drones at close range, the ratio of Russian to Ukrainian casualties has narrowed compared with the early phase dominated by artillery, even as Russia still holds the initiative on the map the advance is slower and more cautious.

That is one quiet reason why the Kremlin now stresses that it may be open to a negotiated end on its own terms. Russia is gaining land, but each gain is now relatively expensive. If Moscow can lock in its main objectives now have the territory its captured recognised as Russian by the world including the whole of the four oblasts it might just agree to the terms.

Why the map and the drone sky matter in the talks

However any negotiation over territory the side that is slowly advancing has less reason to compromise. Every village Russia takes today makes it easier for Moscow to argue tomorrow that the current front line should become the new border. Every Ukrainian retreat weakens the case for total restoration of the old map.

That is why time now works in favour of Russia and against Kyiv, The longer the war drags on, the more any eventual settlement will rest not only on who holds what land but also on how much more blood Russia is willing to pay to hold it.

The numbers behind the squeeze

• American and allied support for Ukraine since 2022 now runs into the hundreds of billions. Tens of billions more are stalled in parliaments and subject to tighter audit and open political dispute.
• Russia produces several times more artillery shells each year than Ukraine and its backers can match on present plans, but both sides are now channelling more money into unmanned systems and electronic warfare than into classic guns.
• Ukraine economy has shrunk by about one third since the invasion. Russia economy has been held up by war mobilisation and redirected trade, but that support rests on higher defence spending and sanctions workarounds that will not last forever.

These are not accounting curiosities. They are the hard background against which every paragraph of the peace plan will be read.

The four positions in plain language

• Russia wants to lock in its gains, keep Ukraine out of NATO and ensure that no large hostile army can build up on its border again. It is ready to keep fighting until those conditions are met, but it is also aware that drones are making each new advance more costly.
• The United States under Trump wants to stop paying for a long war that does not deliver a clear victory. It wants a ceasefire that can be sold at home as success and is trying to do that by writing a framework with Moscow and then presenting it as a choice to Kyiv and to Europe.
• Europe talks solidarity but budgets scarcity. It wants to avoid both a Ukrainian collapse and a wider direct war with Russia, and is willing to live with an ugly settlement if that is the price of stability, but it does not want to sign its name under an obvious capitulation text.
• Ukraine wants to remain intact and sovereign but no longer has the strength to impose that wish on the battlefield or in the negotiating room. It is held up by courage, drones and outside money, and all three are under pressure.

Public mood inside Ukraine

Recent polling suggests a country that is both defiant and tired. Large majorities still back continued defence and do not want to see the loss of more land formalised. At the same time a growing share say they are open to talks if some kind of sovereignty can be preserved and if the alternative is endless war with shrinking support.

That tension between pride and exhaustion is the political air that any Ukrainian leader now breathes.

Three ways this could end

• Best case: a hard ceasefire along an ugly line, enough security guarantees and drones and air defences to deter renewed attack, and real anti corruption reform that unlocks reconstruction.
• Less likely: an uneasy truce that freezes the front for a time, with sporadic clashes, ongoing drone strikes and a permanent wound on the map, partially based on the twenty eight point logic but never openly acknowledged as such.
• Likely if War runs its Course: a forced collapse of Ukrainian defences followed by Russian control of all of the Donbass plus the other three oblasts, a push to the Dnieper and possibly the seizure of Odessa and other Russian speaking regions, leaving Europe with a larger Russian state holding seven Ukrainian oblasts, an army that presents itself as battle tested and near invincible, and a long shadow war that no document will control.