Putin Has Weaponized the Peace Talks. The US Can Stop Him

During the Biden administration, the most effective tool Russia’s President Vladimir Putin had to sustain his invasion of Ukraine proved to be his warnings of nuclear escalation, a tactic that prompted Kyiv’s allies to drip-feed its supply of arms for fear of provoking one. That threat lost its power through overuse, but in the Trump era the Kremlin has been handed a still more potent weapon: the peace process.

More than a year into negotiations that President Donald Trump said would take him 24 hours to resolve, talks in Dubai last week produced nothing beyond a prisoner swap — invaluable to the troops and families involved, but irrelevant to a settlement. Steve Witkoff, the real-estate developer chosen to drive this US-led initiative, gave a short readout from the three-way meeting on the social-media platform X, in which he couldn’t even declare “progress” on the issues that matter: namely, territorial concessions by and security guarantees for Ukraine.