When is Vladimir Putin going to sit down and make peace with Ukraine?

Don’t hold your breath.

The United States — Donald Trump, really — has been pushing hard for a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine to end their bloody, World War II-style war.

Only Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy can make peace happen.

But the two leaders each made trouble this week by subverting the negotiations and making President Trump angry.

Zelenskyy blurted out, foolishly, that as part of any deal he would not allow Russia to keep control of the Crimean Peninsula, which it annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

Meanwhile, Putin’s military launched its deadliest bombing attack on the capital city of Kyiv since last July, killing a dozen civilians and wounding 90.

Zelenskyy has made lots of trouble with his public statements, but Putin is the main enemy of peace.

He’s the one who started the fighting. He’s the invader. He’s the one ultimately responsible for a war that’s killed hundreds of thousands of soldiers from both sides and thousands of innocent Ukrainian civilians.

But Vlad the Invader has gone relatively unpunished for his war-making. The economic sanctions we’ve put on his country have created little pain and were easily circumvented.

And anyway, it’s not Putin and his ruling elite who are suffering from the high inflation rate and soaring food prices. It’s ordinary Russians.

Putin, who won’t agree to an unconditional ceasefire, obviously thinks he’s going to “win” the peace talks. As President Trump has said coldly but accurately, Putin’s the one who holds all the cards.

Putin will most likely get to keep Crimea and the eastern parts of Ukraine that his army occupies now. And he’ll pay little or no price at the peace table for the aggression we let him get away with.

Trump is probably right to say that if he had been in office in 2022 instead of Joe Biden there would have been no invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

But as incoherent as Biden was at a crucial time, the war was not only his fault.

The USA has failed to protect Ukraine since 1994, ever since Bill Clinton signed the Budapest Memorandum that guaranteed its sovereignty and security if it gave up its huge arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Everyone signed on to that security assurance agreement — us, Ukraine, Russia and the UK. But the guarantee didn’t stop Russia from annexing the Ukraine Peninsula.

President Obama rolled over for Russia in 2014 and let it take Crimea because he didn’t want to aggravate Putin. And in 2022 Biden hardly made a peep when Putin’s tank columns were gathering at the Ukraine border.

For more than two decades Putin has won again and again in negotiations with us because he never tells the truth or keeps his word. His word means nothing.

But when it comes to Ukraine, the word of the United States is not worth much either. We swore to protect it, but we didn’t — not even from its most obvious threat.

It’s easy to understand why Zelenskyy gets mad in public. For three years he’s been fighting a one-sided war he could never win. It’s only his civilians and children who’ve been dying. Only his cities that are in ruins.

He and his countrymen have a good reason not to trust the United States. They’re only in the terrible position they’re in because we — i.e., Clinton, Obama and Biden — put them there with our bungled diplomacy and weakness.

Now it’s time for Trump, Putin and Zelenskyy to just shut up and let the negotiators negotiate an end to a tragic slaughter that never should have started and never should have dragged on for three years.

I don’t know what it’s going to take to stop the war in Ukraine. But based on the history, I’m pretty sure the only winner in the long run besides our military industrial complex will be Putin — to America’s eternal shame.

Copyright 2025 Michael Reagan