Let’s be clear about what happened here, because the machinery of power is working exactly as it was built to work, and it is not working for the people of Ukraine.
On Friday night, two days before sanctions passed by Congress and signed into law in September were set to take effect, Donald Trump blocked them. Not renegotiated them. Not delayed them for review through any transparent process. Blocked them, quietly, at the end of the week, the classic hour for decisions someone hopes you won’t read about. Then on October 18 he posted the rationale on Truth Social: “I am in the process of negotiating Peace in the war between Russia and Ukraine, and don’t want to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table.”
Notice who gets the courtesy in that sentence. The invading power gets flexibility. The invaded country gets a lecture. Trump went on to declare that Volodymyr Zelensky “doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did,” and that “he could have made a better deal two years ago than he can now.” That is the language of a man doing damage assessment for the Kremlin’s narrative, not a mediator. Zelensky, who has pushed for an end to the fighting since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in February 2022, told NBC News that siding with Vladimir Putin would be a “historic mistake.” He is right, and the mistake is already underway.
Because here is the pattern, and patterns are how we identify structural harm. Last week Trump struck a deal with Putin to lift sanctions on Russian diesel imports. Now he has waived the broader sanctions package. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has dressed the suspension up as a 60-day “pause” to analyze economic impact, which is the diplomatic term for indefinite. And the Kremlin’s envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, celebrated the move as “an important and truly historic moment,” warning the sanctions would have inflicted “serious damage” on markets. When the aggressor’s envoy calls your policy historic, and the victim’s president calls it a mistake, you do not need a decoder ring to figure out whose interests are being served.
The criticism is not coming only from the usual corners. Members of Trump’s own party are furious, and they should be. Congress passed these sanctions. Trump signed them. Then he unmade them by fiat, in the same breath accusing the leader of the invaded nation of prolonging the war. Meanwhile, as RFE/RL reports, the Kremlin has offered no concessions and repeatedly rejected calls for a full ceasefire. Talks have stalled. So the one party actually being driven away from anything is Ukraine, driven away from the table where its sovereignty is being bartered.
The framing we’re asked to accept is that pressure on Russia is “foolish” and might scare Moscow off. But sanctions are not a mood lighting problem. They are the only leverage short of weapons that a negotiating party holds over an economy funding a war machine. Handing that leverage away before the negotiation concludes is not peace-making. It is pre-concession. You do not keep someone at the bargaining table by giving them everything they asked for before the first course arrives.
What must happen now is straightforward. Congress must reclaim its own legislation and stop letting a Friday-night waiver erase a law it passed. Lawmakers of both parties who say they stand with Ukraine need to say it with subpoena power and override votes, not statements of concern. And the rest of us need to keep saying the plain truth loudly enough that it cannot be paused for 60 days: the country that invaded is being rewarded, the country that was invaded is being blamed, and accountability delayed this long is accountability denied.