A ceasefire that one side can break without paying for it is not a ceasefire. It is a press release. That is the lesson of this week, and Donald Trump is the one teaching it.
The sequence matters. An energy truce is announced over the weekend. Within days, Russian strikes hit power facilities in four Ukrainian regions and leave tens of thousands of families in the dark. A woman is killed in Zaporizhzhia, and a six-year-old is among the wounded. Zelenskyy says Russia has broken the arrangement repeatedly. The American president's answer is to defend his decision to waive planned sanctions on Moscow, because he is "negotiating peace."
Negotiating what, exactly? Diplomacy works when concessions are traded for concessions. Here the concession came first and the other side's compliance never arrived. Vladimir Putin has watched Washington lift pressure while Russian missiles keep hitting the grid. He would be a fool to draw any conclusion except that violations are free.
The strongest counterargument deserves a hearing. Sanctions have not ended this war in three years, and no peace happens without some incentive for Moscow to sign. That is true. But incentives are what you offer after behavior changes, not in advance and on credit. If the sanctions waiver were tied to verified compliance, that would be statecraft. A waiver granted while the strikes continue is simply a gift.
Nor should anyone pretend the two sides' strikes are morally identical. Ukraine launching a thousand drones at oil terminals and fuel depots inside Russia is an attack on the economic machinery that funds an invasion. The death in St. Petersburg is a real loss, and it should be named as one. But Russia's campaign against Ukraine's power grid is built to make civilian life unbearable: no heat, no light, no water pumps, no hospitals running at full capacity. The laws of war forbid deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure, and UN human rights monitors have been documenting the toll these attacks take on ordinary Ukrainians. Treating them as a symmetrical "exchange," as the headline's framing invites, flatters the aggressor.
The Left should be honest about its own record here, too. For too long Democratic officials let fear of escalation set the pace, delivering weapons late and in dribs while Ukrainian cities froze. Caution was sold as prudence, and Ukrainians paid for it. That history is no reason to cheer Trump's approach. It is a reason to say plainly what a serious policy looks like: sustained air defense for the cities and the grid, enforceable terms for any truce, and sanctions relief only in return for measurable Russian steps.
And there is a question the White House has not answered. Who benefits from easing pressure on Moscow? Not the family in Zaporizhzhia. Not the American taxpayers who were told this would be a tough negotiation. Trump has spent months praising the deal he says he is about to make while the people he is supposedly protecting absorb the bombs. Peace obtained by rewarding the party that keeps striking is not peace but a pause that Russia will use to rearm.
If Trump wants to be a peacemaker, he can start with the simplest test in diplomacy: stop paying for promises that are being broken in real time. Reinstate the sanctions, tie any relief to verified compliance, and say out loud who is bombing whose power plants. Anything less is not toughness or deal-making. It is a very expensive way of looking away.
