President Donald Trump’s mission to stop the killing in Ukraine has hit a wall. His strategy to let both Moscow and Kyiv “claim victory” and halt the fighting is missing the agreement of one man: Vladimir Putin, the last obstacle to peace.
Last week, Trump and Putin held yet another high-stakes phone call to end the war. Once more, they talked for two hours and appeared to make progress. A peace summit between all sides seemed possible—only for Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to derail the process by repeating Putin’s maximalist demands.
Putin has not altered his original aim: “The whole of Ukraine is ours,” as he has asserted. The Kremlin is repeating a familiar pattern. Putin clearly does not want peace, even if he keeps talking about it with Trump endlessly.
As Putin filibusters, Russia’s military is ramping up efforts to replace its catastrophic losses, recruiting troops as if the war will never end. Here, Russia faces a major limitation in sustaining its invasion: it cannot conscript soldiers, but must buy them.
The fact is any traditional call-up of Russian soldiers for Ukraine would threaten the regime’s stability—a significant weakness for the Kremlin. Russian officials learned this lesson the hard way back in September 2022 when they attempted a “partial” call-up of young men. The move sparked widespread public opposition, causing the Kremlin to quickly back down.
This leaves the “golden handshake”—lucrative cash bonuses and incentive packages for volunteering—as Russia’s primary option for recruiting cannon fodder. But this cost is reaching new heights.
To meet recruitment targets, some of Russia’s regions have significantly increased pay for voluntary service in Ukraine. In Tyumen, Siberia, officials this month began offering a lump sum of $36,560—approximately three times the area’s average yearly salary—on top of Moscow’s $5,086 cash bonus for volunteering to fight in Ukraine.
Other regions have similarly made extravagant increases to their signing bonuses and are adding extra cash to recruits’ lavish monthly salaries. But few volunteers live long enough to collect their regular pay: one recent report estimated the average life expectancy of a Russian recruit to be just one month after signing a contract.
Worse still for the Kremlin, even as the payroll and golden handshake costs rise, Russia’s economic might is shrinking. This puts Putin in a tight financial corner—and Ukraine, the United States, and the Europeans hold all the cards.
To end the war, Trump must make Putin pay an exponentially higher price for it.
Ukraine has taken the first step, targeting Russia’s ability to refine oil. No military or society can function for very long without diesel and gasoline, and Ukraine’s planners have clearly identified this weak point in the Kremlin’s war economy.
In a series of spectacular drone attacks, they have struck Russian refining plants, doing significant damage to this key industry.
During his meeting with Trump on Friday, Zelensky stressed his country’s need to sustain this “oil war” with US-made weapons that can strike even deeper inside Russia.
So far, the White House has waffled on delivering this hardware—but Trump has told Putin that he was considering it. The US foot-dragging must end. Ukraine should have the ability to take out Russia’s major military-industrial targets.
Next, the United States and Europe must be more aggressive in eliminating Russia’s “shadow fleet” of oil tankers. This fleet consists of older, poorly insured vessels that operate outside of Western-imposed price caps on oil and regulatory oversight, effectively allowing Russia to sell its oil and fund its war while circumventing sanctions.
NATO’s navies can and must play a more aggressive role in seizing Russian tankers that violate international law and sanctions.
Finally, and perhaps most important, the United States must drop the hammer of secondary sanctions on countries that continue to buy Russian oil.
Trump has repeatedly called on Europeans to stop funding both sides of the Ukraine war, noting that while the European Union sends military aid to Ukraine with one hand, members like Hungary, Slovakia, and Austria have funneled billions to Russia through energy payments.
They need to halt this back-door support for the Kremlin—or pay a price for their stubbornness.
On October 6, Ukraine’s helpline for Russian servicemembers, “I Want To Live,” released what it claimed were internal Russian documents showing that 86,744 Russian soldiers were killed in Ukraine during the first eight months of 2025—an average of 10,842 per month.
In addition, 33,966 soldiers are missing, 158,529 were wounded, and 2,311 captured.
Saving lives in Ukraine will require Trump to play the strong cards at his disposal just as he did this month in the Middle East. But to make that move, he must first make it clear that he views Russia as the aggressor.
*Peter Doran is an adjunct senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Dmitriy Shapiro is a research analyst.*
https://nypost.com/2025/10/21/opinion/saving-lives-in-ukraine-will-require-trump-to-play-the-strong-cards-at-his-disposal/
