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Illustration Credit: Gavril Grigorov/AP

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The president’s desperation to end the Ukraine war might lead to another Munich moment with Russia.

President Donald Trump’s unhealthy obsession with winning the Nobel Peace Prize has driven him to make a series of rash decisions in pursuit of ending the war in Ukraine. The latest example is the scheduling of a premature summit with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in Alaska — an object lesson in how not to do diplomacy.

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Trump came to office promising to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, perhaps thinking that Putin would stop the Russian invasion as a personal favor to him. He first tried to strong-arm Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, publicly berating the leader during an infamous Oval Office meeting in February.

But after Zelensky agreed to a ceasefire, it started to dawn on Trump that Putin was the problem. By June, the American president started expressing frustration with his Russian counterpart. “We get a lot of bulls— thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting last month. “He is very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”

Trump’s newfound anger led to more erratic behavior. In threatening to impose massive secondary sanctions on countries doing business with Russia, he first set a deadline for early September, then moved it up to this past Friday. He announced his intention to impose an additional 25 percent tariff on India — an important U.S. strategic partner in Asia — as punishment for buying and refining Russian oil. But no such threats were levied at China, America’s chief rival in Asia, which buys more Russian oil than India.

Despite Putin’s continuing air and ground assaults on Ukraine, Trump is rewarding him with a presidential summit — and on U.S. soil no less. This turnaround appears to have been a product of the U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff’s meeting with Putin on Wednesday, where Putin reportedly proposed that Kyiv give up all of Luhansk and Donetsk provinces in eastern Ukraine in return for a ceasefire. With the battle lines frozen in place, the Wall Street Journal reports, a final end to the war would supposedly be negotiated later. In the real world, the odds of that happening are remote. The more likely scenario would be that Russia would violate the ceasefire, as it has done repeatedly in Ukraine in years past.

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