Zelenski puts pressure on Putin and shows his cards to Trump

Exactly one year ago, in Anchorage (Alaska), Donald Trump rolled out the red carpet for Vladimir Putin in an attempt to stop the war in Ukraine. Six months earlier, on February 28, 2025, in an unusual reprimand broadcast live from the Oval Office of the White House, the U.S. president had insisted to Volodymyr Zelensky that he had to accept a ceasefire under draconian conditions imposed by Moscow. “You are not in a good position, you don’t have the cards,” Trump repeated to him over and over. A tense scene that history will remember.

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The determination of Kyiv and the intelligence of its generals and engineers have so far disproved Trump’s defeatism. The peace dialogue opened in Alaska proved to be a mirage. It is blocked. Ukraine has not been defeated but quite the opposite. On the contact line, its small drones contain the invaders, while other unmanned aircraft almost daily strike refineries, Wildberries logistics centers – the Russian equivalent of Amazon -, military bases, tankers of the stealth fleet, and all kinds of infrastructure deep within Russian territory, including the Moscow and Saint Petersburg regions.

Twelve months after the Alaska summit, the relationship between Trump and Zelensky is more normalized. The North American leader has realized that Putin was not sincere in his search for peace. Kyiv’s resilience has surprised him again.

Despite the relentless Russian bombings, the dramatic lack of missile defense systems, and the inferiority in human forces, Zelensky has shown the reluctant transatlantic ally that he did have cards to play. It was crucial to first convince Elon Musk – this was done by former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, with whom the magnate had a good personal relationship – to cut off the clandestine connection that Russian troops had to the Starlink satellite network. This slowed their assault operations while opening a window of opportunity for the Ukrainians to regain the initiative on the front.

As explained by former French colonel Michel Goya, military historian and author of Théorie du combattant, Ukraine has capitalized on the accumulated knowledge and experiences from the time when it was a vital center of Soviet military industry. That heritage has combined with the dynamism of its civil society and an innovative mindset, undoubtedly forced by circumstances. The country is now a gigantic start-up of the most modern military technologies and a real-time testing laboratory.

Goya emphasizes that the main novelty of this war has been the obsolescence of classic heavy equipment – armored vehicles, tanks, even fighter jets – very expensive to develop and vulnerable, and the rise of light and cheap equipment, although technically sophisticated, such as drones and robots. Ukraine is a power in this field and produces them en masse, with a very decentralized structure for greater protection.

At the start of the conflict, Ukraine depended to a very high percentage on foreign-made and imported military equipment. There has been a radical change there. Although it still needs a lot of help, the country largely supplies itself from its own production. It has developed a cannon similar to the French Caesar and is working on an interceptor missile, the Freyla. Evidence of spectacular progress is the urgent aid several Gulf countries requested from Kyiv to face Iranian Shahed drones. The Ukrainian technological solution was much cheaper and more effective than the American Patriots.

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In a recent article, Pavel Baev, from the Peace Research Institute Oslo (Prio), analyzed in detail the favorable evolution for Ukraine in recent months in the Black Sea theater of operations. According to this expert on the Russian army, one of Ukraine’s successes has been the campaign to cut communication lines between the Crimean Peninsula (occupied by Russia in 2014 and annexed) and the rest of the Russian Federation. These advances are important from both a military and psychological and propaganda point of view, given the relevance this territory has in the Russian nationalist imagination.

Baev recalls a fact that goes somewhat unnoticed: Ukrainian attacks have forced Russia to withdraw many of its planes from bases in Crimea, for security, in a process similar to that of 2024, when the Black Sea fleet had to abandon its base in Sevastopol and retreat to Novorossiysk, much further east, to be safe from Ukrainian naval drones. “The Russian strategic design of a ‘Crimea fortress,’ dominating the central sector of the Black Sea theater, has been de facto canceled,” Baev wrote.

The effective Ukrainian resistance, which has also resulted in some small territorial gains on the Donbass front, serves to convince allies, especially Congress in Washington, that it is worth continuing to help Kyiv. Zelensky did not miss the opportunity, therefore, to attend the recent funeral of Republican Senator Lindsay Graham, one of his great supporters in the Capitol.

Ukraine’s progress since the humiliating scene in the Oval Office and the subsequent Alaska summit does not mean that, in the long run, there will be a positive outcome for Kyiv in this war. Russia’s numerical and material superiority is a key and lasting factor, as is the massive increase in war production. Constant rumors about an imminent general mobilization in Russia to guarantee the flow of men to the front cause much concern, as does the growing involvement of the North Korean ally, with thousands of troops and ballistic missile systems.

Kyiv has no alternative but to continue weakening the aggressor, decimating its shock forces, used as cannon fodder, and exploiting the vulnerabilities of its immense territory to punish its infrastructure and convince the Russian population of the senselessness of this war, which is already in its fifth year.