INTREP360 INTELLIGENCE REPORT
12.10.2025
December 10th, 2025
Greetings! We are deviating today from our normal format to take a deeper dive into the three competing sets of negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. We will circle the globe again tomorrow.
Chasing peace in Ukraine has become a three-ring circus. In ring number one is Team Trump trying to foist an untenable plan on Ukraine.
Photo credit: Sarasota Herald-Tribune
Part of the problem is how peace is defined. For Putin, it is no more resistance from Ukraine. For Zelensky, it’s no more Russian forces in Ukraine. And for Trump – it’s the pursuit of ‘economic opportunities,’ and that means Russia and Ukraine are not killing one another.
In ring two is the European-led coalition of the willing. Yet, beyond photo ops, this coalition is not doing enough to change Russian President Vladimir Putin’s cost calculus.
Ring three? The Kremlin.
Russian circuses are globally renowned. Grand illusions and deceptions are at the core of magic performances.
Exactly as they are now.
Putin isn’t negotiating in his ring. Instead, he is maintaining a maximalist position and demanding Ukraine’s capitulation. all the while creating division between the U.S. and NATO. It’s working. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) is his latest useful idiot.
Yesterday, he introduced a bill in the House to terminate U.S. membership in NATO – the defensive Transatlantic alliance the U.S. help found in 1949. Massie incredulously argues that “NATO is a Cold War relic.”
Really?
What world is he living in?
Per the 2025 Reagan National Defense Survey, 68 percent of Americans support the NATO alliance.
Russia and China pose as great of a threat to our way of life as Nazi Germany and Japan did in 1941. Yet, Massie’s reaction to that is to stand down. Arguably an even greater threat given that both are nuclear powers.
Too many in Washington are disconnected from the reality of growing – certainly not diminishing – threats from Moscow and Beijing and their Arsenals of Evil allies.
Let’s get started!
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RING ONE
President Donald Trump, as a ringmaster, is quixotic. Seemingly, he believes the U.S. is only a business deal or two away from striking a long-lasting peace deal with Putin. Or at least that is what his son-in-law Jared Kushner and special envoy to Russia Steve Witkoff are peddling to Trump. Yet dollar bills won’t stop bullets.
To get there faster, he’s installed an allegorical guillotine in his ring. Either Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky yields to Trump’s demands over ceding the Donbas or Ukraine potentially faces execution in the form of an end to U.S. intel, weapons and munitions. Unless, of course, Europe gets in the way.
As Jon observed during our weekly Tuesday War & Politics 24 show hosted by Daniel Tkiie and Sofiia Nazarenko – it’s on YouTube first and then dubbed for over-the-air broadcast on Kanal 24 in Ukraine – Trump wants it badly.
Yet what Trump wants – and just as importantly the price that he is willing to pay for it – is bad for Ukraine and it is bad for the security of Europe.
Ceding the Donbas to Putin – as Trump is demanding – would be (as we have often said) akin to Ukraine committing national suicide. Especially because it would also mean the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) withdrawing from its Fortress Donbas and its critical defensive beltlines holding back the Russian horde.
Abandoning these beltlines would endanger Kyiv and Ukraine’s strategic port city of Odesa on the Black Sea. Losing the latter would imperil Kyiv’s economy which depends in part on grain exports as one of the world’s largest food baskets.
To best understand its strategic value, consider what it has cost Russia trying to capture it militarily. According to the Institute for the Study of War, “Russian forces have seized roughly 4,669 square kilometers since January 1, 2025.”
They’ve incurred 391,270 casualties or as the ISW calculates, “83 [dead or wounded] per square kilometer.” Essentially, Putin’s false lauding of Russian advances in eastern Ukraine – claims Team Trump appears to buy – are still only at a “footpace.”
Forcing Ukraine to give Putin at the negotiating table what his armies cannot take on the battlefield would be madness. It would also be proof positive that Washington learned nothing from British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler.
Sacrificing Ukraine’s security because of Team Trump’s haste to start striking business deals in Russia would prove just as fleeting over time as Chamberlain’s sacrifice of Czechoslovakia. As we warned last week in the Kyiv Post, Putin isn’t interested in Witkoff and Kushner’s business deals. He wants Ukraine and he aims to destroy NATO.
Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) understands what’s at stake. He said on X, “I totally disagree with President Trump asking Ukraine to give up additional territory for a peace deal. This rewards the invader and does nothing to guarantee peace in years to come. This is appeasement. This is not Reagan, but it is Chamberlain.”
Not only that – Trump 47 is completely ignoring the law Trump 45 signed in 2017 that mandated the U.S. would “never recognize the illegal annexation of Crimea by the Government of the Russian Federation or the separation of any portionof Ukrainian territory through the use of military force.”
Congress in general is pushing back as well. As we highlighted in Monday’s’ INTREP360 Intelligence Report – you can read it here – the bipartisan 2026 National Defense Authorization Act stipulates that U.S. troops in Europe levels cannot permanently drop below 76,000 and it provides $400 million in symbolic aid to Ukraine over the next two years.
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RING TWO
Ring two – the center ring in a circus – is likely where the war in Ukraine gets decided. Europe’ long-term security is in Putin’s crosshairs depending on the outcome.
Indeed, as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz warned Sunday, after meeting with Zelensky, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron in London, that “Ukraine’s fate is Europe’s fate.”
Zelensky is the main act. However, what is missing is a ringmaster willing to step up to the plate and lead Europe’s collective response. Not just to Trump. But to Putin and his Kremlin cronies such as Kirill Dmtriev as well.
Photo ops are not going to stop Putin’s war against Ukraine. Nor will they prevent Trump from bullying Zelensky into a bad deal.
Despite the European bravado in London, Claire Gatinois and Philippe Ricard reporting for Le Monde, assess that Europe is choosing “a muted response toward the U.S.” and shying away from a direct confrontation with Trump. Zelensky did his best to remind Europe’s E3 powers that collectively they do “have a lot of cards to play.”
The problem is, Europe is feckless when it comes to playing them. Macron talks a grandiose game – in October he hyped SkyShield as a European way of defending “Ukrainian airspace from Russian drones and missiles” – yet nothing ever gets done that truly will change Putin’s cost calculus to force him to end the war.
They also are failing to stop Trump from giving new cards to Putin every time Kushner and Witkoff hit a negotiating wall with Putin. Merz, Starmer and Macron could counter Team Trump’s overtures to Russia by immediately handing Ukraine its own new cards – SkyShield, Taurus missiles, air defense batteries, etc. – but the leadership and boldness to do so is lacking in London, Paris and Berlin. They are still afraid to swim alone in the deep end.
Instead, Europe is focused on pushing its counter-peace proposal. In theory, it is a welcomed counterproposal. It reconfirms Ukraine’s sovereignty. It deletes Washington’s proviso that NATO won’t expand. It maintains a sizable Ukrainian army – capped at 800,000 or roughly just slightly smaller than its present size.
It also rejects Kyiv ceding territory not occupied by Russia. Plus, it leaves a narrow pathway for Ukraine at some further point to join NATO negating any current or future Russian say in who can or cannot join the Transatlantic alliance.
Nonetheless, it lacks teeth. Putin is not going to agree to any of that especially while Team Trump is saying he doesn’t have to. Hence the need to act alone – Putin does not respect this ‘coalition of the willing,’ and won’t until they draw blood.
Thus, unless Europe immediately puts skin in the game – e.g., SkyShield – they simply are in reality acquiescing to Trump. Even worse, acquiescing to Trump means Europe is on a glidepath to acquiesce to Putin’s maximalist demands.
If they do, Europe potentially is tying its own hangman’s noose around their neck. Notably, as we pointed out here on Monday, Sergey Karaganov, the head of Russia’s Council to Foreign and Defense Policy, declared last week that: “We are at war with Europe not with the miserable, pitiful, misled Ukraine.”
Europe should listen. Russia is not mincing words.
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RING THREE
This ring – the Kremlin’s ring – is the most straightforward. And yet, paradoxically, it is also the most deceptive.
Essentially, Putin has built it with smoke and mirrors. He is projecting a false sense of strength that betrays his military and economic reality. He is writing checks neither his military nor economy can cash – speed is the essence, and he has President Trump putting his foot down on the gas pedal.
His armies in Ukraine still only advance at a foot’s pace and only after sustaining unsustainable losses. Despite Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of Russia’s general staff, telling Putin in late that Russian forces had taken control of Kupiansk in late November – a Ukrainian town near the border with Russia in the northeast – the AFU has now encircled Russian troops after cutting their supply lines.
It is also clear that Russia never fully took the city. Putin needed a public relations win in Moscow to impress Kushner and Witkoff and Gerasimov gave him a fake talking point that apparently Team Trump swallowed without counsel from their own military advisors, intelligence analysts, and career diplomats.
Plus, significantly, as the Institute for the Study of War observed today, “Russia’s [military and economic] resources are not endless, as Putin is trying to assert.” Despite maintaining his maximalist negotiating position with Trump, Putin is leading a country that is severely weakened and facing difficult choices going forward. As retired Army Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges suggested, Ukraine struck a third Russian shadow fleet oil tanker this week in the Black Sea to add to Moscow’s economic woes.
For now, however, Putin can avoid making them so long as Team Trump keeps capitulating to him. Every time Putin says no, Trump eventually gives Putin another concession and/or goes on the attack against Zelensky as he did yesterday.
This time it was questioning whether Ukraine is a democracy – one of Putin’s main talking points – and calling for Ukraine to hold elections despite its constitution banning them under Article 83 during states of emergency or martial law.
For now, Putin is content to be his own ringmaster telling his audience to look everywhere else but the reality of his failing ‘special military operation.’
If Trump finally can see that, then he can put an end to the killing he claims to want to stop. But not by capitulating to Putin. The killing stops when Russia stops attacking. Trump can achieve that by backing Ukraine to the hilt to force Moscow to a real negotiating table that is not part of a circus act.
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Thanks for reading! As always, please subscribe, share and comment. We truly value your input and observations. We will see you tomorrow!
Jon & Mark
P.S.: Our weekly Thursday national security column at The Hill will be live at 7AM ET. You will be able to read it here when it goes live.
Copyright 2025. Jonanthan E. Sweet and Mark C. Toth. All rights reserved.