Will Trump Bring Russia and Ukraine to the Table?

Happy Tuesday! A resident of Bend, Oregon, took responsibility for the rash of googly eyes mysteriously appearing on sculptures and art installations across the city. The man said he’d done it “just to get a laugh,” but officials said the prank cost the city $1,500 in removal fees. It seems that one man’s laugh is another man’s vandalism charge. 

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Immigration authorities announced that they arrested 1,179 people on Monday—the highest single-day number since President Donald Trump took office—bringing the total number of detentions to more than 3,500 in one week. The crackdown marks a stark increase from the Biden administration’s average of 310.7 arrests of illegal immigrants with criminal convictions or pending charges per day, according to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement report. Also on Monday, the Trump administration deported 110 illegal immigrants to Colombia via a Colombian Air Force plane—a day after President Gustavo Petro barred American Air Force jets carrying Colombian nationals from landing.  
• The S&P 500 dropped nearly 2 percent and Nvidia’s stock plummeted more than 16 percent on Monday after a Chinese AI model called DeepSeek performed comparably to leading American models at a fraction of the computing power and cost. According to a technical report from DeepSeek, the model costs less than $6 million to train, compared to the more than $100 million the task costs American companies. The Chinese lab also developed its model using less powerful chips than other AI labs, raising concerns with investors that AI may not require the cutting-edge chips previously thought necessary. DeepSeek is currently the most popular free app in Apple’s app store, supplanting ChatGPT in the top spot.
• Acting Attorney General James McHenry fired more than a dozen prosecutors who worked with Jack Smith, the special counsel investigating Trump, multiple outlets reported on Monday. “[McHenry] did not believe these officials could be trusted to faithfully implement the president’s agenda because of their significant role in prosecuting the president,” a Justice Department spokesperson told CBS News. Smith led Justice Department probes into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents and attempts to overturn the 2020 election. 
• The Senate voted 68-29 to confirm Scott Bessent as treasury secretary on Monday, with 16 Democrats joining Republicans to support his bid. Throughout his confirmation hearing, the billionaire hedge-fund manager outlined his plans to cut taxes and reduce government spending. He will now be tasked with implementing Trump’s economic agenda, which prioritizes tariffs, deregulation, and energy production. 
• Rwanda-backed rebels said they captured the city of Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo on Monday in what the Congolese government said amounted to a “declaration of war.” Goma has a population of about 2 million people and is located near key mineral-rich mining towns, putting the rebels in a position to further escalate the three-year conflict. The rebel group called M23 began as a faction of ethnic Tutsis who broke away from the Congolese army, briefly capturing Goma in 2012 before launching another attack against the Congo in 2021. According to United Nations experts, more than 4,000 Rwandan troops fight alongside M23 in the ongoing conflict. 

Russia Makes Slow Gains as Trump’s Peace Timeline Lengthens

As President Donald Trump signed executive orders in the Oval Office on his first day in office last week, a reporter asked about his promise to end Russia’s war against Ukraine on Day 1 of his administration. “Well, there’s only half a day,” Trump quipped. “I have another half a day left. We’ll see. We want to get it done.” 

The president campaigned on ending the war even sooner, claiming he’d have it in the bag as soon as he became president-elect, before he was even sworn in. But a week into his term, his administration is now suggesting a slightly longer timeline: 100 days. Yet as the war grinds on, no clear path has emerged for a peace settlement acceptable to both parties even as Trump has said he’ll soon meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

When we wrote to you last month about the war, we noted that neither side was making much progress but, “With Russia’s massive advantage in manpower, the scales are tipped toward Putin. Ukraine is currently struggling to find enough men, a problem exacerbated by the fact that it doesn’t conscript anyone under the age of 25.”

The trajectory has continued, with Russian forces gaining ground and even taking control of some Ukrainian towns and villages along the front in the Dontesk region in eastern Ukraine. The town of Kurakhove fell in early January, and over the weekend Russian forces appeared to take control of Velyka Novosilka, a Dontesk town that has been on the frontlines of the war since the invasion began. As of Sunday, the Institute for the Study of War assessed that Russia occupied 89 percent of the settlement. Ukrainian defense officials said their forces have withdrawn from some positions but still maintain a presence in Velkya Novosilka.  

Ukraine still has a foothold in Russia’s Kursk region—a potential key bargaining chip in any deal to end the conflict—and even launched some smaller offensive operations earlier this month. Yet Russia has retaken half of the territory that Ukraine seized in its summer offensive.

“Russia continues to grind out slow, steady gains in various parts of eastern Ukraine, as well as the Kursk region in Russia, though at really high cost,” John Hardie, the deputy director of the Russia program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said during a briefing on Monday. The average daily casualty rate in December for Russian forces was 1,570, according to an assessment by the United Kingdom’s Defense Intelligence. Each of the past five months has set a new record high daily casualty rate. 

Ukraine has suffered fewer losses, but with less than a quarter of Russia’s population, the military has struggled to maintain troop levels. “Since late 2023, Ukrainian mobilization just hadn’t kept pace with the losses,” Hardie said. “These days, many frontline units are really under strength.” Col.Pavlo Fedosenko, the commander of a Ukrainian tactical grouping in the Donbas region, told The Economist, “They might throw a battalion’s worth of soldiers at a position we’ve manned with four or five soldiers.” 

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has recognized that his country lacks the strength to end the war by expelling Russia from all Ukrainian territory. Over the last two months, Zelensky has pivoted toward focusing on the potential conditions of a deal to end the conflict, emphasizing the need for Ukraine to negotiate from a position of strength and for significant security guarantees from both Europe and the U.S. to accompany any agreement. He’s also begun a flattery campaign toward Trump—likely part of a bid to ensure Ukraine is not iced out of any U.S.-Russia negotiations. Over the weekend, Zelensky reiterated his support of Trump’s focus on a deal, but emphasized, “This can only be done with Ukraine.” 

Trump’s envoy to Ukraine and Russia, retired Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, set a timetable of 100 days to end the conflict. “Let’s set it at 100 days and move all the way back and figure a way we can do this in the near term to make sure that the solution is solid, it’s sustainable, and that this war ends so that we stop the carnage,” he said on Fox News last week. It’s unclear what terms would be involved in such a deal, although Kellogg co-authored a plan for the America First Policy Institute that proposed driving Ukraine to the negotiating table by threatening to end U.S. weapons shipments while pressuring Russia by threatening to ramp up military aid to Ukraine.  

Trump’s early comments on a deal have so far mostly targeted Putin, not Zelensky. “Settle now, and STOP this ridiculous War,” the president wrote in a Wednesday Truth Social post directed at Putin. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries.” When asked about his statement in an interview the following day, Trump offered scant details of how a negotiated settlement could be reached beyond reiterating the threat of sanctions and tariffs against Russia. He also took some shots at Zelensky, partially blaming him for the war and calling him “no angel,” but he didn’t mention any pressure tactics against Ukraine.  

Even since Trump took office, U.S. military assistance has continued to flow as part of the Biden administration’s use of presidential drawdown authority—the shipping of supplies from U.S. stockpiles. Ukraine is also taking deliveries from the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI). Unlike the drawdown authority, the USAI provides aid to Ukraine via funding for contracts with defense companies to manufacture new weapons and munitions. The contracting and manufacturing process takes years, but USAI contracts agreed to in 2022 and 2023 have now started to bear fruit, according to Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who tracks aid to Ukraine. 

“The deliveries to Ukraine will be at a relatively high level if the Trump administration does not interdict them,” Cancian told TMD. Even if no additional U.S. aid is passed by Congress, Ukraine will continue to receive deliveries from existing contracts for the next three to four years—though Cancian noted the current levels of military assistance have not been enough to prevent the Russians from making gains. 

However, Trump’s 90-day freeze on nearly all U.S. foreign aid funding has begun affecting Ukrainian civil society organizations doing everything from repairing the country’s damaged infrastructure to providing medical assistance.

Putin seems to be angling to sideline Ukraine, saying last week he’s ready to open negotiating conversations with Trump directly—he even endorsed the president’s claims that the invasion would have never happened had Trump been in office. Trump said Thursday that he and Putin will “meet as soon as we can.” Zelensky warned Friday that Putin “wants to manipulate the desire of the President of the United States of America to achieve peace.” 

If a deal involved an armistice along the current lines of control—as some analysts have suggested—Russia would be left holding nearly 20 percent of Ukrainian territory. When asked last week about the prospect of freezing the war as a first step in negotiations, Zelensky argued that it would be a gift to Russia. “That is truly a winning position for Russia because they do not lose anything,” he said last week. “They only obtain, and they get the time to replenish the forces.”  

“For me, the quality is important, not the timeline,” Zelensky said. “First and foremost, the peace must be strong, and it must be just.”

Worth Your Time

• In an FAQ for Stratechery, tech analyst Ben Thompson cuts through the panic around DeepSeek and explains the implications of China’s AI breakthrough. “In the long run, model commoditization and cheaper inference — which DeepSeek has also demonstrated — is great for Big Tech. A world where Microsoft gets to provide inference to its customers for a fraction of the cost means that Microsoft has to spend less on data centers and [graphics processing units], or, just as likely, sees dramatically higher usage given that inference is so much cheaper. Another big winner is Amazon: AWS has by-and-large failed to make their own quality model, but that doesn’t matter if there are very high quality open source models that they can serve at far lower costs than expected,” he wrote. “Still, it’s not all rosy. At a minimum DeepSeek’s efficiency and broad availability cast significant doubt on the most optimistic Nvidia growth story, at least in the near term. The payoffs from both model and infrastructure optimization also suggest there are significant gains to be had from exploring alternative approaches to inference in particular. For example, it might be much more plausible to run inference on a standalone AMD GPU, completely sidestepping AMD’s inferior chip-to-chip communications capability. Reasoning models also increase the payoff for inference-only chips that are even more specialized than Nvidia’s GPUs.”

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In the Zeitgeist 

If you need more looming dread in your life, FX aired a trailer during the AFC Championship for Alien: Earth, a new TV spinoff of the classic sci-fi horror series. It only shows 42 seconds of a creature in a spaceship hurtling toward Earth, but we’ll go out on a limb and say that whatever is on that ship won’t be the biggest fan of mankind. 

Toeing the Company Line

• In the newsletters: Kevin Williamson argued (🔒) that January 6 was not your run-of-the-mill crime and Nick Catoggio reflected on (🔒) Elon Musk and generational guilt. 
• On the podcasts: Sarah Isgur and David French unpack a case before the Supreme Court that challenges the Moment of Threat Doctrine on today’s Advisory Opinions.
• On the site: Mike Warren reports on why Tulsi Gabbard’s upcoming confirmation hearing might be the rare one that matters, Gil Guerra explains Donald Trump’s back-and-forth with Colombia, and Greg Lukianoff looks into Trump’s “baseless” lawsuit against Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer.

Let Us Know

Do you think Donald Trump will achieve his goal of negotiating a settlement between Ukraine and Russia in his first 100 days?