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Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump are both trapped in conflicts they cannot win but cannot end without appearing weak, according to Guardian columnist Rafael Behr. In a column published Wednesday, Behr argues that both leaders suffer from a “cult of infallibility” that prevents them from acknowledging strategic blunders, and that each is surrounded by advisers who are too cowardly or too ideologically blinded to survey the “distant shore of reality.”
Behr writes that Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, which was expected to capture Kyiv within weeks, has now lasted longer than World War I. The campaign, he says, has “burned trillions of roubles and sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives for no discernible dividend in national greatness.” He notes that civilians hundreds of miles from the front line see plumes of smoke from oil refineries struck by Ukrainian drones and feel the depletion of wages by inflation. The Kremlin’s propaganda machinery, he writes, cannot hide the scale of the failure.
The column points to last month’s Victory Day parade in Moscow, which Behr describes as “strangely modest.” The traditional convoy of tanks and missiles could not proceed, he writes, because the skies above Red Square were vulnerable to Ukrainian aerial attacks.
Official opinion polls have shown a drop in support for Putin, Behr reports, though he characterizes the dip as a symptom of factional jostling within the regime rather than a genuine shift in public sentiment. Pragmatists in civilian administration, Behr suggests, may have leaked a glimpse of presidential vulnerability as a warning to hardliners that their approach is not working.
Turning to Trump, Behr writes that the president’s worldview is “less cluttered with antique mythology, more pumped with celebrity narcissism” but produces the same effect. He says Trump was easily persuaded that Ukraine’s cause was hopeless because it would have offended the president’s sense of majesty to believe that Zelenskyy could be a winner. If Trump had been interested in the reality of the campaign, Behr writes, he would have observed the leveling effect of drones that allow a smaller force to thwart an overwhelming onslaught.
Behr adds that the Trump administration is “bogged down” in negotiations with Iran, leaving no bandwidth for Ukraine. This, he says, shifts the odds against Putin’s bet that Zelenskyy can be bullied into conceding territory that Russian forces have not been able to seize on the ground.
In Europe, the column reports, momentum is building behind a peace initiative. Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungarian elections earlier this year led to a prompt unblocking of aid to Kyiv. At a recent meeting of EU foreign ministers, there was discussion of candidates to lead negotiations with Moscow. This week, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer hosted Zelenskyy, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and French President Emmanuel Macron for a summit in Downing Street.
Behr writes that these displays of solidarity gloss over the gap between what Ukraine needs in military hardware and what Europeans are ready to provide, but he argues that Putin’s confidence that the West would not stay the course has not been vindicated.
Both the Russian ultranationalist and the Trumpian MAGA movements, Behr writes, view Europe as a “decrepit civilisation” in the death throes of cultural suicide. That diagnosis, he argues, underestimates liberal democracy’s defining strength: “the resilience afforded by pluralism and institutional acceptance of legitimate opposition.” In the United States, he says, constitutional checks and balances, fair elections, a free press, and independent courts can still correct authoritarian drift. In Russia, he writes, they cannot.
Behr concludes that European democracies must prove that their system is not only better in principle but stronger in practice by embracing Ukraine’s struggle as their own.