Putin Wouldn’t Take the Carrot: Now Trump’s Giving Him the Stick
As we predicted, Trump’s response to Putin’s refusal to take a win-win deal including significant U.S. investment is to destroy what’s left of the Russian economy until Putin cries uncle.
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by Rod D. Martin
October 23, 2025
It was the costliest phone call in history.
In a discussion intended to facilitate President Trump’s announced summit with Vladimir Putin in Budapest next week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio that Russia would continue to insist not merely on territory it has never been able to capture, but on the removal of Ukraine’s government as well, labeling Kiev’s leadership “literal Nazis.”
Someone forgot to tell Putin and Lavrov: you don’t get to impose regime change without actually winning the war.
For months, Trump has taken a carrot-and-stick approach to the Ukraine war, as he has in countless other conflicts, resulting in eight peace deals in eight months. For Russia, the carrot is not just ending the killing and lifting of sanctions. It’s the rehabilitation of Russia, its reentry into the good graces of the industrialized world (as opposed to the rogues’s gallery of China, North Korea, and Iran), and direct U.S. investment into Russia, badly needed even before the catastrophe of war.
The stick, of course, has always been twofold. First: choke Russia’s cash flow by making its oil effectively unsaleable, through sweeping sanctions aimed at the companies and countries that finance the Kremlin. Second: remove the geographic immunity Russia has enjoyed for four years by arming Ukraine to strike deep into Russia — not just its military assets but its economic ones as well — and, in the weeks to come, by going forward with deliveries of the long-range Tomahawk systems that make most of European Russia vulnerable.
Together those measures convert distance into vulnerability and revenue into scarcity. They hinder, if not destroy, Putin’s ability to wage war. They also squeeze his oligarchs and population to a degree Russians have not faced so far, potentially making Putin’s continued rule untenable.
Yet Putin has made promises to all of those people that a negotiated peace would show to be failures if not outright lies. He is more afraid of that than he is of Donald Trump, whom he incorrectly perceives as viewing Russia with the same anachronistic awe showered upon it by Team Biden. So despite every promise, he repeatedly scuttles talks.
This time, Trump answered with the stick.