Ukraine: Peace or Profits?

In the tumult of Trump’s second presidency, few relationships have been more up and down than that of Ukraine and the US. When Trump assumed office promising to end the war in a day, Washington’s think tanks braced themselves for ‘isolationism’. But these fears turned out to be unfounded. He has now learned that wars don’t end by presidential edict — and that protracted conflicts can be excellent for business.

Ukraine initially struggled to adjust its messaging to the new administration. Under Joe Biden, Kyiv had styled itself as a defender of democracy against an authoritarian onslaught, flattering Washington’s geriatric liberal internationalists into believing it was still 1991. Ukraine’s first efforts to connect with Trump were failures, and relations reached a nadir in February 2025 with the Trump–Zelenskyy meltdown in the Oval Office. Though Trump described it as ‘great television’, Russia hawks failed to see the entertainment value. For the late Lindsey Graham it was a ‘complete, utter disaster’.

But Kyiv recalibrated. It knew that Trump did not want to see Ukraine as a charity case and a bottomless pit of US aid, and that he detested ‘losers’. It also knew it had to appeal to his love of money and deals. So the Ukrainians set out to present their country in a new light: as a ‘winner’ and a boon to American capital.

They were helped by Putin, who had little incentive to end the war given that Russia was still slowly gaining ground, and who had begun to draw Trump’s ire by ignoring his calls for deescalation. Just hours after the two leaders spoke on the phone in early June, Russia launched its largest aerial attack since the invasion. For Nato allies, that month’s summit in The Hague was an opportunity to capitalise on Trump’s mounting frustration with Russia and urge him to fully back Ukraine.

It seemed to work. All Nato allies except Spain agreed to Trump’s dictate to raise defense spending to 5 percent of GDP, and Trump held a nearly hour-long meeting with Zelensky on the sidelines of the summit. The pair emerged happy. It ‘couldn’t have been nicer’, Trump said. He soon made an agreement with Nato that would allow the US to profit from the bloodshed.

Under a new procurement mechanism called the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL), Nato allies can now purchase American military equipment for Ukraine. (Previously, the Trump administration had only been sending the military aid that Biden had authorised.) By July 2026, PURL had funded nearly $7 billion in US-made weapons. The initiative has allowed Trump to apply his typical transactionalist politics to a conflict that had once seemed like a resource drain. ‘We’re not spending any money on the war’, he assured reporters. ‘We’re actually making money off the war because Nato is buying our equipment.’

The US has continued to supply Ukraine with free intelligence, after CIA Director John Ratcliffe reportedly worked hard to convince the president that Ukraine, far from being a loser, is capable of inflicting grave losses on Russia, which Ukraine’s General Staff now claims exceed 40,000 per month. The former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov described efforts to increase Russian casualties with Trumpian flourish as ‘forcing peace through strength’.

Ukrainian drones are now striking deep within Russian territory, hitting oil refineries, retail warehouses and weapons depots. Trump has reportedly been impressed by these salvos, and suggested at this year’s Nato summit in Ankara that the US could grant Ukraine permission to produce American Patriot air defense interceptors, in what was described as a ‘diplomatic coup’ for Kyiv.

The administration has also ramped up pressure on the Kremlin by backing Graham’s Russia sanctions bill, which would punish countries that buy its petroleum exports. When Trump confidante and MAGA influencer Laura Loomer visited Kyiv in late July — interviewing Zelensky, touring a bomb shelter and renouncing her previous Putinist sympathies — the rapprochement appeared complete.

Yet in recent weeks, Washington backtracked on the Patriots pledge, engaged in yet another round of negotiations, and agreed to import Russian gas. While this has not yielded any diplomatic breakthrough, it serves as a reminder that US–Ukraine relations are still governed by subjective factors — including Trump’s love of dealmaking and irritation with both parties to the conflict — as well as larger structural ones.