Pres Trump May Need to End Sanctions to Regain Putin’s Trust after Drone Attack on Putin (edited by AI)

Reports have circulated that a large Ukrainian drone attack—variously described as involving dozens of drones—was directed toward a site associated with President Vladimir Putin in or near Novgorod. Some accounts further claim that this occurred while President Putin was awaiting a phone call connected to President Trump, shortly after Trump met with President Zelensky in Miami. President Putin was reportedly unharmed.

At present, these claims remain difficult to independently verify. In the fog of war, information is fragmented, exaggerated, or deliberately manipulated. Nonetheless, if even parts of these reports are accurate, they raise serious questions about intelligence leakage, situational awareness, and escalation control. One possibility is that Ukrainian forces possess reliable tracking of Putin’s movements, either through their own intelligence capabilities or with assistance from allied surveillance systems. Another possibility is internal leakage within diplomatic or security circles. A third, not uncommon in wartime, is that the incident itself was exaggerated or staged to gain leverage in negotiations.

What is clear is that Ukraine’s leadership continues to pursue a strategy centered on military and economic attrition against Russia, heavily dependent on sustained Western sanctions and material support. This strategy presumes that Russia can be weakened faster than Ukraine is exhausted—a gamble that has already imposed enormous costs and risks broader escalation.

From this perspective, continued unconditional support for President Zelensky is not a pathway to peace. The conflict cannot be resolved through a British-EU-Ukraine configuration premised on indefinite economic warfare. A more effective approach would be for the United States to unilaterally remove sanctions on Russia and allow normal economic relations to resume. Doing so would undercut the central mechanism of the attrition strategy and force all parties to reassess their negotiating positions.

Sanctions relief would not reward war; it would remove the illusion that economic strangulation can substitute for diplomacy. Only by collapsing the logic of perpetual escalation can conditions for a genuine political settlement between Russia and Ukraine emerge.

It should also be noted that these events are less than twenty-four-forty-eight hours old. In such early stages, Western media coverage is typically fragmented and highly selective, particularly in conflicts where reporting norms strongly favor one side. Ukrainian claims tend to be relayed rapidly and uncritically, while information that complicates the prevailing narrative—especially incidents suggesting escalation risks or internal contradictions—is often delayed, minimized, or framed with excessive skepticism. As a result, early analysis must proceed with caution, but it cannot be suspended altogether without ceding the field to managed narratives rather than facts.