Afrasianet - Abd El, Halim Qandil - In September 2025, on the sidelines of the annual high-level session of the United Nations General Assembly, Trump met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, after which he went out to meet with journalists, in which he said a transcript that Ukraine might be able to regain all its territory that it lost to Russia.
The White House with the Prime Minister of Australia, and after the meeting he came out to address the journalists themselves, and he simply said that I never said which Ukrainians would win, I said they could win! Without anyone knowing the difference between the words victory and victory in the orange man's head, he quickly returned to rest his head and the heads of his followers, and said with a contradictory spontaneity, that he still believes that Ukraine is capable of winning.
Trump had recently returned to meet with Zelensky, and the meeting was preceded by a phone call from Russian President Vladimir Putin with Trump, in which Putin warned of the risk of sending Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine, and their severe impact on Moscow-Washington relations, to which the US president immediately responded, and withdrew the missile offer, and Putin's call cast a shadow on Trump's meeting with Zelensky, which in the words of the British Financial Times turned into a shouting match, reminiscent of Trump's hustle and tears at the Ukrainian president late In February 2025, the US president returned to his harsh insults to his guest, insisted that Zelensky hand over the entire Ukrainian Donbas region, i.e. the Lugansk and Donetsk obstacles, to Russia, and reiterated to Zelensky the points put forward by Putin in their phone call on the eve of the meeting, and referred to Putin's threat to destroy Ukraine, if it does not agree to the required concessions.
Trump realized with certainty that Russia was winning, and he was left with only rounds of confused and contradictory speech, and the obedience of the Russian president.
The story seemed bigger than Trump's innate tendency to lie regularly and spontaneously, and his habit of repeating contradictions shamelessly and negligibly, he even told the Ukrainian president that Putin told him that the ongoing conflict was a special military operation, not a war (in the eyes of the Russians), and that Zelensky had to conclude a deal on Russia's terms, otherwise he would face destruction, and don't ask here of course about Trump's previous comic belief that Ukraine could win, which he himself denied, just as he returned to confusion and turmoil after The Ukrainian president's departure from Trump's meeting sad, and his return to the behavior of complaining to European allies, who addressed Trump, and called on him to adopt their idea of calling for a ceasefire, and freezing the fighting at the current lines, which Trump actually called for, and repeated what he was told.
As if it were a vandalized recording device that repeats the last thing that was said to him, and erases what was previously recorded, because Trump always repeats the last thing he is told, and forgets what he said with his tongue in the past, especially after the Alaska summit that brought him together with the Russian president on August 12, 2025, from which he came out convinced of Putin's words, and his refusal to start a ceasefire, and the need to start a comprehensive settlement agreement, which Putin remained steadfast on without change or change, and proposed to hold a new summit meeting with Trump in Budapest, the capital of Hungary, friendly to Russia.
And after Trump enthusiastically agreed, and began to coordinate to hold the summit with the calls of US Foreign Ministers Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Trump returned to his troubled habits, and the Hungarian summit was postponed until notice Putin does not seem to be worried about postponing the summit, which was awaited, but perhaps he wanted to postpone it to give his special military campaign more time, with which the summit is postponed, perhaps as it was said, until late November 2025, and Putin has succeeded in manipulating Trump's feelings and decisions, and pushing him to retract his intention to send Tomahawk missiles, which the Russians have deliberately exaggerated in their danger, which are long-range missiles of an obsolete type dating back to the 1980s, and the Russians have great potential to neutralize Putin's goal in amplifying the Tomahawk threat was apparent.
As he wants to curb Trump's threats to increase military support, and to impose new sanctions on Russia's trading partners in China and India in particular, and Putin's maneuver has been successful for a while, especially since Trump is preparing for a summit meeting soon with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and wants to persuade China to buy larger quantities of the American soybean crop, and calm his fever The trade wars raging between Beijing and Washington, and here Trump looked for a way out to freeze and cancel the Tomahawk missile deal, and declared himself that the American stockpile of Tomahawk is limited, and that Washington needs it for its army, not to take it to the battlefield of Ukraine, and so Putin's maneuver succeeded with just a smart phone call, which obliterated risks and seduced opportunities.
The Russian president, for hidden and apparent reasons, including Putin's superior ability to address Trump's deal-man tendencies, and his desire to stop the war in Ukraine at any cost, while Putin does not seem to be in a hurry to order the war that is in its fourth year, and is proceeding with the same calm as the Russian forces, for whom Putin has set goals from the beginning of the campaign on February 24, 2022, which are the annexation of the four Ukrainian provinces (Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson), in addition to the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed in 2014.
Without Moscow having to declare a state of emergency, general mobilization, and all-out war, and to this day, the picture looks like this: Russian special and auxiliary forces have almost completely taken control of the Lugansk Oblast by 99%, the Donetsk Oblast by 76%, the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson Oblasts by 73%, and large areas of the Sumy, Kharkiv and Dnipro Petrovsk oblasts, perhaps to bargain with them and on them later, and Russia may be counting on the mud of the coming winter to expand the mission.
In the broader sense of the ongoing war in Ukraine, Russia, which is fighting a Western alliance of 54 countries, seemed to have succeeded in achieving a military victory, and took advantage of the atmosphere of the war to develop a different economy that is growing at a distinctive rate, and to build the alliance of the New East in the face of the aging Western alliance that is suffering from cracks, especially with Trump's condescending tendency to condescend to European allies in NATO, and his focus on exhausting Europe financially, and bringing in billions of it in exchange for providing non-American weapons.
It is capable of changing the equations of the war, nor hastening to push Washington into a direct clash with Russia, which may threaten to explode a nuclear war that destroys the whole world, and in what seems to be the epicenter of the military danger of Russia, whose European territory west of the Ural Mountains constitutes 40% of the entire area of Europe, and produces four times as many weapons annually as the entire European and American West, which explains Trump's desire to withdraw from the ongoing war conflict to avoid bleeding losses in international reputation and delivery.
Russia has its own conditions, preventing the remaining Ukraine from joining NATO, leaving the option to Europe in attrition, paying hundreds of billions of dollars, and without actually responding to Europe's desires to provide what it calls security guarantees to Ukraine, after the war stops, and the deployment of Western forces whose presence Russia categorically rejects, and whose costs and risks the Trump administration does not want to get involved in.
In short, the Ukraine war seems to be on the slope of its last months, and may end in the spring of 2026 or even earlier, although Trump Wanting to hasten the end, and with the motives of portraying himself as a maker of world peace, after he realized with certainty that Russia was winning, he was left with only rounds of confused and contradictory speech, and the presentation of obedience to the Russian president.