Trump-Putin peace talks go nowhere, for an obvious reason.

Donald Trump spent about an hour on the phone with Vladimir Putin on Thursday. They discussed the war in Ukraine. According to Trump, the two made no progress towards a ceasefire, much less a peace agreement.

Trump said he was not happy about this, but he shouldn’t have been surprised. Putin’s war has not brought Russia enough success for him to end it. Therefore, Russia must keep on fighting, even as the number of Russian dead reportedly reaches 250,000 and the number of war casualties approaches one million.

Putin’s war is founded on lie after lie. The original lie was that Ukraine isn’t a real country, just an extension of Russia. But fake countries don’t beat back the kind of onslaught Russia has directed at Ukraine.

Related to the original lie was the promise that the war would produce a quick Russian victory. Kiev would be taken in a matter of weeks, if not days. More than three years later, the Russians haven’t reached Kiev or come very close to doing so.

Russians were also told that Ukraine is fascist. Actually, it’s a democracy. Elections have been postponed due to the war, as would likely happen in the U.S. if a foreign country took Florida and Georgia and was attacking South Carolina. But there’s nothing fascist about Ukraine.

Russia’s failure to defeat Ukraine has produced rampant lying about the progress of the war. These lies are being reported by Russian war bloggers — people who support the war and say they support Putin, but who are frustrated by what’s happening on the battlefield.

According to the Washington Post:

Russian military bloggers and independent media reports on Telegram in recent months have presented a consistent portrait of a problematic military culture, including generals making false claims about conquering villages, troops being sent on “meat assaults” with little regard for their survival, and poor transport and logistics on the front lines resulting in the deaths of wounded soldiers.

Commanders are often described as corrupt — demanding bribes to spare soldiers from deadly assaults and implementing punishment regimes, including caging soldiers or “zeroing” them out, meaning having them killed or sending them on suicidal assaults.

The result, these bloggers say, is low morale, desertions and widespread drunkenness and drug abuse among Russian troops. . . .

The bloggers complain that false reports of villages being taken mean that when units do move to seize them, they get no air or artillery support because it is thought unnecessary.

In mid-June, military bloggers reported that the military command had falsely claimed Komar village in the Donetsk region. “Again a lie, and again because of lies ordinary Russian soldiers will die,” raged military blogger Roman Alyokhin on June 14, complaining that the most effective Russian units were being “driven to correct the lies and mistakes of lying generals.”

(Emphasis added)

There’s more:

Two highly effective Russian drone operators, Dmitry Lysakovsky and Sergei Gritsai of the 87th Separate Rifle Regiment, were killed in a storming operation. In a last-testament video, they claimed that their commander, Igor Puzik, was profiting from assets seized in the war and drug deals in the regiment, and had lied about taking Lysyvka village in Donetsk.

“This situation is not unique. It exists along the entire front. Lies are the absolute norm,” said Lysakovsky, looking sweaty and anxious as he walked in a forest grove, claiming that Puzik and his cronies wanted him and Gritsai to die to prevent them from reporting corruption.

“I am recording this video because there is a very high probability I will not return from this assault,” said Lysakovsky, adding that “the main task that we have now is to survive, and theirs is to make sure that we do not survive.”

(Emphasis added)

In a democracy, a government can’t survive if (1) it fights a foreign war that fails to achieve its objective and (2) the government is perceived to be lying about key facts related to the war. Indeed, Lyndon Johnson’s presidency was toast well before it became clear we would not prevail in Vietnam. His “credibility gap” undermined him.

George W. Bush eventually turned the war in Iraq in America’s favor with the 2007 surge. However, his popularity had already plummeted and never recovered because Americans believed either that Bush “lied” us into war or that he started a war based on bad intelligence.

Russia isn’t a democracy. Far from it. But Putin likely fears that if Russia stops fighting in Ukraine without gaining far more territory than it has so far, Russians, having suffered economic deprivation and massive loss of life, will hold the war against him.

He also likely fears that, if the fighting stops and the troops return home without having achieved Putin’s objective, the stories they’ll tell about reality on the battlefield will cause discontent. Many Russians may come to understand that their government started the war based on lies and lied continuously about how the war was going — that, indeed, “lies were the absolute norm all across the front” and that “because of the lies, ordinary Russian soldiers died.”

In this scenario, I assume Putin would blame his generals and other field commanders. But I doubt even in a dictatorship, the head of a country can escape blame for a foreign war gone bad. Putin is responsible for the conduct of those to whom he entrusts the conduct of the war. And the military bloggers put him on notice regarding the corruption, incompetence, and cruelty of his commanders.

Thus, to ensure his stranglehold on power, Putin needs to keep fighting. And he has reason to believe that by continuing to fight, Russia can deliver the kind of wins that would cover the multitude of sins associated with the war.

Russia recently launched a summer offensive against Ukraine. Experts disagree about whether, or to what degree, this offensive will succeed. However, Putin has reason to hope that it will. He also knows that the U.S. has cut back on the military aid it provides Ukraine.

Putin would be ill-advised to agree to peace until he sees how Russia’s new offensive does. But even if the offensive disappoints him, I believe, for the reasons stated above, that it makes more sense for Putin to continue pursuing military success than to agree to a peace that does not yield territorial gains commensurate with the cost and hardship of this war.

That’s my view of Putin’s calculus. What about Trump’s?

I believe Trump very much wants to end this war. During the presidential campaign, he promised to end it on Day One, if not sooner. That hasn’t happened. But if Trump can bring peace, say, by the end of Year One, wouldn’t that still be a big feather in his cap?

How to accomplish this? One option is to renew and increase military aid to Ukraine in an effort to disabuse Putin of the notion that Russia can win. This might give Putin enough incentive to seek peace on less than maximalist terms.

But Trump may believe, as I do, that Putin just can’t afford to stop fighting until Russia gains large amounts of additional territory. If that’s his belief, then it makes sense to stop aiding Ukraine, or to give it less aid, because the better Russia does on the battlefield, the more able Putin will be to accept a peace deal.

By the same token, Trump may believe that a Russian breakthrough, coupled with significantly less U.S. aid, would disabuse Ukraine of the notion that it can hold off the Russians. Trump has warned Zelensky that he “doesn’t have the cards” — that if he keeps fighting he will lose his country.

Zelensky has demurred and with good reason based on how the war has gone so far. But if the tide turns more decisively against Ukraine, Zelensky’s attitude may change. Alternatively, Zelensky might have to give way to a leader whose view of the war is closer to Trump’s.

The most likely scenarios in Ukraine are (1) major Russian advances and (2) the lack of them. (Major Ukrainian gains seem unlikely.) The first scenario is the one most likely to bring peace, but the peace it’s likely to bring will be highly favorable to Russia.

The second scenario would prolong the war. But it’s the one I will be hoping for.