Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. There’s been a new development, a new phase in the Ukraine war.

I know we’ve talked about it before, but more recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin has escalated his attacks. Not so much on the battlefront per se, but on civilian targets that he is hitting with missiles and drones as far west as Kyiv. And this has solicited an angry response from President Donald Trump.

I think the subtext of Donald Trump is:

Well, wait a minute, Vladimir. I have sort of told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy not to ask for so much and be willing to have a ceasefire. And we have a deal in the works. And now you’re kind of fouling it all up.

And the deal was, pretty much, you’re gonna get the Donbas and Crimea and institutionalize it. And we’re gonna get some kind of arrangement to arm Ukraine, but it will not be officially in NATO. And somewhere where the battle line is today we’ll have a ceasefire. And then there will be an economic zone of rare minerals. It’ll be kind of a tripwire. And out of that general framework we can have a peace conference and hammer out the details.

But now you’re doing this escalation that’s kind of fouling up my dreams of solving the problem that I inherited from former President Joe Biden.

And Trump is kind of exasperated. He said, you know, Vladimir’s acting “crazy.” The Left went kind of ecstatic. And they said, “See, see, see, see. Trump finally came around to our point of view. He now agrees with us. It was all Putin’s fault. And he stopped appeasing Putin. And now he’s gonna follow our lead.”

I don’t think that’s quite what’s actually happened. What Trump is really doing is saying to the world:

If we had followed your lead and put pressure only on Vladimir Putin, we would’ve never got a deal because the Russians would be seen as sort of sympathetic to parts of the world. And they would’ve said the United States was too pro-Ukrainian. But I came in and was willing to give him a chance. And now the world sees that he doesn’t want that chance. And the world sees that he’s blowing a deal.

The next question is: Why would he do that? Why would Vladimir Putin pass up a deal?

And I think the answer is that he has to account for a war that he preempted and started that was designed to take all of Ukraine by decapitating Kyiv in February of 2022. Fast forward, there’s probably 1.5 million dead, wounded, and lost—on both sides—and climbing. But the majority of those losses are Russian. There’s probably 1 million dead Russians, wounded Russians, or missing Russians.

And Vladimir Putin—although he is a dictator with absolute power, no dictator is quite with absolute power—he has to account, informally, to a complex of oligarchs, wealthy oligarchs, bureaucrats, high-level bureaucrats, and the military. And there is a point in which he has to show that what he has done in Ukraine is worth 1 million dead, wounded, and missing. And he thinks he’s not there yet.

In other words, he’s going back to them and saying, “Only Vladimir institutionalized the acquisition of the Donbas and Crimea. Which, by the way, I got for you in 2014. And now there’s no question that they’re part of Russia. Only Vladimir got Ukraine out of NATO. Only Vladimir advanced 40 to 60 miles westward from the Donbas and Crimea.”

And I think he thinks that complex that I just mentioned as saying, “You mean you basically didn’t give us anything you. We had the Donbas. We had Crimea. We were already pushing a little bit westward. We knew they were Ukraine. Europe didn’t want them in NATO. United States didn’t want a NATO. So, what did you really give us, Vladimir? You’re not far west enough. Now, you go back over there and you’ve got to justify a million casualties. And there’s not much on the battlefield.”

So, I think what Vladimir Putin thinks is that he’s going to continue the war; continue the terror campaign; get greater concessions from the Europeans, the Americans, and the Ukrainians; and move the battle lines a little bit to the West.

And I think he’s sorely mistaken. He’s misreading Donald Trump. Because the reason he did not invade in 2017 and 2021—of those four recent administrations, that was the only one he did not. He did not invade during Donald Trump’s administration. But he did invade a neighbor during former Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden’s tenure.

In other words, he saw—in a way that he does not see now—that Donald Trump is very unpredictable and very erratic, in some ways, that it’s beneficial in the making of foreign policy.

And if he continues to go westward or continues to have this terror campaign, I think he will see that Donald Trump will be able to hold his MAGA coalition together and continue to arm Ukraine. And the Europeans will continue, probably, to arm them as well. And this, the quagmire, will only escalate. And he will not be able to knock Ukraine out of the war and it will be increasingly difficult for him to justify any continuation to his constituents.

If I was Vladimir Putin, I would cut a deal today. And then I would resume natural gas and oil shipments to Europe, I would open the economy back up, and I would tell the Russian people what you did.

I don’t think it would be quite accurate, but you could tell them: “Only because of me, Crimea forever is where it belongs, in Russia. The same as Donbas. And I stood up to the West and said, ‘No NATO.’ And I won this war.”

And that’s a lot better—it’s not a good scenario, but it’s a lot better than another Stalingrad or Verdun or Somme for the next two years for Russia.

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