Why Putin won’t stop the war with Ukraine

October 16, 2025 israel, russia

Once again, President Donald Trump is going to meet with Putin to persuade him or buy his agreement to end the war with Ukraine. As a U.S. citizen and the author of forty books and a dozen films about Russia, I feel compelled to warn the White House that Putin will not end the war with Ukraine, even if President Trump offers him his Mar-a-Lago villa in Palm Beach, Trump Tower in New York, and a dozen of his golf clubs. It’s not because Putin doesn’t want to take a break from the war, it’s because he can’t. Why? Because he knows Russian history not from school textbooks, but from real life.

For example, in 1825, the return of Russian troops after their victory over Napoleon led to an anti-tsarist uprising known as the Decembrist Revolt.

In 1905, Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War sparked the first Russian Revolution.

The mass desertion of Russian soldiers from the Russian-German front during World War I led to the February Revolution of 1917 and the abdication of Emperor Nicholas II.

Lenin’s March 1918 peace treaty with Germany allowed the Bolsheviks to execute the entire tsarist family.

The return of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in February 1989 marked the beginning of the USSR’s collapse.

Knowing this, Putin cannot end the war with Ukraine and bring his troops home. Only the opportunity in May 1945 to leave his entire army in Europe as an occupying force helped Stalin avoid a postwar coup. Putin, Stalin’s heir, dreams of occupying Ukraine and the Baltic states, as well as Finland and Poland, to keep his army away from Moscow. He remembers the 525,000 soldiers who returned from Afghanistan in 1989 and turned into “Afghan” bandits who terrorized the entire USSR population. Recently, in June 2023, just 5,000 rebellious Wagner Group soldiers left the Ukrainian front. Led by their commander, Yevgeny Prigozhin, they nearly stormed Moscow.

Therefore, Putin knows exactly what will happen if not five thousand, but one and a half million soldiers who are accustomed to the brutality of war return home from the Ukrainian front.

The war with Ukraine allowed Putin to get rid of two million of the most active opponents of his regime, who fled Russia from Putin’s forced mobilization. Meanwhile, the rest of the young Russian men have been sent to the front or recruited into the punitive services. Putin is not concerned about their mass deaths on the Ukrainian front because, as Marshal Zhukov said during World War II about the losses of his soldiers: “Russian women will give birth to more.” On the other hand, the de facto martial law imposed in Russia is the best way to force the country into submission to Putin and his junta. Therefore, any war—with Ukraine, the Baltic states, NATO, or anyone—is much more important to Putin than anything President Trump could offer him.

I wrote all this in a letter to the White House before Donald Trump’s meeting with Putin in Alaska, but of course, the White House does not read letters from ordinary American citizens. That’s a pity. Now, I’m writing to American Thinker. Maybe Marco Rubio reads your magazine, if not the president. In any case, I don’t want Putin—a former KGB agent with an unscrupulous past—to continue fooling, lying to, and deceiving my president. I am not a military expert or political scientist, but I have a good memory. I remember how Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II managed to lower the price of oil to $9 per barrel, provide the Afghans with Stinger missiles, and stop Moscow from taking over Afghanistan, thereby destroying the USSR.

If President Trump wants to stop Putin and the imperial ambitions of at least half of Russia’s population, he needs to do the same thing: lower the price of oil to at least $25 per barrel and give Ukraine the weapons it needs to defeat the aggressor.

Edward Topol is a citizen of the United States and Israel.

Image from Grok.

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