Thiessen: Putin is stalling and Trump holds all the cards. It’s time for ‘maximum pressure’

President Donald Trump said he is “pissed off” at Russian President Vladimir Putin for stalling his efforts to end the war in Ukraine. His frustration boiled over after Putin on Friday demanded President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s removal and the establishment of a transitional government in Ukraine as a condition of peace.

“I was very angry — pissed off” when Putin “started getting into Zelenskyy’s credibility” and “started talking about new leadership” in Ukraine, Trump told NBC’s Kristen Welker. He said that “if Russia and I are unable to make a deal on stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine, and if I think it was Russia’s fault,” he will impose crushing secondary tariffs on Russian oil sales. Henceforth “if you buy oil from Russia, you can’t do business in the United States,” Trump said.

Trump is right. Putin is dragging his feet and does not seem to realize that he is in no position to make demands. Russia is incredibly weak, both economically and militarily, which means that in these negotiations, Trump holds all the cards.

In 2022, Putin planned for a war that would last weeks but now finds himself in a protracted conflict that is bleeding Russia’s human, military and financial capital dry. That gives Trump enormous leverage. If Putin refuses his demands for peace, Trump can unleash an Iran-style maximum pressure campaign on Moscow that would devastate Russia.

Take the situation on the battlefield. In 2024, Russian forces took a grand total of 1,609 square miles of territory, according to an analysis by the Institute for the Study of War (ISW). That is an area equivalent to about 15% of Haiti. Most of the territory captured was composed of fields and small settlements, none holding any strategic significance.

These glacial advances came at a cost of more than 427,000 Russian casualties either killed or wounded in 2024. That is almost twice as many Russian casualties in a single month in Ukraine as the United States suffered over two decades of fighting in Afghanistan. Even pro-Putin Russian analysts admit that the average Russian soldier now survives less than one month on the front lines before being killed.

Putin might not care about losing men, but he is also suffering unsustainable losses of military equipment. Ukraine destroyed 12,000 Russian tanks and armored combat vehicles and 13,000 artillery systems in 2024. Indeed, Putin’s supplies of armor are so low, he has been forced to turn to Soviet-era tanks and armored vehicles, some dating to the 1950s. He is even recommissioning old Soviet tanks that were being used as movie props by Mosfilm, Russia’s largest film studio.

The Russian defense industrial base cannot keep up with the current pace of losses. According to ISW military analyst George Barros, Russia loses about 350 tank and artillery barrels each month, but can only produce 20 replacements. At current attrition rates, the Wall Street Journal reports, Russia will run out of tanks sometime next year.

To conserve his dwindling supplies of armor, Putin has turned to what the Ukrainians call “meat assaults” — throwing wave after human wave of Russian soldiers at Ukrainian positions, allowing them to be gunned down until the Ukrainians run out of ammunition and have to fall back.

Why does Putin make such enormous strategic sacrifices of men and materiel for such small tactical gains? “Because he wants to create the impression that the map is getting worse for the Ukrainians, that Russia is moving forward,” Barros tells me.

But the reality is that Russia does not have the troops or equipment to achieve Putin’s military aims in Ukraine.

Putin’s economic position is even weaker than his battlefield position. Russia’s war spending (which is estimated at 41% of all state expenditures in 2025) has unleashed double-digit inflation, skyrocketing interest rates, and catastrophic labor shortages. Last year, the price of butter rose 30%, and Russians are now stealing butter to resell on the black market. Russian businesses are struggling to hire because of the exodus of skilled workers fleeing the country and the massive death toll of Russian men aged 20 to 50 in Ukraine. Russia’s budget deficit grew 14-fold in January, and Putin has been forced to spend 24% of the liquid cash reserves in Russia’s sovereign wealth fund. If the current rate of war spending continues, Russia’s liquid assets will be fully depleted by 2030.

The only thing keeping the Russian economy from collapsing is a surge in oil and gas export revenue, a gift to Putin from President Joe Biden. Russian energy revenue jumped by more than 26% in 2024 to $108 billion, making the energy sector the single most important source of cash for the Kremlin — as much as half the revenue that makes up Russia’s federal budget. If Trump imposed a successful Iran-style maximum-pressure campaign against Russia, he could bring it to its knees.

Biden’s weakness left a massive loophole in U.S. sanctions that allowed Russian oil and gas to be sold on the global market by permitting energy transactions with sanctioned Russian banks to continue. Trump could shut off Putin’s economic lifeline by using the same tools he successfully used against Iran during his first term, which dramatically cut Iran’s oil sales from roughly 1.9 million barrels per day in 2017 to about 400,000 in 2020, crippling Iran’s economy and forcing Tehran to cut funds to its terrorist proxies across the region. Trump recently announced a renewal of his maximum pressure on Iran, with a goal of cutting Iranian oil sales by 90%. A similar effort to drive Russian oil and gas sales from the global market could crush the Russian economy and deny Putin the funds to continue his aggression against Ukraine.

Trump could also apply a maximum-pressure campaign on the battlefield. During the campaign, Trump promised to increase the flow of U.S. weapons to Ukraine if Putin did not agree to stop the fighting. “I would tell Putin: If you don’t make a deal, we’re going to give [the Ukrainians] a lot. We’re going to give them more than they ever got, if we have to,” he told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo. Well, right now, Ukraine has agreed to an unconditional ceasefire, while Russia is refusing.

Putin has gravely miscalculated. If Trump decides the Russian leader is the obstacle to peace and brings down the hammer with economic sanctions and increased military support for Kyiv, Russia will be in a world of hurt. Because the reality is that Putin is economically and militarily weak and has no path to victory. He doesn’t hold the cards, Trump does. And he is getting ready to play them.

Marc Thiessen writes a column for The Post on foreign and domestic policy. He is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and the former chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush.