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By Joseph Epstein
Director of the Turan Research Center and Senior Fellow at the Yorktown Institute
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Not a lot of folks outside the former Soviet space have heard of Wildberries, the Russian answer to Amazon—but the company is starting to make news, because it is on fire. In recent weeks, Ukrainian drones have burned eight of its logistics hubs, outside Moscow and St. Petersburg, in Krasnodar, and in occupied Simferopol. More than a tenth of its warehouse capacity is gone. Rebuilding it will cost some $460 million, and the merchandise incinerated inside—most belonging to small Russian sellers now describing their ruin—may run to billions more.
It is not the only crisis. Ukrainian strikes have also taken a quarter of Russian refining capacity offline, forcing rationing in more than half the country's regions. One of the world's largest energy exporters cannot fuel its own cars.
Donald Trump has been president for all of it. Critics spent the better part of a decade calling him a Russian asset—but his Russia policy has accomplished more than any since the Soviet collapse.
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He is the only one on whose watch Putin took nothing. Russia bit off a piece of Georgia under George W. Bush. It annexed Crimea and lit the Donbas on fire under Barack Obama. It launched the full-scale invasion under Joe Biden. Under Trump, Putin has not gained a country, a province, or a port.
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Not because Trump saw Putin clearly first. He didn't—nor did anyone else. Every modern American president arrives convinced the last guy mishandled Moscow and that he can fix it. Bush looked into Putin's eyes at Ljubljana and said he found his soul. Obama sent Hillary Clinton to Geneva with a novelty reset button. Biden himself went to Geneva in 2021 seeking a "stable and predictable" relationship, months before the tanks moved. Trump arrived promising to end the war in 24 hours. The pattern is not partisan; it is American. What separates Trump is not superior insight but speed of correction.
The second term began badly. The isolationists around JD Vance won the early arguments, and the policy that emerged amounted to advancing terms the Kremlin had written. The first Oval Office meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky was a debacle. But within months it was clear Moscow would accept nothing short of capitulation—no deal on offer, only a surrender to be ratified—and to Trump's credit, he did not spend years discovering it. He pivoted. Bush needed a war in Georgia. Obama needed Crimea. Biden needed a full-scale invasion. Trump needed a few bad meetings.
The strategy that replaced appeasement rests on two pillars.
The first is a free hand for Ukraine. Europe pays; Washington supplies, and Kyiv decides where the drones go. That last clause is the one Biden never granted. His administration assumed Russia held “escalation dominance”—Moscow is reckless and nuclear-armed, therefore every rung Russia climbs is one America must climb down. ATACMS exports took two years, and permission to hit airfields the missiles flew from took longer. Caution meant to prevent a war helped invite one. The burning refineries and warehouses are what happens when that restriction comes off. When Trump asked Zelensky at July's NATO summit in Ankara whether he'd travel to Moscow for talks, Zelensky said it was too dangerous—"there are a lot of Ukrainian drones there." Both men laughed.
The second pillar is subtler and may outlast the war: the United States is taking ground across the post-Soviet space while Russia is too consumed with Ukraine to defend it.
In the South Caucasus, Trump brokered peace between Armenia’s Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev, ending a conflict Moscow spent three decades keeping unresolved, because a war it could turn on and off gave it leverage over both sides. The transit corridor through southern Armenia now carries Trump’s name. When the Kremlin threw everything at Pashinyan in June's elections—trade measures, public threats, an interference campaign observers called unprecedented—he won anyway. Washington is now working the final steps, including the constitutional amendment Yerevan must pass before the treaty can be signed. A signed treaty would do more to break Russian power in the Caucasus than any sanctions package.
In Central Asia, Trump has made more headway than any predecessor. He hosted all five heads of state in Washington. Kazakhstan and Cove Capital signed a $1.1 billion venture to mine tungsten—a mineral the Pentagon cannot do without—plus $17 billion in other deals and agreed to join the Abraham Accords. Uzbekistan pledged to invest $100 billion in the U.S. over a decade. Both are on the Board of Peace. Trump and Kazakhstan’s Kassym-Jomart Tokayev now speak regularly, a channel that simply did not exist before.
These governments are moving toward Washington because they spent decades being bullied by Moscow and have finally found an alternative. Armenians and Azerbaijanis were kept at each other's throats for 30 years by a patron who profited. Kazakhstan has listened to Russian politicians muse on television about which of its provinces are really Russian; had Ukraine not been invaded, Kazakhstan was the plausible next candidate. Ukraine's survival is their survival, and they know it.
They are saying so out loud. Aliyev has told Ukrainians to "never accept occupation"—advice from a man who lived under one. And last week in Omsk, on live television, sitting beside Putin, Tokayev told him the war has to end. "It is a shame," he said. "Young people are dying."
None of this is Trump's achievement alone. Putin wrecked Russia himself: the invasion was his, and so was the kleptocracy behind it, two decades of resource windfall turned into palaces and offshore accounts instead of an economy that could survive a long war. What an American president decides is whether to compound that self-destruction or cushion it. His predecessors, chasing stability, cushioned it. Trump saw the opening and took it.
Russia is weaker than at any point since 1991, and its neighbors are betting it stays that way. That is the record, whatever the accusation was.
Joseph Epstein is director of the Turan Research Center and senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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