The key to Ukraine’s victory is to make Putin realise that he cannot win, Petraeus tells us

Kyiv. US President Donald Trump has told his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky to stop attacking Russian fuel infrastructure, arguing that Ukrainian attacks are creating a fuel shortage that “is harming the world”. “Mr Zelensky must stop taking out Russia’s diesel supplies,” Trump said on Sunday. “There are plenty of other targets. Don’t hit the diesel.” Yet that disruption is proof that one of Ukraine’s most significant military campaigns is working, retired US General David Petraeus tells Il Foglio. “The fact that Russian citizens need an app on their phones to tell them which petrol stations actually have petrol and which have diesel indicates that something is seriously wrong,” explains the former CIA director in an interview in Kyiv. 

The ever-expanding Ukrainian campaign, consisting of long-range drone strikes, has damaged Russian refineries, disrupted fuel distribution and forced Moscow to allocate more resources to protecting infrastructure far from the front line. Even Crimea, says Petraeus, is becoming increasingly difficult for Russia to supply and utilise. “The Ukrainians are increasing the constant strategic pressure in a truly impressive manner, isolating Crimea. They have put 285 ships that would normally supply it out of action. They have considerable control over what happens on the bridge and on the roads leading to Crimea,” he explains. “The lights are going out [on the peninsula]. The water supply is being cut off and so on. Crimea will become a burden for Putin rather than his showpiece, and will be virtually unusable for many purposes. They are doing the same thing within the Russian Federation as well.”

On the battlefield, says Petraeus, Moscow has failed to achieve more than incremental gains despite suffering enormous losses. Russian forces, he adds, are now losing more soldiers every month than the country can recruit. “This is not a frozen front,” says Petraeus. “It is very, very active and very bloody.” Petraeus argues that Ukraine can combine attrition on the battlefield with attacks on logistics, military infrastructure and the Russian economy, until Putin comes to the conclusion that continuing the war is unsustainable. “Ukraine’s path to victory lies in continuing to do what it is doing and, ultimately, making Putin realise that he cannot continue this war at any cost,” he says.

Trump’s request highlights an unresolved contradiction in the White House’s approach. The Administration wants negotiations, but serious negotiations require leverage. By asking Ukraine to spare infrastructure that funds and supports Russia’s war effort, Washington risks limiting one of the few effective tools available to Kyiv to alter Putin’s calculations. This raises another, more immediate question: if Ukraine is asked to give up one of its few effective sources of pressure, what leverage does the White House think it can bring to bear to bring Putin to the negotiating table? Republican Congressman Don Bacon of Nebraska criticises this contradiction in an interview with Il Foglio in Kyiv. Bacon, a retired Air Force brigadier general, will not be standing for re-election and will leave Congress at the end of his term in January. His imminent departure from the political scene makes him less vulnerable than most Republicans in Congress to political reprisals from a president who dominates the party. “I have found President Trump to be unpredictable and unreliable on this issue,” says Bacon during a visit to Ukraine with a bipartisan delegation for the Yes Conference. “Russia is a totalitarian dictatorship that has invaded a neighbouring country. America should take a stand and help a victim. And if we don’t, we’re telling the rest of the world that we can’t be trusted.” Bacon also criticised former President Joe Biden’s handling of the war, giving him a “D-plus”, but said that Trump had done even worse.

“President Trump has fared worse than Joe Biden on Ukraine. He seems to have a sort of moral blindness regarding who is responsible,” says Bacon. “He seems to be on better terms with Putin than with Zelensky. And, as an old-school Republican in the mould of Ronald Reagan, that bothers me.” For Bacon, this disagreement reflects a broader shift in American foreign policy. The current approach, he said, has replaced traditional American support for allies and democratic countries with short-term calculations. “It’s all about realism and transactionalism,” he says. “America is better than that. America is the most powerful country in the world, and we should stand on the side of freedom.”

Trump’s envoys, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, have held repeated talks with Moscow and Kyiv without managing to break the deadlock over territory and security. When Kushner told the Yalta European Strategy conference that Putin was determined to bring about peace, a wave of laughter swept through the room. The Ukrainians, after all, experience first-hand every day the true nature of the Russian president’s intentions. If Washington is now asking Kyiv to limit one of its most effective tools for raising the cost of the war, it remains unclear what might persuade Putin to compromise.