With very few exceptions — mobsters, warlords, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-Un, Bashar al-Assad, Ramzan Kadyrov and the like — no one’s ever had an unequivocally “good” call with Vladimir Putin. If you’re on the phone with Putin, you’ve probably already made a mistake. And Elon Musk’s been on the phone with him, allegedly.

There are world leaders other than Xi and Kim capable of conversing with Putin without coming away compromised. Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s one of them. So’s Narendra Modi. And Mohammed Bin Salman. But those are strongmen and they’re under no delusions about who it is they’re talking to and the associated risks.

Donald Trump’s pretty much the last person on Earth you’d want to put on the phone with Putin, not because of any “collusion” (that too, though) but rather because he’s a hapless doofus whose amenability to praise is such that he’d give you his first-born son (and even sooner his second-born son) in exchange for a compliment. That dynamic’s particularly pronounced with Putin, who Trump views as a kind of authoritarian paragon.

The risks associated with putting Trump on the phone with strongmen were on full display in October of 2019, when he sold America’s staunch allies in Kurdish Syria down the river while on a call with Erdogan, who was amused to discover that all he had to do to secure the withdrawal of the US special operators (whose presence in the area prevented the Turkish military from moving against Kurdish positions and communities), was ask.

And that’s Erdogan, a US ally on most (but certainly not all) days. In Putin, we’re talking about America’s worst enemy and a KGB spy who single-handedly transformed the post-Soviet “smash and grab” era into an oligarchical kleptocracy where everyone from the richest to the poorest, from the overlords to the lorded-over, is completely beholden to the Kremlin, with which Putin made himself synonymous.

The asymmetry on a Putin-Trump call is so enormous and so multi-faceted that it’s impossible to communicate the scope of the peril to those not apprised, a group which, unfortunately, includes most Americans.

Regrettably, Trump hopped on a call with the Kremlin Wednesday. He described the conversation with Putin as “lengthy and highly productive.” It probably was lengthy, and it was likely highly productive too. For Putin.

To reiterate: You have to be very, very careful talking to that man. It’s popular to say the only thing Putin respects is power, but that’s not quite right. He respects cold-blooded ruthlessness. He has to know that you’d kill him, personally, and not just if you had to, but if it served some manner of Machiavellian geopolitical purpose, or even just because you didn’t like his tie.

That’s why Xi, Kim, Erdogan, Modi and MBS can safely chat with the Kremlin, or as safely as anyone can chat with Moscow. Every, single one of those men would strangle Putin with their own two hands if the circumstances warranted, and Putin would do the same to them. That murderous reciprocity is what makes dialogue on equal-footing possible.

We talk all day, every day in America about how “dangerous” Trump is. And he is dangerous in many respects, but that’s simply not one of them. Trump hasn’t even demonstrated a willingness to ignore a court order (unless it’s one that says he can’t slander an assault accuser on social media), let alone the kind of psychopathy that possesses a man like Saddam Hussein to shoot another man in the face, or a person like Kim to execute a family member with an anti-aircraft gun, or a leader like Xi to orphan a bureaucrat’s children for taking a bribe. That’s just not Trump, and it never will be, even if he lives to 226 and serves as US president for the entirety of his remaining 148 years.

So, if the question is how it went when Trump and Putin talked Tuesday about Ukraine, the answer’s swimmingly. It went swimmingly for Putin, who I personally guarantee secured any number of promises and concessions, most of which Trump probably doesn’t even know he made.

Trump, giddy, told TruthSocial that he and Putin “agreed we want to stop the millions of deaths taking place” in the war. I’m sure Putin did “agree” to that, but that’s like saying Putin agreed that on balance, and all else equal, sunny days are better than rainy ones. In other words, Trump didn’t get any upper-hand by establishing with Putin that millions of dead are, maybe, in some contexts, worse than an alternative where those millions don’t have to die face down in the frozen mud.

It sounded, from Trump’s social media post, that Putin secured from the White House the only thing the Kremlin wanted to secure on a first call: A willingness on Trump’s part to negotiate without Ukraine, or at least a willingness to relegate Ukraine to de facto bystander status in discussions about the country’s future. “We have agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately,” Trump said, where “our teams” meant his team and Putin’s. “We will begin by calling President Zelensky to inform him of the conversation, something which I will be doing right now.”

No. Just no. This should’ve gone the other way around. Trump should’ve called Zelensky first, established Kyiv’s parameters for negotiations, then called Putin to inform him of the conversation. Because Kyiv’s America’s ally, not Moscow. If Zelensky’s position turns out to be far-fetched, that’s something Trump should convey to Kyiv, not have conveyed to him by Putin.

An hour or so later, Trump hopped back on TruthSocial to detail what I’m sure he thinks was another “perfect phone call” with Zelensky who, according to Trump, “wants to make peace.” Trump said Marco Rubio will lead a peace delegation to Munich on Friday, accompanied by JD Vance, whose views on funding the Ukrainian defense are well established.

Trump was tickled pink when Putin read to him from the MAGA stump script. “President Putin even used my very strong Campaign motto of, ‘COMMON SENSE’,” Trump gushed. Imagine that. It’s almost as if Putin knew just how to manipulate him!

Let me be clear: I don’t necessarily doubt that Trump can “succeed” in bringing this phase of the war to a conclusion. But the terms will be dictated, one way or another, by Putin, first because he has the battlefield upper-hand and by most estimates, it’ll be another year, at least, before the pressure cooker that is Russia’s wartime economy finally explodes, and second because Trump wants so badly to say he ended the war (which, by the way, is something different than saying he wants to end the war because war’s bad), that he’ll agree to anything which doesn’t create poor optics for the White House.

That latter point leaves considerable room for Putin to secure favorable terms. He won’t be able to claim for Russia territory he doesn’t currently hold, and compared to his original aim — i.e., marching into Kyiv and installing a puppet government on week two — the war’s an unmitigated disaster for Moscow. But relative to how things were going in, say, September of 2022, Putin’s position looks pretty strong, and it now seems like a foregone conclusion that the Donbas will be ceded to Russia, with what I’m sure will be ambiguous language leaving the door wide open to a resumption of hostilities later on.

On Wednesday, during a visit to the NATO headquarters, Pete Hegseth called Ukraine’s stated goal of recovering all lost territory since 2014 “unrealistic.” To be fair, the pre-2014 border is something different than the 2025 “border,” so Hegseth’s not necessarily suggesting the lines should be frozen right where they are. But his overarching message seemed more in line with the Kremlin’s talking points than Kyiv’s. “Chasing this illusionary goal will only prolong the war and cause more pain and suffering,” he said, adding that although the US would seek “robust security guarantees” in any peace deal, Ukraine won’t be admitted to NATO.

Speaking of Kremlin talking points, the Senate confirmed Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence on Wednesday. Za zda-ró-vye, Tulsi.