Kirill Dmitriev likes it.

Likes Donald Trump’s decision to suspend the implementation of triple-digit tariffs on countries that buy large amounts of Russian oil and gas, I mean.

The levies, which drew criticism from Beijing and New Delhi, were set to take effect next week along with even steeper duties on US imports of Russian energy.

The trade taxes are part of the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, which Trump signed into law this time last month.

Fortunately for The Kremlin, the legislation contained a proviso that allows the president (of the United States, not Russia, but some might argue that’s a distinction without a difference in this context), to issue indefinite waivers simply by notifying Congress that doing so “is in the national interest.” Trump delivered such a notification on Friday.

Plainly, taxing Russian energy imports at 500% (the rate prescribed by the Graham Act) runs counter to Trump’s farcical diesel deal with Vladimir Putin. Ostensibly, that’s the rationale for the waiver, which the above-mentioned Dmitriev gleefully called “an important and truly historic moment,” playing to Trump’s vanity.

A Kyiv-born, Harvard-trained Goldman alumnus, Dmitriev knows a thing or two about US sanctions. As the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, he’s sanctioned himself, and not just by the US: By the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand too.

Despite being blacklisted by OFAC and its counterparts around the developed world, Dmitriev serves as a crucial go-between for Putin with Trump. As one expert put it a year ago, Dmitriev understands that “Trump Americans [are] business-oriented people who think in terms of profits.”

I’m no fan of the late Lindsey Graham, despite being an on-again, off-again South Carolina resident. He was an unapologetic foreign policy hawk who manifested the interventionist tendencies which led directly and indirectly to the deaths of thousands of US servicemembers deployed around the world, to say nothing of the millions of innocents killed in a succession of American military misadventures.

So there’s that. And here’s this: I’m not convinced the cost to Ukraine of keeping this fight up is worth it assuming (note the emphasis) the territorial concessions needed to end the war are confined to areas where the separatist constituency was already substantial.

To say Ukraine proved its point would be a good candidate for understatement of the decade, right along with “The world was insufficiently prepared for a pandemic.” Even if the Russian military secured a breakthrough that resulted in the fall of Kyiv, Putin’s “special operation” would stand as one of modern history’s worst military miscalculations.

We’re coming up on the fifth anniversary of a war Putin thought he could win in the space of weeks, if not days or even hours. The critical point is that he’s not fighting an insurgency. He’s still fighting the Ukrainian regular army. Imagine Saddam Hussein’s army holding out against the 2003 US invasion until 2008. Or the Taliban never surrendering Kabul in the first place. That’s what this is. Strategically I mean. And it’s not a good look for Moscow.

With that in mind, a part of me sympathizes with Trump on the Ukraine war, just not with whatever ulterior motives he may have for coddling a murderous tyrant. This war isn’t winnable for either side. That much is as plain as the blood on Putin’s hands. Also plain is Putin’s capacity and willingness to perpetuate the bloodshed until his dying days, come hell or high sanctions and regardless of the Russian side’s death toll.

NATO can’t intervene directly to drive Putin out without risking a nuclear confrontation, so much as it pains me to say this from a post-World War II “principles” standpoint, the correct course of action for the US from a humanitarian perspective may in fact be to force Volodymyr Zelensky into a deal.

Would that set a terrible precedent? Yes. Is there a meaningful chance it’d embolden Putin? Well, sure. Obviously. But I don’t believe for a second that his next move would be to invade a NATO country. Hell, who says he even wants a NATO country? Not him, if that counts for anything!

Setting aside some covetous allusions to Estonia, Putin’s tortured historiography doesn’t include direct, explicit references to conquering the whole of Europe. The narrative out of Brussels often makes it sound as though it’s Kyiv today, Warsaw tomorrow, Berlin next week and London in a month. If the question is “What might Putin do next in the presence of appeasement?” the answer’s almost surely “Not that.” Anyone who says otherwise hasn’t actually read his absurdist, imperial mythologizing.

As for the — completely legitimate, well-supported, self-evident — notion that US appeasement vis-à-vis Russia’s claims on the Donbas amounts to a historic triumph for a man (Putin) whose raison d’être is orchestrating the de facto breakup of NATO, I’d regrettably tell you that ship’s already sailed.

Trump’s never made any bones about his disdain for NATO, which was shaken to its very core when Trump subjected Zelensky to a televised dressing down at The White House early last year, a spectacle many viewed as the de facto end of the alliance, despite Ukraine not being a member state. Let’s not forget: Only one world leader has explicitly threatened to invade NATO territory, and that leader is Trump.

Whether what I’ll now call “Ukraine realism” (and yes, that sort of thinking directly contradicts my prior published warnings about the perils of what I once dubbed “Ukraine fatalism“) means the US should be openly contradicting itself by, in this case, effectively reversing legislation that was passed just a month ago, is debatable. As is the “right” way to go about changing tack.

Most importantly, facilitating an end to the war doesn’t have to, and almost surely shouldn’t, mean “bringing Putin in from the cold” on the geopolitical stage, let alone inking any sort of arrangements with Russia that might directly jeopardize US national security. And that brings us neatly full circle.

In the course of celebrating Trump’s decision to waive the Graham Act tariffs, Dmitriev said that in addition to the widely-criticized diesel arrangement, Russia and the US “are discussing joint projects in the field of data centers, including with the use of small-scale nuclear power plants.” (Russia having a pristine nuclear power plant track record and all.)

“Naturally, progress is quite difficult and there is resistance from various quarters,” Dmitriev went on, in the same remarks. “Yet, as the diesel example demonstrates, the ice has, in fact, begun to break.”

Oh, and, um, there’s this.