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President Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir V. Putin, both resist the idea that ostensibly weaker powers fought them to a stalemate, with the two leaders leaning on negotiations to win the capitulation that they failed to secure in battle.
Iran and Ukraine have pushed back robustly against this “might makes right” mentality, with top officials adopting an even more defiant tone in recent days.
In an open letter to Mr. Putin this month, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine derided Mr. Putin for clinging to power as he aged. “You did not expect full-scale resistance from Ukraine, and you did not foresee that things would go this far,” Mr. Zelensky wrote.
After Iran unleashed a missile barrage against Israel last week in retaliation for attacks against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Parliament and Iran’s top negotiator, threatened more. “Until there is a sincere commitment to restoring trust, Iran’s response will not change,” he wrote on X.
Their recalcitrance reflects the reality of two wars in stasis, with a profound lack of trust all around, stymying progress.
Talks to find peace in Ukraine hit an impasse right before the Iran war started, with Ukraine demanding more robust security guarantees for ceding territory than Russia was willing to accept. Diplomacy has mostly produced prisoner swaps between the sides. The United States, once trying to play the main mediator, has shifted its focus to Iran.
American and Iranian officials now say a peace deal with Iran could be at hand. But it appears that it will initially consist of a framework for negotiations that will push the thorniest issues, like Iran’s nuclear program and sanctions relief, down the road. It is expected to allow for at least the temporary reopening of the Strait of Hormuz to shipping.
“Both conflicts have produced a similar outcome: a weaker power has trapped a stronger one in a costly confrontation,” Fiona Hill, who ran Russian and European affairs at the National Security Council during the first Trump administration, wrote in a policy paper for the Brookings Institution this week. “Like Putin, Trump did not have a plan for what would happen next.”
The root of the issue is that both presidents sparked wars with limited understanding of the opposing side, Ms. Hill said in an interview. “Both projected their own centralized views of their own roles onto Iran and Ukraine, so they thought if they could decapitate the system, it would fall,” she said.
Mr. Putin did not anticipate fierce Ukrainian resistance; for example, Mr. Trump ignored admonitions that Iran could shut the Strait of Hormuz, and appeared to underestimate Iran’s capacity to retaliate and inflict damage on America’s allies in the region. Nor did the Iranian people rise up against their authoritarian leaders, as Israel and the United States had urged them to do.
While the bombing campaigns of the United States and Russia have had devastating effects, analysts noted, air power alone has not proved decisive.
“Although Russia’s aggressive invasion of its neighbor differs from Washington’s goal of reining in Iran’s expansionist threat, both states are finding it equally hard to align their end goals with the means available to achieve them,” James F. Jeffrey, a fellow at the Washington Institute and a former Middle East envoy, wrote in Foreign Affairs.
Ukraine managed to halt Russian troop advances in part by producing next-generation drones, changing the face of modern warfare, while the United States has shown no desire to deploy troops inside Iran.
Lack of compromise has prolonged both wars. The United States and Russia have presented extensive demands to the other side, but the list of what their adversaries get in return is short. Mr. Putin, in particular, has not budged from his maximalist demands, which include taking land his army has been unable to capture.
Mr. Trump has also repeatedly revised terms already agreed with the mediators, frustrating the Iranians.
The United States harmed the process “with contradictory messages, frequent changes in positions and demands, as well as repeated violations of the cease-fire,” Esmail Baghaei, the spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, said last week after fighting sputtered back to life.
Each revision erodes a little more of Iran’s confidence that Mr. Trump will stick to an eventual deal, analysts said.
Yet Mr. Trump has repeatedly declared that a resolution is just around the corner, as he did Thursday after calling off yet another offensive.
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Early this year, on the outskirts of Kostiantynivka, Ukraine, which has been bombed consistently. Credit…Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
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