An Emerging Consensus: Ukraine Could Win

President Zelensky was just in town to meet with President Trump and this meeting was very different from the infamous one last year where he essentially got kicked out of the White House.

Unlike Zelenskyy’s tortured Oval Office visit in February 2025, he left a meeting with President Donald Trump in high spirits. And he capped off the trip with another victory, watching the Senate overwhelmingly vote to advance new sanctions on countries that buy Russian oil.

It was a high note in a day that proved a remarkable turnabout from Zelenskyy’s previous disastrous visit. The vote — which the Ukrainian leader witnessed from the gallery inside the Senate chamber — puts Congress one step closer to achieving a top priority for Zelenskyy and is the latest signal that Kyiv’s fortunes aren’t just improving on the battlefield…

“There is an entirely different vibe than a year ago with Trump and Zelenskyy given that Ukraine is doing much better in the war,” said a former Trump administration official, who like some others, was granted anonymity to discuss internal dynamics.

One thing I think it’s fair to say about Trump is that he likes to win and he hates to lose. A year ago, the consensus was that Ukraine was doomed and nothing anyone could do would change that. Today, that’s not clear at all. Russia’s economy is finally in real trouble. There are long gas lines almost everywhere. Crimea is in the dark and Russia continues to lose more soldiers than it can round up.

The new sanctions, which were pushed by Sen. Lindsey Graham before his death, take aim primarily at India and China. Both countries have been buying up as much of Russia’s discounted oil as they can via Putin’s shadow fleet of tankers. Now, assuming it moves forward, they will have to make a choice between Russian oil and U.S. markets.

Lawmakers and officials familiar with the push to secure a deal on the Russia sanctions legislation described it as a memorial to Graham’s tenacity. The senator abruptly died of a heart condition shortly after returning from Ukraine, but up until the final hours of his life, he was working on legislation that took more than a year to negotiate. Multiple colleagues said the bill would have failed without him…

On Tuesday, the Senate voted 86-12 to take up the package, which would allow the administration to impose up to 100 percent tariffs on the top five purchasers of Russian oil and natural gas, among other penalties.

Meanwhile in Russia, the beat goes on. On the same morning Zelensky was meeting with Trump, his military hit two more refineries in Russia.

The overnight attacks started fires at a Lukoil refinery in Russia’s Perm region, more than 1,500 kilometers (900 miles) from Ukraine, and a refinery in Ryazan, about 400 kilometers (180 miles) from the border, Ukraine’s Security Service and General Staff said in separate statements.

The refineries have a combined annual production capacity of around 220 million barrels of oil, according to Ukraine, and make a vital contribution to Russia’s military effort and its government revenue.

Ukraine’s long-range sanctions struck a number of key Russian targets:

▪️ The base of the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s high-speed boats in temporarily occupied Crimea;

▪️ An oil refinery and a logistics center in Russia’s Ryazan region;

▪️ An oil refinery in Russia’s Perm region;… https://t.co/NocpSrdDPA pic.twitter.com/V1zyNmG8SR

— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) July 29, 2026

These attacks have been going on for months now and Russia doesn’t seem to have any way to stop them. So how is Russia keeping the war machine going? The answer, apart from shadow fleet oil tankers, involves seizing the assets of the rich. Russia’s economy is one that Bernie Sanders would love.

Private capital was the first money pot that Moscow turned to in order to finance the war, starting with confiscations. A tally from Cedar, an outlet run by exiled Russian economists, shows that prosecutors filed claims to seize assets worth roughly $60 billion between early 2022 and late 2025. Cedar’s data ends in 2025, but seizures are continuing apace. In May, a court transferred $7.6 billion worth of assets from Rusagro founder Vadim Moshkovich to state ownership, the largest seizure in the current nationalization wave. (Moshkovich’s wife kept her luxury apartment and country house.) To avoid such a fate, Russia’s wealthiest are resorting to creative options. In March, Suleiman Kerimov, whose fortune stands at $11 billion, generously offered to donate $1.4 billion to the state coffers. Meanwhile, other rich Russians are busy moving their wealth abroad.

Most entrepreneurs get to keep their companies, but more of what they earn is being extracted through taxes. In 2025, the profit tax rate climbed to 25 percent (up from 20 percent), a move that Moscow estimates will generate $22 billion per year in extra revenue—a bit more than one month of current military spending.

Putin has also been milking state-owned firms.

Start with state-owned cash cows like such as Gazprom, which used to contribute around around 10%around 10% percent of the Russian federal budget. In 2022, the Kremlin ordered the firm to inject the equivalent of $72 billion into state finance, forcing the company to hand over its entire 2021 profit. In 2023 and 2024, the company had to contribute an additional 50 billion rubles (currently $638 million) per month, pushing the firm to record its first annual loss in almost a quarter century in 2023. The company returned to profitability in 2024, but after years of state extraction, there is little left to milk. Gazprom’s market capitalization has shrunk to $26 billion, a mere one-fifteenth of its $367 billion peak in 2008.

What’s next? Possibly pensions. 

In June, the Russian Finance Ministry announced its support for draft legislation to transfer nearly $40 billion in private pension savings into government coffers.

It hasn’t happened yet but with the shadow fleet being lit up in the black sea and Russia stopping exports of gasoline and diesel, the money has to come from somewhere. Russia is once again benefitting from higher oil prices thanks to the war with Iran. But that won’t last long. Soon, Putin will be back to raiding the savings of every Russian to keep the war going. He’s running out of options and Ukraine is nowhere close to running out of drones. 

Russia has been targeting Ukraine’s electrical grid since the start of the war, hoping to freeze the population into submission. This coming winter, we could see the same thing happening in Moscow for the first time. Suddenly, Russia’s propagandists will be complaining that attacking the electrical grid is an attack on civilians and a war crime. But their hypocrisy won’t keep them warm.

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