President Trump has made another Ukraine U-turn by ordering new oil sanctions against Russia after Putin walked away from a second meeting with the American president in Hungary, designed to end the Ukrainian war on the back of Trump’s success in brokering peace in Gaza. The sanctions are designed to inflict economic pain. The two oil companies affected – Rosneft and Lukoil – provide almost half of Russia’s oil production. Between them, they produce and export more than three million barrels of Russian crude oil daily. After achieving a historic peace in Gaza, it was inevitable that international attention would return to the war in Ukraine. In April, former prime minister Boris Johnson censured the US president, saying that he feared the Ukrainians could expect little or nothing from a US-brokered peace deal. Yet just six months later, in September, Donald Trump performed a remarkable U-turn on Ukraine, saying that the country could win the war and even take more territory. Now, in late October, with Russia refusing to budge – demanding, as the price of a ceasefire, to be granted more territory than it currently holds – he has finally had enough and imposed what he calls “tremendous” sanctions designed to inflict real economic damage. Putin, in response, said that the oil sanctions were an “unfriendly” act that reversed any goodwill between America and Russia created at the Alaska summit. So why has Trump doubled down on Russia? The US president, of course, still wants the Nobel Peace Prize. When he said in September that President Zelenskyy “can win all of Ukraine back in its original form”, he made it clear that the path to peace was through selling Ukraine and her allies all the weapons they needed to win back “territory Russia has invaded [and] maybe even go further than that.” These serious economic sanctions show how attitudes towards Putin have shifted within the Trump administration. He is finally realising that red-carpet treatment will not work with Putin – only hard economic reality will. The oil sanctions are merely the first necessary shot that Trump is firing at Russia. The second – on ice for now – concerns the sale of US-made Tomahawk cruise missiles to NATO countries, allowing Kyiv to carry out long-range strikes inside Russia. Part of Trump’s Houdini act is down to the “soft power” exercised by Britain. To be clear, this is less due to the UK government than to King Charles. It is no coincidence that Trump’s volte-face in September came soon after King Charles and Prince William unleashed all Windsor Castle’s pomp and ceremony to flatter the Anglophile president. In his dinner speech, the King singled out Ukraine. On Ukrainian Independence Day, the King posted on X, expressing his “greatest and deepest admiration for the unbreakable courage and spirit of the Ukrainian people” and calling for a “just and lasting peace.” Zelenskyy later confirmed that the King’s soft-power influence on Trump at the state dinner was a decisive factor in his change of stance towards Ukraine. This shows how relying on old-style diplomatic channels to resolve seemingly intractable conflicts is a model being rewritten by Trump and his team – including his billionaire property developer allies Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, US Special Envoy to the Middle East – who fly in and out of countries under the radar on their own jets. They have taken a more direct and entrepreneurial “deal-maker” approach. Royal dinner or private jet diplomacy is now proving more effective than old-school State Department diplomacy. For peace to happen in Ukraine, Zelenskyy needs to win the battle of military technology. Nobody knows this better than Ukrainian general Valerii Zaluzhnyi, now Ambassador to the UK, whose military tactics – honed through studying modern US and NATO forces – were responsible for repelling the Russian attempt to seize Kyiv in the early days of the war. That the capital did not fall within days in 2022 was due to Zaluzhnyi’s advocacy of a courageous counter-offensive through a combination of military intelligence (helped by US satellite imagery) and the embrace of electronic, AI, and drone warfare. After the former Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine visited London’s DSEI 2025 in September, the leading trade show of the global defence and security industry, he wrote a revealing op-ed in the Kyiv Times, saying that walking around the exhibition made him realise how much of today’s most advanced electronic weaponry had emerged from the needs of the Ukrainian war. The use of drones and AI warfare was now “rethinking modern warfare and reshaping doctrines.” The key to seizing back the military initiative, Zaluzhnyi has long argued, is “to seize the technological initiative”, which is why Tomahawk missiles could be a game-changer by striking at the heart of Russia. He added that this would be “impossible on our own” without access to Western military hardware. Indeed, Ukraine’s entire strategic defen...