First Lady Melania Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s special envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, at the White House on November 5, 2026. Screenshot from official White House video.
Retired Gen. Philip Breedlove, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, warned on Nov. 8 that Putin intends to divide the world into three spheres of influence. Under that plan, “China controls the Far East, Russia controls Europe, and America controls the Western Hemisphere,” Breedlove told Fox News Digital.
His warning came days after President Donald Trump said a coming deal with Moscow could reach beyond Ukraine, and two days before U.S., Ukrainian and Russian negotiators meet in Abu Dhabi.
After meeting with Putin’s envoy Kirill Dmitriev at the White House on Nov. 5, Trump promised a “big, beautiful agreement” that was “going to involve more than Ukraine” and “might involve all of Europe.” On Nov. 8, he said Ukraine would emerge from the process “a little bit different shape.”
European leaders rejected any U.S.-Russian deal that reshapes the continent’s security without their involvement. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told CNN that such an arrangement would be complicated and potentially dangerous.
The Abu Dhabi talks on Nov. 10 and 11 will be the first three-way round since Geneva in February. Special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner will lead the U.S. delegation. Russia is sending presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky, Deputy Foreign Ministers Sergei Ryabkov and Mikhail Galuzin, and General Staff officers.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said Europe will be represented, but Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia has held security talks only with the Americans and none with Europeans.
Breedlove said Putin “has pushed that plan on leaders several times,” adding, “He talks about it, and he writes about it.” If Russia’s maximalist demands remain intact and Europe must sacrifice its security to achieve peace, Breedlove warned, “this is not going to go well.” He said Putin “has never been a partner for peace in Ukraine” and that “Mr. Putin is at war” with the West.
Russia set out its demands in writing two months before the full-scale invasion. On Dec. 17, 2021, its Foreign Ministry published a draft NATO-Russia agreement and a draft U.S.-Russia treaty. The NATO draft demanded no further enlargement of the alliance and a ban on NATO military activity in Ukraine, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia.
The U.S. draft required both countries to remove nuclear weapons stationed outside their territory, which would have forced the withdrawal of American nuclear weapons from Europe.
Putin’s view of Russia’s lost territory predates the war. In his 2005 address to the Federal Assembly, he called the Soviet Union’s collapse “a major geopolitical disaster of the century,” according to the Kremlin’s English text. When he announced the invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, he cited “the expansion of NATO to the east” as a threat “to the very existence of our state.”
On March 31, 2023, Putin approved Russia’s current Foreign Policy Concept, which describes the country as a distinct “state-civilization” and the center of “the Russian world.” The U.S. Institute of Peace called the document a repudiation of the current international order and America’s leading role in it.
Moscow has long claimed the West promised not to enlarge NATO, but no treaty bars the alliance from admitting new members. The 1990 treaty on German reunification restricted NATO forces in East Germany only. Secretary of State James Baker’s remark that year to Gorbachev that NATO would not move “1 inch to the east” referred to East Germany during the reunification talks. The 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, signed by Russia, states that it will not “limit or dilute” NATO’s opening to new members.
Belarus already serves as a Russian forward base. Russia deployed its nuclear-capable Oreshnik missile there in December 2025. Belarus puts its range at up to 5,000 km, enough to reach most of Europe. Russia had previously stationed tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, and its 2024 nuclear doctrine placed the country under Russia’s nuclear umbrella.
German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said in November 2025 that German intelligence warned Russia is creating the option of war against NATO by 2029 at the latest, an assessment Breedlove endorsed at the time. In June, German Army chief Lt. Gen. Christian Freuding called that timeline “NATO-agreed intelligence”, saying all 32 allies agree Russia could be capable of invading a NATO country that year. German Chief of Defense Gen. Carsten Breuer warned an attack could come earlier, while Estonian intelligence assesses that Russia will not attack a NATO member this year or next.
Russia’s ability to keep fighting depends on its economy, which has proved more resilient than early forecasts suggested. In 2022, the International Monetary Fund predicted it would shrink 8.5%. It contracted by about 1.2%, then grew in 2023 and 2024. Russia’s economy is projected to reach $2.86 trillion this year, making it the eighth largest in the world. The Soviet Union sustained a 10-year war in Afghanistan and a four-decade military rivalry with the United States; its economy measured $791 billion in nominal dollars in 1990. Anyone expecting economic pressure to force Moscow to end the war is likely to wait a long time.
Sanctions have slowed Russia’s economy without cutting off its income. Growth is forecast at about 1% this year, and the budget is in deficit for a fifth consecutive year. Yet Russian fossil fuel exports earned about €625 million a day in September. China was the largest buyer, while sanctioned shadow-fleet tankers carried 57% of Russia’s seaborne oil. The European Union still bought €1.7 billion of Russian energy that month, mostly natural gas.
Ukraine cannot match that export income in a war of endurance. At September’s rate, Russia’s annual fossil fuel earnings would total about €228 billion, more than five times the roughly $40 billion Ukraine earns from all its goods exports combined. Ukrainian agricultural exports brought in $22.5 billion in 2025, down from a record $27.9 billion in 2021.
Russia also has a much larger pool of potential soldiers, with about five times Ukraine’s population. Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service estimates Russia’s mobilization resource at 25 million people, about 3 million of them trained. In 2023, Moscow added older men to that pool, raising the age to which rank-and-file reservists can be mobilized to 55, and junior officers to 60, phased in through 2028.
Government-controlled Ukraine has about 28.5 million people, and more than 4.4 million Ukrainians, about 11% of the pre-war population, now live in the EU under temporary protection. Ukraine is drawing soldiers from a population that continues to shrink.
If Ukraine runs short of soldiers, Europe is unlikely to supply them. A poll covering all NATO members in September and October 2025 found that 27% of Germans, 25% of Italians and 30% of the Dutch said they would fight for their own country, compared with 49% of Poles. Presumably, even fewer would be willing to fight for Ukraine.
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