The Atlantic reports that Trump’s envoy John Cole, a 1946 vintage diplomat who apparently slept through the last thirty years, wants to trade sanctions relief for Russian political prisoners. Trump reportedly likes it.
The Transactional Illusion
Of course he does. It sounds like a deal. Trump’s entire worldview is that everything is a transaction waiting for a handshake.
Cole’s logic has two load-bearing walls. Both are made of wet cardboard.
First, he thinks what worked with Lukashenko will work with Putin. Belarus is a small state with no imperial project. Sanctions relief there buys compliance because Minsk actually wants economic normalcy. Russia is a revanchist empire that has spent two decades converting its economy into a war machine.
Putin disregards the welfare of Russian citizens. He cares about restoring Soviet borders and breaking the post-Cold War order. Offering him sanctions relief for a few dissidents is like offering a pyromaniac a discount on matches if he promises not to burn the next house.
The False Reagan Parallel
Second, Cole invokes Reagan and Gorbachev. He says Reagan passed prisoner lists to Gorbachev, and Gorbachev complied, creating a humanitarian channel. Fine. But Gorbachev was de-escalating. He was winding down the Cold War. Putin is escalating.
He annexed Crimea, launched a full-scale invasion, and is now burning Ukrainian cities while threatening NATO. The USSR after 1945 did not annex new territories through direct conquest. Russia under Putin does exactly that. The geopolitical context is inverted.
The Cold War is still ongoing. We are at the beginning of a new one, and nobody should assume it stays cold.
Cole also says countries should “return to the family of nations.” Explain something. If Putin wanted to stay in that family, why did he leave? Nobody expelled Russia from the G8 in 2014. He chose the path of sanctions, isolation, and war. You cannot return someone to a family they burned down on their way out.
Undercutting the Law
The practical question is whether this deal happens. The Atlantic says the initiative is early-stage. Trump signed the Graham sanctions law just weeks ago, giving himself authority to hit buyers of Russian oil with tariffs up to 100%.
That law exists because Congress, including Republicans, understood that money flowing to Moscow funds the war. Any sanctions relief before a ceasefire would directly undercut that law and funnel cash to the Russian military while it is still killing Ukrainians.
There are opponents inside the administration who say no deals before a ceasefire. Good. They should hold that line. Because the moment Washington starts trading sanctions for prisoners, the Kremlin learns that escalation plus token humanitarian gestures equals sanctions erosion. And every European capital watching will draw the same conclusion.
Appeasement here, along with a fantasy about winning a Nobel Prize.