By Suzanne Bowdey

More than 1,000 days into the war against Ukraine, the mood, diplomats say, can only be described as “grim.” For three winters, families who haven’t been displaced are trying to cope with the daily blackouts that are leaving locals without light and heat for up to 20 hours at a time in frigid minus-14 temperatures. Fixing the country’s power grid has been difficult, especially as Vladimir Putin ramps up his air attacks. “We’re anticipating a … very harsh winter,” one senior United States official said soberly. “People will die in their homes because Russia is taking out the energy infrastructure.”

To the Ukrainians, Donald Trump’s inauguration can’t come soon enough. The former president, who famously declared he would end the war in 24 hours, is the region’s best shot at even a fragile peace. “It is certain that the war will end sooner with the policies of the team that will now lead the White House,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told reporters shortly after the U.S. elections. “I think that Putin understands strength only,” the leader explained. “So then he would see that there is this strong [new] president, strong country standing with Ukraine, and then we can achieve peace through strength.”

There’s a lot of hope that Trump’s second term will fix a lot of these messes created by the Biden administration’s weakness. But just how quickly can the 45th (and soon-to-be 47th president) get both sides to the table?

FRC’s Ken Blackwell just returned from war-torn Kyiv this week, where he helped Christian organizations with humanitarian efforts on the ground. It was a long trip, he told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Monday’s “Washington Watch,” but a meaningful one. What impacted him most, he said, was the sheer grit of the Ukrainian people. “The human spirit is not dominated by the … rage of the Russian attack,” he pointed out. “There is a strong resistance to the Russian aggression,” despite how long this violence and suffering has gone on.

But on the question of whether three years of deadly conflict can end with a snap of Trump’s fingers, Blackwell was more realistic. “There’s going to have to be some trade-offs to bring this war to an end. … I think Donald Trump is a peacemaker,” he agreed. “He’s a keen negotiator. [But there is] going to have to be some immediate give on the Ukrainian side as it relates to Crimea. But I think what we have to bring is an assurance that the 1994 Budapest Accords, where we told Ukraine if they gave up their stockpile of nuclear weapons, we would, in fact, give them security from Russian aggression, [must stand].”

So what can Trump do in the immediate future to promote a ceasefire? He’s “drawn a pretty bright line,” Perkins pointed out.

As far as Ken and so many other top Republicans are concerned, it comes down to two things: energy and economics. “I think what we’re going to see first is that this is a president determined to restore the USA to energy dominance. [When he] does that, [it will start] to bankrupt the Russians. [And] I think there will be economic pressures that will result in Russia’s collapse [that will end up] strengthening the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency.” Both of these, Perkins insisted, are “no-brainers.” In fact, he continued, “I believe what we will see a year from now is how, again, the policies of … the Biden-Harris administration fueled this international chaos, because they wanted to appease the green crowd and cut off American energy sources.”

That’s exactly what incoming leaders for the Trump team have been saying for the last several months. Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.), a combat-decorated veteran who’s been tapped as the national security advisor, has been railing against the Biden administration for enabling Putin to turn Ukraine into “an absolute meat grinder of people and personnel on that front” over the last four years. In his mind, “It’s more like World War I trench warfare” — and it all could have been avoided.

The simple fact is, Waltz vented during a House Oversight hearing earlier this year, “Russia fuels its economy on oil and gas. Iran fuels its economy on oil and gas. At about $55 a barrel, Russia can no longer fuel its war machine. It actually goes into economic survival mode. So wouldn’t it make sense,” the former Green Beret asked, “to flood the global market with cleaner … cheaper American oil and gas? Drive down the prices. [Then] you’ve not only solved what’s going on with Iranian-supported terrorists in the Middle East, you’ve put Putin on his back foot as well in terms of the war in Ukraine.” Even better, “You’ve now solved two global problems and the inflation problem here at home.”

But instead, this White House has pursued a climate agenda that’s antithetical to all of that. “We are restricting our supply, and then we are allowing Iran to pump to China. We are allowing Venezuela to pump. Russia is pumping more than it ever has through India and China, for that matter, into Europe. How does this make sense?”

As Perkins said, now that there’s a Republican trifecta in Washington, the Trump administration can turn “the spigot back on for American energy [and] fossil fuels.” Our country [could] revert back to what we were four years ago, “an exporter that drives — not only Russia and their ability to make money down — but Iran and all of these other bad actors [like] China.”

Throw in some economic sanctions on firms that do business with Moscow and suddenly Trump has enormous leverage. Suddenly, “that regime’s ability to supply troops and continue this costly war will have diminished. The Russians will finally be thinking about off-ramps,” veteran and Texas Congressman Dan Crenshaw ® writes.

Not soon enough for a country that’s reporting more deaths than births in these nightmarish days. “Neither side has released reliable casualty figures,” The New York Times’s Megan Stacker acknowledges, “but an estimated one million soldiers and civilians are believed to have been killed or wounded since the 2022 invasion.”

People all around the world are ready for a mature U.S. strategy on Ukraine, the kind many expect from a second Trump term. “This is what I think made him successful the first time,” Perkins noted. “But I think even more so now, because he comes in with a much better understanding, [which] is that to have strength doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve got to punch somebody. You can step on their toe. And that’s what I think we’re going to see is through our economic policy, we’re going to really hurt a lot of these bad guys.”

But none of this, he and Blackwell stressed, are substitutes for the most important consideration: the spiritual side of this battle. “There’s much optimism that the second Trump administration will fix many of these foreign policy blunders that were brought about by the Biden administration,” Perkins pointed out. “I think some of that will happen, but it’s not going to happen without the spiritual [part] of this. We need to be praying into this.” There’s a lot more to this struggle than the political. “I mean, you cannot look at the international stage and what is happening globally and not see [the bigger picture] — unless you don’t have the eyes to see,” he underscored. “But as Christians, we have to have the spiritual eyes to see what is happening.”

And Russia is operating out of a religious vacuum, Ken added. “What you have is a nation-state where they have successfully run God and faith out of the public square now attacking a nation-state that sees an expanding role [of faith].” During his time there, Blackwell was struck by the “wide network of prayer warriors on the ground — across denominations and faith traditions — that actually form the most significant wall to Russian dominance that exists today.”

At the end of the day, only policies grounded on “solid moral and spiritual principles are going to lead to success and benefit the whole world,” Tony insisted. “Absolutely,” Ken replied. If Americans need to understand one thing, he said, it’s that “this is not for the timid, and it’s not for the prayer-less.”

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.