Published on: September 28, 2026 at 11:31 am
U.S. special envoy Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law who he tasked with mediating between Russia and Ukraine, publicly stated that the parameters for a peace agreement have been drafted, but the deal is being stalled by Ukraine’s refusal to withdraw to the territorial lines that Russian President Vladimir Putin demanded as a precondition for ending his attacks.
According to Academy of Management Scholar Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of the Yale School of Management, who moderated the panel “The Framers of 1776 vs. The Nation’s Leadership In 2026; Is the Vision Now Vivid or Blurred?” at the 2026 AOM Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, this upset Ukrainians and Ukraine supporters, especially as the Trump administration has long been perceived as being receptive to Putin’s demands while disrespecting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Sonnenfeld is also a coauthor, with Steven Tian of Yale, of the book Trump’s Ten Commandments: Strategic Lessons from the Trump Leadership Toolbox.
“I enormously admire President Zelenskyy—he is truly heroic, putting his life at risk and uniting and leading his country during wartime,” Sonnenfeld said. “The unity of the EU in supporting Ukraine, for the most part, has been pretty remarkable.
“Ukraine has had pockets of corruption and a fair amount of political divisiveness historically, so the way they’ve come together heroically to fight back against the Russian invaders is astounding,” he said. “On the other hand, in Russia, there’s such cowardice that only 4% of Russians at most were using a VPN to try to get the truth from non-Kremlin-approved sources, because they knew all the newspaper journalists and independent media and broadcast executives were pushed off of balconies and top leaders wound up getting lost in traffic and run over. They know that Putin is corrupted, whereas Ukraine’s people are proving they’re built differently.”
As of September 2026, it has been four and a half years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Putin thought he’d be victorious in a matter of days. Even the most optimistic Ukraine supporters didn’t think the Ukrainian military would be able to hold off the Russian invaders till the end of that year.
“Zelenskyy has been courageously leading them in battle when even people in the U.S. thought it was going to be a three- to five-day campaign,” Sonnenfeld said. “One of my best friends who suddenly passed away, Ash Carter, who is a former U.S. Secretary of Defense confirmed during a bipartisan confirmation hearing, said to me that ‘Zelenskyy is the wrong person at the wrong time in the wrong place. He’s a comedic actor, a clown, and Kiev is going to fall in five days.’”
“Now Ash was very pro-Ukraine, but he just didn’t think they’d have the fortitude to withstand the onslaught of the Russian military,” he said. “Tragically, he died young, but he lived long enough to know that he was wrong about Zelenskyy, and that Ukraine showed incredible resilience.”
“So when President Trump goes into the Oval Office meeting with Zelenskyy in February 2025, and Trump is saying false things and blaming the victim, he was wise not to attack Trump back, even as justified as it was; Zelenskyy knows you can’t be equally thin-skinned as he is or you’ll turn him into an angry animal that’s wounded against a wall and lashing out.”
