Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor and a foreign affairs columnist at POLITICO Europe.

Fourteen-year-old Sofia Glynyana was sitting on a playground bench in the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv on Aug. 30, 2024, when she was struck and killed by a Russian airstrike on the city.

Hit by five powerful precision-guided bombs — none seemingly aimed at military targets — seven other civilians died in that same airstrike. As the bombs pummeled a house, a sports field, a warehouse, an apartment building and Sofia’s playground, they left nearly a hundred more injured, including two dozen children.

“These streets are exclusively parks with large gatherings of civilians. This is a residential building. This is, again, mass terror against our civilian population,” Governor Oleh Sinehubov had posted on Telegram, outraged.

Almost a year later, U.S. President Donald Trump has now finally given his Russian counterpart an ultimatum to agree to a ceasefire in his war on Ukraine by the fall. But how many more will die this Aug. 30 as Russia intensifies its aerial onslaught in the meantime? And will Trump’s stipulations make any difference at all?

Last week, the U.S. president’s demands of Russian leader Vladimir Putin were clear: Agree to a ceasefire by the beginning of September or face further economic penalties, including the imposition of tariffs on countries trading with Western-sanctioned Russia — among them, presumably, China and India, which have been fueling Russia’s economy with their oil purchases.

Meanwhile, the U.S. will sell Patriot air defense systems to Europe for transfer to the Ukrainians, and also supply additional weapons, the numbers and types of which remain unclear.

Trump’s highly anticipated announcement was delivered in a strange way: During an Oval Office press conference, the U.S. leader left it largely to NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte to summarize the new American policy, confining himself to some interjected commentary.

Nonetheless, there was relief in both Kyiv and Western European capitals that Trump wasn’t abandoning Ukraine — and over the change in his tone toward Putin.

That relief, however, was also shared by the Kremlin. Moscow seemed undaunted by Trump’s “very severe tariffs.” And that official calm was reflected more broadly in the country as well, with the Russian stock market taking Trump’s announcement in stride. It went up 2.7 percent in the hours after, and the Russian ruble reversed some losses against the dollar.

And why wouldn’t the Kremlin and Russian markets react that way? According to Russian political scientist Tatiana Stanovaya, the ultimatum was essentially interpreted by Moscow as “carte blanche to intensify its offensive in Ukraine.”

That’s the take from Russian military analyst Yury Fedorov too, who said what the Kremlin had actually feared was the “immediate imposition” of secondary sanctions on buyers of Russian oil, the advancement of legislation in the U.S. Senate that would see steeper penalties imposed on Russia and its trading partners, and the immediate deliveries of long-range missiles. Now, he said, Moscow’s assessment is that it’s been given a green light to continue its aerial onslaught, especially as “Trump is not prepared and does not want to engage in a major confrontation with Russia.”

So, an undeterred Kremlin can now continue to wreak havoc and shed plenty more innocent blood for the rest of the summer. In the week before Sofia was killed, Russian forces had targeted more than 400 drones and missiles at Ukraine — now they’re launching more than that in a single night.

The question is, come September, will Trump really get tougher? Or will Putin be ready to agree to a ceasefire that leads to a peace settlement? There are few grounds to think so.

In a recent interview, long-time Kremlin watcher and Trump’s former Russia czar Fiona Hill warned that the U.S. president is “deferential towards Putin because he really is worried about the risk of a nuclear exchange.”

However, he also “thinks it’s just about real estate, about trade and who gets what, be it minerals, land or rare earths,” she explained. What Trump doesn’t understand is that “Putin doesn’t want a ceasefire. [He] wants a neutered Ukraine, not one that is able to withstand military pressure. Everybody sees this, apart from Trump.”

And underpinning this soft approach to Moscow, Hill argued, is the U.S. president’s personal idolization of Putin.  

The Russian president hasn’t shifted any of his preconditions for ending the conflict so far. In fact, at the recent St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, he simply reiterated them, saying there can only be a peace deal when there’s international recognition of the territories he claims are Russian, and when Ukraine adopts a neutral, non-aligned status.

And until then, Putin seems set on continuing with a war of attrition that might actually be highly dangerous for him to bring to an abrupt halt. According to Ella Paneyakh, a sociologist and research fellow at the New Eurasian Strategies Center — a think tank founded by Russian businessman and long-time Putin opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky — the Russian autocrat needs to prolong the war, as a sudden end and the unraveling of the war economy would trigger “cruel and vicious competition for diminishing resources at every level of society.”

“Returning veterans — especially socially-connected contract soldiers — are likely to demand privileges and disrupt local balances of power, challenging both elites and institutions. A new wartime elite of pseudo-veterans, bureaucrats and war-related contractors will compete with true combatants and civilians, particularly in Russia’s periphery,” she said. And as war veterans return, “conflicts will inevitably take place with those they perceive as ‘cowards’ who did not go to fight.”

This is a dangerous combination — and undoubtedly it’s something the Kremlin has on its radar too.