As he prepares to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, President Donald Trump says he will continue to send U.S. weapons to Kyiv. “I want to reach an agreement, and the only way you’re going to reach an agreement is not to abandon” Ukraine, he told Time magazine in his Person of the Year interview in late November.

He is right. To secure a lasting peace, we must continue to arm Ukraine — but without asking U.S. taxpayers to foot the bill.

The time has come for a just and lasting peace, and Trump is right to seek an end to the fighting. He also understands who the intransigent party is. As he put it on his first day back in the Oval Office, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “wants to make a deal. I don’t know if [Vladimir] Putin does. He might not. … I think he’s destroying Russia by not making a deal. I think Russia’s going to be in big trouble.”

But regardless of what happens at the negotiating table, the United States will need to provide Ukraine with weapons for many years to come. If Putin resists Trump’s peace efforts, the president has promised to increase U.S. military support for Ukraine to force the Russian leader to the negotiating table. And after peace is achieved, Kyiv will need U.S. weapons to deter Russia from resuming hostilities when Trump leaves office.

Trump can deliver those weapons without further burdening U.S. taxpayers. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion began nearly three years ago, the American people have provided about $183 billion in aid to Ukraine. This assistance was not charity. Stopping Putin from subjugating Ukraine was, and remains, in the United States’ vital national security interest. And most of the military aid money has been spent right here at home — reinvigorating our dangerously atrophied defense industrial base, creating good manufacturing jobs and modernizing our military as we send Ukraine older weapons and replace our stockpiles with more advanced versions.

But U.S. taxpayers cannot, and should not, subsidize Ukraine’s defense indefinitely. The time has come to transition Ukraine from an aid recipient to a defense consumer — just like many other U.S. friends and allies across Europe, Asia and the Middle East who purchase U.S. defense materiel. This is the only sustainable way to build a lasting defense cooperation between Washington and Kyiv.

Ukraine critics say they oppose an endless war funded by American taxpayers. What we propose is a strategy for lasting peace backed by U.S. arms sales. Here is our plan:

1. Let Ukraine use frozen Russian assets to buy U.S. weapons

Washington and our European allies currently control about $300 billion in frozen Russian assets — including about $5 billion held in the United States; almost $200 billion held by Euroclear, a Belgian financial services company; and the rest held frozen in Britain, France, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Canada, Japan and other countries.

Do we want Putin to get those funds? Or do we want the lion’s share to go to the United States to purchase arms for Ukraine while further rebuilding our defense industrial base?

Using frozen Russian assets to arm Ukraine gives the United States all the benefits of Ukraine aid in terms of jobs and revitalized defense manufacturing — but with Putin footing the bill instead of U.S. taxpayers.

Let Russia pay to create jobs for American workers building Abrams tanks and Stryker combat vehicles in Ohio; Ground Launched Small Diameter Bombs, Bradley fire-support team vehicles and Hercules recovery vehicles in Pennsylvania; extended-range Joint Direct Attack Munition glide bombs in Arkansas, Missouri and Oklahoma; and 155mm artillery shells in Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Iowa, California and Texas, among countless other American communities producing weapons systems for Ukraine.

Using frozen Russian assets to produce those armaments is a win-win solution: Ukraine gets the weapons and the United States gets the money, while Russia bears the cost of Putin’s aggression.

Why has this not been done already? Answer: A lack of imagination in the Biden White House coupled with European intransigence. For years, Belgium was keeping the interest produced by those Russian assets, effectively profiting from Ukraine’s misery. Only last year did our European allies finally agree to use the interest to buy weapons for Ukraine. But, led by Germany and France, they have balked at using the underlying assets themselves.

This is absurd. Why are U.S. (and European) taxpayers being asked to spend their hard-earned money to arm Ukraine when there is a massive pool of Russian funds available for that purpose? Putin should never have invaded Ukraine (and would not have, in our view, if Trump had been president). He — not the American people — should have to pay for the weapons to defend Ukraine from his unlawful aggression.

Twisting the arms of our European allies to release these funds is a challenge tailor-made for Trump. The president who got NATO allies to spend $400 billion more of their own money on defense should have no trouble persuading them to use frozen Russian assets to allow Ukraine to purchase weapons from U.S. defense manufacturers.

How would it work? Congress should create a “defense cooperation account” for Ukraine using the Russian assets. The model would be the similar account established by Congress in the 1990s to collect more than $50 billion in allied payments for expenses related to Operation Desert Shield. There is no need for legislation; current law already authorizes the defense secretary to create such an account to accept donations of funds, services or defense articles “from any person, foreign government, or international organization … for use by the Department of Defense.”

A defense cooperation account for Ukraine could use not just frozen Russian assets but also contributions from any sovereign party wishing to contribute to the defense of Ukraine with U.S. defense materiel and services. Such weaponry could be purchased, or drawn down from existing U.S. stockpiles, with reimbursement provided from funds deposited to the account.

Trump should tell European allies reluctant to use Russian frozen assets for this purpose that he does not care where the money comes from — that if they don’t want to use Russian money, they can replace the funds with their money from their own taxpayers.

Congress should also amend the Repo Act — the law passed in 2023 which allowed the confiscation of frozen Russian assets in the United States to be used to aid Ukraine. The Biden administration designed the law to put seized assets into a fund administered by the secretary of state. The law should be amended to transfer the money to the Pentagon so it can be used for weapons drawdowns or purchases.

Once a defense cooperation account is established, we can also encourage our allies in the Asia-Pacific to support it, because their security is increasingly tied to Ukraine’s and Europe’s as the Russia-North Korea-China axis strengthens.

This international fund will deliver weapons to Ukraine to either force Russia to the negotiating table or to secure the peace that Trump negotiates. At the same time, it will serve as a way to modernize the U.S. armed forces, create American jobs and supplement Trump’s planned defense buildup.

2. Loans guaranteed by Ukraine’s natural resources

During the 2024 campaign, Trump proposed the idea of lending Ukraine the money to purchase U.S. weapons. As he put it during a South Carolina rally: “Do it this way: Loan them the money. If they can make it, they pay us back. If they can’t make it, they don’t have to pay us back.”

In fact, Ukraine can pay us back. While the war has devastated its economy, the country is sitting on an estimated $26 trillion in untapped natural resources — oil, gas, critical minerals and rare earth metals. Ukraine possesses some of the largest reserves of 22 of the 50 strategic minerals identified as critical to the U.S. economy and national security, including the largest reserves of uranium in Europe; the second-largest reserves of iron ore, titanium and manganese; and the third-largest reserves of shale gas, as well as massive deposits of lithium, graphite and rare earth metals, according to the Canadian geopolitical risk-analysis firm SecDev.

Ukraine’s mineral and hydrocarbon resources can be used as collateral for loans to buy U.S. defense materiel, allowing Kyiv to provide for its own defense.

There are two mechanisms we can use to provide such loans. We can provide weapons to Ukraine using a Lend-Lease program, modeled on the one the United States used to arm Britain during World War II. There is no need for legislation to do this; the authority already exists in current law.

Ukraine can also buy U.S. weapons using another existing program: Foreign Military Financing (FMF) direct loans, like those we provide to U.S. allies and partners around the world. Since the war in Ukraine began, Poland has undertaken a massive defense buildup, financed in part by $11 billion in FMF direct loans, which come with interest that must be paid to the U.S. government. Warsaw is using those loans to purchase advanced U.S. defense systems, including M1A2 Abrams tanks that will be produced in Ohio, Apache helicopters built in Arizona, Airspace and Surface Radar Reconnaissance Systems produced in California, Maryland and Virginia; High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) produced in Florida, North Carolina, Alabama, Illinois, Nebraska, Texas, New Jersey and West Virginia; and Patriot air and missile defense systems produced in Missouri, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Pennsylvania.

Similarly, last year, Romania took out a $920 million FMF direct loan to carry out a major military modernization program, including purchases of U.S. defense equipment such as Abrams tanks and co-production of Abrams tank ammunition.

Congress also approved $2 billion in FMF loans for Taiwan, which it will have to repay over a 12-year period.

Ukraine can do the same. So as not to transfer costs to the U.S. taxpayer, the structure of such an agreement can be negotiated so that Ukraine guarantees these loans with its substantial natural resources.

Ukraine should be more than willing to enter into a loan agreement to purchase U.S. weapons, because it creates a sustainable model for long-term defense cooperation and creates a lasting U.S. interest in Ukraine’s sovereignty and independence. American taxpayers get repaid only if Ukraine survives as a free, stable and prosperous nation.

Its resources can be developed for the benefit of both countries only if Trump succeeds in negotiating a resolution to the conflict. It is hard to mine for minerals or develop offshore oil and natural gas under enemy fire.

The time has come to end the war in Ukraine and to secure a just and lasting peace. The only way to do so is to make sure that Ukraine is armed with weapons made by American workers — without requiring U.S. taxpayers to bear the cost.

Jack Keane, a retired general, is chairman of the Institute for the Study of War and was vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army. Marc A. Thiessen is a Post columnist and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Marc Thiessen writes a column for The Washington Post on foreign and domestic policy.