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. This is the only sustainable way to build a lasting defense cooperation between Washington and Kyiv.

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. 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. Ukraine gets the weapons and the United States gets the money, while Russia bears the cost of Putin’s aggression.

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.

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.

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.

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.