Former President Donald Trump has a secret plan to bring the war in Ukraine to a quick conclusion. Trump, the 2024 Republican nominee-in-waiting, says he plans to implement it even before he takes office, after beating President Joe Biden in their looming rematch.
“I will have that war settled between Putin and Zelensky as president-elect before I take office on Jan. 20,” the once and very likely future president said at last month’s debate with Biden. “People being killed so needlessly, so stupidly, and I will get it settled and I'll get it settled fast before I take office.”
Trump has kept the specifics of his peace proposal close to the vest, but he’s suggested that, like his promise to secure the freedom of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, it is based on his personal relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin .
“I will have him [Gershkovich] out very quickly, as soon as I take office, before I take office … literally as soon as I win the election,” Trump promised at the debate.
Trump’s been cagey about exactly how as president he would force both sides to the negotiating table, but he’s openly suggested he would cut off U.S. aid to Ukraine if President Volodymyr Zelensky refused to make concessions to Putin.
When asked directly, Trump has avoided endorsing Zelensky’s vision of victory, which would require Russia to withdraw from all occupied territory, including the Crimean Peninsula, and Ukraine joining NATO.
“I don't think in terms of winning and losing. I think in terms of getting it settled so we stop killing all these people,” Trump said at a CNN town hall event last May. “I want everybody to stop dying. They're dying, Russians and Ukrainians. I want them to stop dying.”
Trump’s idea is to pressure Zelensky to cede Crimea and the Donbas border region to Russia,” according to insiders who spoke to the Washington Post in early April.
“Privately, Trump has said that he thinks both Russia and Ukraine 'want to save face, they want a way out,' and that people in parts of Ukraine would be okay with being part of Russia,” the newspaper reported.
Coincidentally, just a few days later, the America First Policy Institute, a think tank led by two Trump advisers, published a little-noticed research report fleshing out the kind of approach they’d like to see Biden or Trump take.
“This should start with a formal U.S. policy to bring the war to a conclusion. Specifically, it would mean a formal U.S. policy to seek a cease-fire and negotiated settlement of the Ukraine conflict,” said the white paper, authored by retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, a former Trump national security adviser, and Fred Fleitz, who served as chief of staff in Trump’s National Security Council.
“The United States would continue to arm Ukraine and strengthen its defenses to ensure Russia will make no further advances and will not attack again after a cease-fire or peace agreement but would also condition future American military aid on Ukraine’s participation in peace talks with Russia,” the document added.
To convince Putin to join peace talks, the U.S. and other NATO nations would “offer to put off NATO membership for Ukraine for an extended period in exchange for a comprehensive and verifiable peace deal with security guarantees.”
Kellogg spelled out the carrots and sticks in blunter terms in an interview with Reuters.
"We tell the Ukrainians, 'You've got to come to the table, and if you don't come to the table, support from the United States will dry up,'" Kellogg said. "And you tell Putin, 'He's got to come to the table, and if you don't come to the table, then we'll give Ukrainians everything they need to kill you in the field.'"
Putin shouldn’t need much convincing, given his forces are taking horrific losses on the battlefield and that with the proposed conditions, he would be in a strong position to force Ukraine to surrender the entirety of four regions claimed by Moscow, one of his stated preconditions for a peace agreement.
“The Ukrainian troops must be completely withdrawn from the Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics and Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions,” Putin said, during a meeting with his Foreign Affairs Ministry officials at the Kremlin on June 14.
“As soon as Kyiv declares that it is ready to make this decision and begin a real withdrawal of troops from these regions, and also officially notifies that it abandons its plans to join NATO, our side will follow an order to cease fire and start negotiations will be issued by us that very moment,” Putin said.
Zelensky who’s pushing his own peace plan, promptly rejected Putin’s conditions, comparing them to Adolf Hitler’s demands for capitulation during World War II.
“These messages are messages of ultimatum,” Zelensky said. “It’s the same thing Hitler did.”
While Zelensky said Ukraine will work with whoever is the U.S. president next year, he’s worried that defeatism is taking hold of the MAGA wing of the Republican Party.
“Ukraine's not winning that war,” Trump argued at the June debate. “They're running out of people, they're running out of soldiers, they've lost so many people. It's so sad.”
Trump’s desire to wrap up the war quickly is putting tremendous pressure on Zelensky, who fears under Trump the U.S. would be happy to write off large portions of Ukraine to appease Putin.
“It is impossible to help Ukraine with one hand and shake Putin’s hand with the other,” Zelensky told the Philadelphia Inquirer in a June 24 interview in Kyiv. “It will not work.”
“Everybody is still afraid that Russia can split apart, everybody is afraid of what will happen to Russia without Putin and whether it will stay as it is or get worse,” Zelensky said, arguing that U.S. half-measures, such as restricting Ukraine’s ability to use long-range ATACMS rockets to hit deep into Russian territory, are giving Putin a free hand to improve his negotiating position.
“Any step forward on our territory, any occupation, any village even fully destroyed is positive for them because it is important for them to bargain as much as possible,” he said.
Like many in his base, Trump believes the U.S. is pouring good money after bad to prop up Ukraine in a war it’s destined to lose and that Zelensky is soaking the U.S. and its allies in his quixotic pursuit of glory.
“Every time that Zelensky comes to this country, he walks away with $60 billion. He's the greatest salesman ever,” Trump has said on several occasions.
It’s an argument that resonates with his base and is echoed by his most vocal supporters, including Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), who at this writing is still in contention to be Trump's running mate.
“People who want us to put limitless resources into Ukraine, they want us to believe two things at once,” Vance said on Fox News Sunday in April. “On the one hand, they want us to believe the Ukrainians are on the verge of victory in the far eastern part of Ukraine. On the other hand, they want us to believe that Vladimir Putin is about to march all the way to Paris. You can't believe both of those things at the same time.”
“It's not that we don't admire the courageousness of the Ukrainians — we certainly do. It's that America is stretched too thin. We do not have the industrial capacity to support a war in Ukraine, a war in Israel, potentially a war in East Asia if the Chinese invade Taiwan,” he said, repeating an argument he first made at the Munich Security Conference in February. “So America has to pick and choose.”
Trump may see himself as master of the “Art of the Deal,” but outgoing Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, who has been tapped to be the European Union’s top diplomat, has a warning for Trump about Russian negotiating tactics that she said date back to the days of Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko.
“Three things. First, demand the maximum. Do not ask, but demand something that has never been yours. Second, present ultimatums, threaten. And third, do not give one inch in negotiations,” Kallas said in an interview . “Because there will be always people in the West who will offer you something, and then in the end, you will have one-third or even one-half of something you didn't have before.”
Former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker argues for an alternative strategy to counter Putin’s strategy of grinding away at a war of attrition until the West folds — find a way to make Ukraine’s eventual NATO membership a fait accompli.
“If we tell Vladimir Putin that Ukraine cannot join NATO until after the war, then that’s a message to Putin to continue the war,” Volker said in an interview with Euromaidan Press.
“NATO can make a commitment to Ukraine but also a public statement that would be read by Russia that we would help defend Ukrainian territory that Ukraine controls,” Volker said. “So, no more Russian seizure of territory, but we would not engage to retake territory militarily alongside Ukrainian forces. That’s a matter for Ukraine itself.”
Trump argues if anyone should be doing more to help Ukraine, it should be European countries, not the U.S., because “it has a bigger impact on them, because of location, because we have an ocean in between.”
It’s an argument that has echoes of America’s isolationist sentiment before its entry into World War II.
“Some of our people like to believe that wars in Europe and in Asia are of no concern to us,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in a December 1940 fireside chat. “But the width of those oceans is not what it was in the days of clipper ships.”
“They tell you that the Axis powers are going to win anyway, that all of this bloodshed in the world could be saved, that the United States might just as well throw its influence into the scale of a dictated peace and get the best out of it that we can,” Roosevelt said.
“They call it a ‘negotiated peace.’ Nonsense! … Such a dictated peace would be no peace at all. It would be only another armistice.”
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Ukraine already learned a hard lesson about the value of Russian security guarantees when, in 1994, it gave its nuclear weapons back to Russia in return for a guarantee from Moscow that its territorial sovereignty would never be violated.
“A ceasefire is the best option for the Russians so they can prepare for taking even more,” Zelensky says.
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