If only ending a war were as simple as marking a date in your calendar for the war to end. According to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump has done just that, and peace has been penciled in for the spring.
Citing sources “familiar with the matter,” Reuters was the first to report that a deadline had been proposed. They said that “an ambitious March goal for Russia and Ukraine to agree on a peace deal” has been discussed. They also noted that the “timeline is likely to slip given a lack of agreement” on the key issues.
That timeline has already “slipped.” Zelensky has now revealed a spring deadline. Some reports have said the date is set for June. The White House wants to schedule a resolution by then so it can turn its attention to the midterm elections. “The elections are, for them, definitely more important,” Zelensky explained. “Let’s not be naïve.”
Though Trump may want to turn his attention to the midterms, it is possible that this deadline will be taken no more seriously than the series of other deadlines that have passed. It is also possible that the reports are not true, and that Zelensky is putting the deadline out there to preempt a feared massive Russian spring offensive.
The White House has not confirmed any deadline, and U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker denies Zelensky’s claim, saying “that June deadline was mentioned by President Zelensky. I don’t think that is anything that the United States has put out there.”
Whether or not the reports are accurate, the Trump administration has been promising, since before Trump even reentered the White House, that it can accelerate the peace process by imposing pressure on both sides. The Kellogg plan proposed
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”… And you tell Putin, “[You’ve] 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.”
Negotiations have proven more difficult than pressuring the two sides. They have remained at a standstill because, as Zelensky said after the most recent round of talks, “difficult issues remained difficult.”
Negotiations have revealed the line between what Russia will concede, because it is not what it went to war for, and what Russia will never concede, because it is precisely what it went to war for. Russia has surrendered its demand to acquire all of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson because the war was never about territory. They have surrendered their demand for an extreme cap on the size of the Ukrainian armed forces, because the war was never about Ukrainian forces in Ukraine. They have agreed to Ukraine joining the EU because joining NATO, and not the EU, was the core issue that motivated Moscow to launch the war.
But Russia will not surrender its demand that Ukraine never join NATO, because the key issue for going to war was to preclude the risk of Russia being drawn into a war with NATO by preventing Ukraine, with which it has territorial disputes, from joining the alliance, and to avoid the threat of NATO expanding its military presence in Russia’s backyard.
And Russia will not surrender its demand for Donbas because—after the political threats to ethnic Russian language, religion, culture, and rights following the U.S.-supported 2014 Maidan coup, and after the growing military threats to Donbas from Kiev, and after Europe’s betrayal of the Minsk Agreements that were supposed to calm the Donbas conflict—Russia will not surrender protection of the region’s ethnic Russians.
Ukraine, for its part, insists that it will not surrender land that Russia has not won. “‘We stand where we stand’ is the fairest and most reliable model for a ceasefire today,” Zelensky maintains. And Ukraine and Europe continue to insist on NATO members stationing troops in Ukraine after the war. Earlier this month, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said, “As soon as a peace deal is signed, there will instantly appear armed forces, planes in the sky, and maritime support from those in NATO who have agreed.”
Russia has recently reiterated that troops from NATO countries deployed on Ukrainian soil would be “regarded as foreign intervention posing a direct threat to Russia’s security” and would “become legitimate targets for the Russian Armed Forces.” Such a security arrangement is not beneficial to Europe or Russia. Since Russia went to war to prevent not only Ukraine in NATO, but also NATO in Ukraine, such a security arrangement would be unacceptable to Russia.
The scheduling of a deadline does not resolve these issues, and the setting of a deadline is not a substitute for the difficult work of diplomacy.
There are also reports that the deadline is not just a deadline for diplomacy but for Ukrainian elections. According to these reports, the deal would be put to Ukrainians for approval in a referendum, followed by a quick national election. Zelensky is said to be confident that he would win that election.
A referendum provides some reason for hope. Zelensky recently confirmed that Ukraine would abandon its NATO ambitions in exchange for security guarantees. Polling suggests that the number of Ukrainians expecting to join NATO in the next ten years has dropped to 32 percent from 69 in 2023. And, while in May 2022, 82 percent of Ukrainians said Kiev should not surrender any territory, 40 percent now say they would be in favor of giving up the Donbas for security guarantees.
Zelensky’s confidence going into an election might be less well-founded. Recent polling suggests that his standing among Ukrainians continues to fall. Polling by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in January showed that 72 percent of Ukrainians trust former Commander-in-Chief Valeriy Zaluzhny and 70 percent trust former intelligence chief and current Zelensky chief of staff Kyrylo Budanov, while only 62 percent now trust Zelensky.
Though there were likely multiple reasons for the sidelining of Keith Kellogg as America’s special envoy for Ukraine, his eventual exit certainly revealed a lack of confidence in his approach of ramping up pressure on Russia. The Trump team has had more success at nudging each side to make compromises that are concessions to reality. Russia will not keep all of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, the Ukrainian armed forces will not be capped at a helpless number, Ukraine will have security guarantees, and Ukraine will be given the greenlight to join the EU. But Ukraine will not be a member of NATO, and, instead of recovering land lost in 2014, it will have to come to terms with losing even more as a result of the 2022 invasion.
When the issues are seen by both sides as essential to their security, threats are less effective than diplomacy that urges each side to find a compromise that each can see as sufficient, though not optimal. If the Trump team has set a deadline, then hopefully it will be met. But if it is, it will be because the hard diplomatic work necessary to arrive there has been done.
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