Trump’s Russia–Ukraine Reset

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump promised to end the Russia–Ukraine war in a single day.

After more than 100 days back in the White House, Trump seems closer to ending America’s diplomacy than Russia’s war. Last Friday, Trump officials announced the administration was withdrawing from formal peace negotiations. Tammy Bruce, the State Department spokesperson, explained, “We will continue to help, but we will no longer fly around the world as mediators in meetings.” 

One day earlier, Vice President J.D. Vance had been even blunter, saying the war is “not going to end any time soon.”

The administration is right to recalibrate expectations. Negotiating a settlement in Ukraine was always going to be difficult, with Moscow in no hurry to stop a war of attrition that it is (slowly) winning. Trump deserves credit for easing U.S. tensions with Russia and pushing for a resolution to the conflict, but it’s clear he underestimated the magnitude of the challenge. With negotiations stalled, now seems a good time to take stock of what’s worked, what hasn’t, and what approach to take in the next phase of diplomacy.

As Trump officials reflect on why their intensive efforts didn’t produce peace, they should consider the worrisome possibility that Russia’s military appetite has grown with the eating. If Moscow hopes to swallow the Black Sea port city Odessa—which the Kremlin considers deeply Russian—then it won’t soon consent to a settlement in which the current battle lines are frozen and heavily fortified, as Vance recommended last year.

An even more worrisome possibility: Stupid U.S. policies since the Cold War—in particular, NATO expansion and the pledge to bring Kiev into the alliance—have inflamed revanchist and imperialist tendencies inside Russia. Even if the full-scale invasion of Ukraine was motivated largely by normal security concerns—as I believe it was—Russia may have developed an ambition to reassert some type of control over its entire historical sphere of influence, international borders be damned. The increasingly bellicose rhetoric of Russian hardliners throughout the war—figures like the political scientist Sergei Karaganov, the former President Dmitry Medvedev, and the philosopher Aleksandr Dugin—suggest that this is the case.

Hardliners aren’t the only problem. One reason Trump’s attempt at mediation has floundered is that most Russians, including the relative moderates, doubt that America can be an impartial mediator in this war. For them, the U.S. is a party to the conflict, if not the main enemy that Russia is fighting in Ukraine. Considering the Biden administration’s deep involvement in the war—featuring not just weapons deliveries to Ukraine but targeting assistance and logistical coordination—the prevalence of this view is hardly surprising, though still frustrating for a new American president who seeks to stop a war that started on his predecessor’s watch.

That U.S. mediation efforts came to a halt Friday amid a lack of diplomatic progress didn’t surprise me, and not just because of the obvious complexities involved in resolving the war. Earlier in the week, I had participated in U.S.–Russia track II talks that left me more pessimistic about the prospects for peace. Other participants on the American side shared this impression, though not all. 

Our Russian colleagues, whether as a negotiating tactic or out of sincere confidence about their nation’s geopolitical and military position, drove a hard bargain and seemed to expect that all of Moscow’s war aims will be achieved, including the demilitarization of Ukraine. (Although there was some wiggle room on the matter of “denazification,” which Western analysts have interpreted as a plot to set up a puppet regime in Kiev.)

The White House too seems to have grown pessimistic about Russian intentions, judging by some of Trump’s recent statements. Evidently, the president is starting to see Vladimir Putin, not Volodymyr Zelensky, as the bigger obstacle to peace. Two weeks ago, after a Russian missile and drone attack on Kiev, Trump mused on social media that maybe Putin “doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along.” Trump added that he might need to slap fresh sanctions on Russia to nudge it toward peace.

Last week brought signs that Trump really is seeking to ramp up pressure on Putin. Two days before the White House withdrew from peace talks, it signed a long-awaited minerals deal with Ukraine that cements U.S. investment in the country’s future stability and prosperity. Shortly after the deal was signed, Trump authorized a new weapons delivery to Ukraine, the first such move since he took office. Moreover, the U.S. has refurbished a Patriot air-defense system based in Israel and will send it to Ukraine, the New York Times reported this weekend. Meanwhile, the White House and Congress have each cobbled together a sanctions package that would target Russian energy.

Trump is notoriously unpredictable, but these developments suggest that the U.S., rather than continuing to present itself as a third-party arbitrator, will align more closely with Ukraine and try to increase the costs for Russia of sustaining the war. Such a diplomatic strategy is sensible, but the White House would struggle to shift the military advantage to Ukraine, which suffers from a manpower shortage that U.S. weapons shipments cannot solve as Russian forces in Ukraine actually grow thanks to strong recruitment. Moreover, the Russian economy has withstood severe Western sanctions throughout the war, so Moscow won’t buckle in the face of yet one more round of trade restrictions.

Simply put, Washington doesn’t have big enough sticks to force Russia to stop the war—the “unipolar moment” truly is over. Fortunately, Trump has managed to engineer a large carrot that could help entice Moscow to make peace. In the opening weeks of the administration, the White House not only reestablished diplomatic contacts with the Kremlin but put on the table a grand U.S.-Russia rapprochement, which Putin seems to desire. In last week’s track II talks, the Russians conveyed a strong interest in better bilateral relations. 

Trump should continue to promote closer ties between Washington and Moscow but signal that failure to resolve the war in Ukraine would jeopardize this broader diplomatic project. He should also make clear—not only to Putin but to Russia hawks in Washington—that Moscow would get sanctions relief if it ended the war.

If Trump, through wise deployment of carrots and sticks, manages to coax Putin to the negotiating table, he should use the peace talks not only to try resolving the current conflict but to probe Moscow’s intentions. This would require differentiating between Russian demands that arise from legitimate security concerns and those that bespeak nefarious designs.

For example, Moscow would have good reasons to oppose Europe’s deploying a reassurance force to Ukraine after the war, but if Russian negotiators also objected to a proposal to fortify the contact line and have it patrolled by peacekeepers and monitors from the Global South, then that might suggest an intention to take over all of Ukraine when the opportunity arises. 

As for demilitarization, the U.S. should be open to demands that Ukraine relinquish long-range missiles, but it should resist any calls for Kiev to give up air-defense systems, land mines, and other defensive munitions. Washington might also propose to have offensive weaponry positioned in southeastern Poland for release to Ukraine only in the event of future Russian aggression.

Trump is no doubt disappointed that he has failed to resolve the Russia–Ukraine war as swiftly as he promised. Yet he’s not even four months into his second administration, and the conflict, despite the present impasse, is nearer resolution than when he assumed office. Thanks to U.S. pressure, in recent weeks Zelensky and Putin have each executed a remarkable volte-face by expressing openness to direct talks between their nations.

In sum, the U.S. needn’t give up on Russia–Ukraine just yet. The one-page peace proposal that the White House presented last month is fair and reasonable, and it can still serve as a starting point for negotiations. If the U.S. can get Moscow and Kiev to agree to it, then Trump will have acted as the “peacemaker and unifier” that in his inaugural address he promised to be. Surely that remains a political goal worth pursuing, however challenging it has proven to achieve.

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