One of the many ambitious promises that President Trump ran his 2024 campaign on was the assurance that he would end the war in Ukraine as swiftly as possible. During his campaign last year, he set a lofty goal of brokering peace between Russia and Ukraine within 24 hours of being sworn into the Oval Office. Obviously, these promises have not been fulfilled.
Trump has more recently relaxed his 24-hour ambitions, saying last week that he hoped to have the conflict solved within “six months”, according to NBC News. Keith Kellogg, his appointee for special envoy in the war, separately set the goal of “100 days.” Trump has apparently directed his aides to arrange a phone call with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin soon, with one goal of the conversation to discuss an in-person meeting in the coming months to try to end the war in Ukraine. Putin has signaled his willingness to talk to Trump, signaling a stark change in attitude from that which he had with the Biden Administration. The potential Trump-Putin meeting may seem promising to some, considering Putin’s only meeting with former president Biden was at the 2021 summit in Geneva, eight months before the invasion of Ukraine.
Nevertheless, Ukrainians still doubt that Putin will agree to a diplomatic end of the war and that the terms of peace will justly restore their pre-invasion borders. According to a December poll of around 1,100 people in Kyiv by Gradus Research, a little more than a third of respondents believed the war would end by the close of 2025, while the rest of the respondents expected the war to go on “for years” or were unable to make a prediction. These numbers are up about a quarter from what they were six months earlier. Even if Trump helps to speed up a ceasefire, the chances that it is honored by either side are slim. “I am someone who has lived through dozens of ceasefires, perhaps 20… every one of these ceasefires with Russia didn’t last more than five minutes,” said Roman Kostenko, a Ukrainian politician who led special forces units on the front lines before his election to parliament in 2019.
As the best defense against future Russian aggression, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has pushed hard for his country to be invited to join N.A.T.O. He and other Ukrainian officials worry that if any potential agreement falls short of an unwavering alliance from Washington, the Kremlin will bide its time and eventually strike again. “They will build up their military capabilities to come back,” Oleksii Reznikov, a former defense minister and peace negotiator with Russia, told Reuters. “They will want to continue what they started in 2014 with Crimea, and recommenced on a broader scale in 2022.”
According to Reuters, Putin has stated that he is open to negotiating a ceasefire agreement with Trump, but he opposes making any significant territorial concessions and demands that Kyiv give over vast areas of land to Moscow. Putin also wants assurances that Ukraine would never become a member of N.A.T.O. Given Trump’s track record of undermining the N.A.T.O. alliance, which has historically defended Westernized republics such as Ukraine, many in Europe are concerned that an assured Putin may shift his targets to other former Soviet nations.
Even if a deal to end hostilities is agreed, making it stick could be a major challenge, according to researchers on the conflict at the Centre for Global Governance and Security. In other words, it remains an open question as to who would monitor and enforce a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine.
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