President Donald Trump promised during his campaign to end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours if he got elected. Limited progress has been made in that quest as he approaches the 100-day mark of his tenure, and his administration is threatening to walk away from its mediating role.
His administration’s strategy, at least at the beginning of his term, was to reopen communication lines with Moscow, to stop villainizing them, and to push for significant Ukrainian concessions in the hopes that it could get Russia, the side in a more favorable position on the battlefield, to the negotiating table. But that hasn’t stopped the war.
The president’s belief that he could quickly resolve a conflict that Russian leader Vladimir Putin has had the ability to end for several years “suggested to me an insufficient awareness of the nature of Vladimir Putin as a stone cold predator, an autocrat, an aggressor, and a lack of appreciation for the details and difficulties involved,” Bradley Bowman, a senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Washington Examiner.
Trump told Time Magazine in an interview to mark his 100 days in office that his frequent refrain that he’d end the conflict in 24 hours was “said in jest.”
“I worried at the time, and my worries proved prescient, sadly, that the policy would amount to what it has become and that is all sticks for Ukraine and carrots for Putin,” Bowman added.
Putin’s ambitions are well-documented and long predate the full-scale invasion into Ukraine he ordered in 2022. He’s had the ability to end the war every day since then, and while experts say there’s no indication Russia will achieve its maximalist goals, it continues to make incremental gains in the east and south at the expense of tens of thousands of soldiers monthly.
Russia’s military incurs 30,000-45,000 casualties — killed and wounded — every month, according to George Barros, an expert with the Institute for the Study of War.
Trump, just this week, has rebuked both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for comments he made that the president viewed as detrimental to negotiations, while he also said he was unhappy about Russia’s overnight assault on Kyiv that led to more than 80 casualties.
His call for Putin to “STOP!” the bombings was a rare rebuke for the president, who has much more willingly criticized Zelensky and his own predecessor, President Joe Biden, for the conflict, the deadliest armed conflict in Europe since the end of World War II. It’s a stark contrast from the previous administration that took every opportunity to call out Russia’s invasion and to back Ukraine’s sovereignty.
“Well, the language, I think, is chosen in order to avoid poisoning the relationship with Russia or Trump and Putin personally, so that you can entice Putin to negotiate and end the war. I think that’s been deliberate, a change in language that way,” former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker told the Washington Examiner.
The Trump administration has sought concessions from Ukraine for a deal, rejecting its hopes for a pathway to NATO membership and pressuring it to agree to give up territory. Simultaneously, pushing Ukraine for those concessions has given Russia the impression it can hold out to get additional demands met.
The Ukrainians have also faced the wrath of the White House when it has not accepted their terms, most infamously during Zelensky’s blowup in the Oval Office with the president when the two sides had initially come together to sign a minerals agreement. The extraordinary clash between Zelensky, Trump, and Vance resulted in the Ukrainian leader being kicked out of the White House, and the deal has yet to be signed.
“Crimea will stay with Russia,” Trump told Time, referencing the region of Ukraine that Moscow annexed back in 2014. The president’s remarks differ from his comments earlier this week in which he said, “nobody is asking Zelenskyy to recognize Crimea as Russian Territory.”
Bowman said the administration has offered “unsolicited preemptive concession after concession to the Kremlin and pressure, public and private, applied to our partner, confusing explicitly and implicitly repeatedly the invader and the invaded. So if good policy begins with objective analysis of reality and facts on the ground, we should start with not confusing the Russian invader with the Ukrainian invaded.”
The president, in the interview, repeated Russia’s justification for invading Ukraine, blaming it on Ukraine’s aspirations to join NATO.
“I don’t think they’ll ever be able to join NATO. I think that’s been—from day one, I think that’s been, that’s, I think, what caused the war to start was when they started talking about joining NATO,” Trump said.
In that statement, Trump not only placed blame on Ukraine for the war, but it took away what Kyiv views as one of the most significant long-term security guarantees the West could offer.
Last July, NATO members declared in a communique that Kyiv is on the “irreversible path” to ascension into the alliance.
Vance also indicated this week that their strategy for ending the conflict will likely include freezing the battlefield lines as new borders, which would force Ukraine to give up about a fifth of its territory.
“The current lines, or somewhere close to them, is where you’re ultimately, I think, going to draw the new lines in the conflict,” he said.
His Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, is currently in Moscow for the fourth time since Trump’s inauguration meeting with Putin and other senior Russian leaders.
Trump was asked on Thursday what concessions Russia was offering to make, and the president replied, “stopping the war,” suggesting that not “taking the whole country” is a “pretty big concession.”
Volker said, “It’s not a concession for somebody to say, ‘Oh, I’m not going to take over the whole country.’ They shouldn’t be taking over any of the country. And so, to say that that’s a Russian concession is simply mischaracterizing what’s going on here. They shouldn’t be taking any of Ukraine.”
Experts argue it’s not too late for the administration to ratchet up the pressure on Moscow instead to try and force it to the table.
“I think it would require putting in place some new secondary sanctions on the Russian oil and gas industry and the shipment of oil and gas and on financial institutions, so tightening up the implementation and applying secondary sanctions,” Volker said.
Barros echoed the sentiment of additional sanctions, and he argued that providing weapons to Ukraine, even selling them weapons instead of giving them away, would actually help the peace process.
“It might seem counterintuitive to try to bring about peace by giving the Ukrainians weapons, but actually, the Russians are not going to be able to sustain and protract this war indefinitely, because the sheer quantity of casualties that the Russians are taking is phenomenally high,” he said.
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If these negotiating efforts fail, Russia has the ability to outlast Ukraine’s defenses, especially if Kyiv loses U.S. or European support.
Barros said Russia’s military will likely be able to sustain the current pace and intensity of the conflict for another 12 to 16 months.