It came as no surprise that Donald Trump couldn’t make good on his boast to end Russia’s war in Ukraine on his first day back in the White House.
“Before I even arrive at the Oval Office, shortly after I win the presidency, I will have the horrible war between Russia and Ukraine settled,” Trump proclaimed last spring and reiterated often on the campaign trail.
Then-candidate Trump’s absurd promise of supernatural resolution powers roused fears that he would end the conflict by sacrificing Ukraine to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s expansionist ambitions. Candidate Trump’s pressure on Congress to withhold vital U.S. defense aid to Ukraine a year ago seemed to signal his intent to abandon Ukraine, an aspiring democracy that has been independent since the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union.
But newly inaugurated President Trump’s nominees for the top foreign policy and security positions have been downplaying the prospects for a swift end to the war – equitable or expeditious — any time soon. And the proposed envoys and advisors appear to be pursuing a more even-handed approach to the peace efforts than their Putin-admiring boss had envisioned.
Trump’s appointment of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) to helm the State Department infused a note of sobriety into expectations of how to stop the bloodiest conflict in Europe since World War II.
Rubio, a 53-year-old hawk on Russia and China, is opposed to the kind of authoritarian leadership that drove his parents to flee Cuba after Fidel Castro’s 1959 Communist revolution that sent thousands into exile.
“What Vladimir Putin has done is unacceptable, there’s no doubt about it, but this war has to end, and I think it should be the official policy of the United States that we want to see it end,” Rubio told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee ahead of his full Senate vote Monday. Rubio became Trump’s first confirmed Cabinet member by a 99-0 bipartisan vote.
During questioning last week by committee members, Rubio echoed the views of many in Congress that it is “unrealistic to believe” Ukraine can recover all of its territory that Putin’s forces now occupy – about 20 percent of Ukraine in the south and east. He said compromises will have to be made by both sides, that Putin should not be rewarded for his aggression but that the protracted conflict cannot go on with horrific casualties being suffered on both sides and disruption of commerce and security throughout Europe.
The nation’s new top diplomat has not always been in Trump’s orbit. Rubio disparaged him as a “con man” during their rival candidacies for the White House in 2016. Trump parried with the demeaning nickname “Little Marco.” Rubio is a fierce critic of Putin, whom Trump has openly admired. Trump sided with the Russian autocrat at a 2018 Helsinki summit where he told a press conference he took Putin’s word that the Kremlin didn’t interfere in his first election despite U.S. intelligence reports to the contrary.
Rubio voiced strong support for NATO under questioning ahead of the confirmation vote, a stance that could rankle Trump when and if the president turns his attention away from domestic disruption priorities. During his 14 years in the Senate, Rubio co-sponsored a bipartisan law preventing U.S. withdrawal from the alliance without Senate approval or an act of Congress.
That support for the 32-nation alliance Trump has often denigrated and threatened to withdraw from suggests Rubio would want to extend NATO membership or at least a path toward accession if and when any peace plan is agreed fixing each side’s territory. Under plans being discussed for ending the war, U.S. and other Western diplomats are calling for security guarantees for Ukraine to prevent Russia from using any pause in hostilities to re-arm for a future invasion. NATO members, in particular Poland and the Baltic states along Russia’s border, have offered to patrol the ceasefire lines.
Both NATO membership and Western military troops on Russia’s borders are likely to be nonstarters for Putin. But the Kremlin’s go-for-broke commitment to conquering Ukraine or destroying it is confronting new headwinds. Russian bases and border regions are experiencing blowback from a war that for nearly three years has played out on Ukrainian soil. Putin has had to recruit soldiers from North Korea and other allied rogue states to backfill fallen Russians. He has also lost vital arms delivery routes and military bases in Syria since the December fall of the allied regime of Bashar-al-Assad, now living in exile in Russia.
Russia has sustained disproportionately higher casualties in Ukraine with its “human wave” offensive strategy that has led to an astonishing daily toll of 1,600 as of last month and at least 500,000 dead and seriously injured since Putin launched his invasion on Feb. 24, 2022. Some independent casualty estimates put Russia’s toll of dead and injured as high as 900,000. Ukraine last month disclosed it had lost 43,000 soldiers killed and 370,000 wounded.
Trump’s choice for special envoy on Russia and Ukraine, retired Army Lt. General Keith Kellogg, served in several security roles during the first Trump administration. On Jan. 6, 2021, he was instrumental in preventing the Secret Service from whisking Vice President Mike Pence out of the besieged Capital to a safe location. According to testimony at the Jan. 6 Committee impeachment trial of Trump, Kellogg demanded that Pence be left in place to perform his constitutional duties of certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election won by Joe Biden.
Kellogg, 80, proposed last June a plan to halt the Russia-Ukraine fighting and compel Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to submit to peace talks. Russian forces then as now were making incremental territorial gains against Ukraine and Putin was not inclined to agree to a ceasefire freezing front lines while negotiations got underway. Ukraine was short of weaponry after Trump pressured MAGA allies in Congress to hold up $61 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine for six months, leaving the Ukrainian fighters struggling on the battlefields and experiencing recruiting difficulties as war fatigue set in.
The proposal of Kellogg’s and another veteran security and foreign policy official has been resurrected in recent weeks with the aim of delivering on Trump’s vow to stop the intractable war. If Ukraine refuses to submit to a ceasefire and freezing the front lines, U.S. aid would dry up, further hampering the defense effort. If Putin rejects a halt to fighting while his forces are seizing more territory, the U.S. would increase its arms and support for Ukraine to deter further Russian land seizures.
“The Russian casualties, the Ukrainian casualties, the damage to their cities — this is a war that needs to end,” Kellogg told Fox news in a Jan. 11 interview.
“I think what people need to understand — he’s not trying to give something to Putin or to the Russians. He’s actually trying to save Ukraine and save their sovereignty, and he’s going to make sure that it’s equitable and that it’s fair.”
Kellogg conceded that the Day 1 pledge by Trump was unrealistic. “Let’s set it at 100 days and move all the way back and figure a way we can do this in the near term to make sure that the solution is solid, it’s sustainable, and that this war ends so that we stop the carnage.”
Trump’s nominee for national security adviser, Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL) has also put forward a more likely scenario for getting the warring factions to pause for peace talks.
“Everybody knows that this has to end somehow diplomatically,” he told ABC’s “This Week” before the inauguration. “I just don’t think it’s realistic to say we’re going to expel every Russian from every inch of Ukrainian soil, even Crimea. President Trump has acknowledged that reality, and I think it’s been a huge step forward that the entire world is acknowledging that reality. Now let’s move forward.”
Waltz said since the election there has been a broad shift of public opinion from support for “as long as it takes” to liberate Ukraine, to “even President Zelensky walking in the room in Paris and saying he’s ‘ready to work with you to end this war.’” Waltz referred to the Dec. 8 ceremonies unveiling rebuilt Notre Dame Cathedral where Trump and Zelensky were both in attendance.
While Trump’s foreign policy chiefs are peddling more balanced plans to bring the warring neighbors to the negotiating table, his overpromised agenda for Monday’s Day 1 has forced some triage with an eye toward punting what is obviously unachievable in a snap of his fingers.
Before Monday’s inauguration, Trump ordered through his surrogates the resignations of dozens of State Department veterans whose briefs under the Biden administration don’t align with MAGA “America First” policies. The departures include the department’s undersecretary for management and political affairs, John Bass, and Geoff Pyatt, assistant secretary for energy resources and a former ambassador to Ukraine during the triumphant Maidan Revolution that drove Putin’s puppet president Viktor Yanukovych into exile in Russia.
Trump seems focused on his domestic priorities, like deporting undocumented migrants and scrapping federal climate-protection projects to clear the way for a new oil boom. If he continues to turn to the low-hanging fruit of trashing the legacy of Biden’s achievements there may be hope for an eventual Russia-Ukraine ceasefire and peace talks shepherded by administration foreign policy experts more committed to ending the war than scoring a swift but unsustainable “win.”
It is obvious to anyone that is a student of history that Russia’s imperialistic war of conquest of Ukraine was not going to be resolved quickly. How long was Russia in Afghanistan? How long was the US in Vietnam? In Afghanistan? Such wars of attrition are drag it out affairs that take may take more than a decade to settle.
Timothy Snyder, a Yale Ukrainian history professor and scholar of authoritarianism, observes that authoritarian regimes are by definition unstable. They are weaker than they seem and that change under such regimes can happen suddenly without warning. One day it appears that they are in charge and the next they collapse.
We saw this in East Germany when the wall fell. We saw it in the collapse of the Soviet Union. We saw it in the Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity. We just saw it again in the fall of Syria. One day the regime was in power and the next day it wasn’t. Snyder observes that scholars always say in hindsight that the fall was obvious.
The same will happen with Putin and his circle of oligarchs. The worst thing that the US would do is to withdraw financial and military support for Ukraine or to seek a hasty peace plan. I’d argue that the war will not be won on the battlefield but will be won as the Russian economy collapses under the weight of an unsustainable war that impacts the protected Russian middle class in Moscow and St Petersburg. Putin’s regime when it collapses will be when Ukraine regains its territory.
Those who follow the details of the war can see that Moscow has depleted its stock of Cold War era tanks and artillery. It can’t manufacture new equipment fast enough to replace its old equipment. It is making territorial gains only at the price of massive losses in personnel drawn from very poor regions of Russia. Those too are limited. Resupply and troop rotations at the front are difficult due to swarm of drones overhead, including new fiber-optic drones which are not susceptible to jamming.
The inflation rate is now officially 9%, higher for basic foodstuffs, and the key rate for lending is an unbelievable 21%. Putin prepared for this war by hoarding currency reserves, but those are being depleted as Russia’s oil is sold at a sharp discount in the world markets.
The West is in a better place to sustain a war of attrition than Putin’s Russia. Now is not the time for peace negotiations. It will only give Putin the ability to stabilize his regime and re-arm for the next incursion into Ukraine, Middle East, or Africa. That is what this country does.