With the war in Ukraine now in its fourth year, Trump administration officials, including Donald Trump himself, have spent the last month dialling their Ukrainian colleagues, jetting to foreign capitals to meet with Ukrainian and Russian officials and huddling with European ministers in an attempt to bring the conflict to a conclusion. The latest meeting happened this week, when U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy, traveled to Paris for an all-hands session.
Trump, however, doesn’t have much to show for his efforts. U.S. officials continue to put on a brave face and insist that Trump, and only Trump, has the knowledge, skill-set and experience to negotiate an end to Europe’s deadliest war in 80 years. But a confluence of factors outside of his control – namely the actions of the combatants themselves – runs the high risk of killing off Washington’s diplomatic gamble before it has a chance to succeed. Even Trump, who once boastfully declared he could solve the war in 24 hours, is getting increasingly impatient with the entire enterprise.
It’s not like the Trump administration hasn’t notched any wins on the board. Given the intractability of the warring parties, the fact that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was once impervious to negotiations with a tyrant like Vladimir Putin and the sheer hatred accumulated after three years of intense warfare, just getting Ukrainian and Russian officials into a diplomatic process can be labeled progress.
Yet the process hasn’t produced anything but dashed hopes. The March 11 joint statement announcing Kyiv’s support for an unconditional 30-day ceasefire was quickly rejected by Putin, who introduced a slew of questions about who would enforce it, how violators would be punished and when the core issues would be addressed.
Rubio’s March 23-25 shuttle diplomacy between Ukraine and Russia in Riyadh would have made news if it wasn’t for the reality that both sides had different interpretations of what they agreed to. The Russians tied a ceasefire in the Black Sea to SWIFT re-opening to Russian banks, which the Trump administration couldn’t do without Europe’s buy-in.
The respective positions of Russia and Ukraine remain far apart. That’s to be expected. But the collective West is divided amongst itself on Ukraine policy as well. French president Emmanuel Macron, Prime Minister Keir Starmer and EU foreign policy commissioner Kaja Kallas are dead-set against offering Russia any sanctions relief until the shooting stops and support pumping billions of additional euros in military aid to the Ukrainians so Kyiv can at the very least hold the line. Indeed, one gets the sense that Europeans writ-large don’t buy into Trump’s diplomatic agenda at all. To the Americans, the war in Ukraine is ultimately a local war that won’t directly impact U.S. national security; to Europe (with the exception of Hungary and Slovakia), it’s an existential struggle.
There are even some internal fights brewing within the Trump administration. Witkoff, Trump’s trusted emissary, continues to insist Putin is serious about peace notwithstanding the nightly drone and missile attacks that have killed dozens of Ukrainian civilians over the last week. Rubio and Keith Kellogg, Trump’s envoy on Ukraine, are pressing the president to be more sceptical about what Putin says in these talks.
“The Russians and [Vladimir] Putin will have to make a decision about whether they’re serious about peace or not,” Rubio said earlier this month.
A good number of observers have already made their conclusions: the only peace Putin is interested in is peace on his maximalist terms.
If the Trump administration isn’t pontificating about a Plan B, then it needs to get a move on. There are three major options on the table, none of them ideal but some of which are better than others.
The first option is to re-do Plan A but with softer terms. While this might sound like the definition of insanity given Zelensky’s constant grievances and Putin’s intransigence, Trump has tied his foreign policy legacy to ending the war. He therefore has a personal, vested interest in following through (or at least be perceived as doing so).
For Russia hawks in Washington, D.C, this would be the worst course Trump could take since there is no assurance he wouldn’t cater to some of Putin’s core demands so he could brag about getting a deal done. It would also open a whole can of worms between the U.S. and its European allies, most of whom would vocally balk at a Russia-friendly peace deal. And the Ukrainians have agency as well; confronted with a dishonourable peace shoved down their throats or a longer war with European military assistance, they’re likely to opt for the latter.
The second option Trump could take is to suspend talks, cast Putin as the sole obstacle to progress and double down on U.S. military aid to the Ukrainian army in a bid to push the Russians into negotiating seriously. The administration would need to approach Congress to fund another multi-billion dollar military aid package, similar to what the Biden administration did during its tenure, but this would essentially expose Trump’s previous complaints about Zelensky milking the U.S. taxpayer as nothing short of an empty-campaign slogan. Moreover, there is no guarantee that more U.S military aid would actually compel Putin to second-guess his maximalist aims or result in more Ukrainian gains on the ground; Putin tends to throw more men and resources into the war when he’s cornered. Whether one agrees with the premise or not, Putin sees the conflict in existential terms. Defeat, or a defeatist-like peace accord, is not a hypothetical for him.
Trump’s third option could be to walk away from the entire thing and hand the Ukraine file over to the Europeans. The president’s critics in the commentariat would yell and scream that America is heartlessly throwing the Ukrainians to the wolves without any care for the consequences. Yet there is an argument to be made that it’s more ethical to walk away and let the chips fall where they may than it is to coerce Ukraine into signing a peace deal it isn’t likely to implement anyway. Strategically, it would put Europe on the spot to prove that it can put its money where its mouth is; if the war in Ukraine is as important to European security as Macron, Starmer and Kallas frequently claim it is, then who better than Europe to own the issue completely?
Right now, peace talks are still technically alive. But only just. The United States must prepare itself for the day diplomacy no longer has a pulse.
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