President Trump has repeatedly vowed to end the war in Ukraine. However, neither Russia nor Ukraine appears willing to accept the leaked terms of Trump’s proposed peace plan. Regardless of the outcome of his coming talks with Putin and Zelensky, Trump is in a strong position to advance American interests.
According to a peace plan leaked by the Ukrainian outlet Strana, President Trump will ask Ukraine to renounce its aspiration to join NATO, withdraw from pre-war Russian territory in the Kursk pocket and recognize Russian sovereignty over annexed territories. In exchange, Ukraine will continue receiving U.S. military support and join the European Union by 2030, while Russia will receive limited sanctions relief if it complies with the final settlement.
Although these details remain unconfirmed, they resemble the contours of Trump’s original peace plan, which was devised by former national security adviser Keith Kellogg, the man that Trump has tapped to be his administration’s peace envoy for the war in Ukraine. At the moment, the Strana leaks and Kellogg’s policy recommendations represent the most likely starting point for U.S.-mediated negotiations.
Both plans seek to entice Russia with concessions that the Biden administration was unwilling to make and that fly in the face of Ukrainian President Zelensky’s “victory plan.” Zelensky has vowed to retake lost territories, and Russia’s invasion has only emboldened his desire to see Ukraine in NATO.
Expecting resistance from Ukraine, President Trump has reportedly considered suspending military aid to Ukraine if Zelensky doesn’t agree to negotiate. For now, military support for Ukraine continues even amid sweeping cuts to foreign aid, but America has considerable leverage over Ukraine due to its material and financial exhaustion after three years of war, a fact which Trump will exploit if he intends to bring the war to a close quickly.
However, the current mindset and aspirations of Russian officialdom contradict the hope that Russia will accept the concessions on offer. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesperson, said at the end of last year that "there are no grounds for negotiations yet." Russian media tycoon and close Putin associate Konstantin Malofeyev similarly said that Moscow would reject Trump’s peace plan.
According to Malofeyev, Russia would tell Kellogg to go “screw himself” unless peace negotiations involve talks “not about the future of Ukraine, but the future of Europe and the world.” Such statements from influential figures echo the chorus of Russian media pundits, who regularly decry the notion that Russia should settle for anything less than Ukraine’s capitulation.
Russian President Putin, meanwhile, has stated that Russia is “ready to discuss a peace agreement in any shape or form based on the reality on the ground.” At the end of November, Putin said that “no supplies, even of the most modern weapons, [sent to Ukraine] will change the situation on the battlefield.” This “situation on the ground” is characterized by accelerating Russian advances despite heavy casualties. In other words, the current situation on the battlefield favors Russia, albeit moderately.
More recently, Putin said that Russia is “open to dialogue” but that the “most important thing is to eliminate the root causes of the crisis.” In other words, Russia intends to keep its options open, hopeful that it may yet secure a military victory.
Perhaps Putin is not actually confident in Russia’s performance on the battlefield. A successful and very public bluff, coupled with a short-term intensification of ground offensives, may convince Trump that he needs to make a more generous offer and force Ukraine to make more exacting concessions to Russia.
It’s also possible that, after two years of war and hundreds of thousands of casualties, Russian elites and officials at the highest level have slipped into a sunk-cost mindset, according to which only total victory and a dramatic Yalta 2.0 conference could compensate for the losses suffered on the bloodiest European battlefield since World War II.
Whatever the case may be, the U.S. has already won a strategic victory over Russia, which has expended enough resources and manpower to seriously degrade its capabilities. Trump can now either succeed in ending the war with a settlement or watch as Russia continues to grind itself down. This, in turn, enables the President to fully pursue his pivot to China, America’s most formidable adversary that is already causing AI-induced headaches for Trump’s second term.
While cynical, it’s clear that America currently has little to lose from Russia’s and Ukraine’s unwillingness to negotiate. Importantly, Trump is not at risk of suffering a Kabul-withdrawal moment, something which the President is rightly eager to avoid.
Julian Fisher is a Contributing Fellow at Defense Priorities and a Ph.D. Student at the University of Washington.
