President Donald Trump’s central second-term goals – ending the war in Ukraine and repairing relations with Moscow – have led to another stab at a peace plan in a roller-coaster year of diplomatic efforts on the nearly 4-year-old European conflict.
After a flurry of hush-hush talks that stretched from Florida earlier this month to Geneva over this past weekend, and then to Abu Dhabi, it appeared the parties could be on the cusp of Mr. Trump’s much-desired ceasefire.
Citing “big progress,” Mr. Trump said on social media Monday that “something good might be happening.” In Kyiv, national security adviser Rustem Umerov said on Tuesday that Ukraine had reached a “common understanding on the core terms of an agreement” with U.S. and European officials.
Why We Wrote This
A roller-coaster diplomatic saga, with a mercurial US president at the helm, has left Ukrainians confused about what it will take to end their war with Russia. But could a deal be just around the corner?
As a result, Mr. Umerov said, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would travel to Washington before the end of November to work out remaining “sensitive details” with President Trump.
Yet, despite the fresh momentum toward a deal, the earlier ups and downs of the year have left officials cautious. That included Mr. Trump, who advised his Truth Social readers: “Don’t believe it until you see it.”
Over the last week, an American 28-point plan that read like a Russian wish list was transformed by U.S. and Ukrainian negotiators into a 19-point plan more amenable to Ukrainian interests.
The catch is that the whittled-down plan leaves several of the thorniest issues – including territorial concessions on Ukraine’s part, the size of Ukraine’s army after the war, and NATO’s relationship with Ukraine – to be addressed by Mr. Trump and President Zelenskyy.
Another face to face?
It remained unclear on Tuesday when the two leaders would meet. Some of the Ukrainian leader’s top aides reportedly advised their boss against a trip to Washington, given Mr. Trump’s mercurial nature.
Indeed, the record of face-to-face encounters between the two leaders over the past nine months offers no reliable clue as to how a discussion on such critical issues might go, some experts say.
Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters
“It’s all a question of what Trump’s mood is on the day Zelenskyy meets with him,” says Rajan Menon, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. “It could be an opportunity for Zelenskyy to demonstrate to Trump that he embraces his efforts and win Trump over to his side – or it could go terribly wrong and end up the kind of split that [Russian leader Vladimir] Putin is hoping to see,” he adds.
“It will come down to which Donald Trump Zelenskyy meets with when he arrives,” Dr. Menon says.
Perhaps the one constant over this year has been Mr. Trump’s unwavering insistence on ending the war, thus bolstering his image as a peacemaker.
For a brief period over the summer, the president had suggested he was washing his hands of the war, saying he “wished both countries well” while leaving them to fight it out and “kill each other.”
But with a Gaza ceasefire agreement under his belt, the president directed his chief peace negotiator, business associate Steve Witkoff, to reach a deal in Ukraine before Thanksgiving.
The original 28-point plan that Mr. Witkoff worked out with a Russian counterpart echoed Mr. Trump’s Alaska summit with Mr. Putin, which appeared to many to end with the U.S. president fully in Russia’s court.
Some U.S. analysts and even a few Republican congressional leaders said the plan appeared to have been authored by Russian officials in Moscow.
In a social media post on Sunday night, Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said that “those who think pressuring the victim and appeasing the aggressor will bring peace are kidding themselves.”
The approach of an endgame?
But the weekend talks in Geneva ended with both the American and Ukrainian sides hailing what Secretary of State Marco Rubio called “tremendous progress” in refining the original language to address Ukraine’s chief concerns.
That recalled Mr. Trump’s shift to a more pro-Ukraine stance after a June NATO summit, at which he expressed his “disappointment” with Mr. Putin for not matching his pledges with actions.
President Trump’s renewed enthusiasm for a Ukraine peace deal appears to have been fed by a sense in the White House that a vulnerable Ukraine and a politically weakened Mr. Zelenskyy had little choice but to accept concessions.
“The situation on the ground in Ukraine continues to deteriorate, the military is having trouble with desertions … and now Zelenskyy has a very big corruption scandal on his hands,” points out Michael Desch, an international affairs professor at the University of Notre Dame.
“I don’t know what chips Ukraine has at this point,” he adds, “and I think the Trump folks know that.”
Even more critically, it appears, White House officials concluded that Ukraine was never going to retake the parts of the eastern Donbas region that Russia has occupied and would very likely lose the rest of it in continued bloody fighting.
A proposal in the original plan that Ukraine should cede to Russia what would become a demilitarized zone – seen by many as the cherry on the top of the Russian wish list, appears now to have been dropped. But it remains unclear what proposal on territorial concessions the two presidents will work from when they meet.
The trick for Mr. Zelenskyy, Dr. Menon says, will be to demonstrate to Mr. Trump that he is on board with a U.S. peace plan, even as he resists any provisions that for Ukraine would be tantamount to “abject surrender.”
