Trump, pressing ahead on Ukraine-Russia talks, confronts difficult realities

By David E. Sanger

WASHINGTON – A few hours before President Donald Trump welcomed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to his Mar-a-Lago resort on Sunday (28) for lunch and a detailed discussion of an emerging peace plan to end a nearly 4-year-long war, Russia’s foreign minister suggested that the two men might have saved themselves the effort.

Sergey Lavrov, the Kremlin’s pugnacious top diplomat, reiterated that Russia would never agree to any deal that allowed European forces to be based in Ukraine. Placing European troops inside Ukraine is a key element of the security plan Zelenskyy has been fashioning in negotiations with the Trump administration. Their presence would be intended to prevent future invasions and to monitor a proposed ‘demilitarized zone’ in territory Russia has insisted must be turned over to its full control.

Should the Europeans show up, Lavrov told reporters, they would be a “legitimate target” for Russian forces. He never even got as far as another extraordinary provision in the peace proposal — at least, as described by Zelenskyy last week — that would appear to obligate the United States to come to Ukraine’s defence if Russia attacked again.

Lavrov’s hard-line comments were a reminder of three realities as a peace process that Trump once insisted had to be completed by Thanksgiving, and then Christmas, has turned into what he now admits is a “complicated” plan. “Working groups” will begin, the president said, to engage with Russia in the new year.

First, the Russians so far have given up nothing and have not yet been asked to, at least not formally. The negotiations so far among Americans and Ukrainians have focused on what compromises Zelenskyy is willing to make and what the United States is willing to give in return. Russian President Vladimir Putin has only declared what he would never give up, including his insistence on more Ukrainian territory.

Trump repeated Sunday, after talking to the Russian leader, that Putin was “ready for peace”.  No other Western leader has voiced agreement.

Second, as difficult as the territorial issues are — Trump and Zelenskyy are still debating the future of portions of eastern Ukraine and the fate of Europe’s largest nuclear power plant — it is the long-term plan to deter Russia from another invasion that poses the most complex set of obstacles.

Last week, Zelenskyy insisted that the 20-point proposal now on the table commits the United States to “provide Ukraine with ‘Article V-like guarantees,’” a way of saying the US would protect Ukraine the way it would protect a NATO ally.

But Trump has never uttered those words, and both he and Zelenskyy deflected questions on the issue Sunday, apart from saying they were nearly in agreement. And Trump would face a difficult political challenge in selling such a guarantee to his MAGA base or even to Vice President JD Vance, who has long led the faction of the Republican Party insisting that the United States should never be committed to going to war in defence of Ukraine.

Finally, there is Trump’s insistence that his long-term goal is achieving “strategic stability” with Russia — the words used in his national security strategy. In the Trump understanding of the term, that means more than nuclear stability; it means normalized diplomatic and economic relations.

Achieving that kind of reset would require lifting all economic sanctions on Russia, resuming trade, freeing the flow of Russian oil and gas, and readmitting the country to the West.

That was the role for Russia envisioned in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but before Putin seized portions of Ukraine. Trump, always attracted to the prospect of deals with an economic component, has flirted with that vision, even though European leaders, and swaths of his own party, believe it is naive or dangerous, while Putin remains in power.

Nonetheless, Trump and Zelensky end the year in a place few predicted even a few months ago: with peace proposals on the table, and the American president, who has often pressed for instant deals and seemed to side with Russia, now declaring there are “no deadlines”. Nearly four years into the war, longer than the United States fought in World War II, this is the most detailed peace effort yet.

“The contours of a final settlement are visible, even if both sides vigorously deny it,” Thomas Graham, a senior National Security Council official in the Bush administration and now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote this month.

“Critics will argue that such diplomatic effort is beyond the capabilities of the Trump administration,” he continued. “It allegedly lacks the discipline, consistency, capacity and patience to pursue a sustained diplomatic effort. But even the admittedly halting progress in current negotiations would not have been possible had Trump not opened a dialogue with Putin in February with the goal of ending the war.”

Trump’s appearance at a joint news conference with Zelenskyy in Palm Beach, Florida, on Sunday came off without fireworks. The Ukrainian leader has learned how to handle the volatile American president, thanking him repeatedly and hailing his role as a peacemaker, words Trump has made no secret he wants the Nobel Peace Prize committee to hear.

But in both his public comments Sunday and his private assessments in recent weeks to aides and visitors, Trump now appears to acknowledge that his declaration of imminent deadlines a month ago, which appeared designed to pressure Zelenskyy to make whatever concessions Russia demanded, simply failed.

Trump has repeatedly said, with a bit of surprise in his voice, that he had thought the Russia-Ukraine war would be “the easiest to solve” of many global conflicts, one he had boasted as a candidate that he could resolve in a day. It is almost as if this has been a year of gradual awakening to the conflict’s complexities and deep historical roots, something Putin lectured him about in Anchorage in August.

As recently as early November, Trump generally described the conflict in terms of disputed real estate, a topic he knows well. Now he at least mentions the security concerns, usually dwelling on Europe’s responsibilities to deal with that subject, not Washington’s. On Sunday, he acknowledged that Ukrainian land concessions would require a national referendum in Ukraine, no easy task amid nightly shelling, and a voting population spread across Europe to avoid the violence.

The black box in the talks right now is what Trump is saying to Putin, whom he talked to for about two hours Sunday before Zelenskyy arrived at the gates of Mar-a-Lago, and then again Monday (29). Or, more precisely, what Putin is saying back: whether in private he is showing any willingness to give ground, allow for a demilitarized zone near the current line of contact, or give up his claims to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which is now occupied by Russian forces.

Trump conceded Sunday that Putin told him he was unwilling to agree to a ceasefire, presumably while any peace agreement is being negotiated or during the referendum in Ukraine on land concessions. That may be only one of many issues on which the Russian leader says, essentially, “yes, but” and continues trying to grind out territorial gains while taking out Ukraine’s ability to generate heat and light during another cold, hard winter of war.

Then there is the delicate political issue Trump would eventually have to address at home if a peace deal is struck: whether the United States would truly give Ukraine a binding commitment to come to its military aid if there is another invasion.

Details of the security guarantees contained in the draft proposal by Ukrainian and US negotiators remain unclear. But Zelenskyy’s description of an Article V commitment of the kind enjoyed by NATO allies, if correct, would be a huge shift in US policy.

President Barack Obama was unwilling to go that far when Russia took Crimea in 2014, and President Joe Biden would not send combat troops when Putin invaded in February 2022, though Biden did send weapons, ammunition, intelligence and advisers.

-New York Times