Despite Donald Trump’s campaign promise to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, and despite his team’s overall move-fast-and-break-things approach, the administration’s approach to the now nearly three-year-old conflict started out slowly.
Although the White House announced plans to seek a ceasefire deal, Trump made no moves at first to cut off aid to Ukraine and even threatened additional sanctions and tariffs on Moscow if Putin would not “STOP this ridiculous War.” Fears that Trump was simply going to sell out Ukraine for a quick deal with Russia appeared to have been overblown.
Until last week.
The dramatic shift began last Tuesday, when Steve Witkoff, the former real estate envoy whom Trump has tapped as his Middle East envoy, flew to Russia to conduct a prisoner exchange that secured the release of American teacher Marc Fogel, who had been jailed in Russia since 2021 on marijuana charges.
The next day, Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that he had spoken with Russian President Vladimir Putin and that the two sides would “start negotiations immediately.” Zelenskyy had not been informed about the call beforehand. That same day, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a speech in Germany that it was unrealistic to think Ukraine would recover all its territory, that it was unlikely to ever join NATO, and that future defense guarantees for Ukraine would not be provided by US or NATO troops. In some sense, Hegseth was only saying out loud what many had long been saying privately, but critics charged that he was effectively making concessions to Russia before talks even began. (Hegseth partly walked back the remarks.)
Then, at the annual Munich Security Conference last weekend, Vice President JD Vance, gave a speech that barely mentioned the war at all and suggested that censorship and restrictions on far-right political parties were a greater threat to Europe than Russia. At Munich, Zelenskyy rejected a US proposal that Ukraine sign away rights to half of its critical minerals in exchange for military support, citing a lack of defense guarantees as part of the deal.
On Tuesday, US and Russian negotiators met in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for talks, not only on the war but also on reestablishing diplomatic and economic links between the two superpowers. Zelenskyy canceled a planned trip to Saudi Arabia in protest of Ukraine’s exclusion from the talks.
“One thing everyone has been saying forever — Biden, Trump, every congressman, senator, secretary of state — is ‘no negotiations for Ukraine without Ukraine,’” Oleksandra Ustinova, a Ukrainian member of parliament, told Vox. “Now we see at the table: There’s Russia sitting next to the US. No Ukraine at the table.”
Adding insult to injury, Trump gave a press conference on Tuesday in which he made several false claims about Ukraine that seemingly echo Russian talking points:
- Trump blamed Ukraine for having started the war that began with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine’s territory.
- He said that the US has provided Ukraine with $350 billion in aid, far more than Europe has provided. (The US has provided Ukraine around $118 billion — less than Europe’s $137 billion when both military and economic aid are included.)
- He said that Zelenskyy’s popularity is around 4 percent. (He’s lost support since the start of the war, but most surveys still have him above 50 percent.)
Trump also seemingly confirmed reports that the US is pushing Ukraine to hold new presidential elections before the formal end of the war.
Then things got personal. After Zelenskyy said Trump was living in a Russian-created “disinformation space,” Trump responded with a Truth Social post calling Zelenskyy a “modestly successful comedian” and a “dictator without elections.”
In short, the Trump-Ukraine policy that the country’s defenders feared — one that is overly deferential to Russia and pushes for a quick deal, even at the cost of Ukraine’s sovereignty — appears to be coming to fruition.
But is that really what’s happening? And if so, what can Ukraine — and perhaps even more importantly, European countries — do about it?
What does Trump actually want in Ukraine?
Some observers stress that for all the public back-and-forth of the past few days, there haven’t actually been dramatic changes in actual policy on Western support for Ukraine. In fact, Ukrainian and Western officials say more military hardware has been arriving in recent weeks, thanks to the Biden administration’s moves to rush aid out the door in its closing weeks. Western officials believe Ukraine has enough military hardware to last until the summer from these deliveries.
The US also hasn’t actually lifted any sanctions on Russia, and Vance suggested in an interview with the Wall Street Journal in Munich that economic pressure could still be increased.
The administration has made has made “rhetorical” concessions, such as Trump’s suggestion that Russia be readmitted to the G7, said John Herbst, who served as US ambassador to Ukraine under George W. Bush. (The group had been known as the G8 until Moscow was expelled following the annexation of Crimea in 2014.) It has also made a major “process” concession by holding the meeting in Riyadh without Ukraine’s involvement, effectively ending Russia’s international diplomatic isolation.
But it has not yet made substantive concessions in US demands on Ukraine, Herbst said — although he said he believes this could change if the administration follows through on pushing for elections.
Ukraine would normally have held presidential elections last year, but all elections in the country have been suspended since Russia invaded in 2022 and martial law was declared. Ukrainian officials contend that it would be logistically impossible to hold a fair and credible election while war is raging, and international elections monitoring groups have generally agreed.
The Kremlin has argued that it cannot sign a final agreement with Zelenskyy because, due to suspending elections, he is not the legitimate president of Ukraine, a claim that Trump seemed to endorse with his “dictator” remark.
Does Russia actually want a peace deal?
Fox News has reported that the US and Russia are considering a three-stage peace plan: a ceasefire, then Ukrainian elections, then the signing of a final agreement. Ukrainians worry that Putin’s intention is to remove his hated adversary Zelenskyy from power and replace him with someone more pliant.
This is a legitimate concern, given Russia’s record of interfering in the elections of neighboring countries — including Ukraine — though it seems unlikely that a “pro-Russian” leader could be elected in Ukraine in even the most flawed contest. (Polls suggest the public figure with the best chance of beating Zelenskyy is Valery Zaluzhny, the general who commanded Ukraine’s armed forces for the first two years of the war — not exactly a dove.) But even if Russia couldn’t control the outcome, the process could lead to distraction and delay, exactly what Moscow is hoping for.
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who led the Russian delegation in Riyadh, has denied reports of a deal and rejected the idea, put forward by senior US officials in recent days, of having European troops stationed in Ukraine after the war to maintain a ceasefire.
It’s still far from clear if the Russians are seriously engaging in a peace process or merely playing for time — portraying themselves as the victims in the conflict and dividing Ukraine’s Western backers in the process —while pressing their advantage on the battlefield. US intelligence agencies have reportedly seen no signs that Putin is seriously interested in a real peace deal.
And while Zelenskyy had shown willingness to make compromises as Trump took office, including suggesting that Ukraine would be willing to stop short of recovering all its territory by military means, it will almost certainly oppose terms imposed on it by the US and Russia without its involvement.
“Getting Ukraine’s buy-in is going to be crucial,” said Samuel Charap, a RAND Corporation analyst and former State Department official. “It’s not just a moral issue. It’s a practical one.”
Charap, who has been a prominent public advocate for negotiations to end the war, credited the Trump administration with having “demonstrated the political will to restore bilateral channels” with Russia, but added, “my concern is just that they’re diving into this quite hastily without a coordinated plan about what to do about the war.”
Ukraine and its Western advocates have argued that Trump won’t want to simply allow Ukraine to fall on his watch, repeating the kind of disastrous and embarrassing scenario that befell the Biden administration with the fall of Afghanistan in 2022.
But perhaps he simply won’t care. His recent statements have shown a personal animus toward Zelenskyy, a leader with whom he has, it’s fair to say, a complicated history, while taking a respectful tone toward Putin. He may simply decide Ukraine is not America’s problem, and threaten to cut US support unless Kyiv accepts a deal on Moscow’s terms. In this case, it will become Europe’s problem.
Is it up to Europe now?
The messages coming from the Trump administration in recent days, particularly Vance’s combative Munich speech, and Europe’s exclusion from the US-Russia talks, likely drove home to European leaders that “it’s worse than they thought,” said Liana Fix, a German political analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations.
She added: “The mood in Europe has shifted from ‘let’s find transactional ways to work together with Trump’ to the idea that Trump could be a real ideological challenge to Europe. That’s something which is a new dimension, which they have not experienced before.”
Ustinova, the Ukrainian member of parliament, says that one hopeful sign she observed in Munich, at a generally depressing conference, was that “this is the first time that I saw a lot of the Europeans actually realizing that this is their war.”
What would waking up look like? France, which has long called for Europe (sometimes to the irritation of other Europeans) to demonstrate more “strategic autonomy” — a foreign and defense policy separate from Washington — has now called two emergency summits in the past week to discuss Ukraine policy.
Senior leaders across the continent are calling for increased defense spending, though this might actually be a mixed blessing for Kyiv if Europeans spend on their own militaries instead of Ukraine’s. EU countries are also prepping a new $6 billion military aid package for Ukraine.
There are also increasingly prominent discussions about European countries deploying troops to Ukraine to maintain the ceasefire. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said this week his country would be “ready and willing” to send troops.
On the other hand, Western officials also say they would be unlikely to deploy such a force without a “backstop” from the US — meaning a willingness on the part of Washington to step in if Russia attacked these troops, something Hegseth’s statements last week seemed to rule out.
The markets seemed to detect signs of a shift this week. Shares of US defense contractors fell while their European rivals gained on indications that Europeans might be picking up more of the tab for Ukraine’s defense. But it’s not clear that the Europeans have the weapons in their arsenals, including critical systems like the Patriot missile defense system, to make up for a lack of US support.
But, Ustinova says, it may come to a point where there’s no other option. “The Europeans have to wake up,” she said. “They definitely don’t want a Russian proxy next to their borders, because they’re going to be next. Underlining the stakes, she added that if Ukraine falls under Russian control, the Russians, “will eventually use our army, our trained army, to fight Europeans.”
This, it should be stressed, is not a foregone conclusion. There’s still a visible path toward a deal where the fighting stops, US military aid to Ukraine continues, and a European force is in place to prevent Russia from violating the ceasefire. Russia may not be giving any indications it is willing to accept such a deal right now, but that may change. Some believe the country’s economic distress is more serious than the Kremlin’s public statements indicate, and there are signs it is having trouble recruiting new troops to replace its shockingly high battlefield casualties.
Reaching a real deal that actually ends the war is not out of the question if the US works with allies, is willing to put continued pressure on Russia, and shows patience.
The events of the past few days haven’t included any of that.
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