How Trump Could End the Ukraine War

Posted: January 10th, 2025

Expert View — President-elect Donald Trump said on Thursday that his team is setting up a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss the end of Russia’s war on Ukraine. “He wants to meet, and we are setting it up. President Putin wants to meet,” Trump said at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida. “He has said that even publicly, and we have to get that war over with. That’s a bloody mess.”

The Kremlin said on Friday that it is open to such dialogue. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said there is a “mutual readiness for a meeting,” and “it looks like things will start to move after Trump enters the Oval Office” on January 20.

Reports of a potential Trump-Putin meeting came after the U.S. president-elect’s pick for special envoy to Ukraine, former U.S. Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, suggested it would take 100 days from Trump’s inauguration to nail down a deal to end the war. Speaking on Fox News, Gen. Kellogg said the time frame would suffice “to make sure that this solution is solid, it’s sustainable and that this war ends so that we stop the carnage.”

The Cipher Brief turned to Ambassador Kurt Volker, a former U.S. Ambassador to NATO and former U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine Negotiations, about the latest developments and some of the specifics that may be a part of a Trump administration push to end the war in Ukraine. “Getting Ukraine to negotiate, getting Ukraine to find a reasonable position here is not difficult. They’re ready to do that,” Ambassador Volker said. “It is Putin who wants to take over and eliminate Ukraine as a separate national identity and getting him to give up on that goal. That’s the tough part.”

Ambassador Volker spoke with Cipher Brief Managing Editor Tom Nagorski. Their conversation below has been edited for length and clarity. Watch the full discussion on The Cipher Brief’s YouTube channel.

Nagorski: President-elect Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, retired General Keith Kellogg, has said now that he’s going to pursue a plan to end the war in 100 days. And we’ve heard a lot of interesting elements that might go into this, everything from heightened US oil and gas production to the insertion of peacekeepers to a greater willingness to engage with the Kremlin. What are the things that we should pay most attention to in terms of this approach that we might see unfold in the next hundred days?

Ambassador Volker: First off, I think what’s significant about General Kellogg saying 100 days is that it’s not one day. You’ll remember that President Trump, during the course of the presidential campaign, repeatedly said he would end the war in a day. I think that President Trump and General Kellogg all realize that this is much more difficult than that.

The issue is getting Putin to agree to stop the war. Getting Ukraine to negotiate, getting Ukraine to find a reasonable position here is not difficult. They’re ready to do that. It is Putin who wants to take over and eliminate Ukraine as a separate national identity. Getting him to give up on that goal, that’s the tough part. That’s why I think 100 days here is significant. As to what that entails, I think you have to look to [Ukrainian] President [Volodymyr] Zelensky’s interview with Sky News that he did before Christmas. This basically laid out what I think are indeed the key elements. One is a ceasefire. Two is a non-recognition of Russia’s occupation of parts of Ukrainian territory, including Donbas, including Crimea, including territories he’s taken since 2022. A non-recognition of that, but an acknowledgement by Ukraine that they’re not going to take this back by military means. It’s going to be a long-term dispute, they’ll seek to get it back by diplomatic, political, and other means. And then finally, genuine, meaningful security guarantees for the rest of Ukraine, so that Putin is deterred from ever attacking again.

The Trump team, I don’t think, has had the opportunity to really think all this through, to really put together concrete plans. General Kellogg was hoping to visit Ukraine and some European capitals before inauguration. He’s had to postpone that trip until after inauguration. So, I think it is going to take a little bit of time.

The final point, and you raised this in your question, is energy and what means do we have to put pressure on Russia to come to a negotiating table and to agree to some kind of settlement. I do believe energy is one of the key issues. First off, increased U.S. oil and gas production and export can have an impact on global prices driving them down. That will impact Putin’s war budget right off the top. Second, we’ll have the opportunity then to enforce sanctions that are currently on the books that would inhibit Russia’s oil and gas exports and revenue generation. The Biden administration put a lot on the table in terms of Russia’s energy and finances for sanctions. But then there was not much follow through when it came to secondary sanctions; when it came to the financial transactions that related to energy, those were exempted from sanctions. Closing a lot of these loopholes is now possible. And I think both of these will have a significant impact on Russia’s finances.

Nagorski: This phrase “non-recognition” of the territory that the Russians have taken – is this essentially a compromise where, as you said, the Ukrainians would accept that they cannot retake those lands by force? We’re talking about nearly a fifth of the country. It becomes like Cyprus, or other places with territorial disputes?

Ambassador Volker: Yes, exactly. The best example is East Germany. You’ll remember that at the end of World War II, the Allied powers occupied Western Germany and West Berlin, and the Soviet Union occupied East Germany. And while it was always in the German constitution that there would be a unification of all German lands, it was accepted that it was not going to be done militarily. And indeed, East Germany existed as an independent state. [That is] more than anyone is suggesting for Eastern Ukraine, but East Germany existed as an independent state for 40 years before Germany was unified again.

Another parallel is the Baltic States. The Soviet Union occupied Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania at the outset of World War II and then kept those countries even after World War II. The United States, through the Welles Declaration of 1940, put out a statement that said we do not and will not recognize the forcible incorporation of the territories of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania into the Soviet Union. We maintained that policy throughout the Cold War, and sure enough, those countries got their independence back in 1991. So I think we’re looking at a scenario like this. Yes, it took a long time, but we maintained a position of principle. It was not a war to get those countries back or to unify East Germany and West Germany. It was patience and persistence around this idea of non-recognition.

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Nagorski: It’s widely accepted that Ukraine’s has had a rough go lately — they’ve been losing territory in the East, they’ve had manpower issues, all the rest — and that they would come to a negotiation right now in a very tough position. How would you characterize their leverage or positioning at the moment?

Ambassador Volker: As far as the things you mentioned, they are true. Russia has made steady incremental gains in the East over the second half of 2024 and even into the current day. They have done that. It has not been a lot of land. We’re talking about 4,000-plus square kilometers. And that is at the cost of about 400,000 casualties. Tremendous human cost for Russia to get relatively little. But they are making those incremental gains.

And you’re also right, Ukraine is having issues with manpower. They have had issues with the supply of weapons from the U.S. and other countries. And we know that our industrial capacity is limited, so there isn’t that much out there ready to be given. We have to keep producing it. And Ukraine is, in fact, dependent upon the supply of Western weapons. They’re doing more and more on their own, especially in the unmanned areas — producing drones and sending them long range, producing their own rockets that can go long range. They’re doing better on their own, but they still need Western supplies. They are dependent in that way, going into any kind of negotiation.

But we also have to remember that Russia’s in a weakened position too. They have high inflation. I would estimate it to be around 30 percent, but official estimates are closer to eight or nine. But we do know that interest rates in Russia are fixed at 21 percent right now, so we have to assume that inflation is above that. And this is an aim to try to squeeze down inflation. But the problem is that Russia doesn’t have access to foreign exchange reserves of any great quantity. Their external assets have been frozen. They can’t get new foreign exchange reserves. So they’re drawing down what they’ve got. And this is causing them budgetary pressures. And so they’re having to print rubles, which of course is just fueling inflation. Also fueling inflation is a labor shortage, because they’ve pressed so many people into the conflict in Ukraine that they don’t have the labor force at home to staff out the economy as well as the defense industries that they need.

That’s just on the economic side. On the military side, they also have a manpower problem. They have been losing people on the battlefield at such a rate that they can’t replace them at that speed. We’re talking 1,500 people a day [killed or wounded]. That means that they are working with units that have holes in them. They’ve brought in North Korean troops who are not as effective. They have struggled with how to keep up the tempo while facing a manpower shortage.

And then you have the equipment situation. They can’t produce defense equipment at the rate that they are burning through that either. Therefore, they’re relying on North Korea for artillery shells. They are relying on Iran for drones. They are taking World War II-era equipment out of storage and trying to use that.

So Russia is having a very difficult time as well. And we see this in two things that happened recently. One of them is their inability to oust Ukraine from Russian territory in Kursk. They were invaded by Ukraine as a pushback against Russia’s invasions of Ukraine. And they haven’t been able to dislodge the Ukrainians. The second element is their inability to maintain enough force in Syria to prevent the fall of the [Bashar al-] Assad regime. They had whittled it down so much that the Assad regime just collapsed. And now Russia has faced a growing uncertainty about their presence in the Middle East. They’ve had to draw down forces from Syria even further than they have until now. So there’s a lot of weakness on the Russian side as they go into this as well.

Nagorski: About this 100-day plan, and the notion of greater engagement with the Kremlin, do you think it would be a good idea for Trump to meet with Vladimir Putin?

Ambassador Volker: My view is that he should call Putin as he said he would do and tell Putin to stop the war. And he should offer a meeting with Putin after the war is over. Not before, not as a way of getting there. That would show weakness and Trump being a supplicant, and Trump doesn’t want to be in that position. But to offer that he’s willing to meet with Putin but after Putin stops the war, I think that would be reasonable.

Nagorski: We’ve already seen in the run up to January 20^th, both sides pushing for leverage, particularly on the battlefield. You mentioned Kursk, and Eastern Ukraine, both sides gunning for as much as they can get before a negotiation begins. Is there any danger of the notion that, We’d better get our folks on the battlefield to push even more ferociously and violently for gains before they actually have to meet this deadline?

Ambassador Volker: It’s a reasonable point and I can see how you could say that putting a deadline out there creates that. In a way, though, I think we’ve already faced that. I think with Trump’s victory in the election, we’ve already seen an escalation by Russia in order to try to shore up its position ahead of Trump coming into office. And it’s not as if Russia has a lot of reserves left over that it’s been holding back. Now all of a sudden, it’s going to throw them on the table too. They’ve been going at this all-out for almost three years now, and they’re pretty much maxed out with what they can do. So it’s a fair consideration, but I wouldn’t put too much weight on it.

I do think that it is more useful in a way to give the parties, especially Russia, a sense that there is a deadline. And if they don’t meet that deadline, if they don’t just end the war, then there will be continued aid to Ukraine, maybe even an increase in the types of quality and lifting of restrictions on aid to Ukraine if Russia does not agree to end the war.

And that brings up one point I wanted to make, which is that when we talk about negotiations, a lot of people think that this might then be like the Dayton Accords [which ended the Bosnian war in 1995], with details and details, and What about this settlement? Should there be a referendum in some territories about what those people want? What about autonomy for certain regions? My advice to the Trump team would be, don’t fall for any of that. All those things are smoke screens. The Russians bring those up in order to tie us into knots about how to deal with them. We shouldn’t be engaging in those sorts of conversations. It should all be about just ending the fighting, ending the carnage, as President Trump likes to say. Just keep it simple. Focus on ending that. If more pressure has to be applied to get Russia to do that, apply more pressure, but just end it. Don’t worry about those minutiae.

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