Trump World Wiggles and Squirms for a Ceasefire Plan in Ukraine
Shapeshifting signals emanating from Mar-a-Lago reflect a confounding effort to escape another deadly and chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal and find a fair and equitable peace.
Illustration by David Phinney
HERE’S THE LATEST from last week’s wiggling and squirming by Trump World over what to do with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s three-year, full-scale war on Ukraine:
— On Monday (Jan. 6): Trump’s designated envoy tasked with designing a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine abruptly postponed a trip to Kyiv. The highly anticipated “fact-finding” mission planned to take place this past week had been in the works since early December.
— On Tuesday (Jan. 7): Trump said during a press conference following weeks of glitzy partying at Mar-a-Lago that he planned to meet Putin within six months.
“This was a Biden fiasco,” he told reporters while insisting Putin invaded Ukraine because of concerns about NATO expansion. “It should have never happened,” he added. “It’s “a tough one, much tougher than before it started.”
He was mum on why the situation is tougher than when he repeatedly boasted on the campaign trail last spring that he would end the war in “24 hours.”
— On Wednesday (Jan. 8): Keith Kellogg, Trump’s Ukraine/Russia envoy appeared on Fox News saying he planned to resolve the Russian invasion of Ukraine within a hundred days. He offered no word about why he cancelled this week’s trip to Kyiv.
— On Thursday (Jan. 9): Trump announced at a Mar-a-Lago conference with Republican governors, that Putin wants a meeting and a date was being scheduled for after his inauguration…. Date unknown. (Switzerland and Serbia both offer to host Putin-Trump meeting.)
“President Putin wants to meet — he’s said that even publicly — and we have to get that war over with. That’s a bloody mess,” Trump said. He refrained from placing responsibility on Russia’s invasion for the bloodshed.
— On Sunday (Jan. 12): Trump’s Incoming national security adviser Mike Waltz said that special relationships need to be established over the coming months before a meaningful ceasefire is established. “From President Trump’s perspective, you can’t enter a deal if you don’t have some type of relationship and dialog with the other side,” he said in an appearance on ABC’s This Week. “And we will absolutely establish that in the coming months.”
What does this all mean? Perhaps avoiding an adversarial position and not condemning Putin’s invasion leaves the door open for talks with Putin. Or maybe Trump is delaying for time to come up with a plan of action. Or maybe now that he’s fully briefed by intelligence reports as president-elect he’s just plain stumped.
It could be all three.
If Trump is stalling for time, what he decides to do with the unspent $4 billion in military aid Biden is leaving on the table after he vacates the Oval Office will be a clear indication of his true intentions.
Avoiding Another Afghanistan Debacle
The gist of a Financial Times story reports that the Trump team has yet to prepare a peace plan and believes it will take several months to cobble one together. So say two unnamed European officials. They also said they are confident Trump will continue providing arms support while he repositions as a strong ally. That may be good news for Ukraine.
One of the officials suggested that Trump does not want a repeat performance of Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. “The whole team is obsessed with strength and looking strong, so they’re recalibrating the Ukraine approach,” the official observed.
If past is prologue, count on things to change. One day, two months, one hundred days, six months.... That was the changing timeline in just a week down at Mar-a-Lago as policy options are weighed for hammering out a ceasefire in Ukraine.
Personally, I’ve abandoned attempts to read into the conflicting smoke signals floating out from Mar-a-Lago and elsewhere. To improvise a line from Chinatown, one of my many favorite classic movies, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Trump World.”
What we do know, is that Trump surrounds himself with many who publicly oppose supplying arms to Ukraine and he has personally urged Congress to delay new aid over the past year. His campaign rhetoric tepidly supported Ukraine and he sometimes protested that the U.S. gets nothing in return while insisting Europe do more.
The Financial Times report may have discovered some awkward backtracking by Trump that will require him dressing up in a tutu and doing some political pirouetting among his anti-Ukraine MAGA crowd.
A Board Game Over Other People’s Real Estate
Generally, Trump has framed a resolution to the conflict in terms of playing a board game with other people’s real estate. He spends most of his time bemoaning the extensive destruction of buildings when talking about Putin’s invasion, but rarely casts blame on Russia’s constant bombing of those structures.
He also seems genuinely concerned about military casualties on the battlefields – on both sides. “Soldiers are being killed by the millions,” he said last Thursday echoing his prior comments. “Soldiers are fighting, and they are dying by the hundreds of thousands and not to mention the towns and the cities, you know, largely demolished.”
Again, Trump did not identify Putin as the perpetrator and trespasser of a sovereign nation or Ukraine as the defender of its land. And while he mentioned the deaths of civilians in Russia’s bombing campaign, it was a rarity for him.
Any critical comments seem non-existent about Putin’s marauding army, which has triggered a flood of 6.8 million Ukrainian refugees across Europe and the world, displaced 4 million internally and left 14.6 million in need of humanitarian aid in a country that once had a population over 40 million before the 2022 assault.
No protest about human filtration camps designed to relocate an estimated (but unverified) 1.6 million Ukrainians deep into Russia to pacify occupied areas and mitigate counterinsurgency. Nothing about Putin being a wanted man by the International Criminal Court.
And if you hear him talking about the documented cases of nearly 20,000 children abducted from Ukraine and taken to Russia (although some believe the number could be up to 700,000), please let me know. That, and any comments about the systematic rape, torture and murder of civilians by Russian soldiers.
Putin is the War Monger not Ukraine
Maybe the mind-boggling totality of destruction, the estimated cost of rebuilding now at $486 billion and the appalling human suffering and loss is beyond negotiating. Maybe it’s easier to blame Biden more than Putin.
In the past few months, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky consistently upped the volume on his claims about Russia’s documented war crimes and countless others alleged.
During a widely circulated three-hour Lex Fridman podcast on YouTube, Zelensky did not mince words. Profanity often peppered his unvarnished complaints as he essentially called Putin a terrorist, a murderer and a war criminal and voiced frustration by his European and U.S. allies slacking off on prior security agreements. He skeptically cautioned against future ceasefire agreements without ironclad commitments.
Repeatedly, Zelensky accused Putin of defying international law by the unprovoked invasion and reckless rampage within his nation’s borders.
A ceasefire with strong security backing from Europe and the United States may make ceasefire possible, but negotiating compromises with Putin would be a very high hurdle, Zelensky protested. He claimed to have reports that tens of thousands of civilians had been tortured and murdered in the now Russian-occupied city of Mariupol reflecting similar reports from other areas that Putin’s army now controls.
“The fact that he is not in jail after all the murders,” cannot be excused, Zelensky said. “No one in the world is able to put him in his place and send him to prison. Do you think this is a small compromise? This is not a small compromise and to forgive him will not be a small compromise.”
As for Trump, such concerns are counterproductive to achieving a ceasefire. During a CNN town hall campaign event last May, Trump said Putin’s war crimes must be overlooked for now.
“This should be discussed later,” he said. “If you say he’s a war criminal, it’s going to be a lot tougher to make a deal to get this thing stopped, because if he’s going to be a war criminal, where people are going to go and grab him and execute him, he’s going to fight a lot harder.”
Okay. Just between you and me, don’t tell Putin that.
Yes, It Will be a Tough Job
Kellogg will have his work cut out for him although Zelensky’s terms for a ceasefire are more amenable than Putin’s. The Russian leader seeks total capitulation and annexation of eastern Ukraine, demands limitations on a Ukrainian defense force, a repeal of sanctions and a ban on Ukraine joining NATO.
Zelensky, meanwhile, proposes a ceasefire that would allow Russia to control the territory it now occupies but which will remain part of Ukraine (similar to East Germany during the Cold War) until it is returned through diplomatic means. He also believes NATO protection is key in securing any agreement.
Trump’s envoy for hammering out some agreement is in for a tough job. As a highly experienced and capable retired Army lieutenant general, Kellogg offers decades of distinguished miliary service and has visited Ukraine’s frontlines several times. He knows firsthand the destruction Putin’s invasion has caused. He, too, has suggested a freezing of current frontline in Ukraine and a robust military agreement to secure a lasting ceasefire.
During a Fox News interview last week, Kellogg expressed strong conviction in Trump to bring about some kind of peace.
“People need to understand he's not trying to give something to Putin or the Russians,” Kellogg offered without prompting. “He's actually trying to save Ukraine and save their sovereignty and he's going to make sure that it's equitable and that it's fair.”
With war crimes, the return of stolen children and the hundreds of billions of dollars in reparations yet to be discussed, how equitable and how fair remains to be seen.