Sergey Radchenko
In August, U.S. President Donald Trump was disappointed when a meeting in Alaska with Russian President Vladimir Putin failed to produce a breakthrough in ending the war in Ukraine. “We didn’t get there,” Trump acknowledged at the time. Putin had evinced little interest in ceding ground on his maximalist demands, making a peace deal look remote, but the entirely predictable failure of the Alaska misadventure evidently did not deter Trump from trying again. In November, a 28-point peace plan—which media reports suggest was put together by both Russian and American officials—sent Kyiv and Ukraine’s European allies into conniptions because it largely reflected Russian positions on territory and Ukraine’s future. In tough negotiations with the United States, the Ukrainians successfully pushed back against many of these Russian-leaning positions, arriving at a new plan that Putin has yet to agree to.
Amid this pageantry of proposal and negotiation, Trump remains committed to chasing a fantasy. The U.S. president is seemingly unwilling to accept that his Russian counterpart does not want to end the war without securing Ukraine’s complete surrender. Trump continues to believe that, if only provided with sufficient inducements or threatened with new sanctions, Putin will trade his long-term goals for a reasonable settlement that will preserve a truncated but basically independent Ukraine, one able to defend itself against further Russian encroachment.
Impatient for deliverables, Trump has so far failed to develop a consistent, professional process for attaining them. His approach to peacemaking has suffered from an improbable degree of improvisation, exclusion of regional expertise, and consequentially, shallowness and flights of fancy. The 28-point plan was no exception: produced without consulting European allies and delivered in haste to the weary Ukrainians, it was riddled with inconsistencies and outright errors, and had to be walked back almost at once, undermining the credibility of the entire effort. The leak of transcripts that show Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff advising the Russians about the right way to talk to the U.S. president highlights mind-boggling lapses of judgment among key officials entrusted with looking after American national interests.
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