Hours after his inauguration, President Donald Trump was in the oval office signing executive orders and taking questions from reporters. Some of them asked him about the war in Ukraine and his thoughts about Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“He can’t be thrilled; he’s not doing so well,” Trump said. “I mean he’s grinding it out but most people thought that war would’ve been over in about one week. And now, you’re into three years, right? So, he can’t be thrilled; it’s not making him look very good.”
Trump then expressed interest in making a deal. He said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was on board — but he wasn’t so sure about where Putin stands.
“I think he’s destroying Russia by not making a deal,” Trump said. “I think Russia’s going to be in big trouble. You take a look at their economy, you take a look at the inflation in Russia. I got along with [Putin] great. I would hope he wants to make a deal.”
Trump has repeatedly said that he could end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office. More than a day into his presidency, the war in Ukraine rages on. But ending wars does still appear to be a top priority for the new administration.
Alina Polyakova, the president and CEO of the Center for European Policy Analysis, has been tracking what Trump’s key appointments have said about the war in Ukraine.
She said there “has been one key talking point that we heard, and that is that the war must end. Every single person has said that the war must end.”
In his confirmation hearing, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “What Vladimir Putin has done is unacceptable, there’s no doubt about it, but this war has to end, and I think it should be the official policy of the United States that we want to see it end.”
In an interview with CBS, Trump’s National security adviser Mike Waltz said: “President Trump is clear this war has to stop. Everyone I think should be on board with that.”
And in an interview on Fox News, Keith Kellogg, Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, also shared the same sentiment.
“This is a war that needs to end, and I think he can do it in the near term,” he said. “I really do have a lot of confidence in his ability to actually get to a position where this war is actually over.”
Kellogg also said that his goal is to enter negotiations to end the war within the next 100 days.
However, Polyakova said that, despite the interest in ending the war, the path to getting there is uncertain.
“Right now, there is no deal to be had with Mr. Putin,” Polyakova said. “He signaled no interest in it; we haven’t compelled the Russians to the negotiating table in good faith. At the end of the day, I don’t think that’s a scenario that Mr. Trump wants. I don’t think he wants to meet with Mr. Putin and get a bad deal out of it.”
On Tuesday, Trump said it’s likely that the US would impose sanctions on Russia if Putin doesn’t come to the negotiating table. Polyakova added that Russia, so far, hasn’t budged from its maximalist demands of Ukrainian demilitarization, a commitment to never join NATO and regime change — all conditions that are nonstarters for Ukraine.
But Polyakova said there are ways that the US and Ukraine can compel Russia to come to the negotiating table.
“Something the Trump administration has done [during his first term] was a maximum-pressure campaign on Iran, which really hurt [Iranian] oil revenues and weakened their regime quite significantly, and this is a strategy that could work quite effectively against Russia.”
Polyakova said there are many actions that the US can take to implement a potential maximum-pressure campaign, starting with using the $300 billion in frozen Russian assets to support Ukraine, cutting off Russian oil and gas exports to Europe and increasing secondary sanctions against countries that are still going about business-as-usual with Russia.
“We need more leverage to force the Russians to the negotiating table,” Polyakova explained.
She said the US can also gain leverage by providing more weapons to Ukraine to fight Russia.
Some of Trump’s appointed officials have also said that Ukraine must do more to slow down Russia’s advances on the battlefield. In another interview with ABC, Waltz said that Ukraine needs to lower its draft age to 18 to address its manpower shortage issues.
“This isn’t just about munitions, ammunition or writing more checks, he said. “It’s about seeing the front lines stabilized so that we can enter into some type of deal.”
While the Trump administration hasn’t committed to providing new military support for Ukraine, Secretary of State Rubio was clear that without slowing down Russian advances, it will be very hard for Ukraine to walk away with a good deal.
“Putin’s goal now is to have maximum leverage, so that he can basically impose neutrality on Ukraine, retrofit, and come back and do this again in four or five years,” Rubio said, “and that’s not an outcome I think any of us would favor.”
To prevent that from happening, Rubio said, any future deal will require solid security guarantees for Ukraine, and that, Rubio said, will require concessions “from every party engaged in those conversations.”