The war in Ukraine is not going well. The fortress city of Pokrovsk has fallen to Russian forces after months of heavy fighting, and President Volodymyr Zelensky is embroiled in a corruption scandal that has already claimed several members of his cabinet. U.S. President Donald Trump is making another push for a high-level, quick peace deal—one that everyone expects to fail, just as his past few initiatives have.
Even before the proposed peace deal was leaked last Friday, Ukraine’s supporters in Washington were back to their favorite pastime: hoping for a Trump pivot toward increased military and financial support for Ukraine. European capitals, meanwhile, continue to tout their steadfast support for Ukraine and their commitment to stepping into the breach left by the United States—even as their aid continues to decline in practice.
The war in Ukraine is not going well. The fortress city of Pokrovsk has fallen to Russian forces after months of heavy fighting, and President Volodymyr Zelensky is embroiled in a corruption scandal that has already claimed several members of his cabinet. U.S. President Donald Trump is making another push for a high-level, quick peace deal—one that everyone expects to fail, just as his past few initiatives have.
Even before the proposed peace deal was leaked last Friday, Ukraine’s supporters in Washington were back to their favorite pastime: hoping for a Trump pivot toward increased military and financial support for Ukraine. European capitals, meanwhile, continue to tout their steadfast support for Ukraine and their commitment to stepping into the breach left by the United States—even as their aid continues to decline in practice.
This wishful thinking obscures a darker truth. For all of the dysfunction of Trump’s attempted peace process with Russia, almost everyone else has given up on anything better than the horrifying status quo in Ukraine. The White House’s new plan might fail, but the alternatives to a peace process are worse.
When he first came into office, Trump was clear about his intention to break with the Biden administration on Ukraine policy. Yet former President Joe Biden’s policy—sometimes described by officials with the unfortunate phrase “as long as it takes”—was not as feckless a strategy as it sounded, at least initially. Administration officials believed that giving Ukraine the weapons and breathing space it needed to resist Russia would put it in a better position to negotiate a favorable settlement when peace talks finally emerged.
In practice, however, this strategy ran into some problems: Ukraine was unable to achieve the stunning military successes envisaged by many Western planners; there was little to no agreement in the West on how policymakers would know that the time had come to negotiate; and public support for continued aid to Ukraine began to decline almost immediately. Since at least 2023, Western policymakers have been faced with an unpalatable choice between continued, expensive support for Ukraine—or going back on “as long as it takes.”
Trump’s return to the presidency sliced through this Gordian knot. He was willing—even eager—to negotiate with Moscow, and willing to ignore the views of Europeans to do so. The early stages of his approach involved putting pressure on Ukraine and on European allies—including the spectacular blowup between Vice President J.D. Vance and Zelensky in the Oval Office—and conversations with Moscow were reopened, including the Trump summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska.
Talks, however, have failed to progress, and it remains unclear whether the 28-point peace plan developed by the White House will be enough to move things forward.
There are two reasons for the struggle to close a deal. First, these talks are not exempt from the normal obstacles that bedevil any complicated peace process. There are many complex topics to discuss, a lack of trust on both sides, and the added difficulty that the United States must at least eventually coordinate with Kyiv and with its European allies, all of whom have divergent views and interests they wish to see represented.
Second, and more problematic, are the problems created by the president’s unorthodox approach to negotiations.
Trump’s peacemaking often focuses too much on the trappings of peace: a signing ceremony in front of the press for a deal that has little substance—as in the case of Serbia—or a high-profile summit with Russia in Alaska, before even the initial details of peace are hammered out. Though such pageantry might look good on TV, summits are supposed to be the end of an extensive process of negotiations on nitty-gritty details, not the beginning. This focus on end results over concrete details is only compounded by the Trump administration’s apparent internal disagreements about whether to pursue a peace plan, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio seemingly less supportive than others.
In Moscow, meanwhile, there’s been an entirely reasonable assumption that a cease-fire—with the accompanying media circus—is likely to be the moment at which Trump loses interest. The Russians are thus not particularly interested in a quick, no-strings-attached cease-fire, which would diminish their leverage for few concrete gains; they prefer to fight while talking, in the hopes that the bigger issues at stake can be hammered out over time.
Some of these obstacles could be overcome. Trump’s new peace plan is substantially more detailed than prior attempts, and begins to address some of the key issues for both sides. The plan, however, has been greeted harshly by European governments—and by pro-Ukrainian voices in Washington. One U.S. senator described it over the weekend as a Russian “wishlist”; European governments were quick to deem it unacceptable.
The plan is actually a step forward, though. For Ukraine, there is both good and bad in the draft. High-level caps on Ukraine’s armed forces—and no apparent restrictions on weapons—are a win, though the territorial concessions are relatively harsh. For Russia, a bar on NATO troops in Ukraine has been a long-time demand, yet the plan simultaneously promises Ukraine Western security guarantees, previously a red line for Moscow. Much remains to be hammered out, but even Kyiv has been cautiously quiet about the deal, rather than vocally critical.
Yet if this plan does not spur further negotiations as hoped—or if America’s partners in Europe succeed in blocking it—the war seems destined to continue.
Indeed, for Europe, continued war is perhaps not entirely unwelcome. Actually settling the conflict would raise a variety of troubling political questions: how to integrate Ukraine into Europe, what to do about wartime promises of accelerated European Union membership, and even how to explain to European publics that the triumphal rhetoric of the last three years was overblown. Talks among the “coalition of the willing”—the forum to discuss what European states are prepared to commit and do for Ukraine in the event of a cease-fire—have consistently overpromised and underdelivered.
With intransigence on all sides, much of the attention in Western media has focused on whether or when Trump will pivot from peace back to American support for Ukraine. Any small step from the White House that seems to be more pro-Ukrainian is taken as evidence of a pivot, from the decision to allow European nations to buy weapons for Ukraine to new sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil.
But Trump’s core goal has remained very clear, including the new push for a peace deal. The White House has its reasons for this. For one thing, the situation on the ground is horrific. Both sides are slowly losing a war of attrition, throwing men and equipment into a competition over vanishingly small areas of territory, while the economic costs mount. If a peace deal is not reached, then the most likely outcome in a year would be that little has changed—and both sides are worse off for it.
And Ukraine is losing faster. The country’s inability to mobilize more manpower has compounded the loss of American support. European support, after an initial uptick, is also declining as these states face economic headwinds. Indeed, much of the discussion in Europe now focuses on whether states can be persuaded to seize captive Russian assets as a method of funding the conflict for another year or two. Even the Ukrainian population—though still fiercely patriotic—is increasingly weary of the war and its costs.
Public sentiment has also been undermined by a growing wave of corruption scandals, the most recent of which reaches as high as the office of Zelensky. Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau recently announced the results of an investigation into Tymur Mindich, his former business partner, who is accused of skimming money state energy companies. Whether or not the president himself is involved, the perception is deeply damaging.
The administration appears to believe that this scandal offers an opportunity to push forward with a peace plan while Zelensky is weakened. They may well be wrong on this—Zelensky’s ability to push any peace deal within Ukraine’s fractious politics is also weakened by this scandal. But at a strategic level, Trump’s intuition that there are no good plausible alternatives to peace in Ukraine is correct; every other theory of victory has significant flaws. Providing Ukraine with more weapons would be expensive and practically challenging. Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign on Russian energy infrastructure, meanwhile, is causing some economic pain, but not enough to force a rapid end to the conflict. The same is true for sanctions.
The sad truth is that many of Ukraine’s supporters in Washington and in European capitals have largely given up on the hope of something better. Too many of the arguments opposed to negotiations are in essence an argument to stay the course in the hopes that something better turns up. This is not much of a strategy. This approach also condemns Ukrainians to years of further war—and European publics to years of further economic support.
All of this leaves us in the curious position that Trump’s peace overtures, however imperfect, are the only option that actually could achieve a better outcome than the status quo. But if the White House can’t get its act together and build a more robust peace process that can survive both public scrutiny and the actual rigors of cease-fire mechanics, then even this slim hope may fail.
