par Gram Slattery
Despite the campaign promises of Donald Trump, who will return to the White House on Monday, the American president-elect’s advisers now admit that the war in Ukraine will last several more months, or even longer.
During his campaign, the businessman assured that he would put an end “from the first day” to the conflict between Kyiv and Moscow. Two of his advisers admit today that these were campaign boasts of which he has always been fond and that Donald Trump had undoubtedly not appreciated the situation in its entirety.
These assertions echo remarks by Donald Trump’s designated envoy for Russia and Ukraine, retired Army Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, who told Fox News last week that he would like to have a ” solution” to the war within 100 days, well beyond the president-elect’s initial timetable.
For John Herbst, former US ambassador to Ukraine, who now works at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington, the hundred days put forward by Keith Kellogg is itself far too optimistic.
“For this to work, Trump has to persuade (Russian President Vladimir) Putin that his intransigence is harmful,” explained John Herbst.
Donald Trump, however, repeated throughout his meetings that an agreement between Russia and Ukraine was possible on the first day of his mandate, or even before.
At the end of October, however, as the electoral campaign drew to a close, he made a slight semantic shift, pledging to end the war “very quickly”.
Since November 5 and his victory against Vice-President Kamala Harris, Donald Trump has only promised to “resolve the conflict”, throwing away the draft schedule he had outlined while admitting that he would be more simpler to obtain a ceasefire in Gaza than in Ukraine.
“I think the situation between Russia and Ukraine will deteriorate,” he observed, responding to a question about the conflict in the Gaza Strip. “I think it’s more difficult.”
-At the same time, contradictory signals are arriving from Moscow on the possibility of a peace agreement. We welcome the idea of direct talks with Donald Trump while dismissing the avenues put forward by the president-elect’s advisors, deemed unrealistic.
“NO INTEREST”
As for the Kremlin, it has never commented on the Trump team’s updated schedule. Representatives of the incoming Trump administration and the Ukrainian embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment from Reuters.
The Russian government is also in all the less eager to sit down at the negotiating table as its army is inexorably advancing into Ukrainian territory. Many analysts also point out that Vladimir Putin has more interest in amplifying territorial gains despite their high human and material cost than in accelerating the organization of talks.
John Herbst on this point underlined the comments recently made by Vassili Nebenzia, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, according to whom the peace plans mentioned by Donald Trump’s advisers presented “no interest”.
If the exact contours of Donald Trump’s plan for peace remain unclear, his advisers agree that he will have to exclude any accession of Ukraine to NATO in the short or medium term and establish a freeze of the lines head-on.
Most of them are also in favor of granting Ukraine a material guarantee of security, for example by creating a demilitarized zone placed under the surveillance of European soldiers.
So far, the proposals from Donald Trump and his advisers for Ukraine have been met with polite disinterest from the Kremlin, reminding the president-elect that he will have difficulty implementing his peace promises.
(Gram Slattery reporting; with Jonathan Landay in Washington and Tom Balmforth in Kyiv, French version Nicolas Delame)
