You can’t blame President Donald Trump for feeling frustrated with the minutiae involved in negotiating a settlement to the war in Ukraine. Nobody said such a feat was going to be easy, even if Trump at times genuinely seemed to drink his own Kool Aid about terminating the conflict in a day. His grand proclamations have run head-first into the realities of international peacemaking.
If the battlefield has long since descended into a bloody slog where the frontlines are close to immovable, then Trump’s cadence toward the war is a mishmash of disjointed hot takes in which yesterday’s villain becomes tomorrow’s hero. On April 23, Trump lambasted Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky for undermining peace efforts and making statements that “will do nothing but prolong the killing field” in a war he constantly claims (without much evidence) wouldn’t have happened if he had been president at the time. Days later, after sitting somberly with Zelensky in the halls of the Vatican, he redirected his rhetorical spear at Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, openly questioning whether the dictator-president is really interested in a peace process to begin with. Although Trump is keeping the faith, it’s increasingly clear that he’s at the end of his rope. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has twice threatened to withdraw the United States from the entire process, and the war itself, if Ukraine and Russia don’t start giving the Americans a reason to continue their efforts.
Those efforts include a draft peace plan, tabled by the Trump administration last week, that aims to square the circle between Russia’s maximalist ambitions and Ukraine’s desire to remain a strong, independent state. Unfortunately, the document presented didn’t do anything other than unleash a wave of objections from the combatants. Zelensky vocally denounced the Trump administration’s willingness to accept Crimea as Russian territory, stating that if Washington expected Kiev to follow suit, then it was deluding itself. The Russians, in typical fashion, offered a counter-proposal in the media that merely restated its standard argument: Ukraine must be demilitarized, denazified, and otherwise subjugated to Russia’s sphere of influence.
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