Trump Must Gain More Leverage to Bring Putin to the Negotiating Table
From: Foreign Affairs by Alina Polyakova
Alina Polyakova is President and CEO of the Center for European Policy Analysis and Donald Marron Senior Fellow at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
In June 2024, Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general and national security adviser to former President Donald Trump, presented a plan he co-authored with the former CIA analyst Fred Fleitz that proposed halting the delivery of U.S. weapons to Ukraine if Kyiv didn’t enter into peace talks with Moscow—but also warning Moscow that if it refused to negotiate with Kyiv, Washington would increase its support for Ukraine. About five months later, President-elect Trump named Kellogg as his special envoy for Ukraine and Russia. “The makeup of the war has expanded,” Kellogg said in an interview, “and it’s time to put it back in a box.”
In response to Kellogg’s nomination, Konstantin Malofeyev, a Russian oligarch with ties to the Kremlin, told a reporter for the Financial Times what he thought the likely Russian response would be. “Kellogg comes to Moscow with his plan, we take it and then tell him to screw himself, because we don’t like any of it,” Malofeyev said. “That’d be the whole negotiation.”
As Malofeyev’s blustery message makes clear, Russian President Vladimir Putin has no interest in a negotiated settlement to the war in Ukraine—which would require Moscow to compromise—because he believes Russia is winning the war. Nonetheless, if only to underscore its end goal, Russia has laid out a maximalist set of demands for Kyiv and its partners: permanent neutrality for Ukraine with no future option for NATO or EU membership, Western recognition of the Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine, the removal of all Western sanctions, and broader agreement from the West to recognize Russia’s self-defined “sphere of influence.”
Voice of Ukraine 