After nearly three years of fighting, it will take more than a day to end the war in Ukraine, as even Donald Trump now appears to acknowledge. Though the president-elect repeatedly vowed during his campaign that he would end the conflict in 24 hours after returning to the White House, Trump has more recently said he thinks six months is a realistic timetable. His nominee for special envoy for Ukraine, retired Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, is a bit more optimistic, believing a deal in 100 days is feasible.
News of an imminent ceasefire in Gaza, negotiated in part by representatives of both Joe Biden’s and Donald Trump’s diplomatic teams, may raise hopes of a similar breakthrough for Ukraine. But as even Trump himself has acknowledged, ending Europe’s first major land war in decades is likely to be much more difficult.
That’s because neither side is close to achieving its aims. For Russia, that’s the replacement of Ukraine’s pro-Western government with a more pliant one, or what President Vladimir Putin has called the “demilitarization” and “denazification” of a country he views as within Moscow’s rightful sphere of influence. For Ukraine, it’s the full removal of Russian troops from Ukrainian territory, including Crimea and areas in the east of the country that were already occupied before the full-scale invasion in 2022.
That’s not to say that the war won’t end until one side or the other achieves total victory — few wars do. Leaders of both countries have suggested they might settle for something less. But whether or not a deal to stop the fighting can be reached depends on the answers to three questions.
The first is whether Ukraine, and even more so Russia, is interested in pursuing a ceasefire. The second is whether an agreement exists that will allow Ukraine to feel confident about its future security, but isn’t a complete nonstarter for the Russians. The third is just what Trump, a consistent critic of US support for Ukraine, is willing to do to pressure the two sides into taking a deal — and whether it will be enough.
As Trump prepares to take office, Russian forces, which currently control about 20 percent of Ukraine, are advancing at their fastest rate since the earliest days of the war, albeit at an enormous cost in human lives and materiel.
Russia seized more than 1,600 square miles of Ukrainian territory in 2024, according to the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War, while suffering around 427,000 troops killed or injured (about 40 per square mile). Ukraine’s biggest victory in 2024 was the surprise invasion of Russia’s Kursk province over the summer. But this has not slowed down Russia’s advance within Ukraine itself. In fact, it may have actually helped by stretching Ukraine’s defensive lines thin. And thanks in part to an influx of thousands of North Korean troops, the Russians are slowly taking back territory in Kursk as well.
Early in the war, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy insisted that the full return of all of the country’s internationally recognized territory was “not up to negotiations.” But the battlefield situation — as well as the result of the US presidential election — appears to have led to a slight softening, or at least a shift in emphasis.
In more recent statements, Zelenskyy has suggested that if Ukraine were given adequate security guarantees, it could agree to end the “hot phase” of the war. Kyiv would then seek to recover the rest of its territory through diplomatic means. His people largely back this shift: Polls show that this year, for the first time, more Ukrainians favor negotiations to end the war rather than fighting on until victory.
During the election, much of the conversation around Trump’s Ukraine plans focused on how he would manage to pressure the Ukrainians to agree to a deal while Russian troops were still in their territory. But today, the better question may be whether Russia is open to negotiations.
Officially, the Kremlin says it is open to talks, but is sticking to Russia’s maximalist demands. “I don’t think it’s feasible to negotiate when it’s clear the Russians aren’t interested in anything other than the full and total subjugation of Ukraine,” Ivo Daalder, former US ambassador to NATO, told Vox. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has told lawmakers that Ukraine is not ready for peace talks because it “cannot at this moment negotiate from a position of strength.”
Mark Galeotti, a UK-based Russian security analyst, said Russia is likely to participate in talks “because they don’t want to be seen not to.” But with Russia making slow but steady progress on the battlefield and Putin seemingly unconcerned by the astronomically high number of casualties nor the growing damage to his country’s economy, there may be little incentive to stop. “Putin seems to feel he’s winning,” said Galeotti. “Why would he compromise?”
Franz-Stefan Gady, an Austrian military analyst who travels frequently to the battlefront in Ukraine, believes that until the front lines are stabilized in Ukraine, “any discussion regarding a potential ceasefire is academic.” In Gady’s view, this stabilization will require Ukraine to address its well-documented manpower shortage. Experts like Gady say Ukrainian forces are dangerously thin at the front. The Ukrainian military is also struggling with desertions and low morale, and due to the government’s reluctance to draft young people into combat roles, the average age of its troops is around 40. “This is not something the Trump administration really has any say in,” Gady said.
Despite these complications, some argue that it’s time to at least test the waters to see if a potential deal can be found. There haven’t been serious talks aimed at ending the fighting since a round of negotiations in Istanbul in early 2022, during the first months of the war.
The RAND Corporation’s Samuel Charap, an advocate for resuming peace talks, told Vox that the Russians “cannot achieve their objectives through the battlefield alone, because their objectives are fundamentally political, unless they can oust the [Ukraine] government by force. I think they’ve come to grips with the reality that this is a very low probability outcome.”
In light of this, he argues “a lot of people assume that [the Russians] aren’t willing to negotiate without having actually tested the proposition.”
What would a deal actually look like?
Ceding any territory to Russia, even if it’s on a temporary basis, and even if Ukraine and the international community do not formally recognize Russia’s control, would be a painful concession for Ukraine, if nothing else because of the reports of bleak human rights conditions and efforts to indoctrinate children in Russian-controlled areas.
But as Zelenskyy’s recent statements have indicated, the bigger concern is making sure Russia can’t simply rest and recover, then invade again, taking even more territory. Only a more permanent peace could prevent that. “A ceasefire is great from the Russians’ point of view, because it allows them to regroup their forces, and it gives them the initiative,” Galeotti said. “The Ukrainians are not going to be the ones to break the ceasefire if it’s Trump’s ceasefire, but that means they will never know if it’s going to be a day, a week or, a year, before Putin restarts the war.”
The topic of “security guarantees” makes many Ukrainians bristle. “We’ve already been through all this before,” Oleksandra Ustinova, a Ukrainian member of parliament, told reporters during a recent visit to Washington. She pointed to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Ukraine agreed to give up the nuclear weapons left on its territory after the Soviet collapse in exchange for guarantees from Russia, the US, and other countries that its sovereignty would be respected. More recently were the 2014 and 2015 Minsk Agreements, which aimed to bring an end to the fighting after Russia’s initial invasion of Ukrainian territory in 2014, but those agreements collapsed decisively in 2022 after years of violations.
“I cannot imagine our parliament voting for some big deal, if they believe that [the Russians] will be back in a few months, or in a few years, being much stronger,” said Ustinova.
The Ukrainians have always been clear about the security guarantee they want: full membership in NATO. This is what Zelenskyy said in his recent remarks could end the “hot phase” of the war.
NATO members are protected by Article 5 of the alliance’s charter, which states that an attack on one is an attack on all. In other words, if Russia went to war with Ukraine again, he’d be going to war with all the alliance’s members, including the United States, and they would be treaty-bound to defend it.
In many ways, the war in Ukraine has been a demonstration of the value of NATO membership: Russia has refrained from any attacks on NATO countries like Poland, despite billions of dollars worth of weaponry from NATO countries flowing over its border into Ukraine, where they are then used to kill Russian forces. Putin may not respect international law, but so far he has shown he respects Article 5.
Ukraine was promised eventual NATO membership back in 2008, under heavy lobbying from the George W. Bush administration, albeit without any firm commitments about when it would happen. At their 2024 summit, NATO members agreed that Ukraine was on an “irreversible path” to joining.
That might sound like a sure thing, but in reality, Ukraine is almost certainly not going to be admitted to NATO any time soon. This would likely have been the case had Kamala Harris won the election, but it’s even more so now. Trump has expressed sympathy for Russia’s position that Ukraine should not be admitted to the alliance. Other NATO governments are skeptical as well. And given that preventing Ukraine from joining NATO is a significant part of the reason Putin wants to oust its government, it’s hard to imagine he would go along with a ceasefire deal that included Article 5 guarantees for Kyiv.
So the real question is: Could Ukraine receive some meaningful assurances outside the NATO framework? Zelenskyy recently said that the only way security guarantees could work is if the US provides them. The US has mutual defense treaties with several non-NATO countries, like Japan and the Philippines, but if there’s one thing that’s predictable about Trump’s often unpredictable foreign policy, it’s his skepticism of binding treaties like these.
There’s also the EU: Though primarily a political and economic alliance, the European Union’s charter also obliges countries to come to the aid of fellow members that are the “victim of armed aggression.” Ukraine has been formally approved as a candidate for membership, but is likely years from actually joining.
Some have argued that security guarantees could be provided by an all-European “coalition of the resolute”: This could include some combination of Poland and the Baltic countries, which have often pushed further than their Western European counterparts in their support for Ukraine. The United Kingdom and France, which have the military budgets (and nuclear weapons) to back them up, are also possibilities. The French government, in particular, has been keen on discussing the idea of deploying peacekeepers to Ukraine, though any such force would function mostly as a tripwire to deter Putin from taking on a Western military, even if it is in a non-NATO country.
Of course, European NATO members providing security guarantees raises the question of what the US will do if deterrence fails. If Russia gets into a shooting war with Britain or Poland, will the US simply sit back and watch? It’s possible to view this as a kind of backdoor way of extending Article 5 to Ukraine without the consent of all NATO’s members.
“The US has consistently said we don’t want to be in a situation where an ally takes a military set of military commitments that we are not part of that could lead to the invocation of Article 5 without us having any say in that possibility,” said Daalder, the former ambassador to NATO. Given that Trump has repeatedly mused about pulling the US out of NATO, this seems like the sort of issue that could pull the alliance apart at the seams rather than strengthen its role in providing for European security. Which may be exactly what Putin would want to see.
Some have also suggested that rather than a mutual defense treaty, the US could pursue a version of the “Israel model.” The US is not bound by law to come to Israel’s defense, but it is required to provide Israel with military capabilities to maintain its “qualitative military edge” over its rivals, as has been amply demonstrated during the war in Gaza.
If either or both of the sides are not interested in a deal, can Trump pressure them into one? The main leverage the United States has over the situation is military aid. Under the plan that Kellogg presented to Trump last summer, Washington will tell Ukraine that it will not get any more US support unless it enters into peace talks. At the same time, Trump would warn Russia that if it does not agree to end the war, Ukraine would get more aid.
Trump has indicated that he doesn’t plan to immediately cut off aid to Ukraine, but he could certainly restrict it if he wanted to. In the closing weeks of the Biden administration, the White House and Pentagon have been rushing to allocate aid to Ukraine as quickly as possible, anticipating that Trump might not send any more. Last week, the administration announced the final tranche of aid it will send before leaving office: a $500 million package including air defense missiles, air-to-ground munitions, and equipment for F-16 fighter jets.
Many of the weapons that have been allocated to be sent to Ukraine from US stocks won’t actually reach Ukraine for months. If Trump wanted to, he could likely stop delivery on systems that have been promised, even those that are en route to the battlefield.
That wouldn’t necessarily end the war, but it would seriously hamper Ukraine’s ability to fight at a moment when it is struggling to tread water. Some in Trump’s orbit might hope that Ukraine can simply be pressured into taking what Kyiv might consider a “bad” deal, rather than fight without US weaponry.
Zelenskyy’s government has been on a major diplomatic offensive to make its case to the incoming administration, which included him appearing on tech influencer Lex Fridman’s podcast just a few days after Trump did. The message, from the Ukrainians and their advocates, is that Trump doesn’t want a Afghanistan-style collapse on his watch like Biden experienced, and that a ceasefire without real guarantees for Ukraine’s security would only kick the can down the road.
A bad deal “doesn’t mean that the Trump presidency would have four years of peace,” said Hanna Shelest, a Kyiv-based fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis. “It means that in a year or two, he would have a much bigger problem.”
As is often the case, Russia’s incentives are harder to read. Trump, who plans to speak soon with Putin, has said he will tell the Russian president, “If you don’t make a deal, we’re going to give [Zelenskyy] a lot. We’re going to [give Ukraine] more than they ever got if we have to.”
But there’s some question as to whether there’s really that much more the US can give. The slow pace of US arms deliveries to Ukraine, a source of frequent frustration to the Ukrainians, was dictated not just by the Biden administration’s concerns about escalation, but by the fact that the US is running low on its own stocks of items like Javelin missiles and air defense ammunition.
As one US army general told me in 2023, referring to the ubiquitous 155-millimeter artillery shell, which American industry has raced to increase the production of since the war broke out, “We operate at the speed of steel” — and for the US, steel moves even slower than politics.
In theory, Trump could lift some of the remaining restrictions on how Ukraine uses its weapons, including targets it can strike within Russia, but given that he has blasted Biden for moving in that direction, such a course of action seems unlikely.
In short, there are likely to be ceasefire talks within the next year, but finding a deal that actually ends the war, rather than just delays it, won’t be easy, whether the timeline is one day, 100 days, or longer.
Galeotti said it’s possible the Russians may engage with the negotiation process “with the expectation that they can just basically talk things out to the point where Trump loses interest.” Some of Trump’s high-ranking national security advisers — including his nominees for national security adviser, Mike Waltz, and secretary of state, Marco Rubio — seem likely to oppose simply abandoning Ukraine to its fate. But clashes between Trump and his more traditionally hawkish advisers are hardly new, and it’s impossible to predict which side would win.
Russia remains the wild card, but Putin might eventually see a ceasefire as in his interest. The Russian president hasn’t suffered much politically so far from the heavy losses in Ukraine, but there is evidence that the government is having a harder time recruiting soldiers and would prefer to avoid a politically costly mass mobilization.
It’s far from certain that Russia can continue losing 40 troops for every square mile of Ukrainian territory until the whole country is conquered, as it has been suffering so far. Russia has weathered international sanctions better than many expected, but it’s still not a given that it can continue to maintain its current level of military spending. Some commentators have suggested Putin’s overheated war economy is a house of cards, meaning time is not actually on the Russian leader’s side.
The house of cards may not tumble tomorrow, but not even Russia can keep fighting this way forever. Putin is just counting on it being able to do it longer than the Ukrainians. The final stages of the war in Ukraine are likely to be less a war of territory than a war of exhaustion, for both the soldiers on the ground and the diplomats in the conference room. Sooner or later, one side may be willing to make compromises it currently considers unacceptable — but when that happens might not be up to Trump.
