CNAS Insights | Ten Days That Shook the War

The Trump administration is right to pursue an end to fighting in Ukraine. Kyiv’s position is slipping, Moscow is advancing, and Western fatigue is growing. The war’s brutality has reached astonishing heights and demands an effort to stop it. But Washington is not, and should not pretend to be, a neutral mediator in this conflict. It should clearly distinguish between aggressor and victim. It should realize that preserving Ukrainian independence and sovereignty accords deeply with U.S. national interests. And considering those realities, U.S. negotiators should seek a favorable peace. That may prove, for now, an impossible task.

A flurry of diplomacy

More diplomacy on Ukraine has taken place over the past 10 days than the previous 10 months combined. The high tempo continues, with meetings scheduled this week in Moscow and Europe. Much of the back and forth remains obscure, and this flurry of activity could mark either an inflection point in the war or simply another turn of the wheel. For all the murkiness, however, several realities of the present moment have become clear.

Land and security guarantees remain at the core of the dispute.

Russian President Vladimir Putin demands at a minimum the entirety of the Donbass region, including areas that remain under Ukrainian control, and he seeks to take it by talks or by force. Moscow wants a neutral Ukraine, without foreign troops on its soil, and with only a weak military to defend itself. Kyiv quite naturally seeks the opposite—robust security guarantees from the United States and Europe, foreign peacekeepers to serve as a tripwire force, and a strong military that can fend off future Russian incursions. Those entrenched positions leave little trade space for an agreement that can enshrine genuine peace rather than pave the way for future conflict.

Russia has not budged, while Ukraine’s position is eroding.

Russia’s incremental gains in eastern Ukraine contrast with Kyiv’s shortage of manpower and missiles. Putin retains his maximalist aims despite the astonishingly high price his country continues to pay in casualties—losing, by some estimates, more than 30,000 fighters per month. Moscow appears ready to pay a functionally unlimited price in blood to take more Ukrainian land; additional economic pressure on Russia from the West is now key to generating leverage in any talks. Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is reeling from a major corruption scandal that has toppled his powerful chief of staff, and continued U.S. backing for Ukraine is uncertain. Despite heavy losses and an inability to seize the entire Donbass after more than three years of war, Putin believes that his forces are making progress and that time is on his side. Absent a recommitment to Ukraine from the United States, he may well be right.

The gap between Europe and Washington is growing.

European leaders played no role in crafting the original 28-point peace plan, and it showed. In the plan, U.S. and Russian negotiators made commitments on Europe’s behalf—including the creation of a $100 billion European reconstruction fund—alongside security and territorial arrangements wholly unacceptable to European leaders. For all that, Europe is only the fourth most important player, after Kyiv, Moscow, and Washington, and has struggled to insert itself into the negotiation process with the relatively little leverage it possesses. For Washington, almost everything is negotiable—territorial lines, recognition, the possibility of European peacekeepers, the disposition of Russian assets, and even who earns a profit from any reconstruction business. For Europe, few of these items are truly subject to negotiation; the countries cannot even agree to use frozen Russian assets. Reality is dawning on European leaders that any agreement is unlikely to fully protect their interests, that continued war will draw only limited support from the United States, and that in a postwar scenario, they will face off against a hostile and aggressive Russia.

Nothing is final in Trump-style diplomacy.

The Trump administration’s 28-point plan elicited shock by ceding Crimea and the Donbass to Moscow, pledging de facto recognition of Russian sovereignty over those Ukrainian lands, barring foreign troops, and providing only a vague security guarantee to Ukraine. The administration then reportedly issued a take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum that demanded a response from Kyiv by Thanksgiving. Within days, however, the timeline and the plan itself were up in the air. It appears that Secretary of State Marco Rubio led the drafting of a competing plan more conducive to Ukrainian concerns, and now Special Envoy Steve Witkoff is taking talks to Moscow. President Donald Trump himself has shifted his stance repeatedly, insisting first that Ukraine could not win the war since it lacked the necessary cards to play, then claiming that it was Russia that could not win and that Ukraine would likely take back all of its territory, and now (apparently) viewing Russian control of the Donbass as inevitable, whether it is won at the negotiating table or on the battlefield. Perhaps the surest bet at this point is that the parties will not reach a specific, binding agreement anytime soon—and that all of them will simply treat the latest U.S. position as up for grabs.

A bad peace is worse than no peace.

Trump appears to genuinely want the killing in Ukraine to stop and is flexible about the specific terms that would bring peace. But the terms are all important. The cardinal rule of postwar international order remains a prohibition against forcible conquest, and to reward Russian aggression would undermine the very foundations of a stable world. An agreement that pauses the war but does not securely end the fighting would be worse still; Ukraine and Europe would look forward not to peace on the continent but rather to an interregnum before renewed conflict. U.S. interests in Ukraine go well beyond Ukraine, and at stake is the shape of the world to come.

Richard Fontaine is CEO of the Center for a New American Security and former foreign policy advisor to the late Senator John McCain.