Supporters of Ukraine’s defense against Russian aggression are likely to be unsatisfied by its terms.
According to Bloomberg, Donald Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine and Russia, Keith Kellogg, plans to present the administration’s plan for a durable end to Russia’s war of conquest in Ukraine to European leaders during an upcoming trip to Munich. “He won’t be presenting the plan publicly, as that’s for Trump to do,” the report noted.
If the administration’s plan resembles the one Kellogg and his co-author promoted last year, supporters of Ukraine’s defense against Russian aggression are likely to be unsatisfied by its terms.
Bloomberg already confirms some similarities: “Elements include potentially freezing the conflict and leaving territory occupied by Russian forces in limbo while providing Ukraine with security guarantees to ensure that Moscow can’t attack again.”
Some of the stipulations have, however, changed in the intervening months. Kellogg has “signaled” that the U.S. wants to see Ukraine lift the martial-law order Kyiv instated at the outset of Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine so Kyiv can hold elections. That’s less objectionable than Trump’s insistence on securing U.S. control over critical raw materials and commodities in Ukraine — a rider that will lend superficial credence to Moscow’s previously baseless claim that the West’s support for Ukraine’s independence was a colonialist project.
The peace plan that will be presented to European allies will likely reflect Trump’s stated intention to impose “massive sanctions” on Russia if it doesn’t come to the table. But why wouldn’t Moscow consent to an arrangement that gives it most of what it wants in the near term in exchange for dubious Western promises?
The danger in the Kellogg plan is that, like the Minsk process, it will lend Western legitimacy to one of the many “frozen conflicts” Russia is responsible for igniting in the first place and which it thaws at times and places of its choosing. American elected and appointed officials from both parties were content to defend the “peace” that followed both Minsk agreements (an inquiring mind might ask what happened to the first Minsk agreement that made a second one necessary). But the so-called “line of contact” never went cold.
The conflict raged across the arbitrary border that separated Kyiv’s fighters and Russian-backed forces, and Western interests were content with the fiction that the conflict wasn’t being prosecuted by Russian forces but nebulous Ukrainian “separatists.” The Kellogg plan’s reliance on a similar framework to halt the fighting along the present lines of contact invites the same temptations and the same risks.
This time, however, the peace will be underwritten by Western “security guarantees,” the plan’s backers maintain. Those guarantees are unlikely to be backed by NATO’s security architecture. More likely, we’ll be talking about something resembling a coalition of the willing. But Moscow has every reason to suspect that it can successfully deter Western intervention into this conflict — it has so far. More likely, those security guarantees will consist of commitments that some of Ukraine’s partners have already made to provide Kyiv with “the type and scale of military and other support they have provided since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.”
There’s nothing to stop Ukraine’s Western partners from redoubling commitments like those now, at a point when they could be most beneficial on the battlefield and in the absence of an artificial respite that allows the Kremlin to regroup and rebuild its forces. The Russian regime’s desire to subsume its neighbor into the Russian Federation is consistent enough to anticipate a third war for control over Ukraine.
I reserve the right to be pleasantly surprised by the terms Trump’s envoy will present to Europe in advance of its submission to this war’s combatants, but the early signs are inauspicious.