President Donald Trump, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and Russian President Vladimir Putin — three leaders furiously strategizing how to come out on top when the war in Ukraine inevitably ends, as all wars do.
After three years, hundreds of thousands of deaths, and untold destruction, 2025 could be the year the fighting stops.
Now back in the White House, Trump dropped all the campaign braggadocio about locking Zelensky and Putin in a room and brokering a peace deal in a single day.
However, he hasn’t given up on ending the war — and the horrific death toll.
“I’d like to see that end. Millions of people are being killed … It’s a vicious situation,” Trump said on his second day in office. “Russia’s lost about 800,000 soldiers now. Ukraine’s lost about 600 or 700,000 … And that war should stop.”
Sitting in the Oval Office on the night of his inauguration for the first time in four years, Trump was in an expansive mood as he engaged in freewheeling persiflage with the White House press corps, intermittently stopping to sign Day One executive orders.
He even joked about his risible boast about ending the war in 24 hours.
“Well, this is only a half a day. I have another half a day left,” he said with a wry smirk. “We’ll see. We want to get it done.”
At least on that night, it seemed Trump’s ubiquitous swagger had mellowed into a more pragmatic, almost reflective, demeanor.
“Zelensky wants to make a deal. I don’t know if Putin does. He might not. I don’t know. He should make a deal,” Trump said in his first public acknowledgment that Russia, not Ukraine, is a main obstacle to peace.
“Trump is now coming to terms with the fact that Putin is not interested in real compromise, where Zelensky has said that he’s willing to accept territorial compromise,” John Herbst, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, said in a recent interview. “I think he has begun to connect with reality on the timing when he said a couple of weeks ago this could take three or six months. And I think he’s now asking Ambassador [Keith] Kellogg to do this within 100 days. I think that’s also extremely ambitious.”
Trump is correct when he says Zelensky wants to make a deal, but it may not be quite the deal Trump has in mind.
“Donald Trump is a man of strength,” Zelensky posted on X on Jan. 20, congratulating Trump on his inauguration. “Ukrainians are ready to work together with Americans to achieve peace — a true peace. This is a chance that must be seized.”
Like any good poker player, Trump doesn’t like to show his hand. However, based on statements made by Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, it appears Trump envisions a Korea-style armistice with a demilitarized zone patrolled by European peacekeepers, with Ukraine ceding one-fifth of its land to Russia and deferring for decades its dream to join NATO.
In Senate testimony and interviews after his confirmation, Rubio signaled that the United States now sees the war as a protracted stalemate, a dynamic, he argued, neither side can change.
“It is important for everyone to be realistic,” Rubio said in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “There’s no way Ukraine is also going to push these people all the way back to where they were on the eve of the invasion, just given the size dynamic.”
Zelensky has a different plan, and it centers on leveraging Ukraine’s impressive advances in drone warfare, which this month alone has been wreaking havoc on Russia’s oil and gas industry.
As of mid-January, Ukraine drones, most of them homegrown, have struck more than a dozen Russian energy facilities located between 400 and 600 miles inside Russian territory.
One oil depot that served the Engels-2 airfield, where Russian long-range bombers are based, burned for six days.
Some argue that Putin’s position is more tenuous than he has projected, a talking point Trump seems to have embraced as well.
“I think he’s destroying Russia by not making a deal,” Trump said. “I think Russia’s going to be in big trouble. You take a look at their economy. You take a look at the inflation in Russia.”
A fresh round of U.S. sanctions targeting Russia’s oil production and exports and British sanctions on Russian oil giants leveled this month are further crippling Putin’s main source of revenue, and Trump is threatening even more.
When asked by a reporter if he would impose additional sanctions on Russia if Putin doesn’t come to the table, Trump replied, “Sounds likely.”
“The economic cost to ordinary Russians of Putin’s imperial fantasies has been staggering,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in Germany two weeks ago. “The Kremlin plans to spend about 40% of Russia’s 2025 budget to keep up with [allied] support to Ukraine.”
While Russia has continued to take advantage of manpower — largely because Putin appears unconcerned with losses of between 1,000 and 1,500 troops a day — its gains in the last year have been incremental and strategically insignificant.
Despite the addition of 10,000 fresh troops from North Korea, Putin’s forces have been unable to reclaim a small sliver of the Russian territory in the Kursk region, which Ukraine has held since a surprise offensive in August.
Zelensky sees drones as the great equalizer and a way for Ukraine to continue to grind down Russia’s military without resorting to drafting 18-year-olds to die in battles over small patches of land.
“Drones deter the enemy, keep them at a distance,” Zelensky argued. “Drones are something that has already changed the nature of war … To stop losing people and territories, we need drones.”
When British Prime Minister Keir Starmer visited Zelensky in Kyiv this month, the two leaders signed a historic 100-year partnership agreement. At the same time, the United Kingdom, Denmark, the Netherlands, Latvia, and Sweden committed to funding the production of 30,000 drones to be delivered this year.
However, that would mean little if Zelensky can’t convince Trump to drive a tough bargain.
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“The Russians have said they’re willing to talk, they’re willing to negotiate, but they’ve said they have not changed their objectives, and they haven’t,” said Herbst. “Putin is going to try to pre-negotiate the conditions he does not like with Trump before sitting down to real negotiations. But Trump can’t agree with that because if he does, he’s essentially giving Ukraine to Putin. And he doesn’t want to do that. That would make Trump look like a very weak negotiator.”
“Putin needs to feel American pressure. Economic sanctions are important. That’s true. But nothing will be as important as demonstrating to the Kremlin that we will make it impossible for Russia to make further additional gains on the territory of Ukraine,” he added. “If we make clear that we’re going to help Ukraine stop further Russian advances on the battlefield, Putin may have incentive to seek a real peace.”