President Trump 2.0 and a Ukrainian Peace

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Gordon Hahn

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Freshly inaugurated, US President Donald Trump may be on the wrong track in his pursuit of a Russo-Ukrainian peace agreement that he claimed repeatedly during the presidential campaign he could achieve on his first day in the White House.

This article was first published on Hahn’s homepage on January 24, 2025.

Although Trump seems to be well-intentioned and has become more sanguine about the ease of resolving the NATO-Russian-Ukrainian War in the face of the very harsh realities of the conflict he hopes to resolve, he continues to set unrealistic expectations.

Moreover, he is making policy decisions on the basis of faulty data—always a product of bad outcomes. Garbage in means garbage out. It appears he is already being misled, wittingly or not by advisors or US intelligence, and this will likely disable his efforts to conclude a Ukrainian-Russian or any US-Russian agreement or treaty. This demonstrated by the statements made by President Trump and members of his new administration, which features not a single serious Russia or Ukraine expert.

To be sure, President Trump is operating with one foot solidly planted on the ground; he has acknowledged the validity of Russia’s core concern which provoked Russian President Vladimir ‘Putin’s unprovoked invasion’ or SMO—NATO’s efforts to expand to Ukraine. This may signal that he sees NATO expansion to Ukraine at least to be the main cause of the Ukrainian war.

It is of crucial importance to getting the Russians onboard any agreement and providing a some footing for the beginning and perhaps success of peace talks that the both the US and Russia, both Trump and Putin see eye to eye on the main root cause of the conflict—the central reason why Putin decided to declare the SMO. Trump’s statement resonates with Putin’s call for solutions that remove the “root causes” of the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War foremost among them in Moscow’s view is NATO expansion.

However, other statements coming from Trump and his administration are less than helpful and cause for concern.

The US president’s other most revealing statement since becoming president to date came in a tweet – the practice of tweeting was an unfortunate feature of Trump’s first term and apparently will survive into the second – in which he threatened to escalate the U.S. and Western sanctions war on Russia in the event Putin fails to sign a peace agreement with Ukraine and pile on 'taxes and tariffs'. This unfortunate tweet comes without the White House having made any concrete proposals, as far as we know, to the Kremlin. Russians do not react well to threats or disrespect.

Trump’s recent claim that “we” have figures for those “killed” in the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War, which he relayed as 1 million Russians killed and 700,000 Ukrainians killed, was as far from reality as Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy's penchant for constructing alternative realities and likely originates from Ukrainian-supplies 'data.' Trump may have confused ‘killed’ for ‘casualties,’ as I know of no source claiming such high numbers of killed, but even this still leaves the figures distant from the real world. Actual figures are more like just over 1 million Ukrainian casualties and some 4-500,000 Russian casualties.

That Trump is getting such bad advice is deeply troubling. Trump is no foreign policy wonk and can easily be manipulated by ‘expert advice’ in this area, much as he was during his first term regarding the COVID virus. Bad advice on Russia and the Ukrainian war is particularly dangerous. In this particular case, it is leading Trump to believe that Russian war losses are so high that Putin to some degree very much wants, even desperately needs an end to the war. The above problems are also true with regard to Trump's claim in the same tweet that Russia's economy "is failing," an issue I have addressed recently.

To be sure, Putin and almost all Russians did not want and do not like this war against a country where many have friends and relatives and historical, cultural, social, and economic ties run deep. But being guided by the belief that Russians as a whole and Putin separately are desperate to end this war is to misread Russian and its culture, particularly its strategic culture. This has nothing to do with ideas such as ‘in Russia life is cheap’ with the political leadership and military command comfortably throwing Russian lives away in crude ‘human wave’ attacks and the like.

No, Russia is conducting the war on the basis of sophisticated military strategies and tactics. More importantly, Russian strategic culture values security vigilance against foreign threats, especially those emanating from the West, and therefore Russians are willing to sacrifice to protect their country.

This is deeply ingrained in Russian thought, literature, music, the general culture, political culture, strategic culture, and even the social sciences. It is informed by historical experience: the Polish- and Vatican-organized invasions and occupation of Russia sparking and punctuating the ‘Smuta’ or Time of Troubles; the invasion by Napoleon Bonaparte’s European-wide ‘Grande Armee’; German Kaiser Wilhelm’s ‘color revolution’ in Russia by way of bankrolling Russia’s revolutionaries, in particular Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks and the Western interventions in World War I and the Russian Civil War; and the Nazi invasion, occupation, and genocide. Besides realist security concerns provoked by NATO expansion, this history is the central driver during the last three decades behind Russia’s opposition to NATO expansion [see Gordon M. Hahn, The Russian Dilemma: Security, Vigilance, and Relations with the West from Ivan III to Putin (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2021)].

This is especially true concerning Ukraine, which served as an invasion route for both the Polish-sponsored Russian opposition army in the Smuta and Nazi Germany’s Wermacht in World War II. Neighboring Belarus, of course, was transgressed by both the troops of Napoleon and Wilhelm.

To be sure, Trump made an important nod in this tweet relevant to Russia’s security culture and vigilance sensibilities when he noted ‘Russia’s’ contribution to the defeat of Nazism. Unfortunately, this nod was tainted by Trump’s claim that ‘Russia helped the U.S. win’ World War II. But the positive effect was perhaps wholly mitigated by Trump's clumsy claim that the USSR merely 'helped the U.S. win' World War II.

Russians naturally have taken great umbrage at this idea. When by the time Americans took to the shores of Normandy in the war, the Soviets – most of them Russians – had already suffered some 15 million military and civilian casualties, perhaps more. Some two-thirds of the Nazi Wehrmacht was deployed against the USSR.

Further evidence that Trump is getting some faulty advice on matters related to Russia, its politics, and history is that in this same statement, he asserts the Russians (Soviets) lost 60 million people in this war they call the ‘Great Patriotic War’ (the war against Napoleon is called the ‘Patriotic War’). In fact, the standard, almost unanimous Russian, Soviet, and Western view has been that 27 million Soviets, civilian and military combined, perished in that war, though some recent research has led some Russian scholars to raise that figure as high as 40 million. Still, Trump’s 60 million is far off the mark.

Most importantly, however, is that the approach to starting peace talks that Trump has been signalling thus far leaves much to be desired. Neither 'Twitter diplomacy' (with egregious mistakes in the text no less) nor ultimata will be appreciated by Putin. The Russian president understands Trump's peculiar bargaining style and bombastic rhetorical habits and has been careful to talk around Trump's overstatements and threats, rather than confront them in his comments (https://t.me/SolovievLive/309676).

Moreover, there is a great danger in overstating Russian suffering in the present conflict. It translates into overestimating Putin’s and the Russians’ desire or need to end the war. Russians feel they are winning the war and are confident they will win. They are willing to fight a long war to do so, as they see NATO's presence in Ukraine as an existential threat that must be extinguished.

In turn, Trump's underestimation of all this will lead to a gross calculation of the extent to which the Kremlin will drive a hard bargain and is unwilling to move to any significant degree off of its clearly and repeatedly stated negotiating positions and key war aims as it continues to accelerate its march to the Dnieper river and western Ukraine.

Trump’s special envoy for the Ukrainian war, Gen. Keith Kellogg, reportedly has floated the idea of a ten- or twenty-year hold on any Ukrainian accession to NATO. There is no way in lieu of an unlikely Russian defeat in the war and/or an equally unlikely ‘color revolution’ that Moscow will ever accept Ukraine’s membership in NATO. This is true whether it is Putin or his successor, with whom Trump is negotiating.

The Ukrainian War has been nothing less and really nothing more than a war over the issue of NATO expansion; hence, NATO’s ongoing desperate efforts to back Kiev, despite the long odds of victory over Russia without an all-out war effort by all of NATO’s members. Make no mistake; this would mean World War III or, as Russians will see it, the Greatest Patriotic War against yet another in the history of aggressive Western alliances attacking Russia.

No ten-, twenty-, fifty-, or perhaps even a one-hundred-year moratorium on Ukraine’s NATO membership will satisfy Moscow. Ukrainian neutrality encoded in a legal binding treaty as well as Russia’s sovereignty over Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporozhia, and Kherson – perhaps even Ukrainian and Western recognition thereof – are Russia’s mandatory, minimalist positions.

As was the case with the April 2022 Istanbul agreement scuttled by the West, there may be some wiggle room on de-nazification and particularly demilitarization – Russia’s two other officially stated demands and goals of Putin’s ‘special military operation.’ For example, demilitarization of Ukraine can be limited in reducing the number of Ukrainian armed forces, by regulating the locations where Ukrainian troops can be deployed perhaps by way of a demilitarized zone.

Putin reportedly hopes to see a 80 percent reduction in the size of the Ukrainian army, but this may be achieved by attrition during the present and future fighting that will be prolonged by Western and Ukrainian refusal to sit down at the negotiating table and then the difficulties in arriving at any agreement. De-nazification will be another tough nut for the negotiations to crack, as Zelenskiy's failure to protect from Ukraine's ultranationalists and neofascists could lead them to block any agreement, perhaps by force and even by coup. The same may be true to a lesser extent of demilitarization.

There is a contradiction in Trump's stated belief in Putin’s urgent need to make peace. On the one hand, Trump states that Putin will ‘destroy Russia’ if he fails to conclude a peace agreement. On the other hand, he states he will continue, indeed deepen, the West’s current sanctions policy intended precisely to strangle Russia, thus demonstrating again that it is the West that seeks to destroy Russia – in Russian minds and understandably so – having provoked the war and now intent on punishing Russia in order to deal her a ‘strategic defeat’.

This makes the Ukrainian war an existential conflict, and one that will be suffered quite long and in the face of most if not all economic hardships the West may seek to inflict on Russian citizens. Indeed, any economic assault initially at least will only cement the support of the elite and population for Putin and the SMO, catalyzing Russia’s traditional inclination to aspire to solidarity or wholeness [see Gordon M. Hahn, Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Thought, Culture, History, and Politics (London: Europe Books, 2022)].

Second, sanctions have had a minimal effect on Russia’s economy, and there is little left to sanction. He mentions sanctioning Russian goods sold in the US, but there are virtually none. This means that Trump will be focusing on secondary sanctions, which will hurt third countries, including likely European allies, who continue to buy Russian oil and gas through the dark market of Russia’s shadow fleet. Another Trump threat -- driving down oil prices -- will likewise harm the economies of U.S. allies and that of the U.S. itself.

It will be extraordinarily difficult – perhaps a bridge too far – to get the West, particularly the American public and Senate, to support a treaty agreement that effectively terminates NATO's aspiration to take Ukraine if not other states in Russia's sphere of influence and cedes Crimea and the noted four Ukrainian eastern and southern regions to Russia.

A caveat regarding the latter may be that Russia’s further advance into other regions of Ukraine will make it clear to Americans (and Europeans) that return of the first five regions taken by Russia is impossible, and in order to save Ukraine from further Russian conquest a peace treaty must be signed as soon as possible.

Russian forces are already in and advancing deeper into Kharkiv (Kharkov), Sumy, and Mikolayiv (Mikolaev) regions and are soon to cross into the key industrial region of Dnipro (Dnepropetrovsk). By summer, the entire territory of at least one of these four regions is likely to be added to Russia’s inventory and by year's end likely all four.

Therefore, the West and Ukraine will need to make compromises on other issues to return these newly occupied regions to Kiev's fold. Here I put aside the possibility of the collapse of both the Ukrainian army and state this year.

Finally, there will need to be a two-track structure to any talks, because Moscow’s central demand – an end to NATO expansion – is not likely to be limited to Ukraine.

Moldova and Georgia remain NATO ‘target states.’ Moreover, any end to NATO expansion to Ukraine, not to mention to Moldova and Georgia, will require a new security architecture for Europe and western Eurasia (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, and perhaps Armenia and Azerbaijan as well).

The West has been pressuring the less anti-Russian Georgian leadership so that it turns against Moscow as Ukraine did in 2014. Moldova has a serious stateness problem in the breakaway republic of Transdniestr, which poses a problem similar to that Crimea and Donbas have posed for Ukraine. Armenia has recently turned to the West, after Russia’s preoccupation with Ukraine prevented Moscow from protecting Armenia against Azerbaijani aggression.

With the arrival of new weapons, such as Oreshnik, and redeployments of weapons by both sides during the war, new limits on deployments such as those negotiated by the US and USSR under the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty abandoned by both Moscow and Washington in recent years and new nuclear arms control and anti-ballistic missile treaties will be needed to stabilize the situation.

These issues will need to be negotiated separately and are likely to take much longer to resolve than an already exceedingly complex Russo-Ukrainian peace treaty.

Finally, I should not ‘talk about the Ukrainian war without (discussing) Ukraine.’ It may take a change in leader to have successful negotiations. Zelenskiy’s interest in ending the war is minimal, since there will be many questions from Ukrainian ‘left’ (democrats and socialists) and even the right (nationalists, ultranationalists, and neofascists) about why Zelenskiy chose to abandon the 2022 Istanbul agreement and got to war with Russia.

In any elections he will be hard-pressed to win. Since he has had his security services investigate ex-president Petro Poroshenko, ex-commander of Ukraine’s armed forces, Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhniy, and others for treason on the basis of no evidence, he is unlikely to find an accommodating, compromise-willing opposition.

Moreover, the ultranationalists and neofascists steadfastly oppose any and all negotiations with the ‘moskals’ and will likely move against Zelenskiy should he seek peace. In the end, Zelenskiy may lose far more than a reelection campaign.

Ukraine’s road to the negotiating table will be a dangerous one, and with the army on the verge of collapse, some period of chaos could further complicate the starting or maintaining the negotiating process. So there is a long road ahead before Ukraine sees any peace; 100 days will not suffice either for concluding a Ukrainian peace or for putting back together the European security architecture that NATO expansion without and against Russia and the NATO-Russia-Ukrainian War it spawned.