Mr. Trump has presided over the partners\u2019 separation.<\/p>\n
The headlines are well known: Mr. Trump\u2019s televised Oval Office humiliation of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in February. The August summit with Mr. Putin in Alaska. The furious flurry of diplomacy that led to the Mar-a-Lago meeting on Sunday with Mr. Zelensky<\/a>, the latest high-stakes but inconclusive negotiation in which the fate of Ukraine has seemed to hang in the balance.<\/p>\n It is still unclear when, and if, a deal will be reached. This is the chaotic and previously untold story behind the past year of head-spinning headlines:<\/p>\n The Ukraine specialists at the Pentagon afraid to utter the word \u201cUkraine.\u201d Mr. Trump telling his chosen envoy to Russia and Ukraine, \u201cRussia is mine.\u201d The secretary of state quoting from \u201cThe Godfather\u201d in negotiations with the Russians. The Ukrainian defense minister pleading with the American defense secretary, \u201cJust be honest with me.\u201d A departing American commander\u2019s \u201cbeginning of the end\u201d memo. Mr. Zelensky\u2019s Oval Office phone call, set up by the president, with a former Miss Ukraine.<\/p>\n This account draws on more than 300 interviews with national security officials, military and intelligence officers and diplomats in Washington, Kyiv and across Europe. Virtually all insisted on anonymity, for fear of reprisal from Mr. Trump and his administration.<\/p>\n Mr. Trump had scant ideological commitment. His pronouncements and determinations were often shaped by the last person he spoke to, by how much respect he felt the Ukrainian and Russian leaders had shown him, by what caught his eye on Fox News.<\/p>\n Policy was forged in the clash of bitterly warring camps.<\/p>\n Mr. Biden had left the Ukrainians a financial and weapons nest egg to cushion them for an uncertain future. Mr. Trump\u2019s point man for peace negotiations presented him with a plan to maintain support for Ukraine and squeeze the Russian war machine.<\/p>\n But that strategy ran headlong into a phalanx of Ukraine skeptics led by the vice president, JD Vance, and like-minded officials he seeded at the Pentagon and elsewhere in the administration. In their view, instead of squandering America\u2019s depleted military stocks on a sinking ship, they should be reapportioned to counter the greatest global threat: China.<\/p>\n A cold wind \u2014 what one senior military officer called \u201ca de facto anti-Ukraine policy\u201d \u2014 swept through the Pentagon. Time and again, Mr. Hegseth and his advisers undermined, sidelined or silenced front-line generals and administration officials sympathetic to Ukraine.<\/p>\n Against that backdrop, Mr. Trump granted Mr. Hegseth and other subordinates wide latitude to make decisions about the flow of aid to Ukraine. On several occasions, when those decisions brought bad press or internal backlash \u2014 as with the 18,000 shells \u2014 Ukraine-friendly commentators at Fox stepped in and persuaded the president to reverse them.<\/p>\n Even as Mr. Trump bullied Mr. Zelensky, he seemed to coddle Mr. Putin. When the Russian stiff-armed peace proposals and accelerated bombing campaigns on Ukrainian cities, Mr. Trump would lash out on Truth Social and ask his aides, \u201cDo we sanction their banks or do we sanction their energy infrastructure?\u201d For months, he did neither.<\/p>\n But in secret, the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. military, with his blessing, supercharged a Ukrainian campaign of drone strikes on Russian oil facilities and tankers to hobble Mr. Putin\u2019s war machine.<\/p>\n Day to day, Mr. Trump was inconsistent. But he was still a deal maker determined to broker a deal \u2014 and convinced that, in the calculus of leverage, the advantage lay with the stronger. Both sides fought a war within the war, to shape the president\u2019s perceptions. \u201cThey look invincible,\u201d he told aides in May after seeing footage of a military parade in Moscow. Three weeks later, after Ukraine mounted an audacious covert drone operation inside Russia, Mr. Zelensky sent a parade of aides to the White House with his own victory message: \u201cWe are not losing. We are winning.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet on the battlefield and at the negotiating table, Mr. Trump kept pushing the Ukrainians deeper and deeper into a box. What he underestimated was the Russian leader\u2019s refusal to budge from his demands.<\/p>\n The origin point of this story was the president\u2019s belief in what he saw as his personal connection to Mr. Putin. On the campaign trail, he had promised to broker peace quickly, perhaps even before taking office. After he won the election, European and Middle Eastern leaders began calling, offering to help smooth the way for talks with the Russians during the transition.<\/p>\n Mr. Trump\u2019s aides knew he was eager to get started, but they were also aware of the shadow that outreach to Russia had cast over his first term. Then, several aides\u2019 undisclosed contacts with the Russians before the inauguration had become part of the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Mr. Trump took to bitterly calling it \u201cthe Russia, Russia, Russia hoax.\u201d<\/p>\n This time, his aides decided, they needed official cover.<\/p>\n \u201cLook, we\u2019ve been getting all kinds of outreach,\u201d Mr. Trump\u2019s pick for national security adviser, Michael Waltz, told his Biden administration counterpart, Jake Sullivan. \u201cWe\u2019d like to go ahead and start testing some of these, because Trump wants to move quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n And so Mr. Waltz made a request, never before reported, for a letter of permission from Mr. Biden.<\/p>\n A Ukrainian tank that was struck by a drone a few miles from the Kursk region of Russia.<\/p>\n Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York Times<\/p>\n The Transition<\/p>\n U.S. Lloyd J. Austin III Def. Sec.<\/p>\n Joseph R. Biden Jr. President<\/p>\n Keith Kellogg Envoy<\/p>\n Jared Kushner Adviser<\/p>\n Donald J. Trump President<\/p>\n J.D. Vance Vice Pres.<\/p>\n Michael Waltz Nat. Sec.<\/p>\n Susie Wiles Staff Chief<\/p>\n Steve Witkoff Envoy<\/p>\n Mr. Waltz had some grounds for optimism.<\/p>\n It had been a profoundly rancorous campaign, but once it was over, Mr. Biden told aides that he wanted an orderly, cooperative transfer of power.<\/p>\n The week after the election, he hosted Mr. Trump at the Oval Office and explained why he believed it was in America\u2019s interest to continue military support for Ukraine. Mr. Trump didn\u2019t telegraph his intent. But according to two former administration officials, he ended the meeting on a strikingly gracious note, commending Mr. Biden on a \u201csuccessful presidency\u201d and promising to protect the things he cared about.<\/p>\n Before Mr. Biden dropped out of the race in July, many of his rival\u2019s most stinging attacks had been aimed at his son Hunter, over his legal troubles, struggles with addiction and business dealings in Ukraine and elsewhere. Now Mr. Trump told him, \u201cIf there\u2019s anything I can do for Hunter, please let me know.\u201d (Three weeks later, Mr. Biden would, controversially, pardon his son, sweeping away his illegal gun purchase and tax evasion convictions \u2014 and shielding him from potential presidential retribution.)<\/p>\n Mr. Biden\u2019s top national security aides had, for the most part, cordial meetings with their successors. The exception was the defense secretary, Lloyd J. Austin III. Mr. Austin had been a proud architect of the Biden administration\u2019s Ukraine partnership, and he, too, hoped to argue for its survival. He let it be known that he was available to meet with Mr. Hegseth, but the Trump transition team did not reply.<\/p>\n Mr. Waltz\u2019s request for the letter divided Mr. Biden\u2019s national security aides.<\/p>\n There is a law, the Logan Act, last employed in 1853, that prohibits an unauthorized person from negotiating a dispute between the United States and a foreign government. But the West Wing debate wasn\u2019t a legal one. It turned on far murkier questions.<\/p>\n While one senior aide argued that providing the letter would underscore Mr. Biden\u2019s desire for transition good will, another saw danger \u2014 especially given the president-elect\u2019s history of deference to Mr. Putin.<\/p>\n \u201cWhy are we going to give them cover to start what could be a very damaging Russia conversation?\u201d Jon Finer, the deputy national security adviser, asked Mr. Biden.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t as if the Biden administration hadn\u2019t explored talking to the Russians.<\/p>\n In November 2021, amid signs of impending invasion, the president had sent William J. Burns, head of the C.I.A., to Moscow to press Mr. Putin to pull back. In secret, a close Biden adviser, Amos Hochstein, had also tried to forestall invasion through talks with the chief of Russia\u2019s sovereign wealth fund, Kirill Dmitriev.<\/p>\n Now, in the twilight of his power and of the wartime partnership he had shepherded, Mr. Biden weighed the Trump team\u2019s request and saw little reason to believe that Mr. Putin would now be any more willing to negotiate peace. After all, he believed he was winning.<\/p>\n Mr. Biden would not forbid the administration-in-waiting from engaging with the Russians. But there would be no letter.<\/p>\n As one aide remembers it, \u201cWhat Biden said was: \u2018If I send this letter, it\u2019s like I\u2019m blessing whatever Trump does, and I have no idea what he\u2019s going to do. He could make a deal with Putin at Ukraine\u2019s expense and I don\u2019t want to be endorsing that.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Formal talks would wait for Inauguration Day. Still, it was imperative to be prepared. And the man who very badly wanted to be at the center of those preparations was Keith Kellogg.<\/p>\n A retired Army general and one of the president-elect\u2019s most loyal longtime aides, Mr. Kellogg had served as Vice President Mike Pence\u2019s national security adviser in the first Trump presidency. He had definite ideas about the Russians and the war in Ukraine \u2014 and a conviction that if Mr. Trump didn\u2019t manage negotiations well, it would be disastrous for America, for Europe and for his legacy.<\/p>\n Mr. Kellogg\u2019s feelings about the Russians had been forged in the depths of the Cold War. Serving in U.S. Special Forces, he had led a Green Light team, soldiers trained to parachute behind Soviet lines with tactical nuclear weapons strapped between their legs. He also harbored a suspicion that the Russians had once tried to kill him. In 2000, while on the Army staff at the Pentagon, he had just left an event at the Russian embassy when he felt a sharp pain in his right elbow. Later, at dinner with friends, his wife noticed the swelling. The next day, he was rushed to the hospital, where doctors nearly had to amputate his arm to keep a staph infection from spreading.<\/p>\n His evolving ideas on the Ukraine war had formed the basis of a policy paper he published in April 2024. He had once been among those who believed that the Biden administration was not doing enough to support the Ukrainians. Now the battlefield balance had shifted, and Ukraine, Mr. Kellogg wrote, no longer had a path to victory. Still, he argued, America needed to arm the Ukrainians sufficiently to convince Mr. Putin that his territorial ambitions had hit a wall.<\/p>\n Mr. Kellogg sent the paper to Mr. Trump, who sent it back with a note at the top that read, \u201cGreat job,\u201d and beneath it his distinctively squiggly signature. Mr. Kellogg framed the autographed page and hung it in his home office.<\/p>\n As the new administration took shape, Mr. Kellogg sought, unsuccessfully, to be named defense secretary or national security adviser. But in late November, he traveled to Mar-a-Lago to pitch himself for another job \u2014 special envoy for Ukraine and Russia. This time, Mr. Trump bit.<\/p>\n Keith Kellogg, special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, arrived in Kyiv last February to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky.<\/p>\n Evgeniy Maloletka\/Associated Press<\/p>\n Almost immediately, the appointment ignited an early flaring of the ideological combat that would run through the administration\u2019s handling of the war. To some of Mr. Vance\u2019s allies, Mr. Kellogg, 80 at the time, was a Cold War relic with a cold warrior\u2019s view of the conflict and the Russian threat. Mr. Putin, they suspected, would never work with him. What\u2019s more, in their view, the sort of support Mr. Kellogg was advocating would only prolong the fighting; America needed to de-escalate.<\/p>\n Knives were out, and Mr. Kellogg didn\u2019t help himself with the \u201clistening tour\u201d he was planning of several European capitals. His daughter, Meaghan Mobbs, who ran a charity that operated aid programs in Ukraine and Afghanistan, offered to help arrange financing for the trip. She found a donor to pay for a plane and hotel expenses.<\/p>\n Some Trump aides had their suspicions about the charity, its founders and Mr. Kellogg\u2019s daughter. They saw them as fervent Ukraine advocates, openly hostile toward Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump. (In reality, some were anti-Trump, others pro-Trump.) They worried, too, that a high-profile trip, by an outspoken Putin critic, might spook the Russians. Mr. Trump\u2019s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, vetoed the trip, and Mr. Vance moved to limit his remit.<\/p>\n Mr. Kellogg could talk to the Ukrainians and Europeans, Mr. Vance told aides, \u201cbut keep him away from the Russians.\u201d<\/p>\n One man would be talking to the Russians during the transition \u2014 Steve Witkoff, the New York developer and old Trump friend who had been appointed special envoy to the Middle East. The man he would be talking to was the sovereign wealth fund chief, Mr. Dmitriev.<\/p>\n Mr. Dmitriev hadn\u2019t only flirted briefly with the Biden administration. He\u2019d had repeated flirtations with Trumpworld and come to know the president\u2019s son-in-law Jared Kushner.<\/p>\n A month into his job as Middle East envoy, Mr. Witkoff traveled to Riyadh to meet with the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, about the war in Gaza. The crown prince was aware of Mr. Trump\u2019s campaign pledge to quickly negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, and he proffered an introduction.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re going to have a lot of people come to you claiming to have a line into President Putin,\u201d the crown prince told Mr. Witkoff. And Mr. Dmitriev, he added, was \u201cthe right guy. We\u2019ve done business with him.\u201d Mr. Kushner vouched for him, too.<\/p>\n Unlike the talks that Mr. Biden had refused to sign on to, Mr. Trump\u2019s advisers told themselves, these would be informal, \u201ca business guy to a business guy.\u201d And so Mr. Trump directed Mr. Witkoff to open a back channel to the Russian.<\/p>\n A woman assessing the damage to her apartment after a bombing in Kostiantynivka, a city in the contested Donetsk region.<\/p>\n Tyler Hicks\/The New York Times<\/p>\n First Days<\/p>\n U.S. Joseph R. Biden Jr. President<\/p>\n Charles Q. Brown Jr. General<\/p>\n Dan Caldwell Def. Offic.<\/p>\n Elbridge A. Colby Def. Offic.<\/p>\n Pete Hegseth Def. Sec.<\/p>\n Joe Kasper Def. Aide<\/p>\n Keith Kellogg Envoy<\/p>\n Brian Kilmeade Fox News<\/p>\n Donald J. Trump President<\/p>\n Michael Waltz Nat. Sec.<\/p>\n Ukraine <\/p>\n What would Mr. Trump\u2019s Ukraine policy be? In the first days of his new administration, the competing camps set out their markers.<\/p>\n Mr. Hegseth \u2014 onetime infantry officer turned Fox News host \u2014 arrived at the Pentagon on Jan. 25 as something of a blank slate on the war. \u201cHe didn\u2019t have any of his own thoughts on Russia and Ukraine,\u201d a former Pentagon official explained, adding, \u201cBut he had civilian advisers who did.\u201d<\/p>\n On Day 4, the freshly minted defense secretary sat at a Pentagon conference table as one of his coterie of advisers argued for an immediate U-turn.<\/p>\n The ideological godfather of the group was Elbridge A. Colby, grandson of the Nixon-era C.I.A. director William E. Colby. The younger Mr. Colby and Mr. Vance had been introduced in 2015 by an editor at National Review who thought they were like-minded. Nearly nine years later, as Mr. Biden poured billions of dollars into arming Ukraine, Mr. Colby argued that \u201cwe would have been better served to put a lot more of that money to use in the Pacific.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, it was one of his disciples, Dan Caldwell, presenting the group\u2019s recommendations to Mr. Hegseth, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other military leaders.<\/p>\n The Pentagon, Mr. Caldwell argued, should pause delivery of certain munitions that the Biden administration had promised to Ukraine, because, he believed, existing stocks were insufficient to execute America\u2019s war plans around the world. Nor should it use the additional $3.8 billion left unspent by the Biden administration to buy weapons for Ukraine.<\/p>\n General Brown did not speak as Mr. Caldwell wrapped up. He simply shifted uncomfortably in his chair.<\/p>\n The next day, Mr. Kellogg and his team arrived at the Oval Office bearing several large charts that laid out their plan to end the war. One was headlined, hopefully, in Trumpian all-caps, \u201cAN AMERICA FIRST PLAN: TRUMP\u2019S HISTORIC PEACE DEAL FOR RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR.\u201d<\/p>\n In many ways, the plan was a refinement of Mr. Kellogg\u2019s 2024 policy paper. It echoed some of Mr. Trump\u2019s campaign talking points: \u201cStop American taxpayer dollars funding an endless war\u201d and \u201cpush Europe to step up for its own security and stability needs.\u201d In Mr. Kellogg\u2019s presentation, he quoted from Mr. Trump\u2019s book \u201cThe Art of the Deal\u201d: \u201cLeverage is the biggest strength you can have.\u201d<\/p>\n U.S. assistance would continue \u2014 but only if Mr. Zelensky agreed to negotiate with Russia.<\/p>\n For Mr. Putin, there was incentive \u2014 the easing of sanctions \u2014 and counterincentive: choking off oil and gas revenues; pressuring China to end economic support for the Russian war machine; and working with the Europeans to use more than $300 billion in frozen Russian assets to rearm and rebuild Ukraine.<\/p>\n First would come a cease-fire, then negotiations on a deal.<\/p>\n Mr. Trump broke in.<\/p>\n Ukraine, he said, should not join NATO. (Mr. Kellogg advocated at least pausing such plans.)<\/p>\n He disliked Mr. Zelensky.<\/p>\n And then, addressing his special envoy: \u201cRussia is mine, not yours,\u201d one official recalled the president saying.<\/p>\n To which a bewildered Mr. Kellogg replied, \u201cOK, you\u2019re the president.\u201d<\/p>\n At one point, Mr. Hegseth chimed in with the recommendation against using the unspent $3.8 billion. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to do that right now,\u201d the president told him.<\/p>\n Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth spoke briefly as the meeting broke up. One official recalls the president\u2019s message this way: \u201cPete, you\u2019re doing a great job, and you just go ahead and you don\u2019t need me to make decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n Back at the Pentagon, later that day, Mr. Hegseth pulled General Brown aside and told him, \u201cStop P.D.A.\u201d<\/p>\n P.D.A. referred to munitions and equipment Mr. Biden had agreed to provide using \u201cpresidential drawdown authority.\u201d But exactly what would be stopped? Generals in Europe sent blistering queries to the Pentagon.<\/p>\n Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., then the Joint Chiefs chairman, left, with Pete Hegseth on his first official day as defense secretary last January.<\/p>\n Shawn Thew\/EPA, via Shutterstock<\/p>\n At the urging of his chief of staff, Joe Kasper, Mr. Hegseth clarified his order. It would not affect supplies already headed to Ukraine by road or rail. But at the U.S. military base in Wiesbaden, Germany, nerve center of the partnership birthed by the Biden administration, Ukrainian officers suddenly saw on their screens that 11 supply flights from the United States had been canceled.<\/p>\n Within minutes, the Ukrainians began calling people who might have insight and influence.<\/p>\n They called Mr. Kellogg, who called Mr. Waltz. President Zelensky\u2019s top adviser, Andriy Yermak, called Brian Kilmeade, a Fox News personality who was supportive of Ukraine and had administration clout. Mr. Kilmeade called Mr. Hegseth and Mr. Trump. (Mr. Kilmeade declined to comment.)<\/p>\n Mr. Trump had just seemed to give Mr. Hegseth a blank check. Now he told his advisers that he had not, in fact, meant for the defense secretary to cut off the supplies.<\/p>\n The flights would resume, after a six-day pause. But for the Ukrainians and their American military partners in Europe and at the Pentagon, the episode became a premonition of their deepest fears.<\/p>\n (The Pentagon declined to answer specific questions about Mr. Hegseth\u2019s role in this and other episodes. But the chief spokesman, Sean Parnell, said in a statement that Mr. Hegseth shared the president\u2019s vision and \u201cwould never carry out actions that contradict the wishes of the President or actions that contradict the pillars of the America First agenda.\u201d)<\/p>\n A Ukrainian artillery unit, part of the 28th Mechanized Brigade, prepared to fire a U.S.-made 155-millimeter shell from an M109 howitzer on the outskirts of Kostiantynivka.<\/p>\n Tyler Hicks\/The New York Times<\/p>\n \u2018Just Be Honest With Me\u2019<\/p>\n U.S. Lloyd J. Austin III Def. Sec.<\/p>\n Dan Caldwell Def. Offic.<\/p>\n Christopher G. Cavoli General<\/p>\n Pete Hegseth Def. Sec.<\/p>\n Joe Kasper Def. Aide<\/p>\n Keith Kellogg Envoy<\/p>\n John Ratcliffe C.I.A. Chief<\/p>\n Marco Rubio State Sec.<\/p>\n Donald J. Trump President<\/p>\n Michael Waltz Nat. Sec.<\/p>\n Steve Witkoff Envoy<\/p>\n Ukraine Rustem Umerov Negotiator<\/p>\n At the Pentagon, the Joint Staff had recently prepared an assessment of the Ukrainians\u2019 battlefield situation: Unless the administration tapped into the unspent $3.8 billion, Ukraine would start to run out of critical munitions by summer. The generals knew Mr. Trump\u2019s emerging strategy hinged on Europe taking the lead. But after depleting their already thin weapons stocks to aid Ukraine, the Joint Staff warned, the Europeans had little left to give.<\/p>\n Russia, in truth, was eking out only minimal territorial gains and taking huge losses \u2014 more than 250,000 soldiers killed and 500,000 more wounded. Still, without a steady supply of American munitions to Ukraine, one senior U.S. official said, \u201ceventually the music stops.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet if Ukraine\u2019s supporters at the Pentagon hoped to sway Mr. Hegseth and his advisers, the defense secretary\u2019s camp had a different interpretation: The Ukrainians were losing, and they had till summer to push them to cut a deal with Moscow.<\/p>\n In the second week of February, Mr. Hegseth headed to Europe. His would not be a listening tour.<\/p>\n Mr. Hegseth\u2019s first stop was the Army garrison in Stuttgart, Germany, to meet with his European commander, General Cavoli.<\/p>\n For nearly three years, General Cavoli had been on Defense Secretary Austin\u2019s speed dial. Every day but Sunday, he had sent Mr. Austin a detailed battle report.<\/p>\n The general started out by sending Mr. Hegseth the same daily reports, only to be told they were too long. He sent abbreviated daily reports, only to be told they were too frequent and still too long. Henceforth, General Cavoli would send a single weekly summary, four or five sentences long.<\/p>\n On the morning of Feb. 11, General Cavoli escorted Mr. Hegseth to his office and, sitting knee to knee, walked him through everything European Command was doing to support Ukraine. \u201cIf we stop doing this,\u201d he said, \u201cit\u2019s going to veer to the wrong side.\u201d<\/p>\n Exactly what it was that so annoyed the secretary, his aides were not sure. It could have been the protesters who had gathered outside, condemning the Pentagon\u2019s crackdown on transgender soldiers. It could have been jet lag. It could have been the meager refreshments \u2014 two small bottles of water for six people \u2014 or the way the general leaned forward as he spoke. Or it could have been General Cavoli\u2019s clear sympathy for Ukraine and animus toward Russia.<\/p>\n In any case, this \u2014 their first and only meeting \u2014 \u201cwas when Hegseth began to associate General Cavoli with the Ukraine fight,\u201d an official said. \u201cHe started hating them both. And I don\u2019t know who he hated first.\u201d<\/p>\n The next day, the secretary traveled to NATO headquarters in Brussels and met with Ukraine\u2019s defense minister, Rustem Umerov. The Ukrainians had repeatedly requested a proper sit-down. Instead it would be a brief stand-up affair in an anteroom.<\/p>\n Beforehand, according to an American official present, Mr. Hegseth dabbed his nose with powder from a small compact. \u201cLook commanding,\u201d he told one aide. The handshake with the Ukrainian might be shown on Fox; the president might be watching.<\/p>\n Mr. Hegseth met with Rustem Umerov, the Ukrainian defense minister, at the NATO headquarters in Brussels last February.<\/p>\n Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Alexander C. Kubitza\/Department of Defense<\/p>\n Then the standing meeting began, Mr. Umerov coming in close, taking his voice down to a whisper, assuring the secretary that he knew America\u2019s political and security agenda might be changing. He didn\u2019t ask for new aid. He just needed to know one thing: Would the U.S. military continue to supply the munitions Ukraine was counting on, the ones approved by Mr. Biden? Every delivery sustained the lives of Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines; every delivery that didn\u2019t arrive one day meant those soldiers would die the next.<\/p>\n Again and again, Mr. Umerov repeated his plea: \u201cI just need you to be honest with me. Just be honest with me.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI got goose bumps,\u201d said an American official standing nearby. \u201cHe wasn\u2019t pleading for the answer that he wanted, but just for honesty, some indication. He was saying: You can trust me; you can trust us. Just tell me what you guys are thinking.\u201d <\/p>\n Mr. Hegseth, aides said, simply nodded.<\/p>\n Mr. Hegseth laid down his hard truths later that day at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, the international alliance supporting the war effort:<\/p>\n \u201cWe must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine\u2019s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective.\u201d<\/p>\n Then, \u201cThe United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement.\u201d<\/p>\n The Ukraine Defense Contact Group, a European alliance supporting the war effort, gathered in Brussels last February.<\/p>\n Johanna Geron\/Reuters<\/p>\n Finally, U.S. troops would not join a peacekeeping force after a deal to end the war.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think that it is wise to take Ukrainian NATO membership off the table and make territorial concessions to the Russians before the negotiations have even started,\u201d the German defense minister, Boris Pistorius, broke in. \u201cHe had steam coming off his head,\u201d a senior U.S. military officer in the room said.<\/p>\n That was just the sort of stunned reaction Mr. Hegseth had been seeking, U.S. officials recalled, and afterward, he and his adviser Mr. Caldwell pronounced \u201cmission accomplished!\u201d<\/p>\n Every point of Mr. Hegseth\u2019s speech had been coordinated with Mr. Trump\u2019s top advisers via a Signal chat. Absent from the group was Mr. Kellogg. That day and over the next several days, he would come to better understand what Mr. Trump meant when he declared, \u201cRussia is mine, not yours.\u201d<\/p>\n At 1:30 p.m. on Feb. 11, Mr. Waltz, the national security adviser, took to X to announce that Mr. Witkoff was \u201cleaving Russian airspace with Marc Fogel,\u201d an American teacher jailed in Russia since 2021.<\/p>\n It quickly emerged that the freeing of Mr. Fogel was the fruit of the talks that Mr. Witkoff \u2014 unknown to Mr. Kellogg and all but a handful of others \u2014 had begun with Mr. Dmitriev during the transition. Now the back channel had passed its first test.<\/p>\n The next morning, the president posted his own announcement, on Truth Social. He had just finished a \u201chighly productive\u201d call with Mr. Putin; their teams would start negotiations immediately.<\/p>\n On the call, according to two U.S. officials, Mr. Putin had praised Mr. Witkoff. He would lead Mr. Trump\u2019s team, along with John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director; Marco Rubio, the secretary of state; and Mr. Waltz. The post did not mention the special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, Mr. Kellogg.<\/p>\n In Germany on Feb. 14 for the Munich Security Conference, unsure whether he still had a job or what it entailed, Mr. Kellogg encountered European and Ukrainian leaders in their own storm of confusion. \u201cDo we still have an alliance?\u201d the Polish deputy prime minister, Rados\u0142aw Sikorski, asked. Mr. Kellogg sought to reassure them, describing himself as \u201cyour best friend\u201d in the administration.<\/p>\n A Hegseth loyalist at the conference, though, rendered it differently in messages to Washington, accusing Mr. Kellogg of claiming, \u201cI\u2019m holding the line against these isolationists in the administration.\u201d This only cemented the envoy\u2019s outsider status, as did a Fox News item juxtaposing his latest social media post about Mr. Zelensky (he was \u201cthe embattled and courageous leader of a nation at war\u201d) with one from Mr. Trump (he was \u201ca dictator without elections\u201d).<\/p>\n When Mr. Kellogg visited the Oval Office soon after, the president pounced.<\/p>\n \u201cSo you call Zelensky embattled and courageous?\u201d he snapped, according to two officials.<\/p>\n \u201cSir, he is,\u201d Mr. Kellogg responded. \u201cIt\u2019s an existential fight on Ukrainian soil for his nation\u2019s survival. When was the last time an American president faced that? It was Abraham Lincoln.\u201d<\/p>\n Recounting the episode later to other advisers, Mr. Trump grumbled, \u201cHe\u2019s an idiot.\u201d<\/p>\n The Inhulska uranium mine, seen from an apartment building in Pervozvanivka.<\/p>\n Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times<\/p>\n \u2018Be Very, Very Thankful\u2019<\/p>\n U.S. Scott Bessent Treas. Sec.<\/p>\n Dan Caldwell Def. Offic.<\/p>\n Lindsey Graham Senator<\/p>\n Pete Hegseth Def. Sec.<\/p>\n Keith Kellogg Envoy<\/p>\n Howard Lutnick Comm. Sec.<\/p>\n Marco Rubio State Sec.<\/p>\n Donald J. Trump President<\/p>\n J.D. Vance Vice Pres.<\/p>\n Michael Waltz Nat. Sec.<\/p>\n Ukraine Oksana Markarova Ambssdr.<\/p>\n Olha Stefanishyna Justice Min.<\/p>\n Andriy Yermak Adviser<\/p>\n Volodymyr Zelensky President<\/p>\n Mr. Trump had made some things crystal clear: For all the help America had given the Ukrainians, it should get something in return.<\/p>\n On the golf course with Mr. Trump during the campaign, Senator Lindsey Graham had floated an idea. The South Carolina Republican had recently returned from Ukraine, where officials had given him a map of the country\u2019s mineral riches. The senator recalls showing it to Mr. Trump, who proclaimed, \u201cI want half.\u201d<\/p>\n No one had a firm fix on how much mineral wealth the Ukrainians actually had, or whether it could be mined anytime soon. But by his first weeks back in office, Mr. Trump had fixated on striking an immediate deal.<\/p>\n What ensued might have been a set piece from a madcap diplomatic farce: the president\u2019s men, rivalries on display, competing to see whose version of a deal would win over the Ukrainians \u2014 and Mr. Trump.<\/p>\n First up was the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent. His plan called for Ukraine to cede half its revenue from mineral, oil and gas resources in perpetuity. He arrived in Kyiv on Feb. 12. Several top officials seemed to give positive feedback, but Mr. Zelensky declined to sign, saying he had yet to read the document. Frustrated and empty-handed, Mr. Bessent left town.<\/p>\n Mr. Vance, Mr. Rubio and Mr. Kellogg would be meeting Mr. Zelensky in Munich on Feb. 14, hopeful of agreement on a revised version of the document. They were so hopeful that they had a room all decked out, with Ukrainian and American flags, an ornate desk for the signing and tape markers on the floor instructing the dignitaries where to stand. But beforehand, Mr. Vance and Mr. Rubio pulled Mr. Zelensky away, and the Ukrainian made clear that he was not ready to sign.<\/p>\n Even so, the show would go on, and later, when Mr. Vance asked if he would sign, the president turned to the justice minister, Olha Stefanishyna, who told him, \u201cNo, you cannot sign this \u2014 it has to be approved by the Rada,\u201d Ukraine\u2019s parliament.<\/p>\n Now Mr. Kellogg headed to Kyiv to try a different tack. He asked Mr. Zelensky\u2019s top adviser, Mr. Yermak, to arrange for the president to sign a brief letter saying he intended to sign a document, details to follow. Mr. Trump, he explained, felt the Ukrainians were giving him the runaround.<\/p>\n Mr. Yermak sounded amenable \u2014 until, suddenly, he wasn\u2019t: He had just begun discussions, he told the American, about a different arrangement with a different administration official \u2014 the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick.<\/p>\n With talks flailing and with the president\u2019s blessing, Mr. Lutnick had thrown together a plan: Ukraine would cede half of its profits from minerals, oil and gas. And there would be a cap, of $500 billion.<\/p>\n In Kyiv, Mr. Kellogg rushed to the U.S. embassy and called Mr. Lutnick. Mr. Yermak was on the verge of getting Mr. Zelensky to sign his letter. Would Mr. Lutnick stand down? He would, an embassy official recalled him saying. Only after boarding his train back to Poland did Mr. Kellogg learn from Mr. Yermak that he and the commerce secretary were talking again.<\/p>\n In this swirl of players and documents, it fell to Mr. Waltz to call Mr. Bessent and Mr. Lutnick into the White House situation room. Mr. Trump would sort matters out. In the end, it would be Mr. Bessent carrying his plan \u2014 with the unlimited upside for America \u2014 across the finish line.<\/p>\n Only now Mr. Zelensky was insisting on a White House signing ceremony, and kept insisting even after Mr. Kellogg warned that he was setting himself up for a fall.<\/p>\n On the morning of Feb. 28, Mr. Kellogg, Mr. Graham and several other Ukraine supporters met with Mr. Zelensky for a prep session at the Hay-Adams Hotel, a short walk from the White House.<\/p>\n There would be much tortured back story to contend with. During his first term, Mr. Trump had come to blame Ukraine, not the Kremlin, for the 2016 election interference that spawned the Russia investigation. And it was his effort to have Ukraine investigate the Bidens that led to his first impeachment. In meetings, according to five aides, Mr. Trump would sometimes say of Mr. Zelensky, \u201cHe\u2019s a motherfucker.\u201d<\/p>\n Mindful of all this, according to several participants, Mr. Kellogg and the others counseled Mr. Zelensky to flatter Mr. Trump a bit, \u201cto be very, very thankful to the United States of America for what it\u2019s done\u201d for Ukraine. They counseled him specifically not to show Mr. Trump the photos he had brought of emaciated Ukrainian prisoners of war.<\/p>\n Mr. Zelensky took almost none of the pregame advice: The fall that Mr. Kellogg had feared was broadcast live, the images and insults then replayed and replayed again.<\/p>\n Mr. Zelensky and President Trump in the Oval Office in February.<\/p>\n Doug Mills\/The New York Times<\/p>\n The schedule had included a working lunch. Instead, the Ukrainians were banished to the Roosevelt Room as the Americans debated next moves.<\/p>\n \u201cLet\u2019s just have the lunch and talk our way through it,\u201d Mr. Trump told his advisers. But first Mr. Waltz, and then others, argued that Mr. Zelensky had treated the president badly and should be sent packing.<\/p>\n Mr. Waltz and Mr. Rubio would perform the eviction; a lunch, they told the Ukrainians, was clearly not going to be productive. The Ukrainians resisted. The Americans insisted. On the way out, a senior U.S. official recalled, Ukraine\u2019s ambassador, Oksana Markarova, looked as if she was crying. Afterward, Mr. Trump and his advisers ate the lunch.<\/p>\n In his office that afternoon, Fox News rerunning the showdown, Mr. Hegseth turned up the volume to hear the commentary. Mr. Caldwell and others came in, Pentagon officials recalled, and the men took turns gleefully, even giddily, deriding Mr. Zelensky and praising Mr. Trump.<\/p>\n The 14th Mechanized Brigade fired at Russian forces from an artillery position in the Kupiansk area.<\/p>\n Tyler Hicks\/The New York Times<\/p>\n The Ukrainians<\/p>\n The following Monday, March 3, Mr. Trump gathered his advisers in the Oval Office to consider recommendations for pausing aid to Ukraine. Mr. Caldwell stood outside, and as the president\u2019s aides filed in, he handed out copies of an Associated Press report with quotations highlighted in yellow.<\/p>\n Mr. Zelensky had told reporters in London that he believed the partnership remained strong, that U.S. aid would keep flowing, that a negotiated peace was \u201cvery, very far away.\u201d<\/p>\n To the president\u2019s advisers, the article was proof that Mr. Zelensky was both taking their support for granted and dismissing out of hand Mr. Trump\u2019s promise of cutting a deal.<\/p>\n Mr. Trump ordered a freeze in assistance to Ukraine. The only debate was over its duration. Aides recommended a week, but the president wanted maximum leverage. \u201cNo,\u201d he told them. \u201cLet\u2019s not say when the freeze will end.\u201d<\/p>\n Even before the freeze, two blows had shaken the partnership (and perhaps strengthened the president\u2019s hand).<\/p>\n In the fall of 2023, easing a prohibition against American boots on Ukrainian ground, Mr. Biden had sent a small complement of military advisers and other officers to Kyiv; the limit was later raised to 133. But when Mr. Hegseth saw an internal report that there were now 84 officers in Ukraine, he circled the number and declared \u201cno more.\u201d<\/p>\n After much prodding, Mr. Biden had also let the Ukrainians launch long-range American missiles known as Army Tactical Missile Systems, or ATACMS, into Russia to protect forces they had sent into the Kursk region. Mr. Trump hadn\u2019t rescinded that permission, and with the Russian defenders and North Korean allies closing in, the Ukrainians asked General Cavoli to free up their remaining 18 ATACMS. He was their steadfast champion, yet he had refused; the missiles were an older variant with little chance of penetrating Russian air defenses. Better to save them for more vulnerable targets. The Ukrainians said they understood, but still it chafed.<\/p>\n A photograph released by the Russian Defense Ministry purporting to show the remains of a U.S.-produced ATACMS missile in the Kursk region of Russia.<\/p>\n Russian Defense Ministry<\/p>\n Now came the freeze, and once again, Mr. Umerov was pleading.<\/p>\n What would it take, he asked Mr. Hegseth the next day, to get the aid flowing again?<\/p>\n Mr. Hegseth stuck to the script crafted by the White House: \u201cWe need to see you taking the negotiation process seriously.\u201d<\/p>\n Taking the negotiation process seriously would mean facing up to some painful diplomatic candor.<\/p>\n On March 11, Mr. Rubio stood in a conference room at a hotel in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and spread a large map of Ukraine on the table. It charted the two armies\u2019 line of contact \u2014 the line cleaving the country between Ukrainian- and Russian-held land.<\/p>\n \u201cI want to know what your absolute bottom lines are; what do you have to have to survive as a country?\u201d he asked the Ukrainians, according to a U.S. official who was present.<\/p>\n A March meeting of American and Ukrainian officials in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.<\/p>\n Ukrainian Presidential Press Service<\/p>\n Opening the day, the Ukrainians had quickly agreed to Mr. Trump\u2019s call for an immediate, across-the-board 30-day cease-fire.<\/p>\n Now, as the group stood peering down at the map of Ukraine, Mr. Waltz handed Mr. Umerov a dark blue marker and told him, \u201cStart drawing.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Umerov traced Ukraine\u2019s northern border with Russia and Belarus, then followed the line of contact through the oblasts of Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.<\/p>\n He then circled the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe\u2019s largest. According to a Ukrainian official, Mr. Umerov warned that the Russian occupiers were failing to maintain the plant, risking \u201cnuclear disaster.\u201d Ukraine wanted it back.<\/p>\n Finally he pointed to the Kinburn Spit, a needle of beach and salt meadow jutting into the Black Sea. Regaining control of the spit, he explained, would allow Ukrainian ships to move in and out of the shipyards of Mykolaiv.<\/p>\n Ukraine\u2019s first territorial suggestion for a peace plan <\/p>\n A Ukrainian delegation indicated that it was prepared to accept an agreement that stopped the war at the current front line, provided it kept two areas vital to national security.<\/p>\n Source: The Institute for the Study of War with American Enterprise Institute\u2019s Critical Threats Project (Russian territorial control as of Feb. 19, 2025).<\/p>\n Daniel Wood\/The New York Times<\/p>\n Across three years of war, Mr. Zelensky had vowed and vowed again that Ukraine\u2019s armies would fight until they won back their stolen land. This was his most politically untenable of red lines.<\/p>\n Here, then, was the breakthrough moment, one American official recalled \u2014 \u201cthe first time that Zelensky, through his people, said, in order to reach peace I\u2019m willing to give up 20 percent of my country.\u201d<\/p>\n The Ukrainians, Mr. Trump\u2019s advisers told one another, were now \u201cin the box.\u201d<\/p>\n Later that day, Mr. Trump directed that aid resume, and his advisers drew up the parameters of a deal.<\/p>\n Ukraine would forfeit territory along Mr. Umerov\u2019s line. While Ukraine could join the European Union, Mr. Trump would block admission to NATO. The nuclear plant would be run by the United States or an international organization. The Americans would ask Russia to return the Kinburn Spit.<\/p>\n Then there was Crimea. The peninsula, seized by Russia in 2014, was perhaps the most powerful symbol of the homeland yearnings underpinning the war on both sides. Accepting it as Russian, the Trump team reasoned, would be a powerful carrot for Mr. Putin.<\/p>\n It would also be one of the hardest for the Ukrainians to accept. The mere suggestion, at the talks\u2019 start, had set Mr. Umerov to speechifying.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can\u2019t believe Russian propaganda, because they will tell you that Crimea is not Ukrainian, that it has always been Russian,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I am here to tell you that I am Crimean Tatar and Crimea is Ukrainian.\u201d His family had been exiled by the Russians to Uzbekistan but returned to Crimea when he was 9. There he had watched his father and brother build a house with their own hands.<\/p>\n Now Mr. Rubio told the Ukrainians that Mr. Trump wouldn\u2019t ask them, or the Europeans, to recognize the Russians\u2019 claim. \u201cWe\u2019ll be the only ones,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The Americans understood the Ukrainians\u2019 objections and reservations. But as a senior U.S. official recalled, \u201cThe specific question we asked them was, \u2018Are you going to walk away over this?\u2019 And they said, \u2018No.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n It was in the midst of the talks that Mr. Trump made official Mr. Kellogg\u2019s diminished role, posting on Truth Social that he was now \u201cSpecial Envoy to Ukraine.\u201d Mr. Kellogg would try to comfort the Ukrainians, counseling them to think of post-World War II Germany \u2014 divided between the U.S.-aligned West and the Soviet-aligned East. The Russians might get Crimea and large swaths of the east today, but in the future Ukraine could again be made whole.<\/p>\n Now the ball was in the Russians\u2019 court. And if Mr. Putin refused to play? \u201cThen he has a Donald Trump problem,\u201d Mr. Rubio told the Ukrainians in Jeddah.<\/p>\n Boys fishing as smoke rose from dozens of reported Russian drone strikes on industrial sites in Dnipro.<\/p>\n Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times<\/p>\n The Russians<\/p>\n U.S. Michael Anton State Offic.<\/p>\n Richard Blumenthal Senator<\/p>\n Dan Caldwell Def. Offic.<\/p>\n Christopher G. Cavoli General<\/p>\n Pete Hegseth Def. Sec.<\/p>\n Joe Kasper Def. Aide<\/p>\n Keith Kellogg Envoy<\/p>\n Marco Rubio State Sec.<\/p>\n Donald J. Trump President<\/p>\n Michael Waltz Nat. Sec.<\/p>\n Steve Witkoff Envoy<\/p>\n Russia Kirill Dmitriev Wealth Fund<\/p>\n Sergei Lavrov Foreign Min.<\/p>\n Vladimir V. Putin President<\/p>\n Yuri Ushakov Putin Aide<\/p>\n The Americans might have been comfortable bullying the Ukrainians. But to get Mr. Putin to play, they felt they needed a softer approach.<\/p>\n At the first negotiating session, in February in Riyadh, Mr. Rubio had sought to break the ice. He channeled his inner Brando.<\/p>\n Sitting across from the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and the close Putin aide Yuri Ushakov, he offered his rendition of the scene from \u201cThe Godfather\u201d in which Vito Corleone counsels his son about threats from rival crime families and tells him: \u201cI spend my life trying not to be careless. Women and children can be careless, but not men.\u201d Nuclear powers, Mr. Rubio explained, need to communicate.<\/p>\n Even the characteristically scowling Mr. Lavrov broke a smile.<\/p>\n From the beginning, Mr. Trump\u2019s advisers had judged that Mr. Putin had two options:<\/p>\n Fight on, at great cost \u2014 in battlefield dead, in economic havoc, in damage to his relationship with the American president.<\/p>\n Or cut a deal, laden with what Mr. Waltz touted to the Russians as \u201call of this upside\u201d: an easing of sanctions, a new era of business cooperation \u2014 even an end to exile from the group of leading industrialized nations.<\/p>\n What made Mr. Trump confident about the upside was his belief in a personal connection to Mr. Putin. Returning from Moscow, Mr. Witkoff would gush about the Russian\u2019s \u201chuge respect\u201d for the president. But there was more than that: For the first time in years, Mr. Trump\u2019s aides told themselves, an American president and many top advisers were courting the Russians, listening with sympathetic ears. Surely Mr. Putin would see value there.<\/p>\n Yet it was not quite so simple. Mr. Witkoff may have been plying his back channel with Mr. Dmitriev. But the official negotiations would be conducted by two very different Russians, seasoned diplomats with a more orthodox adherence to geopolitical grievances and rivalries.<\/p>\n Mr. Lavrov was a nationalist hard-liner vehemently opposed to concessions to end the war; he spoke ominously about \u201csolving the Ukraine problem once and for all.\u201d Mr. Ushakov came across as more open. Yet he, too, spoke frequently about the war\u2019s \u201croot causes\u201d \u2014 Kremlin shorthand for Mr. Putin\u2019s bitterness over his country\u2019s diminished post-Soviet world stature.<\/p>\n This front-channel, back-channel tension flared in the episode of the chairs.<\/p>\n At the February talks in Riyadh, Mr. Rubio, Mr. Waltz and Mr. Witkoff had taken their seats opposite Mr. Lavrov and Mr. Ushakov. The third chair, Mr. Dmitriev\u2019s, was empty. \u201cWe want to wait for him?\u201d a puzzled Mr. Rubio asked. \u201cNo,\u201d Mr. Lavrov responded, and the chair was moved to the back of the room.<\/p>\n When the second session began, there were three chairs on the Russian side, and Mr. Dmitriev was in the room. According to two U.S. officials who were present, Mr. Lavrov moved the chair back to the rear, only to have Mr. Dmitriev retrieve it, sit down and later extol the economic benefits of a peace deal. (A spokeswoman for Mr. Dmitriev said the American account of the episode was \u201ccompletely not true,\u201d adding, \u201cThe meeting was always preplanned and structured with clearly defined political and economic segments.\u201d)<\/p>\n American and Russian officials discussed ending the war at a February meeting in Riyadh.<\/p>\n Evelyn Hockstein\/Reuters<\/p>\n If all of this bred uncertainty about where Mr. Putin stood, the hard-liners sought to put it to rest. To understand Mr. Putin\u2019s negotiating position, they told the Americans, they should refer to his June 2024 speech to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: Mr. Putin would not end the war until he fulfilled his territorial ambitions \u2014 complete control of the four oblasts in Ukraine\u2019s east.<\/p>\n At that moment, in three of them, Russia controlled less than three-quarters of the territory. Mr. Trump could force the Ukrainians to abandon the rest, or the Russians would fight on.<\/p>\n Mr. Putin, the hard-liners seemed to be saying, wasn\u2019t terribly keen on the Americans\u2019 upside.<\/p>\n Once they had maneuvered the Ukrainians into the box, the Americans hoped to persuade the Russians to make concessions of their own. Wouldn\u2019t Mr. Putin want to stay on Mr. Trump\u2019s good side?<\/p>\n A week after Jeddah, Mr. Trump called Mr. Putin and asked him to accept the cease-fire. But the Russian would only agree to negotiate a narrow pause \u2014 of strikes on energy infrastructure.<\/p>\n To Mr. Trump\u2019s advisers, perhaps the problem was less the incentives than skepticism that the president would deliver. \u201cToday, Trump says one thing; tomorrow, who knows?\u201d a senior European official recalls Mr. Lavrov saying. During his first presidency, after all, Mr. Trump had spoken about warming relations only to have Russia hawks in key national security posts double down with more adversarial policies.<\/p>\n Now, preparing for a second round of talks in Riyadh in late March, the Americans sought to show that this time would be different. They sent representatives who had been prominent critics of the Biden administration\u2019s support for Ukraine \u2014 Michael Anton, the State Department\u2019s head of policy planning, and Mr. Hegseth\u2019s aide Mr. Caldwell. \u201cA lot of people you don\u2019t like are not here,\u201d Mr. Anton told the Russians in Riyadh.<\/p>\n The Americans hoped to parlay the freeze on energy strikes into the broad cease-fire that the Ukrainians had accepted in Jeddah. But the talks would end where they had begun, with the Russians agreeing only to freeze energy strikes for 30 days.<\/p>\n Mr. Witkoff remained an optimist. \u201cSteve says, \u2018It\u2019s always going great,\u2019\u201d a senior U.S. official said. Yet however much the president\u2019s advisers wanted to believe in Mr. Dmitriev, many still couldn\u2019t. Some, too, harbored misgivings about Mr. Witkoff. They were reluctant to speak up because of his friendship with the president, but they noticed how Mr. Witkoff sometimes seemed to lack an understanding of Ukraine\u2019s geography and its strategic implications.<\/p>\n There was also his insistence on meeting alone with Mr. Putin and his aides; some American officials worried that would leave the diplomatically inexperienced Mr. Witkoff open to manipulation. At the first meeting, he was not accompanied by a U.S. government translator; while he did take one to subsequent meetings, he would not bring a note taker.<\/p>\n \u201cHe felt like Putin had invited him, and that he had this level of rapport with Putin,\u201d an official explained. Mr. Witkoff told colleagues, \u201cI\u2019m a trained lawyer \u2014 I was the note taker.\u201d<\/p>\n Over the next three months, Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Dmitriev tried to move the needle. The two men privately discussed possible new concessions to Mr. Putin that went far beyond those presented to the Ukrainians. Mr. Witkoff smoothed the way for Mr. Dmitriev\u2019s brief April visit to Washington, bearing what the Russian touted as new proposals for consideration.<\/p>\n The meetings were held at Mr. Witkoff\u2019s house in the Kalorama neighborhood, and to promote Mr. Dmitriev\u2019s credibility, Mr. Witkoff invited Mr. Rubio and a group of senators to dinner on the night of April 2.<\/p>\n Among the senators was Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat and outspoken Ukraine supporter. He had accepted the invitation, he recalled, with \u201cmixed feelings\u201d about \u201chaving this very elegant meal with a guy who is one of Putin\u2019s henchmen.\u201d He added, \u201cI was a little put off by the friendliness, the chumminess, the coziness between him and Witkoff.\u201d<\/p>\n At the dinner, Mr. Blumenthal said, he confronted Mr. Dmitriev, \u201cas politely and courteously as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t say, \u2018You have blood on your hands,\u2019\u201d he recalled. \u201cBut I basically said, \u2018We hope you will come to the table because Russia here is the aggressor, and people are dying.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n One Trump adviser said the dinner was a way to pass a message to Mr. Putin through Mr. Dmitriev: \u201cWe have a lot of political obstacles here. This is what I heard here. Here are the political realities in Washington.\u201d<\/p>\n It was amid the hope against hope in negotiations that Mr. Hegseth\u2019s acrimony toward General Cavoli erupted.<\/p>\n The morning after the Dmitriev dinner party, the CNN correspondent Natasha Bertrand posted a message on X quoting the general\u2019s remarks to a Senate committee that Russia constituted a \u201cchronic\u201d and \u201cgrowing\u201d threat. Aides forwarded the post to Mr. Hegseth as evidence that the general was undercutting efforts to win over Mr. Putin. \u201cFire Cavoli,\u201d Mr. Hegseth barked to his chief of staff, Mr. Kasper, according to officials briefed on the conversation. General Cavoli would have become one of the at least two dozen top military officers<\/a> purged by the defense secretary had Mr. Kasper not pointed out that a European general would have temporarily overseen U.S. nuclear forces in Europe.<\/p>\n Gen. Christopher G. Cavoli speaking with Senator Rick Scott before the start of an Armed Services Committee hearing in April.<\/p>\n Brendan Smialowski\/Agence France-Presse \u2014 Getty Images<\/p>\n On April 8, the general appeared before a House committee. First, though, a Caldwell ally at the Pentagon, Katherine Thompson, testified that \u201ccontours of a lasting peace are coming into view,\u201d that an initial cease-fire \u2014 presumably the freeze on energy strikes \u2014 was taking hold.<\/p>\n Then General Cavoli spoke and, apparently unaware how close he had just come to being fired, repeated his warning about the Russian threat. This time the secretary called him and, according to an official briefed on the conversation, told him that by his \u201cwords, demeanor and testimony\u201d he was undermining the president. What had he said? the general asked. \u201cIt\u2019s not what you said necessarily; it\u2019s what you didn\u2019t say,\u201d the secretary responded. \u201cYou didn\u2019t say cease-fire, you didn\u2019t say peace, you didn\u2019t say negotiations.\u201d<\/p>\n In fact, that initial cease-fire was holding only in the slimmest sense, with each side accusing the other of violations. Ukraine agreed to extend the pause; Russia refused.<\/p>\n Even Mr. Trump had to ask, \u201cDoes Putin really want a deal, or does he want all of Ukraine?\u201d The president, one aide said, was beginning to suspect that he had \u201ccompletely overestimated\u201d his ability to charm Mr. Putin. A few weeks later, a senior European official spoke with Mr. Putin. Mr. Zelensky had conceded so much; Mr. Trump had offered so much. \u201cIf you ask me, Trump\u2019s position is very close to your position,\u201d he told the Russian president. \u201cWhy don\u2019t you agree to a cease-fire and get the Americans to lift the sanctions?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe want to get peace,\u201d Mr. Putin responded, and then reiterated his maximalist demands: Not only did he want all of the contested territory; he wanted the Americans and Europeans to recognize the legitimacy of his claims.<\/p>\n The European official later pressed Mr. Witkoff to take more initiative to bring Mr. Putin to the table. Mr. Witkoff\u2019s message was: \u201cWe have tried every imaginable idea. And none of it was working. And we\u2019d gotten to this place that, maybe, they just needed to fight it out.\u201d<\/p>\n Civilians at a bombed apartment building in Sloviansk, part of the Donetsk region.<\/p>\n Tyler Hicks\/The New York Times<\/p>\n \u2018De Facto Anti-Ukraine Policy\u2019<\/p>\n U.S. Joseph R. Biden Jr. President<\/p>\n Dan Caine General<\/p>\n Dan Caldwell Def. Offic.<\/p>\n Christopher G. Cavoli General<\/p>\n Elbridge A. Colby Def. Offic.<\/p>\n Alexus G. Grynkewich General<\/p>\n Pete Hegseth Def. Sec.<\/p>\n Joe Kasper Def. Aide<\/p>\n Jack Keane Ret. Gen.<\/p>\n Keith Kellogg Envoy<\/p>\n Donald J. Trump President<\/p>\n J.D. Vance Vice Pres.<\/p>\n The line of contact stretched for 750 miles. By June, the twin vectors of the war \u2014 the war of words and the war of blood and bullets \u2014 were coalescing at one point on that line, at the place called Pokrovsk.<\/p>\n Since the previous July, the Russians had increasingly trained their forces and firepower on the city. A railway hub of 60,000 people before the war, Pokrovsk was now a shell of fewer than 2,000 holding out in the ruins. The Russians\u2019 losses had been calamitous, many tens of thousands. And still Pokrovsk had not fallen.<\/p>\n For Mr. Putin and his generals, though, the ghost city was gold \u2014 another trophy in the yearslong campaign to capture all of Donetsk Oblast. If Mr. Putin could finally win Pokrovsk, it would signal to Mr. Trump that Russian victory was inevitable.<\/p>\n For Ukraine and its champions, Pokrovsk was asking a different question: Would the Pentagon provide the munitions to help sustain Ukraine\u2019s defenses, to show Mr. Putin that the price of Pokrovsk was too much to pay?<\/p>\n That question was at the center of powerful crosscurrents roiling the Pentagon.<\/p>\n General Cavoli and others who had long worked to support Ukraine remained deeply devoted to the cause. Mr. Vance\u2019s allies, people like Mr. Colby and Mr. Caldwell, were eager to start withholding munitions.<\/p>\n Their devotion was directed elsewhere \u2014 to Asia, to hedge against Chinese designs on Taiwan, and to the Middle East, where war was brewing with Iran and where Israel, fighting in Gaza, was asking for about 100,000 155-millimeter shells, a large proportion of the U.S. military\u2019s depleted stocks.<\/p>\n For three years, even as the Pentagon struggled to increase production of critical weaponry, the Biden administration had poured munitions into Ukraine. Mr. Vance\u2019s allies were unwilling to take that risk.<\/p>\n As a senior U.S. military officer put it: \u201cThey believed that Ukraine was on the verge of failing. The fact that empirical evidence indicated the opposite didn\u2019t seem to bother them; if anything, they seemed to think it meant that they should help Ukraine fail faster to get it over with.\u201d<\/p>\n The man in the middle, with his hand on the spigot, was Mr. Hegseth.<\/p>\n His guide in navigating this dynamic would be something called the stoplight chart.<\/p>\n The stoplight chart compared the number of certain munitions the Pentagon had in stock with the number needed for war plans around the world. If the military had less than half the quantity required, a munition was coded \u201cred.\u201d Mr. Hegseth had three options: Stop providing red munitions, halve the supply or cut it at a rate to be determined. He could also maintain the status quo.<\/p>\n In February, Mr. Caldwell and his allies recommended that Mr. Hegseth start withholding a range of critical munitions. Instead, the secretary stayed the course. He didn\u2019t want to get ahead of the president, he told them, didn\u2019t want to imperil the minerals deal. (It would be signed in April.)<\/p>\n In March, after Mr. Trump called off the aid freeze imposed after the Oval Office fiasco, Mr. Caldwell and his allies recommended hewing to the status quo, but with one exception \u2014 U.S.-made 155-millimeter shells that Mr. Biden had promised Ukraine just before leaving office. (The Pentagon could still provide shells purchased from abroad.)<\/p>\n The shells, fired from M777 howitzers, had been key to Ukraine\u2019s successful 2022 counteroffensive. And while the Ukrainians had increasingly come to rely on domestically produced attack drones, the 155s remained a workhorse of their arsenal. Pentagon stocks were precariously low, Mr. Caldwell told Mr. Hegseth; a cutoff was the only way to force the Europeans to step up.<\/p>\n Mr. Kasper sought, futilely, to dissuade his boss; to hold back the Russians, the Ukrainians needed more shells than Europe could provide. But Mr. Hegseth, unannounced, ordered the freeze. Some American officers called it a \u201cshadow ban.\u201d<\/p>\n Which was why, for three and a half months, those thousands upon thousands of shells lay waiting on pallets at the Army\u2019s ammunition depot in western Germany. It was why General Cavoli and his staff sent email after email pleading for their release. And it was why it fell to General Keane, a Fox contributor, to visit Mr. Hegseth at the Pentagon and then call the president to get the train moving. (General Keane declined to comment.)<\/p>\n \u201cThe last time I checked, our policy was to support Ukraine,\u201d a senior U.S. military officer said. \u201cThe president said to restart shipments. And these people at the Pentagon were preventing that from happening, creating a de facto anti-Ukraine policy by dragging their feet, putting sticks in the spokes and slow-rolling support in these nasty little ways.\u201d<\/p>\n Near Pokrovsk, a commander who goes by the name Alex was rationing 155s. With 200 a day, his men could attack only five of the 50 targets spotted by reconnaissance drones. \u201cIt\u2019s not enough to hold the line,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n Alex had fought in Bakhmut, another small city that had once seemed to encompass the full stakes of the war. He had watched the war evolve. \u201cIn Bakhmut, it was Ukrainian soldier and Russian soldier, face to face, in trenches,\u201d he said. In Pokrovsk, \u201cdrones are killing the Russians more than bullets and artillery shells.\u201d<\/p>\n And still the Ukrainians were overmatched \u2014 in drones, in troops and in those mainstay artillery shells. \u201cThe fewer shells we have, the more casualties we have,\u201d Alex explained. \u201cThere is a direct correlation.\u201d<\/p>\n On June 11, the same day Mr. Hegseth testified to the Senate subcommittee that the munitions Mr. Biden had promised were \u201cstill flowing,\u201d he signed an updated version of the stoplight chart. It required European Command to get his permission before sending red munitions to the Ukrainians. Deliveries were halted, awaiting clarity from Mr. Hegseth.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve never seen this before in my life,\u201d Gen. Dan Caine, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told colleagues who confronted him about the order. (General Brown had been fired in late February.)<\/p>\n Gen. Dan Caine, the Joint Chiefs chairman, with Mr. Hegseth at a Senate hearing in June.<\/p>\n Kenny Holston\/The New York Times<\/p>\n General Cavoli would be retiring on July 1, and he sent Mr. Hegseth what American officers called the \u201cbeginning of the end\u201d memo. The Ukrainians were slowly losing, he wrote, and if the Pentagon did not provide more munitions, they would lose faster.<\/p>\n The Europeans had already developed a plan to arm the Ukrainians from their existing weapons stocks and buy new U.S.-made munitions for themselves and for Ukraine. Yet those weapons would hardly arrive immediately; it would take time to expand production lines, time to manufacture the munitions. And with everyone\u2019s stocks depleted, the Europeans and Ukrainians would have to wait in a queue behind the U.S. military to buy the new weapons.<\/p>\n Ukraine also needed more than artillery shells. If the 155s were the most basic frozen red munitions, the most technologically advanced were the PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhancement interceptors. Nothing else was as proficient at shooting down the ballistic missiles terrorizing Ukrainian cities; only the Americans could provide them.<\/p>\n They were also in chronically short supply. Only 50 or so came off the production line each month.<\/p>\n News that the Ukrainians wouldn\u2019t be getting their scheduled complement of interceptors came as the Russians were quickening their barrage. In May, they had fired 45 ballistic missiles into Ukraine; in June, they would fire 59. By month\u2019s end, the Ukrainians\u2019 supply of PAC-3s would dwindle to 16.<\/p>\n Between 6 p.m. on July 3 and the next morning, the Russians launched 539 attack drones and seven ballistic missiles toward Kyiv, one of their heaviest bombardments of the capital, the Ukrainian Air Force reported. Two civilians were killed, 31 more wounded. The Polish embassy was damaged by falling debris.<\/p>\n On July 4, Mr. Kellogg called the president and told him, \u201cThis is how wars spin out of control,\u201d explaining the stoplight chart and referring to Poland\u2019s membership in NATO. Mr. Trump then directed him to tell Mr. Hegseth to immediately transfer 10 PAC-3s.<\/p>\n Two weeks later, the 10 interceptors had yet to be sent. Heading home from Kyiv, Mr. Kellogg stopped in Wiesbaden. The Pentagon, officials there told him, was \u201cmetering\u201d deliveries of a range of munitions to Ukraine. Back in Washington, he visited the Pentagon.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re slowing things down. This is killing them,\u201d he told Mr. Hegseth.<\/p>\n \u201cNo, we\u2019re not,\u201d the secretary replied.<\/p>\n General Caine was in the room, and now he interceded. \u201cWhat SACEUR wants, SACEUR gets,\u201d General Caine told Mr. Hegseth, referring to the new supreme allied commander in Europe, Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich.<\/p>\n At month\u2019s end, the Ukrainians finally received 30 interceptors.<\/p>\n A small team of Ukraine specialists \u2014 six or so \u2014 worked in the office of the under secretary for policy, Mr. Colby. A senior military officer visited the team in late June. \u201cThey were literally afraid to say the word \u2018Ukraine,\u2019\u201d he recalled.<\/p>\n During the Biden administration, Ukrainian officials in Washington and Kyiv had been in near-constant contact with the Ukraine specialists. Now, as the Russians surged drone strikes on Ukrainian cities, the Ukrainians were desperate to acquire relatively cheap interceptors. One general who oversaw air defenses in Kyiv recalled: \u201cWe were sending the Ukraine team messages. We said we needed more of the drone interceptors. But all of a sudden, they were not responding anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n Word had come down from Mr. Hegseth\u2019s office that the specialists were not to communicate with the Ukrainians without express permission to do so. Some Hegseth aides said they suspected the specialists would try to sabotage efforts to redirect the interceptors and other critical munitions to the Middle East.<\/p>\n Late at night and on weekends, the Ukrainians would get messages from their old Pentagon contacts: \u201cWe\u2019re here, but we can\u2019t do anything. We\u2019re sorry.\u201d<\/p>\n The chill ascended the ranks.<\/p>\n General Caine had been sworn in as Joint Chiefs chairman in April. It would be August before he even called his Ukrainian counterpart.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s 100 percent Pol Pot,\u201d a senior military officer explained. \u201cThere\u2019s very much a Leninist angle here, like, we\u2019re going to tell you the sky is green, and so the sky is green.\u201d<\/p>\n The 28th Mechanized Brigade in Kostiantynivka, a key strategic goal in Russia\u2019s plans to conquer the Donetsk Oblast and the greater Donbas region.<\/p>\n Tyler Hicks\/The New York Times<\/p>\n \u2018Something That Is Working\u2019<\/p>\n In so many ways, the partnership was breaking apart. But there was a counternarrative, spooled out largely in secret. At its center was the C.I.A.<\/p>\n Where Mr. Hegseth had marginalized his Ukraine-supporting generals, the C.I.A. director, Mr. Ratcliffe, had consistently protected his own officers\u2019 efforts for Ukraine. He kept the agency\u2019s presence in the country at full strength; funding for its programs there even increased. When Mr. Trump ordered the March aid freeze, the U.S. military rushed to shut down all intelligence sharing. But when Mr. Ratcliffe explained the risk facing C.I.A. officers in Ukraine, the White House allowed the agency to keep sharing intelligence about Russian threats inside Ukraine.<\/p>\n Now, the agency honed a plan to at least buy time, to make it harder for the Russians to capitalize on the Ukrainians\u2019 extraordinary moment of weakness.<\/p>\n One powerful tool finally employed by the Biden administration \u2014 supplying ATACMS and targeting intelligence for strikes inside Russia \u2014 had been effectively pulled from the table. But a parallel weapon had remained in place \u2014 permission for C.I.A. and military officers to share targeting intelligence and provide other assistance for Ukrainian drone strikes against crucial components of the Russian defense industrial base. These included factories manufacturing \u201cenergetics\u201d \u2014 chemicals used in explosives \u2014 as well as petroleum-industry facilities.<\/p>\n John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. chief, looked on during a White House meeting in July.<\/p>\n Haiyun Jiang\/The New York Times<\/p>\n In the Trump administration\u2019s first months, these strikes had been scattershot with negligible impact. Ukrainian military and intelligence agencies were competing, working off different target lists. Russia\u2019s air defenses and electromagnetic jammers rendered energetics facilities virtually impenetrable. At oil refineries, drones were slamming into storage tanks, igniting blasts that grabbed headlines but accomplished little else.<\/p>\n In June, beleaguered U.S. military officers met with their C.I.A. counterparts to help craft a more concerted Ukrainian campaign. It would focus exclusively on oil refineries and, instead of supply tanks, would target the refineries\u2019 Achilles\u2019 heel: A C.I.A. expert had identified a type of coupler that was so hard to replace or repair that a refinery would remain offline for weeks. (To avoid backlash, they would not supply weapons and other equipment that Mr. Vance\u2019s allies wanted for other priorities.)<\/p>\n As the campaign began to show results, Mr. Ratcliffe discussed it with Mr. Trump. The president seemed to listen to him; they had a frequent Sunday tee time. According to U.S. officials, Mr. Trump praised America\u2019s surreptitious role in these blows to Russia\u2019s energy industry. They gave him deniability and leverage, he told Mr. Ratcliffe, as the Russian president continued to \u201cjerk him off.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/static01.nytimes.com\/newsgraphics\/2025-02-21-inv-wiesbaden\/f16bd4cc-7260-4cd6-9672-4a7ed12b7e4d\/_assets\/austin.png\")
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