Bottom lines up front<\/p>\n
WASHINGTON\u2014The likelihood of a cease-fire by Christmas<\/a> is low, but the Trump administration\u2019s latest effort to achieve a negotiated end to the Kremlin\u2019s aggression in Ukraine continues in hope. Today, US envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, US President Donald Trump\u2019s son-in-law, wrapped up two days of meetings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other European leaders in Berlin.\u00a0<\/p>\n While the exact details of the current White House plan are not publicly available, reporting<\/a> suggests that the key points include a renewed US proposal for Ukraine to cede the strategic regions in western Donbas that Russia has been unable to conquer and create a demilitarized zone there.\u00a0Kyiv rejected this initiative when initially presented in mid-November, and it was widely criticized in the United States, including by Republicans in Congress, as dangerously favorable to the Kremlin.\u00a0Kyiv still considers this proposal\u2014an effort to meet Moscow\u2019s demand that Ukraine give up all of the Donbas\u2014extremely risky. If Russian troops were to move into this highly fortified \u201cdemilitarized zone,\u201d then it would be much easier for them to move west and take far more Ukrainian territory.\u00a0<\/p>\n In order to persuade the Ukrainians to accept this, Washington is willing<\/a> to give Ukraine, according to Axios\u2019s Barak Ravid, \u201ca guarantee based on NATO\u2019s Article 5 that would be approved by Congress and be legally binding.\u201d The exact details of this guarantee are not public. But talks regarding the guarantees have been underway since Zelenskyy and seven other European leaders met in August with Trump, following his Alaska summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. For months, Team Trump has been reluctant to provide Ukraine concrete guarantees, preferring<\/a> to reach agreement on the terms of a cease-fire first, and only then to turn to the issue of guarantees\u2014a position Kyiv thought unsatisfactory. This is understandable given the fact that Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal under the Budapest Memorandum in 1994 in exchange for \u201csecurity assurances\u201d from Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and China that they would not permit any infringements on Ukraine\u2019s territorial integrity\u2014assurances that proved worthless.\u00a0<\/p>\n If Washington is now willing to provide Ukraine strong guarantees, either alone or, better yet, with at least some of its European allies, then that might be enough for Zelenskyy to consider a withdrawal from western Donbas. In connection to that, the Ukrainian president said publicly late last week that he was willing to consider a public referendum on handing over western Donbas. This step would likely meet his constitutional requirement not to make, without public approval, any change to Ukraine\u2019s borders.\u00a0<\/p>\n In his December 12 report, Ravid quotes<\/a> an unidentified senior US official as saying, \u201cWe want to give the Ukrainians a security guarantee that will not be a blank check on the one hand but will be strong enough on the other hand. We are willing to send it to Congress to vote on it.\u201d This is certainly a gesture to Zelenskyy, but it does not make clear if the administration is talking about a (legally binding) treaty\u2014Zelenskyy\u2019s position\u2014or something less.<\/p>\n There is also little public information on the critical elements of those guarantees. How would this work? Zelenskyy worries that Russia might secretly place troops in the demilitarized zone. This past Friday, senior Putin adviser Yuri Ushakov said<\/a> that while \u201cit\u2019s entirely possible that there won\u2019t be any troops [in the Donbas], either Russian or Ukrainian\u201d in a postwar scenario, \u201cthere will be the Russian national guard\u201d and \u201cpolice.\u201d Russia\u2019s national guard is a paramilitary force, and it would not be difficult to conceal a build-up of troops in the zone as national guardsmen. In 2014, Russian troops without any markings seized Crimea. Would the security guarantees under discussion respond to a significant build-up of the Russian national guard in this zone? More broadly, what Russian violation of the demilitarized zone or offensive action beyond it would oblige a strong US response?\u00a0<\/p>\n It is worth noting that this proposal poses an unnecessary risk to the United States. To persuade Ukraine to give up strong defensive positions, the guarantees must offer strong US action if Russia breaks the cease-fire and moves troops into this area. That would immediately put any US forces\u2014even from the air\u2014in unnecessary danger because Russian troops would be operating from an advantageous position both for defensive or offensive operations. The United States would have to be prepared for this contingency.\u00a0<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s envoys are claiming serious progress in the talks, but there are still no clear indications that the Kremlin is willing to accept conditions that would lead to a sustainable peace. Indeed, Ushakov said<\/a> on Friday that while Moscow had not seen the latest draft following talks between the United States and Ukraine, \u201cwhen we see them, we may not like a lot of things, that\u2019s how I sense it.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s stated aim is still a peace that lasts. And despite nearly a month of talks since the launch of this latest Trump initiative, there is no indication that Putin has given up his objective to achieve effective political control of Ukraine, which would require Russia to take far more Ukrainian territory. Even Trump seemed to acknowledge this when criticizing Zelenskyy on December 7 for not responding favorably to the latest US proposal. While he felt that Russia would accept that proposal, Trump stated<\/a> that \u201cRussia . . . I guess, would rather have the whole country when you think of\u00a0it.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n Andrei Kelin, Russia\u2019s ambassador in London, made<\/a> this clear in a December 10 interview when he said that what was on the table was not a \u201cdeal\u201d so much as Ukrainian \u201csurrender<\/a>.\u201d As US envoys push Ukraine to accept even previously rejected Russian conditions, and as the United States and its European allies spar about the terms of the plans to end the war, Moscow watches, with no incentive to make concessions to achieve a durable peace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bottom lines up front WASHINGTON\u2014The likelihood of a cease-fire by Christmas is low, but the Trump administration\u2019s latest…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":351088,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-351087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=351087"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351087\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/351088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=351087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=351087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=351087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}