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Sunday’s talks between U.S. and Russian negotiators on how to end the war in Ukraine went absolutely nowhere, and the only surprise is that anyone might have been surprised by the deadlock.
President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff tried to pretend otherwise, calling the talks “productive and constructive.” But Yuri Ushakov, the Kremlin’s top diplomatic adviser, called them “rather unproductive.”
The basic fact and the principal obstacle to peace—which Trump and Witkoff seem to ignore—is that Russian President Vladimir Putin doesn’t want to stop fighting until he achieves total victory. He has said this many times, most recently on Friday, during his annual end-of-year marathon news conference, this one lasting four and a half hours, in which he declared that his war aims are unchanged and that compromise is out of the question.
Those aims, as he has also noted many times, include the complete subjugation of Ukraine—which he has said does not exist as a real country with a real culture or history and which he also claims is ruled by a “neo-Nazi regime” hell-bent on conquering Russia.
As long as that is the case, drawn-out detailed discussions about the borderline between Russia and Ukraine, the shape of a demilitarized zone in the Donbas province, and the precise configuration of security arrangements for Kyiv are all colossal wastes of time.
This is not a controversial point. Reuters reported on Monday that a recent U.S. intelligence analysis concluded that Putin has not abandoned his aims of capturing all of Ukraine and of reclaiming parts of Europe that belonged to the former Soviet empire. The story was credited to six sources who are familiar with the analysis.
Yet it seems that the American president, the main audience for intelligence analyses, either didn’t see this report or waved away its conclusion.
Perhaps Witkoff—who headed the U.S. delegation at the talks in Florida, along with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and White House staffer Josh Gruenbaum—really does believe, as he posted on social media, that “Russia remains fully committed to achieving peace in Ukraine.” The problem here may be that Witkoff—a real-estate magnate with no experience in diplomacy and no prior knowledge of Russian affairs—thinks “peace” means nothing more than a ceasefire and the signing of a document.
In that sense, he isn’t so different from his longtime friend and fellow real-estate tycoon who currently resides in the White House. In October, Trump played a key role in pressuring Israel and Hamas to sign a ceasefire in Gaza and a hostage-for-prisoners exchange—a notable achievement. But this marked only the first phase—covering just the initial planks—of a 20-point peace plan. The next phase requires outside countries to station security forces inside Gaza, to maintain order and set the foundations for a new political authority. So far, none of the countries in the region have volunteered for the job. Trump proudly announced, at the signing ceremony for the first phase, that he would be chairman of a “board of peace” to supervise the subsequent phases—but he has done nothing to prod anyone into action. It seems that, in his mind, he got the ball rolling; if it stops rolling, if the fighting resumes (as it has to some extent already), then that’s not his fault.
Like Witkoff, he doesn’t seem to understand that making peace, actively enforcing a ceasefire or molding the foundations to sustain one, is not a one-off gesture. It requires persistent involvement, coupled with a thorough schooling in the causes of the war and the necessary preconditions for real peace.
Trump and Witkoff not only lack that specialized schooling but think they don’t need it. They view themselves as “dealmakers” and see no distinction between brokering a deal with the New York City Department of Buildings, some vendor on a construction project, or the Kremlin.
The significant thing here is that Putin recognized, and figured out how to exploit, this skewed outlook for his own benefit. In the early days of Trump’s second term, according to a remarkable story in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, Putin asked Trump to send Witkoff to Moscow for talks on Ukraine, offering to release an American prisoner if he did so, but only on the condition that Witkoff come alone, bringing no aides or CIA analysts with him.
Trump had chosen Witkoff to be his emissary on the Middle East, so the request must have come as a surprise. In the course of a rambling hourlong address to the Israeli Knesset in October, Trump said he thought Witkoff would have a “15-or-20-minute meeting” with Putin, adding, “Steve had no idea about Russia, had no idea about Putin too much, didn’t know too much about politics, wasn’t too interested.”
As we now know, this is what made Witkoff so appealing to Putin. The Russian president already had a sympathetic ear in Trump. Now he wanted to ensure that his chief American interlocutor was someone he could easily manipulate. It is no coincidence that retired Gen. Keith Kellogg, Trump’s original appointee as envoy on Ukrainian matters, recently resigned; he found himself having nothing to do.
Trump ends his first year as the returning president believing, perhaps sincerely, that he is a peacemaker. But in fact two of the world’s most consequential conflicts rage on—the war in Ukraine, which he thought he could easily end, and the war in Gaza, which he thinks he has ended. And Trump doesn’t understand why.
