On Ukraine America President elect Donald Trump has said that he will end the Ukraine war within 24 hours Ukraine would have never happened I talk to Putin a lot nobody knows quite what he means by that and probably he doesn’t either that I think that uh we can work out something that’s good for both sides we do know that he has appointed Keith Kellogg as his special representative on Ukraine and Russia so who is Keith Kellogg and what do we think he thinks Keith Kellogg is 80 years old so he’s not the youngest Diplomat in the business but he has a very distinguished military career.
Behind him he was a paratrooper he served with the 82nd Airborne and the 101st Airborne the Screaming Eagles he was in Vietnam as a trooper he served in the first Gulf War nobody would doubt his military credibility all the fact that he was a thoughtful and careful military officer I live to service I understand sacrifice.
I know leadership Keith Kellog served in the first Trump Administration he was the National Security adviser to the vice president Mike Pence and for a while he was acting National Security advisor when Mike Flynn stood down from that role and there was a gap for a for a little while in April this year he produced a report along with Fred flights in which he looked at America and Russia and the war in Ukraine and in it.
Reports about Ukraine war from America
although most of the report is actually an attack on the Biden Administration but at the end he comes up with a series of recommendations as to what he thinks might bring an end at least to the immediate fighting in Ukraine and that’s the best indication that we are going to have this side of the 20th of January as to what the thinking of the Trump Administration may be when it comes into office
I have been in the room where it happened I saw only one agenda and one guiding question when tough calls had to be made is this decision right for America the recommendations made in this paper are not necessarily of course what the Trump Administration will do we don’t know what the administration will come up with I really think we’re going to get into I we have more good relations
we’re going to oh I see yeah but you know it takes two to tango you know and but the ideas at the end of this paper are quite interesting and they may give us a pretty fair indication at least of the direction of travel and what it seems to recommend is a ceasefire in place which would allow Russia to keep what it’s gained so far but against that uh military aid will continue to Ukraine and Ukraine will be given the strength to build itself up as a deterrent against Putin breaking whatever agreement.
He made and attacking again and there are there are mechanisms suggested in this paper for putting it uh effectively a premium on Russian oil sales in the world in order to pay for Ukrainian reconstruction and a sort of a guarantee that Ukraine whatever relations it had with NATO would not get membership of NATO for at least 10 years now whether zalinsky of Ukraine would sign up to that and even more whether Putin of Russia would sign up to that is not at all clear but it does indicate a way of thinking
which is to say that we’ve got to accept that the Russians have conquered what they’ve conquered and even though they would not be given legal right to that it just stay as a conquest Ukraine would maintain its claim to all of the territory which should which it should have legally nevertheless that’s the reality of it and so the point is that this at least would bring the fighting to an end for the foreseeable future allowing time for the
political Wheels to turn and who knows what the situation might be in five or 10 years time part of the idea behind this may be that the United States would say to Russia if you don’t come to the table on something like these terms we’ll give more military aid to Ukraine and their Position will strengthen and your position will weaken so it’s very much a carrot and stick approach. it will not on this basis resolve the conflict the Russia Ukraine war will be an open War but the fighting would come to an end and what Keith Kellogg says in this document is that in a war of attrition in the long term Ukraine
will lose because it’s a smaller country with a smaller population and it is already in danger of sacrificing a generation of its young men to a war that It ultimately cannot win there are many hurdles to go before this sort of plan would make political sense but so far it seems to be a direction of travel in which the American political establishment is interested in moving at the moment these ideas don’t line up with either
what the Russians are saying or what the ukrainians are saying if we want to stop the hot stage of the war we should take under NATO umbrella the territory of Ukraine that we have under our control as soon as keev declares they are ready for such a decision and begin the withdrawal of troops and officially abandoned plans to join NATO we will at the same minute order a ceasefire and start neg iations but the expectation would be that with President Trump in the white house with all of the policy levers at his disposal that both sides would moderate what they’ve said so far they they’d change their position somewhat and the ukrainians
would have to accept
on this basis that they won’t get into NATO anytime soon but they might be given sufficient assurances and sufficient material help to guarantee that that peace line could hold if they had enough military equipment to build up strongly behind it and that would put them in a better position in five years time 10 years time if fighting ever broke out again Russia will do everything it can to prevent Global confrontation but at the same time.
we will not allow anyone to threaten us our strategic forces are always on combat alert one of the things that might count against this plan on the Russian side is that President Putin thinks at the moment that he’s doing quite well that he is winning slowly uh and he may be inclined to overplay his hand I think in fact he may be overstating his own strength but if if he believes that he’s doing very well then he would be more likely to play real hard ball with these sort of proposal .
so it may be that President Trump in order to actually make proposals like this stick would have to show that America is prepared to be very tough on Russia all things are possible from the point of view of the White House whether president Trump would be prepared to lean that heavily on Putin if Putin resisted.
we just don’t know I would argue let’s not have all these discussions step by step on what a peace process might look like make sure that Ukraine has what it needs to get to a position of strength when those peace talks start when the Ukrainian government government has decided they are ready to do so if this proposal had diplomatic legs then at least
it would take the pressure off Europeans for a few years it would put an end not to the war but to the immediate fighting everyone would take a breath and it would allow the political Wheels to turn a few more times and so one of the things that I think this proposal has going for it or this type of proposal is that it would actually help the Europeans to be more resolute in aiding Ukraine but also not to be caught on this hook of either offering NATO membership or not offering NATO
membership on the assumption that in 10 years time the politics of Europe might look rather different.
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