President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office on February 28. / Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images.
In Washington, the Democratic Party leadership, having spent years ignoring the impairment of President Joe Biden, is now ignoring the increasing evidence that Russia has won the war in Ukraine. Leading Democrats in Congress have returned to the mentality of the Cold War in their contempt for and fear of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
I can report that some of those involved in the on-and-off secret talks between Ukraine and Russia are convinced that the long stalemated war will soon be ended by a closely calculated division of territory that has been lost by each side in a war that Putin chose to initiate in February of 2022.
There is still a widespread belief in the Democratic Party that President Donald Trump’s chronic complaints about the leaders of the nations that make up NATO are not paying their way are, as one international scholar told me, “a ruse.” Trump is really interested, the scholar said, “in weakening democratic, liberal Europe and its collective institutions in order to make it easier for his new ally, Putin, to throw his weight around.” The scholar quoted a recent essay by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the world economy editor of the Telegraph, who compared Trump’s actions to the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between the Soviet Union and Germany that barred the countries from attacking each other. and left Germany to focus on Western Europe, drawing the UK into the war.
The scholar cited a number of Trump administration actions to back up his view of Trump as little more than a Russia asset. The president has ceased arms shipments to Ukraine and intelligence sharing with its military. He ordered an end to offensive cyber operations against Russia. He and Vice President JD Vance publicly supported pro-Russian political parties in recent European elections. Some of his key aides are working to revive the flow of cheap Russian gas to Germany via the remaining Nord Stream pipelines “to keep Western European countries, especially Germany, dependent on Russian gas and oil, thus providing Putin with another lever of influence” in Western Europe.
The major American media, most notably the New York Times, remain hostile to Putin. The newspaper’s opinion and news columns repeatedly express the belief that, having won a large chunk of Ukraine on the battlefield, Putin would take advantage of any negotiated settlement to deepen Russia’s hold on Ukraine. It is feared that Putin would take a settlement, which could include the dropping of all sanctions on Russian gas and oil trading, as a sign of American weakness, and that Russia would undercut the leadership of the Baltic states and continue to undermine Nato and the European Union.
A much different view came last week from Jack F. Matlock, Jr., who served four tours as a US diplomat in Russia, the last as Ronald Reagan’s and George H.W. Bush’s ambassador to Moscow from 1987 to 1991.
“Finally,” Matlock writes in an essay for Responsible Statecraft, “there is a prospect for bringing the war in Ukraine to an end. President Trump and his foreign policy team have created the conditions for a negotiated end to the war, replacing a fundamentally flawed and dangerous set of policies adopted by his predecessors including, ironically, the Donald Trump of his first administration.
“Indeed, anyone interested in peace rather than the threat of nuclear war should be congratulating President Trump. After all, if the war does end and Russia is brought back into cooperative economic relations with Europe and the United States, everyone will benefit. If the war and the attempted isolation of Russia continues, all will suffer and cooperation to deal with common problems, such as environmental degradation, mass migration and international financial crime will become impossible.
“I say this not as a Trump supporter—I did not vote for him and have been critical of most of his moves. But in regard to the war in Ukraine and relations with Russia, I believe he is on the right track. . . . I have been appalled that a succession of American presidents and European leaders discarded the diplomacy that ended the Cold War, abandoned the agreements that curbed the nuclear arms race, and provoked a new cold war which has now become hot.”
Matlock depicts Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 as a catastrophe for both nations but says that Putin attacked because he believed that the Biden administration was trying “to draw Ukraine into a hostile military alliance.”
“At last,” Matlock concludes, an “American president has defined a viable road to peace and the Russian president has greeted this effort.”
There are other voices that do not get into the mainstream media. Jeffrey D. Sachs, a widely respected economist at Columbia University who has consulted with the United Nations leadership for more than two decades, argues in a recent essay that war-torn Ukraine had much to gain from a peace settlement that was on the table three years ago that was rebuffed by the UK and the US. If adopted in principle today, Sachs writes, Ukraine would have to cede more territory to Russia but “it will gain the essentials: sovereignty, international security arrangements, and peace.”
Russian and Western concern about the security guarantees about the plan would be resolved, Sachs writes, as administration of the security guarantees would be put “under the authority of the UN Security Council. This means that the US, China, Russia, UK, and France would all be co-guarantors, together with the rest of the UN Security Council.”
“The time has arrived,” Sachs concludes, “for diplomacy that brings collective security to Europe, Ukraine and Russia. Europe should open direct talks with Russia and should urge Russia and Ukraine to sign a peace agreement” based on the 2022 talks. “Peace in Ukraine should be followed by the creation of a new system of collective security for all of Europe, stretching from Britain to the Urals, and indeed beyond.”
Much narrower talks are now under way. What follows is a report from inside a series on-and-off talks between some Americans and Russians that have been going on since it became clear in 2023 there would be no victors in the war.
One American knowledgeable of the current talks told me that they now have the attention of senior Trump Administration officials. It is understood that any settlement that emerges will not include a post-settlement role for Zelensky. His term as Ukraine’s president expired last spring, but the Ukrainian constitution bars elections while the country is under martial law. Zelensky has long been long known by American intelligence to be among a group of political officials and military leaders siphoning millions of dollars from American and European war aid. At one point, I was told that Zelensky was warned by William Burns, director of the Central Intelligence Agency under Biden, that the corrupt generals and political figures involved in skimming funds were angry because Zelensky himself was taking too big a cut.
As to the specifics of the discussions now under way, the current objective “is short-term and pragmatic—stop the shooting. Putin is in. He sees the domestic political benefit of winning back the ‘Russian’ provinces and giving the arrogant Ukrainians a bloody nose as well as an economic solution to Russia’s inflation driven-economy.” The Russian delegation to the talks seeks “no long-term solution to the historic hatred and mistrust” between the two countries. Vice President Vance, who has been involved in some of the discussions, believes implicit deterrence of any future Russian military action against Ukraine will come through American “corporate interests and US involvement in redevelopment across the board.”
The insider said that “the task for Vance now is tell Europe, ‘Don’t do it’”: don’t offer renewed arms and rebuilding funds for a Ukraine government still led by Zelensky. The insider told me that his bet is that Zelensky “will cave to reality and sign. Russia wants Zelensky gone, but the US says it is up to the Ukrainians. Vance sees that American domestic critics will blame Trump for a sellout to Russia because of his love for Putin.”
In the end, the insider said, Zelensky will stay for a while but be replaced within a year and shooting will stop.
He added, “I hope.”
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