This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
Americans are joining together in unity to celebrate the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump, which is ushering a new more hopeful era of peace and prosperity following his electoral landslide victory. The American people delivered Trump a mandate to follow through on his pledge to bring America back from the brink of a potential world war with Russia in response to President Joe Biden's disastrous proxy war in Ukraine. The Ukrainians have suffered over a million casualties since the war began and are hovering perilously closer on the verge of defeat in their unwinnable war against Russia.
Their only hope of preventing additional Russian territorial gains and preserving their independence is a negotiated peace settlement with Russia. However, the details as to exactly how the Trump administration intends to accomplish the president's lofty goals in ending the war remain murky. Some portions of Special Envoy Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg's peace proposal have already been rejected outright by the Russians as unacceptable, including sending thousands of NATO peacekeepers to Ukraine. President Trump has been seriously misled by his advisers to believe that ending the war in Ukraine will be complicated and arduous, that it will take at least six months. In fact, the path to peace with Russia is very straightforward and simple, and a "win-win" agreement ending the war could be achieved inside a week.
To ensure a reasonable chance a peace deal can be agreed to quickly, the U.S. should negotiate it directly with Russia without Ukraine because while Putin has been "salivating for peace," in the words of one U.S. diplomat, since March 2022, Zelensky has outlawed all peace negotiations with Moscow. Accordingly, it's not Russia but Ukraine that must be pressured by the U.S. to accept a peace deal. That said, Russia may condition any ceasefire agreement on the U.S. providing a written guarantee that Ukraine will never join NATO and acceptance of continued Russian de-facto control over its annexed territories.
Both Biden Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky have conceded that Russia could keep control of all its annexed territory under a peace settlement provided Ukraine be allowed to remain a U.S. client state. Also, the Biden administration has opposed Ukrainian NATO membership behind the scenes from the time Biden took office and told Zelensky that in no uncertain terms in private discussions. Accordingly, Ukraine NATO membership should be taken off the table by Trump in advance of negotiations. If not, Kellogg's alarmingly dangerous recommendation to massively increase U.S. military aid to Ukraine if Russia refuses a ceasefire could bring the U.S. even closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than we were during the Biden administration.
U.S. national security experts, notably including Kellogg himself, have demonstrated a profound misunderstanding of Russia's actual reasons for invading Ukraine. As demonstrated by the Istanbul Agreement, which mandated a full Russian military withdrawal from all of Ukraine's pre-war controlled territory as well as Putin's decision to unilaterally withdraw Russian troops from all northern Ukraine including Kyiv oblast in April 2022, Russia's decision to invade Ukraine was never about retaking control of lost territory. Rather, Russia has been fighting to restore Ukraine's pre-February 2014 Maidan coup status as a neutral buffer state separating Russia from NATO. On Jan. 7, President Trump demonstrated his clear understanding of the origins of the war in Ukraine by appearing to concede that Russia's own version of the Monroe Doctrine to ensure there are no hostile states along its borders was legitimate.
Russia has been seeking to rollback NATO's de-facto expansion into Ukraine that occurred in 2021 with the signing of two strategic partnership agreements and to negotiate mutual security agreements with the U.S. and NATO along the lines of its December 2021 proposals. Trump actually campaigned on forging a similar grand bargain with Russia. This would realize Russia's 36-year long objective of bringing Russia into the economic and security architecture of Europe and permanently end all hostilities with the West.
President Trump should utilize such a peace deal to restore a more favorable balance of power for the US that would neutralize the Sino-Russian military alliance with a new Russo-American entente. It should also establish a new security architecture that benefits all European nations under the principle of "indivisible security" with the aim of providing security to all parties instead of promoting conflict with Russia by continued NATO imperial expansion all along its western frontier. This could end the ongoing Russia-NATO security dilemma and establish a just and enduring peace.
