Advisers to President-elect Donald Trump now concede that the Ukraine war will take months or even longer to resolve, a sharp reality check on his biggest foreign policy promise – to strike a peace deal on his first day in the White House.
Two Trump associates, who have discussed the war in Ukraine with the president-elect, told Reuters they were looking at a timeline of months to resolve the conflict, describing the Day One promises as a combination of campaign bluster and a lack of appreciation of the intractability of the conflict and the time it takes to staff up a new administration.
Those assessments dovetail with remarks by Trump’s incoming Russia-Ukraine envoy, retired Lieutenant-General Keith Kellogg, who said in an interview with Fox News last week that he would like to have a “solution” to the war within 100 days, far beyond the president-elect’s original timeline.
Yet even Kellogg’s extended deadline was “way, way too optimistic,” said John Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who is now at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington.
“For this to work, Trump has to persuade (Russian President Vladimir) Putin that there’s a downside for being intransigent,” Herbst said.
In the run-up to his Nov. 5 election victory, Trump declared dozens of times that he would have a deal in place between Ukraine and Russia on his first day in office, if not before.
In late October, however, he made a subtle shift in his rhetoric, and began saying he could solve the war “very quickly.”
