Donald Trump is disappointed with Vladimir Putin. “The talk doesn’t mean anything,” Mr. Trump has said of his phone calls with Russia’s president about ending the war on Ukraine. “We’ll have a great conversation,” he told the BBC. “I’ll say: ‘That’s good, I think we’re close to getting it done,’ and then he’ll knock down a building in Kyiv.”
This frustration has translated into additional support for Ukraine and vows of more pressure on Russia. Mr. Trump announced last week that the United States would sell weapons to European nations, which would ship them to Ukraine, and threatened to impose “very severe” tariffs if Russia does not agree to a cease-fire within 50 days.
Mr. Trump seems to have come to the conclusion that Mr. Putin is the barrier to the peace in Ukraine that Mr. Trump has promised he will deliver. That despite visits to Moscow by Mr. Trump’s special envoy, exchanges of terse proposals and several phone calls between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin, the Russian president has not merely continued his invasion, he has accelerated it.
Mr. Trump may be right: Mr. Putin may indeed think that he does not need to compromise, that he can still have his way in Ukraine if he keeps fighting. But if Mr. Trump believes that diplomacy has been tried and has failed, he is mistaken. A few phone calls and a couple of visits are not enough to end a war. And no one — maybe not even Mr. Putin himself — knows what he would accept if he were presented with a real negotiation process that required compromises from all sides. Until we test him with such a process, we cannot be sure that he is determined to fight on in any circumstances.
Historically, negotiations to resolve major conflicts have been painstaking and protracted. The Good Friday Agreement in 1998, which ended the bloodshed known as the Troubles in Northern Ireland, took almost two years of direct negotiations — and those negotiations took place only after years of groundwork and preparatory discussions. After the Arab-Israel war of 1973, Henry Kissinger spent months flying back and forth from Egypt to Israel, and Israel to Syria, in order to narrow the gaps between countries that had fought two wars in less than six years. The term “shuttle diplomacy” was coined to describe his dogged approach. The armistice to end the Korean War took 575 meetings over two years to finalize.
These examples underscore the need for Mr. Trump to empower a professional team of negotiators to engage the parties regularly. American mediators could use Mr. Kissinger’s shuttle model, or they could lead talks in a third country with Russian and Ukrainian delegations permanently stationed there. For a while, perhaps months, Mr. Trump himself would need to let negotiators hash it out. He might occasionally intervene to break a deadlock, or, at the end of the process, to seal the deal. But he cannot manage a diplomatic process day to day.
Mr. Trump’s insistence on ending the war in Ukraine has already produced some important results. He has greatly shifted the conversation in key capitals, and thanks to his combination of carrots and sticks a variety of consultations have begun. Russia and Ukraine had not held peace talks since 2022, soon after the full-scale invasion, but they have met directly with each other three times this year, most recently on Wednesday.
These meetings have not succeeded in reducing the intensity of the war, though they have led to significant prisoner exchanges. But a cease-fire remains elusive. Mr. Putin has made it clear that he will not relinquish the leverage that continued fighting gives him, and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, for his part, demands a full cease-fire before discussing a durable peace deal.
A newly reinvigorated American diplomatic effort could break this impasse by pushing the sides to hammer out a framework agreement — a document that sets out the parameters of what the final settlement would contain. With confidence about where peace talks will lead, Mr. Putin might agree to the cease-fire that he has so far refused, thus setting the stage for detailed negotiations to proceed. This was the approach taken in the talks between the Colombian government and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC: In 2012 both parties signed a five-page framework agreement along with a cease-fire. After four more years of negotiations, they agreed to a final settlement of 323 pages.
It is of course possible that even if the Trump administration invested in a comprehensive conflict diplomacy process, Mr. Putin would still block a deal. But we haven’t yet tested that proposition. Negotiations to end the war in Ukraine have not failed. They haven’t yet properly begun.
Samuel Charap (@scharap) is the distinguished chair in Russia and Eurasia policy and a senior political scientist at RAND, and the co-author of “Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia.”
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