As he campaigned to return to the presidency, Donald Trump promised at least 53 times that he would end the war between Russia and Ukraine on “day one”, that it would be easy to end it with a few phone calls, and that the war would never have happened on his watch.
Day one was 345 days ago, and there is still no peace deal – but there are always promises that a deal is very, very close. This time, Volodymyr Zelensky said the US has promised Ukraine “security guarantees” for 15 years – 35 less than he asked for, but progress nonetheless. All parties involved promise a deal is very close, but few are convinced: we have heard this before, after all. We have heard it all year.
Without a doubt, Trump changed the terms for what a peace deal in Ukraine would look like. Under Joe Biden, Ukraine received tens of billions of dollars a year worth of military and financial assistance from the US – who at the time regarded Ukraine as an ally, defending itself against a war of aggression, and wanted it to win the war.
Trump had a very different set of prior positions. Ukraine was at the heart of several elaborate anti-Biden conspiracy theories, many of which centred around the business dealings of his son, Hunter, in the country. That gave Trump and his team a natural scepticism – bordering on hostility for some – about Zelensky.
Added to that, Trump had a very different view of Russia than his predecessor. Trump seems to genuinely like Vladimir Putin, and has a general affinity with dictators. Additionally, he dislikes Russia hawks, not least because of what he calls the “Russia hoax” over accusations Moscow helped him win the 2016 election, and that members of his team colluded with those efforts.
Finally, Trump has consistently proven more interested in signing peace deals than in worrying about whether or not those deals are good or not. Trump, eyes secured firmly on winning a Nobel Peace Prize, wants the peace deal signed, more or less on any terms. From that perspective, Ukraine’s stubborn refusal to just give in to Russia was an obstacle to that goal.
All of this meant that Trump was not wrong when he told Zelensky that “you don’t have the cards” in their infamous Oval Office meeting early in 2025 – if only because Trump himself had snatched them from his hands. Trump cut off Ukraine militarily, diplomatically and financially. The game for Zelensky got much harder.
On one level, Trump has proven easy to handle for many foreign leaders. He is very subject to flattery, he likes lavish gifts, and he seems to like it when his family can sign lucrative business dealings with countries he interacts with. That gave Zelensky a fairly obvious playbook – but he has always been constrained in ways that Putin is not.
Zelensky is an elected political leader, subject to the public opinion of Ukrainians, who have been at war for nearly four years. There are concessions that Putin wants – and so Trump wants Ukraine to give – that Zelensky simply cannot offer.
Ukraine can only offer Trump or the US so much financially before he alienates European supporters upon whom the country now relies. Making it worse, many senior figures around Trump, not least Vice President JD Vance, seem openly hostile to Ukraine and Zelensky, and make no attempt to hide that.
The president of Ukraine has been playing high-stakes poker with the fate of his country. He has no cards, and he’s got at least one hand tied behind his back. And yet, things have gone better than they might have – Ukraine has not, yet, had to surrender. There have been no public blow-ups since that first Oval Office incident.
Trump’s hand-picked negotiator, Steve Witkoff, routinely meets Russian officials alone and without CIA briefing, and then seems unsure what he agreed. But Ukraine is still going. It has new financial support from Europe, it can at least still buy weapons and ammunition from the US, and it is still holding most of its key strongholds.
There are no flashy wins for Zelensky, no brilliant trick he can roll out to score an obvious win. He is having to fight a constant rearguard action against a hostile administration running what should be his country’s most valuable ally.
He has managed this for almost a year, fighting a diplomatic version of the same kind of war of attrition his military is fighting in the east of his country. Despite the endless promises of an imminent “peace deal”, he may have to do so for much longer still.
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