When Donald Trump met President Zelensky in New York last September, the then US presidential candidate exuded confidence he could bring the war in Ukraine to an early end. “If we win, I think we’re going to get it resolved very quickly,” he said.
How quickly he meant varied over time. In a TV debate a few days earlier, Mr Trump had promised he would “get it settled before I even become president”. This was an escalation on his previous commitment in May 2023 to stop the fighting in the first 24 hours of his presidency.
Mr Trump has now been in office for more than two months and the penny may be beginning to drop in the White House that trying to end a conflict as bitter and complex as this may take time.
In a television interview last weekend, the US president admitted that when he promised to end the war in a day, he was “being a little bit sarcastic”.
There are many reasons for the slower progress than Team Trump may have anticipated.
First, the president’s belief in the power of his personal, one-on-one diplomacy may have been misplaced. He has long believed any international problem can be solved if he sits down with another leader and agrees a deal. Mr Trump first spoke to Vladimir Putin on 12 February, an hour-and-a-half conversation he described as “highly productive”. The two leaders spoke again on 18 March.
But it is clear these telephone calls failed to secure the immediate 30-day interim ceasefire Mr Trump wanted. The only substantive concession he squeezed out of Mr Putin was a promise to end Russian attacks on Ukrainian energy facilities, a commitment he is accused by Ukraine of breaking within hours of the call.
Second, the Russian president has made it clear he does not intend to be rushed. His first public comments about the negotiations came last week in a press conference that was a whole month after his telephone call with Mr Trump.
Mr Putin showed he was resolutely opposed to the US two-stage strategy of seeking an interim ceasefire before talking about a longer-term settlement. Instead, he said any talks must address what he sees as “the root causes of the war”, namely his fears an expanding Nato alliance and the very existence of Ukraine as a sovereign state somehow present a threat to Russia’s security. He also set out detailed questions and conditions that must be answered and met before any deal could be agreed.
Third, the US strategy of directing its initial focus on Ukraine may have been misjudged. The White House came to the belief that President Zelensky was the obstacle to peace. Western diplomats acknowledge the Ukrainian government was slow to realise just how much the world had changed with the arrival of Mr Trump.
But the US pressure on Kyiv that led to the now infamous confrontation in the Oval Office – when Mr Trump and his vice-president, JD Vance, harangued the Ukrainian leader – consumed time, effort and political capital.
It also ruptured transatlantic relations, setting Europe and the US at odds, another diplomatic problem that took time to settle. All the while Vladimir Putin sat back and enjoyed the show, biding his time.
Fourth, the sheer complexity of the conflict makes any resolution hard. The Ukrainian offer was initially for an interim ceasefire in the air and at sea. The idea was that this would be relatively straightforward to monitor.
But in last week’s talks in Jeddah, the US insisted any immediate ceasefire should also include the more than 1200km-long front line in the east. Instantly that made the logistics of verifying any ceasefire more complicated. This, of course, was then rejected by Mr Putin.
But even his agreement to the more modest proposal – to end attacks on energy infrastructure – is not without its problems. It is the details about that proposal which will occupy much of the technical negotiations that are expected to take place in Saudi Arabia on Monday. Military and energy experts will draw up detailed lists of potential power plants – nuclear or otherwise – that might be protected.
They will also try to agree which weapons systems should not be used. But agreeing the difference between energy and other civilian infrastructure may take some time. Remember: Ukraine and Russia are not talking to one another; they are engaging separately and bilaterally with the US which is promising to shuttle between both sides. This again adds to the time.
Fifth, the US focus on the economic benefits of a ceasefire distracted attention from the priority of ending the fighting. Mr Trump has spent time trying to agree a framework deal giving US firms access to Ukrainian critical minerals. Some saw this as the US investing in Ukraine’s future – others as it extorting the country’s natural resources.
President Zelensky argued initially he could agree a deal only if the US promised to provide Ukraine with security guarantees to deter future Russian aggression. The White House refused, saying the presence of US mining firms and workers would be deterrent enough. Eventually Mr Zelensky conceded defeat and said he would agree a minerals deal without security guarantees. But despite that, the US has yet to sign the agreement, hoping again to improve the terms, possibly by including access to or even ownership of Ukrainian nuclear power plants.
Ending wars can be complex and time consuming. We would not have got to this stage without Trump’s pushing, but progress has not been as quick or simple as he believed. In December 2018, as he campaigned for the presidency, Volodymyr Zelensky suggested negotiations with Vladimir Putin would be quite straightforward. “You need to talk in a very simple way,” he told the Ukrainian journalist, Dmytro Gordon. ‘”What do you want, what are your conditions?” And I’d tell them: ‘Here are our points.’ We would agree somewhere in the middle.”
Well, on the evidence of the last two months, it may be harder than that.
