Summary and Key Points: Despite President Donald Trump’s pledge to end the Ukraine war quickly, the Kremlin has declared the conflict’s resolution will be prolonged.
-Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov cited the complexity and difficulty of negotiations, suggesting Russia is unlikely to accept Western demands, including recent U.S. proposals for immediate ceasefires.
Russian MLRS firing. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
-Trump’s frustration has grown with Putin’s unyielding stance, leading to threats of additional sanctions and tariffs.
-Putin, meanwhile, is preparing for intensified warfare, recently ordering a large conscription.
-Ukrainian President Zelensky argues Russia remains aggressive, rejecting diplomatic solutions, underscoring the persistent international stalemate over the conflict and the difficulty in reaching peace.
Kremlin Spokesman: Ending Ukraine War Will Be a “Drawn-Out Process”
US President Donald Trump famously said on the 2024 campaign trail that if elected, he would “end the Ukraine war in one day.”
Appearing on a CNN town hall back in May 2023, Trump said: “They’re dying, Russians and Ukrainians. I want them to stop dying. And I’ll have that done. I’ll have that done in 24 hours.”
Then-candidate Trump said that it could all happen once he was president again, when he would have the opportunity to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Russian President Vladimir Putin. He repeated this claim many times throughout the year on the campaign trail.
At the time, the Trump campaign’s communications director, Steven Cheung, echoed the US president’s post-election victory intention: “A top priority in his second term will be to quickly negotiate an end to the Russia-Ukraine war.”
Sometimes, plans made with the best intentions just do not work out. Ending the Ukraine War seems to be one of those. There are a few reasons why.
What Makes This War An Unending One
Today, the official Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, stated that ending the war with Ukraine would be “a drawn-out process.”
“We are working to implement some ideas in connection with the Ukrainian settlement. This work is ongoing,” he said in a conference call with reporters in Moscow. “There is nothing concrete yet that we could and should announce. This is a drawn-out process because of the difficulty of its substance.”
This “difficulty of its substance” stems partially from the fact that the US, Ukraine, and dozens of the world’s other nations are insisting on a set of terms and conditions for ending the conflict that the Russian side will never agree to.
The most recent example of this stalemate was Russia rejecting a US proposal for an immediate and complete 30-day halt to all hostilities. The feasibility of any ceasefire on the Black Sea, a waterway utilized by both nations for transporting shipments of grain and other commercial cargo, was also essentially undermined when negotiators on the Russian side insisted on what the AP has characterized as “far-reaching conditions.”
Frustration With Putin
Peskov made his comments after US President Donald Trump had expressed frustration in dealing with Putin on the issue. He did not make any reference to Trump’s criticism of Putin on Sunday when the US leader said he was “angry, pissed off” that Putin had questioned Zelensky’s credibility as a leader.
He added that Putin “remains absolutely open to contact” with the US president and was ready to speak to him. Trump, for his part, has been threatening to punish Putin’s intransigence by imposing further sanctions on Russia, which already is enduring growing financial penalties and economic disruptions, by using tariffs to undermine Moscow’s oil exports.
However, despite his statements about being willing to discuss a peace deal, Putin shows all the signs of preparing for an intensification of the fighting.
On Monday, the Russian president ordered a regular bi-annual military call-up to draft 160,000 to 180,000 conscripts to complete a one-year term of compulsory military service. Russian authorities claim that military personnel who have been deployed in Ukraine are not raw recruits but volunteers who signed contracts with the military as professional soldiers.
The same officials claim that conscripts are not being dispatched to the frontline. However, intelligence reports from the front after the August 2024 incursion by Ukraine into the Kursk region of Russia indicate that draftees ended up fighting against the Ukrainian military, and some were taken prisoners as well.
Zelensky said late on Sunday that Russia has never scaled back any of its attacks from the first day that it began the invasion of his country in February 2022.
“The geography and brutality of Russian strikes, not just occasionally, but literally every day and night, show that Putin couldn’t care less about diplomacy,” Zelenskiy said in his nightly address on Ukrainian television.
Russian TOS-1 MLRS. Image Credit: Creative Commons.
“And almost every day, in response to this [ceasefire] proposal, there are Russian drones, bombs, artillery shelling, and ballistic strikes,” he said.
The Ukrainian president has urged further international pressure on Moscow to compel Russia to negotiate, including new sanctions, and to drop any mention of lifting those already in place.
About the Author: Reuben F. Johnson
Reuben F. Johnson is a survivor of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and is now an Expert on Foreign Military Affairs with the Fundacja im. Kazimierza Pułaskiego in Warsaw. He has been a consultant to the Pentagon, several NATO governments and the Australian government in the fields of defense technology and weapon systems design. Over the past 30 years he has resided in and reported from Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Brazil, the People’s Republic of China and Australia.
