Peace talks with Russia are a form of capitulation. There is nothing but death by peace talks. Because while the peace talks are going on, Russia is seizing more territory and making more military gains. And Russian diplomats are notorious for being able to talk nonsense incessantly, negotiating entirely in bad faith while the dictator behind them continues to pursue his territorial goals.
The Trump administration as it transitions into office has to take these very straightforward and incontrovertible facts into mind. Any negotiations or discussions can take place only after an effective armistice and ceasefire, not before. The front line must be frozen because at the current stage the Ukrainian Armed Forces are losing on the battlefield. They are not losing at a fast rate and the number of Russian casualties being suffered as a proportion of the territorial gains Russia is making are appalling; but nonetheless with her “meat grinder” tactics of sending thousands of troops to their deaths every day, and with overwhelming shelling capacity, the Russians are slowly winning. They will continue to win slowly until the sides lay down their arms, and that will not happen voluntarily. It will happen only when NATO peacekeepers declare an armistice and appear themselves at the front line.
If an armistice is merely declared by Ukraine and Russia with the United States intermediating, then the fighting will not end. It will just carry on while people talk nonsense at the peace talks. At the peace talks the parties will choose mutually incompatible red lines with which to talk nonsense at one-another. And all the while the fighting will continue. President-elect Donald Trump has declared that the fighting must stop “immediately”; but he must face the reality that the only way of making the fighting stop immediately or at all is to insert US troops and armour between the warring parties and to use American might to compel the parties to stop fighting. I remain of the view that Russian Armed Forces will never fire on US soldiers, and therefore a unilateral US presence in a “de-militarised zone” to formed by NATO and led initially by the United States must be imposed by the United States and this is the most important decision the US President must make in his early days in office: to commit hundreds of thousands of US troops to that peacekeeping zone immediately.
Otherwise there will be talks about talks that go nowhere, whether with Trump’s envoy General Kellogg or otherwise, and all the while the fighting will continue, just as did in Bosnia during the Vance-Owen peace plan in 1993-1994. It was only with the Contact Group plan to arm the Bosnian Muslims secretly via CIA night flights in 1995 that the Serbian government was brought to a real negotiating table with a map. (The Bosnian Serbs were never brought to the negotiating table; like the Russians, they would rather die than actually agree anything.) So President Trump will not be able to delegate the issue of ludicrous pre-ceasefire peace talks to one of his envoys; only the post-armistice peace talks will matter and they can be wrapped up quite quickly because once the fighting stops the front line is set and the number of issues to be negotiated is quite short because there is no point negotiating with Russia about anything much except prisoner swaps.
Peace must be imposed, not negotiated, and this is the first lesson President-elect Trump will have to take on board if he wants to find peace between Ukraine and Russia. Otherwise Russia will simply win the war in Ukraine, slowly but surely, over several years and no doubt with the loss of millions of men. It took the deaths of six million Russians in World War I to foment revolution; by all accounts the Russian casualty rate of some four hundred thousand (if Ukraine's President Zelensky is to be believed) has a long way to go before revolution. That is particularly as Russia’s population is now bigger than in 1917 - although not by as much as you might imagine; Russia has suffered dramatic population decline in recent years which is one of the reasons to occupy Ukraine - to repopulate Russian territories as people have had fewer children or have fled Russia.
Peace talks all over the world in the context of civil conflict are often just a pretext for diplomats doing nothing and the conflict to continue. Do we want Ukraine to lose this war, so that there is no such country as Ukraine left, not even a rump state? If not, then we must act decisively, and militarily, and immediately once President Trump takes office. The first component of the solution, as with Bosnia, is not diplomacy but military force. Then the Russians will stop what they are doing because force is all they respect. Then the West will impose a peace on Ukraine and Russia, which can be done with lawyers not diplomats. Let’s just avoid peace talks about peace talks, the endless bendy ruler that never draws a straight line.