General Keith Kellogg, US President Donald Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine, has a plan to bring peace to Ukraine. Very roughly, it consists in the following components. Firstly, let the parties fight a little longer in order to exhaust them so they are ready for a ceasefire. This is a tactic typical coming from a military man. On the Ukrainian side, they are running out of men; ever more (small) pieces of territory are being lost: Toretsk (southeast of Kostiantinyvka), and Kostiantinyvka is itself in severe danger of falling. In any event the damage to the eastern front cities is becoming increasingly devastating. On the Russian side, the loss of men is even more severe, by all accounts, and Russia’s economy is crumbling. If Russia does not agree to a ceasefire, then the United States will use its policy of “energy dominance” - an invention of the first Trump administration - to drive down oil prices so that Russia goes bankrupt. The way this works is that the United States pumps more oil (it is one of the biggest oil producers in the world) and pressures its allies in OPEC - in particular Saudi Arabia - to reduce OPEC prices. Saudi Arabia can afford to do this, as it barely costs the Saudis US$1 a barrel to pump crude oil: the lowest in the world. Saudi Arabia wants American help in fighting Iran, so she has an incentive to comply with Trump’s demands.
The next step is to impose an armistice line through shuttle diplomacy (Putin will not meet Ukrainian President Zelensky so there can be no direct talks) and then to enforce the armistice line with NATO troops. Trump will pressurise the other countries of NATO to provide the greater bulk of those troops, through threats of withdrawal from NATO by the United States and the threats of imposing tariffs on European Union exports if the necessary troops are not provided. That is another reason why a period of time - Trump has given it 100 days - is necessary to impose an armistice: the other members of NATO must get their troops in order to enter Ukraine. The European Union must find the funding to reconstruct Ukraine, because the United States has no intention under President Trump of pouring more money into what he perceives to be a very corrupt country in which donor funds simply disappear. (This view is shared by him across many countries, which is why he has ordered a halt to USAID activities.)
There will be no peace agreement, because the Ukrainians will never agree to cede the occupied territories to Russia and Russia will never agree that this is all that they can take. They want to reserve the right somehow to continue war in the future. A promise will be given by Trump that Ukraine cannot join NATO for some specified period of time; but in fact that period of time will only be four years, because that is the maximum period Trump can remain President. In the meantime US troops in Ukraine will be replaced by other NATO member state troops as those other NATO member states continue to build up their frankly weak military capacities that they have allowed to degrade during the period after the end of the (first) Cold War. So there will be another frozen conflict, in the nature of North Korea, with NATO peacekeepers in the middle, just as there are US peacekeepers in the middle of the de-militarised zone between the two Koreas. However President Trump sees Ukraine as a European problem while he focuses his military and diplomatic attention upon China and what he sees as China’s international economic aggression towards the United States and military aggression in the South China Sea.
Then there must be elections. In truth, Ukraine has never had free and fair elections since independence. All Ukrainians know this. An uneasy agreement between Russia and the West existed until 2014 that the Ukrainian Presidency would somehow alternate between western and eastern axes but that understanding was demolished with the Maidan Revolution in 2014.
The major problem facing Kellogg in his plan is not bringing the parties’ fighting to a halt but in managing the political process and the notion of free and fair elections in Ukraine, to bring free Ukraine into the orbit of Euro-Atlantic institutions, in the period after the armistice agreement. It will be a massive exercise. Ukraine has a strong tradition of fixing elections with bribe payments to voters (such as carousel voting), particularly in the east and the south. So every polling station would have to be managed by OSCE or a similar international supervisory body. Also there is only effectively one political party in Ukraine right now, the “Servant of the People Party”, that was created by the now-imprisoned oligarch, Igor Kolomoisky in order to place Zelensky in power as an affront to Russian interests in Ukraine and to permit his return to Ukraine (he had previously been living in Israel to avoid a Ukrainian arrest warrant for money laundering over his bank, now privatised, Privatbank). So how do we have free and fair elections in a one-party state with a history of corruption in the electoral process?
The key to how the elections are managed will determine the future of Ukraine. If the electoral process can be managed successfully, Ukraine may be able to merge into the European model of peaceful democracy. If it is not managed successfully - and the effort will be enormous - then there is the prospect of returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 electoral conditions in which all the Ukrainian speakers voted for one party and all the Russian speakers voted for another party and the country was effectively divided. That was what Russia wanted; and Kolomoisky’s actions in setting up the “Servant of the People Party” were precisely what Putin despised and arguably were one of the principal catalysts of the second Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
One option - which it does not appear that the Trump administration has seriously considered - is federalisation of Ukraine. The reason this may be necessary in 2025 is the same as the reason it has always been necessary in post-Soviet Ukraine yet never adequately written into the constitution. The Ukrainian-speaking and Russian-speaking populations of Ukraine (roughly 70% / 30%) have never seen eye-to-eye in terms of cultural identification. They have different traditions, customs and habits, and that explains in part why historically in post-independence Ukraine they have voted differently: the Ukrainian-speakers for pro-western parties, the Russian-speakers for pro-Russian parties. Overcoming these differences to create a unified Ukraine in the context of a one-party state will prove extremely challenging, particularly where the sense of difference has transformed ever more into animosity by reason of the movements of internally displaced peoples and the enormity of the size of Ukraine that makes the people living in the west of the country feel a world apart from the war in the east. So a single President and cabinet, with overarching powers over the entire country, may not be appropriate in a post-independence free Ukraine.
Indeed the centralisation of power in Kyiv may be one explanation of the disparity of wealth between different regions of the country; the Russian-speaking regions have historically been significantly poorer in the post-Soviet period, because Kyiv has not devoted resources to them. This has pronounced regional differences and animosities.
It would be imprudent to imagine that the Ukrainian-speakers and Russian-speakers in Ukraine do not harbour animosity or resentment towards one-another. The people of Lviv are appalled by the fact that internally displaced persons with different (if anything, more colourful and anarchistic) values have flooded into their city and it is common to hear that they are revolted to hear the Russian language spoken in their city. In turn, in the Russian-speaking areas of free Ukraine in the south and the east of the country, people continue to speak Russian save when around Ukrainian soldiers from west Ukraine and foreigners. It comes as a jaw-dropping surprise to walk into a restaurant or bar in south or eastern Ukraine as a foreigner and open one’s mouth in Russian, a language the local people never expect a western foreigner to be able to speak.
What this all boils down to is that the current constitution of Ukraine, providing for gross centralisation of power in a President that treats different parts of the country unequally, may be the wrong model for a post-war Ukraine. General Kellogg may have an adequate strategy for bringing the war to an end, being a military man; but he may not yet fully have plotted the political strategy for state-building in post-war free Ukraine to ensure that Ukraine does not again become a hotbed of ethnic resentment and conflict in the coming years or decades. The Russians can be kept at bay with NATO peacekeepers. It may not be possible to keep the Ukrainians at bay each between the other without radical political reforms.
And then there is the spectre of Valerii Zuluzhnyi, the dramatically popular former commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces demoted to be Ukrainian Ambassador to the United Kingdom because he is a potential political rival to Zelensky. Unlike Zelensky, who is a Russian speaker, Zuluzhnyi is a Ukrainian speaker from Zhytomyr oblast, an individual of greater stature, age and perceived political integrity, and enormously charismatic and popular. If there is to be a free and fair democratic election in post-war free Ukraine, it may well be a Presidential election between these two people and it will be the West’s responsibility, if it cares for a secure and prosperous future Ukraine, to mediate the political election so that it is truly free and fair.