His
Deadline for a Peace Deal Blown, Trump Faces Choices on Russia-Ukraine Talks
The
president wanted Moscow and Kyiv to come to terms by Thanksgiving. Negotiations
are now stalled, leaving the White House to decide if an agreement is possible
anytime soon.
David E.
SangerAnton Troianovski
By David
E. Sanger and Anton Troianovski
Reporting
from Washington
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/03/us/politics/trump-russia-ukraine-deadline.html
Dec. 3,
2025
Just two
weeks ago, President Trump set a Thanksgiving deadline for Ukraine to agree to
a peace treaty with Russia, putting on the table a proposal with elements that
could have been drafted by the Kremlin.
Now, it
seems clear he will have to wait — maybe weeks, maybe past the fourth
anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February.
A
Ukrainian delegation is expected to meet on Thursday with Mr. Trump’s
negotiators, keeping alive hope for some progress. But President Vladimir V.
Putin signaled yet again this week that he was not budging from his hard-line
demands, leaving Mr. Trump’s envoys with no breakthrough to show for their
five-hour meeting with the Russian leader in Moscow on Tuesday.
That
leaves Mr. Trump with a difficult but familiar set of choices. Does he pressure
Ukraine to make even more concessions — as he attempted two weeks ago — even if
that means endangering the country’s sovereignty? Does he eventually walk away,
as he has suggested at some moments that he might, even if that admits failure
in an effort to end a war that he had promised to solve in 24 hours?
Or does
he reverse course and restore wide-ranging American military aid to Ukraine,
after declaring that Europe, not the United States, would have to bear the
financial burden of arming the country?
“It does
take two to tango,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Wednesday, acknowledging the
difficulty of getting Russia and Ukraine to a deal.
“I don’t
know what the Kremlin is doing,” Mr. Trump said when asked for an update on
Tuesday’s meeting, which included his envoy, Steve Witkoff, and his son-in-law,
Jared Kushner. “I can tell you that they had a reasonably good meeting with
President Putin. We’re going to find out.”
It was a
very different tone than the one he used at his August meeting with Mr. Putin
in Anchorage, Alaska, where he confidently predicted that the leaders of Russia
and Ukraine would sit down together and hammer out an understanding, with Mr.
Trump as their mediator and guide.
All year,
Mr. Trump has set deadlines and claimed that a peace deal might be nigh, only
to be frustrated by a Russian president who has stuck, unwaveringly, to his
far-reaching goals for Ukrainian territory and sovereignty.
But while
many observers expected Mr. Trump to eventually lose interest in trying to stop
the war, he has only redoubled his efforts in recent weeks, apparently
convinced that Ukraine’s grinding battlefield setbacks and the mounting costs
to Moscow of a sustained conflict would drive both sides toward a deal.
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American
officials have argued that in their effort to get proposals on paper, and in
front of Mr. Putin and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, there have been
more negotiations in the past few weeks than in the past three years.
For now,
it appears that those negotiations are continuing. The United States has
invited Ukrainian officials to visit “in the near future” for more peace talks,
Andrii Sybiha, Ukraine’s foreign minister, said on Wednesday. A White House
official said Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner would meet the Ukrainian delegation
on Thursday in Miami.
Ukraine
has sought to show Mr. Trump that it is ready to keep talking, even though many
Ukrainians are convinced that Mr. Putin has no interest in reaching a
negotiated end to the war.
“Activity
is at its maximum to bring this war to an end,” Mr. Zelensky said in his
evening address on Wednesday. “And from our side, from Ukraine’s state, there
will be no obstacles or delays.”
Mr.
Putin, on the other hand, has not been eager to rush into an agreement,
maintaining his strategy of going along with talks while being unwilling to
make substantive concessions.
The
biggest sticking points appear unchanged despite the diplomatic sprint of
recent weeks, which began last month with the leak of a 28-point U.S. plan for
ending the war that was widely criticized as being too favorable to Russia.
Russia,
Mr. Putin suggested last week, not only wants Ukraine to cede land that Kyiv
still controls, but also to have the United States legally recognize Russia’s
conquests.
“No
compromise option has yet been found” on the territorial issue, Mr. Putin’s
foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, told reporters past midnight on Wednesday
in Moscow. “The work will continue.”
Mr.
Ushakov was speaking after Mr. Putin spent about five hours meeting with Mr.
Witkoff and Mr. Kushner. He said that Russia had agreed to some parts of a
four-part U.S. proposal to end the war, but that Mr. Putin “made no secret of
our critical and even negative attitude” toward other parts.
Mr.
Putin’s reaction to the revised American proposal was unsurprising. When the
original, 28-point text leaked two weeks ago, taking Europeans by surprise,
U.S. negotiators were forced to rewrite it, excising the sections that most
undercut Ukraine’s future security.
Predictably,
that made it unacceptable to Mr. Putin, whose goals, Secretary of State Marco
Rubio said on Tuesday night, remained the same: to undercut the Ukrainian
state.
“Putin a
couple of weeks ago said: It may take long — we are going to achieve our
objectives; it may cost more and take longer than we want it to, but we will
get it done,” Mr. Rubio told Sean Hannity of Fox News in an interview after the
marathon negotiating session in Moscow.
“I
actually think that’s their mentality,” he continued. “And what we’re trying to
see: Is it possible to end the war in a way that protects Ukraine’s future that
both sides could agree to? That’s what we’re trying to find out, and I think
we’ve made some progress. But we’re not there yet.”
While Mr.
Trump said on Wednesday that Mr. Kushner and Mr. Witkoff had the impression
that the Kremlin would “like to make a deal,” Mr. Rubio suggested he was not so
sure. He told Mr. Hannity that he could not put a “confidence level” on
reaching an accord, “because ultimately the decisions have to be made, in the
case of Russia, by Putin alone, not his advisers.”
Tuesday’s
five-hour session was the sixth, and longest, meeting between Mr. Witkoff and
Mr. Putin in Russia this year. For the first time, the two were joined by Mr.
Kushner, who played central roles in negotiating the Gaza cease-fire in October
and the Abraham Accords, the deals that normalized relations between Israel and
some Arab countries in Mr. Trump’s first term.
But
already, officials say, the negotiation on the war is taking a different form
than the Gaza agreement, reflecting the very different nature of the conflict.
People
familiar with the discussions say there are now four separate elements being
negotiated in parallel. One concerns issues related to Ukraine’s sovereignty,
like limits on the future size of its peacetime army and on the range of its
missiles. The others cover territory, economic cooperation and broader European
security issues.
Mr.
Zelensky said that his aides would brief European officials in Brussels on
Wednesday on the talks, “and they will also discuss the European component of
the necessary security architecture.” He made it clear that beyond negotiating
over territory, Ukraine’s goal was to make sure that any peace deal included
guarantees of Western support to deter a new Russian invasion in the future.
“The most
important thing is Europe’s effective involvement in our defense, and also in
guaranteeing security after this war,” Mr. Zelensky said.
But even
as the talks appeared set to continue, there was widespread skepticism in
Europe and in Washington about the chances that they would end in agreement.
Jennifer
Kavanagh, a military analyst at Defense Priorities, a bipartisan research
center that promotes a restrained global role for the United States, said that
Mr. Putin was unlikely to compromise given his apparent conviction that
Russia’s battlefield leverage was increasing.
“Any deal
that ends the war is going to be painful and unfair,” she said. “It still seems
like we’re a long way from a set of terms that meets Russia’s minimum
acceptable criteria and that is palatable enough to Ukraine that the United
States can convince Kyiv to accept it.”
Zolan
Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting from Washington.
David E.
Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues.
He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four
books on foreign policy and national security challenges.
Anton
Troianovski writes about American foreign policy and national security for The
Times from Washington. He was previously a foreign correspondent based in
Moscow and Berlin.
