When Donald Trump arrived in the White House in January 2025, securing a quick end to the war in Ukraine was near the top of his foreign policy agenda . Despite political backlash, he pushed ahead with this objective early in his second term by resuming dialogue with Russian President Vladimir Putin and initiating parallel diplomatic tracks with Kyiv and Moscow.
Eighteen months later, however, peace talks have stalled and the war has only escalated. U.S. distraction in the Middle East is to blame for the most recent setback, but the failure of Trump’s initiative has deeper roots.
Simply put, Trump’s efforts in Ukraine to this point have been counterproductive, pushing peace further off rather than bringing it closer. Fundamental flaws in the negotiating process have undermined efforts to reach a ceasefire and created new obstacles to a near-term armistice that will be challenging to overcome.
If the Trump administration is serious about ending the conflict in Ukraine, it will need to reboot its approach. This means shifting away from the focus on territory, ensuring that the U.S. only makes realistic promises to each side, and breaking down silos to include all parties and the most sensitive political issues. Redirecting the current peace process will not be easy, but, with the window for a deal closing, there is urgency to do so.
The first mistake U.S. negotiators made was pushing the issue of territory to the center of negotiations to end the war. When it began, Russia’s “special military operation” was not about territorial conquest. Instead, Moscow’s goals were political, including preventing Ukraine’s slow drift toward the West and stopping its integration into Western (and NATO) military institutions. In fact, early in the conflict, when Ukraine and Russia met in Istanbul, the two sides came close to an agreement that traded Ukrainian political concessions for a full Russian withdrawal from territories seized in the 2022 campaign.
Territory became more important over time, after Putin passed constitutional laws incorporating oblasts claimed during the conflict and as the war slipped into one of attrition, forcing Russia’s more ambitious political goals out of reach.
Still, American officials reinforced and encouraged this focus on territorial compromise as the key to ending the war, first by pressing Ukraine’s negotiating team to accept territorial concessions as a condition for peace and then, after the Anchorage summit in August 2025, suggesting that Ukraine pull out of the part of Donetsk that Kyiv still controlled to facilitate a ceasefire. As a result, the trade of “ territory for security guarantees ” has become the central paradigm of peace negotiations, with the Trump administration promising vague security commitments to Ukraine if it withdraws from the territory in question.
Now, the central position of territory in the negotiating process has become a serious obstacle to peace. The war’s true root causes — Ukraine’s alignment and NATO’s encroachment on Russia’s borders — lend themselves to compromise and tradeoffs , creating space for a deal. On the issue of territory, however, the positions of the two sides seem irreconcilable. Russia and Ukraine cannot simultaneously control the disputed piece of land. Even a shared sovereignty arrangement would require a single administrative authority in charge of legal matters and taxation.
But putting territory at the center of negotiations was not the only misstep made by U.S. negotiators.
A sustainable deal to end the war in Ukraine must have terms that match the battlefield reality, as neither party can expect an outcome that it did not win through fighting. Rather than pushing the two combatants toward such an agreement, however, Washington has pulled them away from it, offering unrealistic promises that Russia and Ukraine are now — understandably — reluctant to give up.
To Ukraine, the Trump administration has spoken at times of “ Article 5-like ” security guarantees that it likely has no intention of providing. Presidents going back as far as George H.W. Bush have been clear that fighting a war with Russia over Ukraine (as would be implied by such a guarantee) is not in U.S. interests.
To Russia, Washington seems to have suggested that it might be able to compel Ukrainian withdrawal from the remainder of Donetsk under the so-called Anchorage formula . Such a commitment was never viable. For Kyiv, giving up territory at the negotiating table is politically toxic. It would be easier to lose the land on the battlefield, despite the high costs that would come with doing so. In any case, the United States simply does not have the influence over Ukraine required to force such a concession.
Having been promised such favorable terms, however, neither Ukraine nor Russia is ready to accept more attainable ones, especially because of the political costs of walking back commitments made to domestic audiences. The United States will therefore need to rescind…
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