Negotiations over the Russia-Ukraine war, Trump-style

Regardless of what one thinks of the Trump Administration’s decision to try to put a quick end to the Russia-Ukraine War at this time, there are practical considerations that need to be kept in mind, unless someone is just a MAGA-cult cheerleader.

Michael McFaul was US Ambassador to Russia (2012-2014). He has tended to take a rigidly hawkish position on the Russia-Ukraine War and is currently, which it would be hard to argue has worked out unambiguously well for Ukraine so far. He is currently a senior fellow with the conservative Hoover Institute at Stanford. But he does have direct experience of negotiating with the Russians. And this observation about what he sees as an amateurish approach to the current Trump Administration negotiations with Russia over Ukraine. He thinks the Russians were likely surprised by the big concessions Trump made on this issue last week.

I watch Russian television so you don't have to. And. honestly, I think they are surprised by how much they have already gained in the last week of negotiations. I think they didn't expect that it would just be handed to them in the way that it does.

Like I said, I've negotiated with them. You hold your hardest cards to the for the last play in the negotiations, right? Like I helped to negotiate the New START treaty [of 2011]. And you left the very last plays to the end. We did the same thing on many other negotiations. And that’s, everything was just handed to them [by the Trump Administration in the last week], I, honestly, I think they were surprised by that.

Now, again, I hope that we're going to get better. You know, this was just their first time on the field. And [Russian Foreign Minister Sergey] Lavrov sitting there - he's been at it for 21 years. Secretary Rubio has been at it for three weeks. That's a big asymmetry in experience. I hope they get it right. But the first round definitely goes to the Russians.¹

The need to negotiate an end to the hostilities seems obvious. And the Ukrainians’ most successful pushback against the Russia forces was in 2022, the first year of the war. They are now at an obvious disadvantage on the battlefield. So, there’s a good argument to be made that the West should have been making an aggressive push for a ceasefire two years ago.

But such negotiations are complicated, way more complicated than practicing for an episode of The Apprentice. And high-stakes international negotiations like this are particularly complicated, requiring some basic amount of professional trust and predictability on the part of the negotiators.

McFaul notably calls Trump’s negotiating approach “trolling.” And he sees it – plausibly – as a sign of weakness in negotiation.

Investment banker Bill Browder, the CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, has been one of the prominent critics of the Putin regime. He’s very familiar with the Putting regime and has been outspoken in his criticism of it for years. Not that it directly affects his competence as a commentator on Russia, but it’s an interesting biographical factoid that his grandfather was Earl Browder, who served as Chairman of the US Communist Party 1934-1945. Here is an interview with him from Times Radio, affiliated with the conservative Times of London²:

He also refers to the bumbling, confusing nature of the current approach Trump and Marco Rubio are taking in their current diplomatic posture.

Another specialist on Russia with interesting “red” ancestry is Nina Khrushcheva of the New School, the great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev, the main leader of the Soviet Union 1953-1964. She mentions that she was also the last research assistant of the foreign policy scholar and expert on Russia, George Kennan.

Early in the following interview³, she also makes the argument that Über-Realist John Mearsheimer has been making, which is that it has not been Putin’s aim earlier in the war or even now to capture all of Ukraine, though it’s very common for politicians and commentators to take it for granted that completely absorbing Ukraine is a goal of the current war. Khrushcheva does say that Putin may well want to have a puppet government of some sort in Ukraine. (Russia has formerly declared the Crimean Peninsula and part of eastern Ukraine as having been annexed to the Russian Federation.)

At 4:00 in the interview, the host asks her, “Are you concerned about what a Trump-brokered peace deal might look like?

To which she responds with a chuckle, “Well, I mean, I am concerned about anything [a] Trump deal would look like. I mean, generally I'm concerned about Trump globally. As far as NATO goes everybody knows that Ukraine's road to NATO may never happen.”

She goes on to say that the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO in the face of Russian opposition was always highly unlikely.

Another NATO complication

Another practical consideration for the European NATO allies is one that most commentators seem to find too delicate to mention. But, whatever one thinks of the grand strategy of NATO expansion, both Democratic and Republican administrations tended to look to expansion as a “freebie,” in the sense that it would increase American influence but was not going to be taken to require seriously preparing for war with Russia that could break out at any time.

The unification of Germany in 1990 added territory to former West Germany that was already a NATO member. (Exactly what promises the US made in those negotiations is still the subject of polemics to this day.) The first “NATO enlargement” after that was the addition of the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Finland joined NATO in 2023 and Sweden in 2024.

J.R.I. Shifrinson made an important point in 2023 on the problem with looking at new members as more-or-less freebies:

NATO enlargement may expose the United States to a variety of security ills while limiting its ability to respond to these dilemmas. First, ongoing expansion requires the United States to defend several Eastern European states of questionable strategic value, up to and including the use of nuclear weapons. Even if some of the members to which NATO has expanded are useful for denying prospective rivals room to prove their mettle (e.g., the European Union) or to expand their geographic reach (e.g., Russia), many of the member states to which the United States offered security guarantees via NATO are of minimal long-term importance. Loss of the Baltic states to Russia, for instance, would do little to shift Europe’s strategic map, while none of NATO’s new Southeastern European members are of use in either reinforcing US power or denying power to others. Having taken on the commitment, the United States—as NATO’s principal military backer—is now stuck having to try to defend these actors.⁴ [my emphasis]

This is part of what is very misleading about all the Munich Analogy talk we’ve been hearing the last three years around the Russia-Ukraine War. It is commonly asserted that if the Western powers don’t help Ukraine stop the Russian invasion, Russia will absorb all of Ukraine and then start taking over Poland and other countries.

But what NATO countries have to take into account as a very practical matter is that Ukraine is not a member or formal military ally of NATO. The Baltic countries are. As Shifrinson further points out:

As the Russia-Ukraine War and the prospect of further Russian aggrandizement has thrown into stark relief, this is no easy task. The Baltics present an especially problematic situation, particularly for conventional defense. Local geography is unfavorable, the distances involved make reinforcement difficult, and the proximity to local prospective threats - in this case, Russia - means it is nearly impossible to obtain favorable force ratios. Nevertheless, the United States and other NATO members have tried to engage the problem, committing growing assets along the way. The alliance is therefore playing a fraught game. The United States and its partners can certainly try to develop military tools to meet NATO’s expanded commitments, but doing so is expensive, may exacerbate tensions with Russia, stands a real chance of failure, and—insofar as allies are under the US security umbrella—risks the United States putting its own survival on the line by extending US nuclear guarantees in the face of a nuclear-armed opponent. In sum, US backing for enlargement has left the United States with a suppurating sore of a strategic commitment, putting it on the firing line in Eastern Europe.

I think this is the first time I’ve ever encountered the phrase “suppurating sore of a strategic commitment”! And he adds in a footnote about the then-pending memberships of Finland and Sweden:

Likely Swedish and Finnish membership in NATO may mitigate some of the problems associated with a conventional defense of the Baltics, though is unlikely to resolve all issues. For that matter, Finland - despite its impressive indigenous capabilities - may present another difficult military challenge for the alliance.

It seems unlikely at the moment that Trump, who is trying to shove an unfavorable peace arrangement down Ukraine’s throat, will offer to commit US troops in Ukrainian territory. But with characters as erratic as Trump and his appointees, who knows?

Perhaps more relevant at the moment are European considerations of picking up the slack for American aid to Ukraine. With Trump communicating repeatedly that he does not consider himself bound to European defense under the NATO Treaty obligations, European NATO members are facing immediate decisions about how much additional aid they can or will provide to Ukraine.⁵

If the US pulls its support, European nations’ decision-making will be heavily influenced by the vulnerabilities Shifrinson describes – even though European leaders are unlikely to describe them publicly as a “suppurating sore of a strategic commitment.”

1. Trump Cozies up to Russia — Why “Nobody Trusts America”. Katie Couric YouTube channel 02/21/2025 (23:00ff in the video). (Accessed: 2025-23-02).

2. Bill Browder: Putin can’t afford to end the war in Ukraine. Times Radio YouTube channel 02/21/2025. (Accessed: 2025-23-02).

3. Nina Khrushcheva: 'It's Putin and Trump against the world'. Al Jazeera English YouTube channel 02/21/2025. (Accessed: 2025-23-02).

4. Shifrinson, Joshua R. Itzkowitz (2023): The NATO Enlargement Consensus and US Foreign Policy: Origins and Consequences. In: J. Goldgeier, J. & Shifrinson J.R.I. (eds.), Evaluating NATO Enlargement: From Cold War Victory to the Russia-Ukraine War, 122-3. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23364-7_4>

5. Gleichschaltung apparently hasn’t been fully implemented yet at the Voice of America. They report that European countries have contributed more to Ukraine in non-military aid than the US has, contrary to a public claim by Trump.

Powell, Anita & Babb, Carla (2025): US figures do not support Trump claims on Ukraine spending. VOA News 02/19/2025. <https://www.voanews.com/a/us-figures-do-not-support-trump-claims-on-ukraine-spending/7981441.html> (Accessed: 2025-23-02).