One key to a successful negotiation is always being willing to walk away from the table. But it isn’t clear whether the Trump administration has threatened to give up on a Russia-Ukraine peace deal as a negotiating tactic or simply because it lacks the concentration for a complicated negotiation – a shortcoming that has dogged the administration’s foreign policy through its first three months in office.
Standing on a tarmac in Paris, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, issued a threat that the US could simply “move on” from mediating the biggest military conflict in Europe since the second world war. That would be the latest about-face for an administration that has already taken a back seat on negotiating a peace in Gaza and retreated on implementing worldwide tariffs that shook financial markets around the globe earlier this month.
Diplomacy, it turns out, is hard. The 24 hours that Donald Trump promised he would need to halt the fighting in Ukraine have long since passed. And the administration has done little of the hard diplomatic work that was required to secure landmark deals like the Dayton agreement or the Camp David accords in the past.
There have been plenty of meetings: Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff has spoken three times with Vladimir Putin, during which he has listened to the Kremlin leader’s thoughts on Ukraine for hours, and Rubio was on the phone with Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, and met with Ukrainian officials and European leaders in Paris on Thursday.
But there are few indications that new ground has been struck, that the US has exerted any pressure on the Kremlin or that the negotiations have identified what kinds of security guarantees would exist to ensure that Russia wouldn’t simply continue the war when it sees fit. One element of a “Trump deal” appears to be this: that it doesn’t take very long or involve very much effort to achieve.
“We’re not going to continue to fly all over the world and do meeting after meeting after meeting if no progress is being made,” Rubio said, noting that the US wanted to stop “thousands” of people from dying in the next year. “So if they’re serious about peace – either side, or both – we want to help. If it’s not going to happen, then we’re just going to move on. We’re going to move on to other topics that are equally if not more important in some ways to the United States.”
Rubio clearly wished to vent frustration on Friday, a day after Trump had said in the White House that he was waiting for Russia’s response to the proposed framework for a peace deal and expected to have it this week. The White House appears to be increasingly frustrated with Moscow, something that both European and Ukrainian officials had hoped would take place.
But if Trump walks away from a deal and the war altogether, the decision will still play into Putin’s hands – relieving Ukraine of a key ally and financial backer in its fight against Russia. Moscow appears to see the situation as a win-win: either taking a favourable deal with the White House or waiting for Trump to lose patience. Which he is now threatening to do.
There are more hopeful voices in the administration. JD Vance, the Ukraine-sceptic vice-president, told Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, on Friday that he felt “optimistic that we can hopefully bring this war, this very brutal war, to a close”. There had been “some things … even in the past 24 hours” that he said could indicate a chance to secure a ceasefire.
But to listen to Rubio or Witkoff, the various sides have barely moved from their opening positions. On Friday, Bloomberg reported that the United States had offered Russia some sanctions relief in exchange for a deal – something that Rubio had offered as far back as his confirmation hearings in January. And Witkoff appeared surprised on Fox News that Russia wanted “so much more” than just a ceasefire. “I mean, it’s just a lot of detail attached to it,” he said. “It’s a complicated situation from, you know – rooted in some real problematic things happening between the two countries.”
There was always an expertise gap in the difficult negotiations over a ceasefire to the Russian war in Ukraine. Now the administration appears to have a patience gap and has signaled it is ready to walk away. Ukraine does not have that option.
