View from Washington: Trump can force an endgame in the war between Ukraine and Russia

Keith Kellogg (left), Steve Witkoff (right) and Trump.
Pic.: ‘The American Thinker’

That caused Trump to cancel a planned meeting with Putin, saying he did not want to participate in another “wasted meeting”. Putin refused to agree to a ceasefire along the current front line, ‘The American Thinker’ writes.

In Gaza, Trump was able to strong-arm Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into a ceasefire with Hamas, simply by expressing his displeasure over Netanyahu’s decision to attack Hamas leaders in Qatar without first seeking permission from Washington. But unlike Israel in its war on Hamas in Gaza, Putin is not dependent upon the United States to continue the war in Ukraine. Putin’s insistence that he wants control of the Donbas region as a condition of a ceasefire suggests Putin is willing to continue a war that he feels Russia can and will win, even if it means going to war with the United States.

Trump appears to be wavering between two sets of advisors: U.S. Special Envoy General Keith Kellogg, who has clearly taken the warmongering position against Putin in Ukraine, and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, who has met with Putin five times this year. Kellogg has repeatedly insisted that Ukraine could win the war if Trump provided Ukraine with the weapons needed to win the war. Importantly, Kellogg did not attend the meeting with Zelinsky in the White House on October 17. Witkoff told the Ukrainian delegation that Zelensky must give Russia the entire Donetsk region to stop the fighting.

What Trump must realize is that the United States State Department under Presidents Obama and Biden, together with the CIA and George Soros, were the aggressors determined to weaken Russia by expanding NATO to include Ukraine, extending U.S. military muscle to the border of Russia. In his 678-page book entitled Provoked: “How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine”, Scott Horton, the director of the Libertarian Institute and the editorial director of Antiwar.com, wrote:

The current fear campaign against Russia in the American media is no different from the demonization of any of the U.S. government’s enemies here and around the world: virtually the entire popular narrative is fake. But the older generation is used to hating Russia and the young have been sold a line about “Russian aggression” throughout Eastern Europe for years now. There is also the harm done by the Russiagate hoax that claimed the dastardly Putin influenced President Donald Trump upon our land, which has seemingly forever damaged the brains of America’s Democrats and made peaceful coexistence for them unthinkable. (page 662)

Suppose Putin intensifies military pressure to take the Donbas region, and Trump supplies Zelensky with Tomahawk missiles. In that case, we return to the brink of nuclear war — the same precipice we faced when Biden authorized Ukraine to use U.S. ATACMS long-range missiles to attack Russia. The geopolitical reality is that Russia cannot be disengaged from the territory Russia currently holds in Ukraine without triggering an unthinkable nuclear war.

What Trump must realize is that the only way to stop this war may be Witkoff’s solution of ceding the Donbas region to Putin — an endgame Trump can force simply by refusing to supply advanced weapons to Ukraine, even if that means cutting funding to NATO. Simply holding fast on not supplying Tomahawks to Zelensky may be enough for Trump to force an endgame on Zelensky, causing Zelensky and NATO to accept the reality that Putin has won this war, including the Donbas region, short of nuclear war.

Zelenskyy simply can’t accept the decision about  Donbas to become  part of Russia. If he agrees, that would become the end of his political career and Ukrainian Nazis would eventually eliminate him. Zelenskyy does understand this. The immediate question to him will be – what this war was for?

Therefore, a solution to the Ukrainian crisis with Zelenskyy is next to impossible. That’s what they should take into consideration in Washington thinking about how to “end this war”.

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