The US plan for ending the war in Ukraine - on paper at least - became a good deal clearer on Wednesday, with President-elect Donald Trump’s appointment of Lt. Gen. (retired) Joseph “Keith” Kellogg as his point person.
A Vietnam war veteran and a career soldier, Kellogg is co-author of a policy paper that, so far, seems to be the closest thing to a blueprint of the incoming administration’s strategy for the war. In campaign speeches, Trump promised voters he would end the war in Ukraine “in 24 hours.”
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Published by the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a Washington DC-based think tank, the white paper written by Kellogg and co-author Fred Fleitz spelled out how American superpower strength could strong-arm Moscow and Kyiv to the negotiating table and bring an end to hostilities.
Once you wade through the rhetoric highlighting the alleged foreign policy errors of the outgoing Democratic administration, the Kellogg strategy boils down to, on the face of it, something close to “Reaganite Republican” textbook core assumptions:
- Russia and Putin are aggressive and cannot be trusted
- NATO warfighting capability must be credible to deter Russian aggression
- A continued war between Ukraine and Russia weakens NATO and distracts the US from China
- The Kremlin must be engaged so that US leverage can work
- Formalization and/or recognition of Russian occupation of Ukrainian territory is unacceptable
- Ukraine cannot sustain a long war due to manpower shortages
- There is not enough will in the US and NATO to arm Ukraine to enable it to take back lost territory
- The war and US military support to Ukraine has drained US weapon stockpiles to dangerously low levels
- US national security institutions, if unchecked, will seek status quo, not resolution of the war
In a nutshell, Kellogg’s thinking boils down to this: “What we should not continue to do is to send arms to a stalemate that Ukraine will eventually find difficult to win. We should start with a formal US policy to bring the war to a conclusion.”
The AFPI paper calls for a formal ceasefire and creation of a demilitarized zone between Russian and Ukrainian forces. Ukraine would give up its aspirations for NATO membership “for an extended period in exchange for a comprehensive and verifiable peace deal with security guarantees.”
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Western sanctions on Russia would remain largely in place and would not be lifted, until such time as Russia removed its forces from Ukrainian territory. Ukrainian reconstruction would be paid for by “levies” on Russian energy sales.
Kellogg acknowledges Russia has ignored international agreements it has signed and invaded Ukraine despite commitments not to. Therefore, the Kremlin cannot be trusted to keep its word in the future.
Since NATO membership for Ukraine would be off the table, Kellogg argues, the solution to Ukraine’s legitimate fear that Russia might invade again is “a long-term security architecture for Ukraine’s defense that focuses on bilateral security defense.”
In comments made to Fox on Nov. 22, less than a week before Trump named him as the incoming administration’s chief negotiator with Kyiv and Moscow, Kellog said the US needed to call Russia’s bluff and confront the Putin regime with American resolve, and that as long as hostilities are in progress, US military and political support to Ukraine should be beefed up.
However, were one to wind back the American political clock, Kellogg’s previous stance on Russia and Ukraine was “beefier” still. Following a January 2023 visit to Ukraine at the head of a US delegation, Kellogg told both Congress and Fox television, among others, that Russia could not be negotiated with, and that Ukraine’s only path to security was the defeat of Russia on the battlefield.
Some of his remarks from that time have aged poorly:
Shortly after that visit he told Fox News: “Here is what I think the end game is. I think that evicting the Russians from Ukraine, I think they’ve got the capacity to do it, the Ukrainians, with their fighting spirit, as long as we give them the kit.”
In comments made in June to the Reuters news agency, Kellogg had effectively reversed his position that Ukraine should be armed for victory: “We tell the Ukrainians, 'You've got to come to the table, and if you don't come to the table, support from the United States will dry up’... and you tell Putin, ‘He's got to come to the table and if you don't come to the table, then we'll give Ukrainians everything they need to kill you in the field'."
But from both the Ukrainian and Russian perspectives, threats like that, even though made by a superpower, are arguably hollow.
The critical elements of US assistance to Ukraine have been some categories of artillery ammunition, which only accounts for about half of all the artillery ammunition Ukraine received from other allies. Ukraine also manufactures artillery ammunition of its own, albeit with varying levels of quality.
The most irreplaceable US weapon Ukraine receives is probably Patriot anti-aircraft missiles, which are practically the only means Ukraine has of intercepting Russian ballistic missiles bombarding Ukrainian cities. However, US stockpiles of Patriot missiles are already so low it’s an open question whether the incoming Trump administration would have enough Patriot missiles in hand to credibly threaten to deprive Ukraine of more Patriots.
The stick Kellogg would wield against Russia, that Washington would arm Ukraine to the teeth if Russia won’t talk, therefore, appears far from totally credible.
On the material side, on Nov. 19 in comments reported by AP, Admiral Sam Pepeo, Commander of US Indo-Pacific forces, pointed out that US arms commitments to Israel and Ukraine had already reduced supplies of Patriot missiles and most other high-tech munitions needed by US forces to fight a war to dangerously low levels.
“It’s now eating into stocks, and to say otherwise would be dishonest,” Pepeo told an audience at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
On the political side, Trump campaigned on a platform of ending what he called exorbitant US arms transfers to Ukraine that US taxpayers neither wanted nor could afford. If implemented as written, however, the Kellog/AFPI plan recommends the exact opposite.
Then there is the actual scale of the money involved. The Kellogg/AFPI plan calls for “long-term security architecture” that will enable Ukraine to deter a future invasion by Russia - a nuclear power fielding the second, or third-most powerful military in the world.
NATO states, like Ukraine, with a national security interest in deterring Russia from invading spent about $380 billion in 2024 on defense, which excludes the amounts spent by the US.
Both France and Britain back up deterrence with their own nuclear weapons. From the perspective of policymakers in Kyiv, if Ukraine is excluded from the NATO military alliance it would, as a non-nuclear power, need a force with similar combat power to that fielded by the 32 Alliance members if it was to convince the Kremlin it was too risky to invade Ukraine again.
If we use European NATO defense expenditures as a reasonable yardstick to measure the cost of deterring Russia, then the promised US support of $60 billion to Ukraine is less than one-sixth of the $380 billion provided by NATO’s European members.
Based on that, if the Kellogg/AFPI strategy was to work, US taxpayers would have to pony up six times more money for Ukraine than currently - every year for as long as Russia was a threat to Ukraine, in order to deter Moscow from invading again.
The Zelensky administration has signaled a preparedness to negotiate on sensitive issues such as territory and war crimes, but not on a deal that compromises Ukraine’s future sovereignty and security.
If the US proposals led to the provision of weaponry insufficient to deter Russia, then Kyiv would justifiably feel that the existential national security risk for Ukraine would be unacceptable. In that case, Ukraine would have no option but to fight on against Russia, rather than giving the Kremlin breathing space to re-arm before attacking Ukraine again.
Moscow, for its part, has repeatedly stated its war objectives [as a minimum] are total control of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea regions, ongoing Ukrainian neutrality and no security alliances with any state, a Ukrainian military cut to roughly one quarter its present size, along with no reparations or war crimes prosecutions. Putin’s position is that anyone unhappy with those terms can just sit back and watch the Russian army take the territory it wants by force.
Both Moscow and Kyiv will, in upcoming negotiations be aware that veteran national security experts that, like Kellogg, worked for Trump during his first term as US President from 2016-2000, were often sidelined or simply sacked if they were seen to directly disagree with him.
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