Will US President-elect Trump end the Russia-Ukraine war within 100 days? |Russia-Ukraine War News

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and his team plan to take action immediately after being sworn in on Monday and plan to sign a number of executive orders.

Ending the war in Ukraine is one of their top priorities.

Trump’s special envoy to Ukraine, retired U.S. general Keith Kellogg, told Fox News on January 8, “I want to set a goal on a personal level, on a professional level, and I want to say, let’s The goal is 100 days.”

That sounds optimistic for a war that turns three next month, but 100 days represents a step back from a more optimistic timetable. In May 2023, Trump said the conflict would be “absolutely over” within “24 hours” of his official inauguration as president.

On January 7, at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, USA, when asked how he would end the war in Ukraine, Trump abandoned his statement during the campaign that it would end within 24 hours. , calling the negotiation “a difficult negotiation.”

What are Trump’s red lines?

Trump's rush unnerved Ukraine.

Question: “Do you want Ukraine to win this war?” During a campaign debate with U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump responded: “I want the war to stop. I want to save lives.”

Russia, on the other hand, welcomed Trump's swift action.

The day after Trump's press conference, Nikolay Patrushev, an aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin, said the solution to Ukraine should be left to the United States and Russia without the involvement of Ukraine and the European Union. achieved under the circumstances.

Kyiv and Moscow have expressed mutually incompatible ceasefire terms.

Kyiv demands a full withdrawal of Russian troops from its territory and immediate accession to NATO. Moscow says there is no question of returning any of the land it occupies and wants Ukraine to be excluded from NATO.

Trump and his team have not provided details on what a deal might look like, but he has said he is willing to accept Russia's view that Ukraine's right to self-determination can be waived for the greater good.

At Mar-a-Lago, he said: “There are people in Russia right on their doorstep, and I can understand how they feel about that.”

Trump said that before the war broke out, “the deal (with Russia) could have been made by a normal dealmaker,” suggesting he would readily agree to exclude Ukraine from NATO and potentially make the move out of office US President Joe Biden found other concessions unpalatable.

Kellogg said Trump was “not trying to offer anything to Putin or the Russians… He was actually trying to save Ukraine and save their sovereignty. “

Who is winning this war?

Since Ukraine regained large areas of territory in September 2022, the war has basically reached a stalemate.

Ukraine regained some square kilometers of territory in its 2023 counteroffensive, but failed to break through Russian defenses. Russia renewed its offensive last year, slowly and painstakingly capturing 0.69% of Ukraine's territory, which Ukraine said cost Moscow 430,000 casualties.

Russia claimed to have captured two more Ukrainian villages on Monday, Novokhorivka in Luhansk and Shevchenko in Donetsk. It has also made some progress against Ukrainian positions in its own Kursk region, after Ukraine's surprise attack in the first week of the year expanded its counter-invasion into the Kursk region.

As the war remains largely static on the ground, experts told Al Jazeera that control of airspace and sustainable war finances are more likely to determine who wins.

Ukraine has recently expressed confidence in its ability to continue to withstand Russian attacks while inflicting huge losses that it believes will weaken the Russian military, cause the Russian war to lose political support, or exceed Putin's ability to help Russia's economic recovery.

This year, Ukraine plans to produce a record number of its own weapons, bypassing restrictions on the use of Western missiles and build a $30 billion defense industry. Over the past few weeks, U.S. strategic interdiction operations in Russia have struck oil refineries and warehouses, weapons depots and chemical facilities critical to Russia's war effort.

Russia's defense spending has led to high inflation, and some analysts believe that Russia's central bank interest rates are as high as 21%, which indicates that Putin will face financial difficulties.

“Moscow now faces a dilemma: The longer the ceasefire drags on, the greater the risk that credit events such as corporate and bank bailouts will spiral out of control and weaken Moscow's negotiating leverage,” said Harvard University economist Craig Kennedy.

On the campaign trail, Trump said he planned to contact Putin directly to broker peace.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on January 10: “President Putin has consistently stated that he is open to contacts with international leaders, including the President of the United States, including Donald Trump. Trump.”

He said a date for the meeting has not yet been set. CNN reported that the call could take place within days.