Maybe it’s a measure of Ukraine’s wartime success that President Donald Trump has moved from deriding President Volodymyr Zelensky more than 18 months ago as a weakling with “no cards” to protesting his devastating attacks on Russian refineries.
Last weekend, Trump’s abiding irritation with Zelensky led him to a diesel-oil deal with Moscow that sharply undercuts a Russia sanctions law he just signed. And the White House is threatening even worse—a cutoff in crucial intelligence support for Kyiv that a European diplomat conceded to me would be “hard to replicate.”
But like so many Trump eruptions, this latest Ukraine flap obscures what may be a more important development: The United States and Europe are moving slowly toward a joint peace proposal that would deliver financial and security benefits to both Ukraine and Russia as a baseline for a territorial settlement that falls short of both sides’ war aims.
The rationale for this vexed peace initiative draws on the maxim: Whenever you run into a problem you can’t solve, make it bigger. US negotiators are trying to frame a package that addresses Ukraine’s and Russia’s postwar needs in a way that ends the bloodbath and leaves both countries better off—as a sweetener for a territorial compromise neither side will like.
“We need to make the problem and the solution bigger to help both sides see what the postwar situation would be—and then make concessions,” explained a US official familiar with the talks who gave me this detailed summary.
The diplomatic push came during a six-hour meeting last Friday in Florida hosted by US envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. The meeting, which included Ukrainian officials and representatives of Britain, France, and Germany, was held at the Shell Bay Golf Club, a development owned by Witkoff in Hallandale Beach.
Trump wants Ukraine and Russia to stop bombing each other’s refineries as a condition for the US peace initiative. That’s easy for Russia—Ukraine’s biggest refinery has already been battered by Russian attacks. But for Zelensky it would mean holstering one of his strongest weapons. “Clearly, the Ukrainians’ ability to strike refineries is having an impact on Russia’s economy,” the European diplomat said. “It has increased Zelensky’s leverage.”
Kushner and Witkoff asked the Ukrainians to halt refinery attacks at Friday’s meeting and warned that Trump would do the diesel deal, according to the American official; the official said that US negotiators had made the request a half-dozen times in recent months, as diesel oil prices spiked. What followed was predictable: Zelensky balked; Trump did the deal (with the nakedly political aim of lowering prices as the midterm elections approach); Zelensky derided Trump’s decision as “weak”; and Trump threatened to cut off intelligence support.
If Zelensky agrees to halt refinery attacks, “we’re back in, and we go to Moscow,” the American official told me. But what would Ukraine get—and give up—as part of the US-European settlement that has been taking shape?
