- Donald Trump has previously said he could end the war in Ukraine in a day, but never detailed how.
- Trump’s advisors have reportedly set out plans, including setting up a demilitarized zone.
- The Wall Street Journal said that Trump hasn’t approved a specific approach yet.
Donald Trump is the new US president-elect — and his advisors are laying out plans on how to end the war in Ukraine, according to The Wall Street Journal.
One of the plans includes establishing an 800-mile demilitarized zone, the Journal reported, citing three people close to Trump.
Under that plan, Ukraine would also pledge not to join NATO for at least 20 years in exchange for continued US weapons deliveries, they said.
It’s unclear who would police the DMZ, and one advisor told the Journal that American troops and US-funded international organizations like the UN would not be part of any peacekeeping mission.
Vice President-elect JD Vance discussed a similar idea in an interview with the “Shawn Ryan Show” in September.
He said a peaceful settlement would “probably” look like a demilitarized zone on the current line of demarcation between Russia and Ukraine, which would be “heavily fortified” so that Russian forces don’t invade again.
Under that plan, Vance said that Ukraine wouldn’t join NATO so that Russia would get its guarantee of neutrality, and that Germany, among others, would fund some of its reconstruction.
Trump hasn’t approved a specific plan, those close to him told the Journal, which would also have to involve getting Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to negotiate.
According to the report, the proposals all depart from President Joe Biden’s approach of letting Kyiv decide when peace talks should begin. They also all recommend freezing the war where it stands, geographically.
Keith Kellogg and Fred Fleitz, two top officials who served on the National Security Council under Trump’s first administration, presented another plan to Trump earlier this year that involved withholding weapons from Ukraine until the country agreed to engage in peace talks with Russia, Reuters reported in June.
During negotiations, a cease-fire would be established based on the current combat lines, Fleitz told the news agency at the time.
Trump has repeatedly said he could end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours by forcing Russia and Ukraine to negotiate a peace deal — but has never detailed how he would go about it.
Trump told Fox News last year that he would end the war in one day by threatening Ukraine with a suspension of aid and threatening Russia that he would send more aid to Ukraine if Putin doesn’t agree to make a deal.
In a statement sent to Voice of America in March, Steven Cheung, the Trump campaign’s communications director, said Trump’s top priority in his second term would be to “quickly negotiate” an end to the war in Ukraine.
And in a speech at an election night event at his resort in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, Trump said he would stop the wars, but he did not detail how he would do it.
Donald Trump’s campaign didn’t immediately respond to a BI request for comment.
Kurt Volker, the US ambassador to NATO between 2008 and 2009 and a former special envoy to Ukraine under Trump, told the Kyiv Independent he believes Trump will call Putin “as quickly as possible” and urge him to stop the war by projecting power.
One way of doing this, Volker said, was ramping up oil and gas production and trying to flood global markets with as much cheap energy as possible, with the intent of negatively impacting Russia’s economy.
It will be “bad for Putin’s budget, and so I think that’s one thing that he is almost guaranteed to do,” Volker said.
Since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022, Russia has repeatedly increased its defense budget to sustain its war in Ukraine, but the move has caused domestic inflation to soar, forcing Russia’s central bank to hike interest rates.
