One of Donald Trump’s many lofty campaign promises will be tested before he takes office: a self-imposed deadline to end the war in Ukraine.
On podcast appearances and at stump speeches, Trump consistently claimed that he would see to the end of the conflict. “I will have that war settled when I’m president-elect,” Trump told podcast host Shawn Ryan in late August. “Meaning, before I get to office on Jan. 20.”
He told Logan Paul that he would push for the war to be over “right after the election.”
“I’ll get it stopped fast before I even get into office,” Trump said.
So far Trump has offered no specifics other than saying he would meet with Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “I do not want to tell you for the purpose of looking smart to five people,” he told Joe Rogan just 11 days before the election. “Because if I told you exactly what I’d do, I could never make the deal.”
“All I can tell you is that I would meet with Putin and I would meet with [Zelenskyy]. And I know exactly what I’d say to each one of them,” he said.
Experts close to the Ukrainian government said Zelenskyy spoke to Trump on Wednesday. Axios reported that Elon Musk joined the call.
“I appreciate President Trump’s commitment to the ‘peace through strength’ approach in global affairs,” Zelenskyy said in a post that day.
Putin called Trump a “courageous person” and congratulated him during a conference in Sochi, Russia, on Thursday. “I would be loath to comment on what was said during the electoral campaign because it was a deliberate thing to fight for votes,” Putin said. “If he does what he has been promising, before the inauguration, if he makes a phone call. If he says, ‘Vladimir, let’s meet,’ you know, I don’t think it would be beneath me to call him myself.”
One Republican lawmaker told NOTUS Trump had already taken a call with Putin. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Even Trump’s allies in Congress have voiced some doubt that the president-elect will be able to make good on his promise that all of this will be wrapped up before he comes into office.
“He’s got his work cut out for him,” Rep. Tim Burchett, a longtime critic of sending military aid to Ukraine, told NOTUS. “I don’t know, legally, if he can do it or not,” he said. “But we’ll see, we’ll see. I have confidence in him getting it done shortly after he gets in office.”
Foreign policy experts, too, aren’t holding their breath for any serious movement.
“President Trump, in his campaign, made a number of very large and complicated promises,” said Melinda Haring, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and senior adviser at Razom for Ukraine. “As President Trump comes back into office and understands the implications of this policy, he’s unlikely to go forward with it and may have a change of heart.”
The general consensus among experts and those involved in the conflict is that Trump’s claim is something to take seriously, just not on his proposed timeline.
“It’s hard to imagine that there will be much that can be accomplished between now and Jan. 20,” David Kramer, the executive director of the George W. Bush Institute, said.
Kramer said that it’s likely that the leaders will meet and discuss the situation but pointed out that a president-elect doesn’t have much power to negotiate. “His ability to actually effectuate that kind of outcome is extraordinarily limited,” he said.
Alex Plitsas, a veteran of U.S. special operations and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, noted that the conflict is currently too deep to be resolved militarily or diplomatically over the next few months.
“In the next 11 weeks, it’s not going to be fought or decided militarily,” he told NOTUS. “I think the president-elect has a genuine desire to end the war quickly and quietly. But both sides would have to agree, and right now, there doesn’t seem to be room for agreement.”
Republicans have called on using tariffs and energy policy to force Russia out of Ukraine — though neither of those strategies are short-term solutions. Along with tariffs, Rep. Mike Waltz pointed to the energy sector as a main lever to use in negotiating with Putin.
“We can solve this issue with energy,” Waltz told Washington Watch. “Russia is a gas station with nukes.” Waltz, who is on Trump’s short list for secretary of Defense, didn’t put a date on it.
“What President Trump has made clear is he will be focused on ending the war,” Waltz said. “Not this kind of endless, blank check, whatever that means, we have to stop Putin, absolutely, but what’s in our interest?”
Trump too has implied that leveraging the United States’ energy production could produce much better results than arming Ukrainians, remarking that Germany’s purchase of Russian natural gas was “giving them money” to run the war.
Early on during his campaign, in June, Trump told the “All-In” podcast that he’s committed to “no boots on the ground” in Ukraine and said he doesn’t think Ukraine should be part of NATO.
Stephen Wertheim, a foreign policy expert at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Trump’s promise of speedily ending the conflict, and his pledge to keep boots off the ground, would put more “on the table” in any possible negotiations.
“Even though it’s not the outcome that Trump would seem to prefer, there is a risk that in his haste to try to bring about a settlement, we end up with the U.S. either threatening to or delivering on increased support for Ukraine,” he said.
Ukraine has made clear that it would not cede any territory to Russia.
“Putin will be looking to strike a deal that gives him time to rearm and try again to conquer all of Ukraine within the next few years before Trump leaves office,” Josh Rudolph, an expert with the German Marshall Fund, said. According to Rudolph, “the absence of any formal territorial concessions — even if Ukraine is not going to fight back at the moment — a strongly maintained DMZ and security guarantees” would be critical to negotiations.
Without specifics, or a clear readout from Trump’s calls with the foreign leaders, it’s impossible to know what he sees as a path forward. This isn’t his only campaign promise on a tight deadline either.
“You’ve got this, we’ve got Gaza, we’ve got Lebanon … he’s said he wants it all done by the time he gets into office,” Plitsas said. “So he signed up for more than just this.” Inauguration is only 11 weeks away.
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John T. Seward is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.