The Trump administration is moving quickly to initiate a cease-fire and bring an end to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
“I think President Putin wants peace, and President Zelenskyy wants peace, and I want peace,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “I just want to see people stop being killed.”
Earlier in the week, Trump sent Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to Kyiv to meet with Zelenskyy and hammer out an initial framework for continued U.S. security assistance as negotiations begin.
Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio will likewise meet with Zelenskyy and his team on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 14 to discuss Trump’s vision for peace and move toward formally starting negotiations to end Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II.
That process is still nascent, however, and many issues related to trade, diplomacy, security assistance, and territorial disputes will need to be agreed upon in the weeks and months ahead.
Ukraine Trades Rare Earths for Security Assistance
Trump has frequently criticized the amount of security assistance the United States has sent to Ukraine and suggested that the United States ought to receive economic benefits for its continued support.Such a deal would be vital not only to Ukraine’s current defense but also to its ability to deter future Russian aggression after a cease-fire is called.
To that end, Zelenskyy and Bessent agreed to an initial framework that would allow the United States access to hundreds of billions of dollars of rare earth elements in Ukraine in exchange for continued security assistance.
Zelenskyy, meanwhile, said the framework that he and Bessent signed also covered “security, economic cooperation, and resource partnership.”
The move, though not directly related to Russia, is likely to be seen as a key foundation for any lasting peace in the region, as it will anchor U.S. business interests within Ukraine and continue the flow of American-made weapons to Kyiv regardless of whether the United States ever agrees to offer a troop presence there.
The United States is also keen to secure the Ukrainian supply of rare earths for its own strategic reasons. Currently, the United States is largely dependent on the Chinese regime for its supply of rare earths, as China is the world’s largest supplier of many of those metals.
No NATO Membership for Ukraine, No US Presence
Another key sticking point in the discussion about a potential cease-fire has been the possibility of NATO membership for Ukraine.Membership in the trans-Atlantic alliance has been an aspiration of Ukrainian leadership for three decades. Ukraine was the first post-Soviet nation to sign formal agreements with the alliance, beginning with its signing of the Partnership for Peace, an initiative that sought to encourage post-Soviet nations to seek admission to NATO.
Putin has made preventing that goal a key aim of his rule, however, and barring Ukraine from joining NATO was one of the core objectives of his full-scale invasion of the nation in 2022.
Despite its efforts, Ukraine has never been formally considered for membership in the alliance, and it is unlikely Ukraine could join regardless. That’s because accession to the alliance requires unanimous consent from all members, and some, including Hungary, have repeatedly stated that they would reject Ukraine’s membership.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed this week that the United States would ensure NATO membership was off the table as a condition for coaxing Moscow to the cease-fire table.
“Any security guarantee must be backed by capable European and non-European troops ... as part of a non-NATO mission, and they should not be covered under Article Five,” he added.
Article Five of NATO’s founding treaty calls upon the alliance’s members to collectively defend any member state that is attacked by a foreign power.
To date, Article Five has only ever been invoked once, when the NATO alliance came to the defense of the United States following the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
It is possible, therefore, that a new treaty alliance of primarily European nations will take over the defense of Ukraine, effectively forming a NATO-type organization without the influence of the United States.
Ukraine’s Borders Unlikely to Be Those of 2014 or 2024
Finally, there is the central issue of land, which will likely prove the most difficult problem to solve.Ukraine has not controlled a wide swath of its territory since 2014. At that time, pro-Western Ukrainians in Kyiv and elsewhere ousted the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych for rejecting an agreement to expand economic ties with the European Union.
Shortly after, Yanukovych fled Ukraine, and Russian forces invaded the Crimean peninsula. At about the same time, the primarily Russian-speaking populations in Ukraine’s eastern provinces rose up against Kyiv and, with the support of Russian paramilitary forces, declared independence.
The establishment of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic in eastern Ukraine began a brutal conflict in the Donbas that has raged on to the present. Defending Russian speakers in the new republics, which are not internationally recognized, was one of the reasons Putin gave for launching his full-scale invasion in 2022.
Russia also sought then to annex two more regions—Kherson and Zaporizhzhia—that form a land bridge from Donetsk to Crimea.
Still, it is unlikely that Ukraine could secure much of the land that Russia has seized.
As such, the Trump administration has broken with the precedent set by NATO and the Biden administration by acknowledging that Ukraine would cede some territory to Russia as part of a negotiated settlement.
“We must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective,” Hegseth said earlier this week.
The inevitability of some transfer of land has likely weighed on Kyiv for some time and appears to have informed its strategic decision-making on the battlefield.
It is unclear at this time which lands, in particular, Zelenskyy will seek to regain in exchange for Kursk. Still, the control of the Russian territory will likely ensure Kyiv does not need to cede the unoccupied parts of its country that Moscow has demanded.
To what extent the Trump administration is willing to continue providing arms to Ukraine while that negotiation works itself out remains to be seen, as does whether Trump will seek to put pressure on Moscow to relinquish some of the territory it currently possesses.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.
