Trump is right: Zelensky does not have the cards
Ukraine needs a negotiated settlement
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By John Vick, Executive Director at Concerned Veterans for America
The recent, tense oval office meeting between President Trump, Vice President Vance, and Ukrainian President Zelensky, followed by a pause in U.S. aid and support have charted a new course for how the U.S. will participate in the war between Russia and Ukraine. In short, the administration (and President Zelensky too, per a letter sent to President Trump) are committed to peace and a negotiated settlement.
A realistic understanding of viable options for Ukraine is tough, but necessary.
The longer the war continues, the greater the chance the Ukrainian military will face a catastrophic collapse that will result in far greater Russian gains than might have been secured in a negotiated settlement. As President Trump accurately put it, Ukraine does not have the cards. And as former President Biden learned, those cards cannot be purchased with American tax dollars.
For years, the Biden administration’s rhetoric misled Ukraine into imagining that the United States could supply its war effort indefinitely and that Americans would be willing to guarantee Ukraine’s security with U.S. troops.
These misconceptions need to be dropped, and this war needs to come to an end.
After what amounted to a moratorium on diplomacy under the Biden administration, the Trump administration took the correct step of beginning talks with Russia about how to end the war. Such negotiations will be complex and difficult, but the Trump administration has thus far demonstrated smart instincts when it comes to recognizing the reality of the situation.
Ukraine is nearing the end of its rope. Its armies have fought bravely, but are depleted, demoralized, and exhausted. Ukraine is running out of weapons, munitions, and soldiers. The West is losing the ability to replenish the former two in adequate numbers due to the degraded state of our military manufacturing industrial base. As for manpower, Ukraine faces mass desertions, a failing campaign to draft its citizens, and reluctance to endanger its future by conscripting 18-22 year-olds. The war has already resulted in an estimated one million casualities.
These are unpleasant facts, but the world must face up to them.
Similarly, the world must accept Ukraine cannot join NATO. Any attempt to make such NATO membership an element of a peace deal will only prolong and worsen Ukraine’s suffering by increasing Russia’s incentive to keep fighting instead of seeking a ceasefire.
Russia bears clear responsibility for launching this war. That said, policymakers in the West are not without some blame. Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have a history of rhetoric that encouraged more strident positions from Ukraine, even though they repeatedly proved unwilling to actually put NATO troops on the line. The 2008 Bucharest summit declaration that Ukraine and Georgia would one day become members of NATO was case in point. Prior to the Trump administration, Western policymakers felt that they had to lie to Ukraine about the possibility of an alliance even though they were never willing to extend NATO membership.
When war came, Ukraine’s Western partners encouraged Ukraine to ignore early opportunities for negotiations and cheered on a hasty, ill-prepared counteroffensive, squandering earlier chances for Kyiv to negotiate when greater capacity to resist remained.
Now Ukraine lies in ruins and Russia continues to grind forward taking more Ukrainian territory.
America’s key interest in the Ukraine war is preventing the conflict from spiraling into a regional confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia. Rather than improving U.S. security, NATO membership for Ukraine makes nuclear war a far greater possibility and would permanently tie down hundreds of thousands of alliance troops in Ukraine at a time when the U.S. needs to be pivoting to greater priorities like Asia.
Even with the Trump administration’s notable progress in shifting more of the burden for European security to European countries, the U.S. will remain the primary guarantor of any check that NATO writes – and Ukrainian membership in NATO is a big, dangerous, blank check for the entire region.
The stark reality is, regardless of the moral and material support that the U.S. may want to give Ukraine, doing so on an open-ended basis is depleting our arsenals in ways that make war more likely elsewhere. While its latent economic strength dwarfs Russia’s, NATO’s economies are not mobilized for wartime production and are being substantially outproduced by Russia in key munitions like artillery shells.
Acknowledging that time is not on Ukraine’s side is an overdue reality check that policymakers have ignored for years, prolonging Ukrainian suffering and hurting U.S. interests in the process. Chief among those interests is a stable and predictable European security arrangement, and that has rarely come without difficult and realistic negotiation – just ask Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The Trump administration is right to pursue ceasefire negotiations to bring the conflict to a swift, needed end. The White House should continue its candor about U.S. interests and reiterate Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s remarks in February that the United States is not willing to provide security guarantees or support NATO membership for Ukraine as part of a peace settlement. Well-armed Ukrainian neutrality and a Europe willing to finally prioritize its own security are the best chances for Kyiv’s long-term independence.
Ukraine has no perfect options right now, but it is well-positioned to secure its sovereignty, rebuild its civil society, and secure a defensible peace. U.S. policy under President Biden did Ukraine a disservice by encouraging it to prolong a bloody, attritional conflict which risks its future when the most likely outcome has always been a negotiated settlement.
The U.S. must encourage Kyiv to seek the best remaining option for Ukraine’s long-term future, and make clear that a ceasefire based in neutrality, not NATO membership, is what it will support.
John Vick is the executive director of Concerned Veterans for America, an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve, and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. The views expressed herein do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of the Navy or the Department of Defense.