Date: Tuesday, 15 April 2025
https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/why-trumps-proposed-solution-to-end
https://theduran.com/why-trumps-proposed-solution-to-end-ukraines-war
Why Trump’s Proposed Solution to End Ukraine’s War Will Be Rejected by Russia
15 April 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)
Here is Trump’s proposal, which comes from his official negotiator on the Ukraine war, Keith Kellogg, who spoke about it with Rupert Murdoch’s London Times on April 11th, and which proposal Kellogg has actually been advocating ever since back in April 2024 he proposed it as a Republican alternative to Biden’s goal of outright defeating Russia. It's designed for allowing Russia to retain only the territory that it was already occupying (in Ukraine’s southeast), and it ignored all of Russia’s repeatedly stated national-security “red lines” the crossing of which by the U.S. and its NATO anti-Russian military alliance had precipitated Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine (such as Russia’s “red line” that Ukraine, the only nation that’s less than 400 miles away from The Kremlin, mustn’t ever be allowed into America’s anti-Russian military alliance, NATO). Kellogg's plan would explicitly allow Ukraine into NATO, and would therefore be a defeat of Russia and thereby cause the overthrow of Putin. Trump liked Kellogg's plan enough to choose him to be his negotiator on the Ukraine war.
The version of his plan that Kellogg stated to the London Times on April 11th is more detailed than the original version of it was, and it therefore adds details to the defeat of Russia that Trump wants. Rather than softening Kellogg’s original plan, the latest version is hardening it — though Russia increasingly has been winning its war in Ukraine, so that Kellogg ought to be softening his demands, not hardening them.
Here is the current version of his plan, as mapped by the London Times on April 11th:
The section in the upper right, which is in an orangish-beige and called “UKRAINE” would be controlled by Ukraine’s Government, and includes the parts of Ukraine that are the nearest of all to The Kremlin, even as close as only 300 miles, or 5 minutes of missile-flying time, away from possibly decapitating Russia’s central command prior to an all-out nuclear destruction of Russia.
The biggest part of Ukraine, shown bluish-green in the left half, west of the Dnipro River, would be occupied by the military forces of Britain, France, and Ukraine.
The reddish-beige part of Ukraine’s southest woud be occupied by the military forces of Russia.
The Times article said that “Kellogg acknowledged that Putin, who has in recent weeks frustrated Trump with an intransigent approach to ceasefire talks, ‘might not accept’ the zones of control proposal.” That’s putting it mildly. The article went on to say “In what is likely to be viewed in Kyiv and European capitals as an attempt to bring Putin back to the negotiating table, Kellogg said the US supported fresh elections in Ukraine.” This lie presumed that Russia, which has consistently supported the holding of elections (or “plebiscites”) as determinig final status issues in the various parts of Ukraine, has instead opposed that.
The Times also said “Russia has continued its daily air strikes on Ukraine. … European officials have pointed to the attacks as proof that the Kremlin is not serious about pursuing peace. Kellogg said he and the Ukrainians, who were at 'maximum compliance’ [with the 30-day ceasefire], …” The first lie there is presuming that the 30-day ceasefire now in force applies to more than merely against targeting energy facilities in both Ukraine and Russia, but that is not true: it applies ONLY to targeting energy-facilities. The second lie there is that Ukraine has many times violated that promise by specifically targeting energy facilities — though Russia has NOT been violating it, and still has not done so. A typical example: on April 5th, Reuters headlined “Russia says Ukraine 'multiplying' energy attacks despite US-brokered moratorium” and reported: “Russia's defence ministry said on Saturday Ukraine had increased its attacks on Russian energy infrastructure, hitting targets 14 times in the last 24 hours, despite a U.S.-brokered moratorium.”
As regards the original statement by Kellogg, of his (now Trump’s) plan, he said, “The Ukrainian government understandably is resistant to any settlement that would reward Russian aggression.” That’s a lie because the aggressor who STARTED this war (against Russia but IN Ukraine) was not Putin but Obama — Kellogg’s own country, America — when President Obama in February 2014 perpetrated in Kiev a very bloody coup that replaced the democratically elected Government and installed a rabidly anti-Russian government in order to get Ukraine into the EU and especially into NATO.
Obviously, then, Putin would need to be an absolute fool in order for him to take seriously Trump’s efforts to negotiate an end to this war that America itself had started. It was an outrage when Trump appointed Kellogg to be America’s official negotiator to end Ukraine’s war, but it’s even more outrageous that Trump hasn’t yet fired that neocon.
Trump, like Biden before him, leaves to Russia no other reasonable option, for protecting Russia's own national security, than for Russia to simply WIN this war — and this means that Russia will have to outright conquer Ukraine. Trump’s pretenses to ’negotiating for peace in Ukraine’ are ONLY pretenses, and though Putin might be wanting to drag out as long as possible the inevitable clear military defeat of the U.S. and its NATO in the battlefields of Ukraine, this win by Russia is, by now, the almost certain ultimate outcome of the war in Ukraine. The U.S. and its colonies (‘allies’) have, by now, made that crystal clear — they have forced upon Russia the capitulation of Ukraine (and the likely subsequent end of the U.S. empire).
Anyone now who expects an undoing of the catastrophe that Obama started in Ukraine by his coup in February 2014 is bound to be tragically disappointed. Trump’s only way out of the situation was for him to have blamed his immediate predecessors Obama and Biden for having caused this war, and thus having been honest enough to admit that The West is lying to blame it on Russia as having caused it — but instead he only continues their lies. His sheer stupidity has been enormous, and there is no reason to expect him to change. If the war in Ukraine won’t end in a Russian victory (as it should), it will end in a World War Three that will kill half of the world’s population in just the first two years. This is a very serious matter, and more people than just I should be pointing all these things out and documenting them. Or is journalism in The West SO corrupt as to prevent that? How much longer will this basic truth of post-WW2 history continue to be hidden from the publics in U.S.-and-allied countries?
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
