ALBERTO COLL: Trump Promised A Ukraine-Russia Peace Deal — Here’s One Plan

As he promised throughout his campaign, one of President-elect Donald Trump’s top priorities is to end the war in Ukraine. For 33 months now, the Biden administration has refused to give Ukraine in timely fashion enough of the long-range capabilities and air defenses it needs to win decisively. As a result, the conflict has become a stalemated war of attrition.

Ukrainian losses now exceed 80,000 killed soldiers and 5,000 dead civilians. Under the surface of the Ukrainians’ extraordinary resilience, determination and sheer courage, a palpable sense of war weariness has begun to spread.

In some ways, Trump faces a predicament not unlike that of President Richard Nixon, who inherited from his Democratic predecessor in 1969 a war that President Lyndon Johnson could neither win nor end. The good news is that, unlike our South Vietnamese allies, Ukraine has shown that it can emerge from the war as a self-sustaining, prosperous and independent country. In a call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky following his election, Trump reassured the Ukrainian leader that the endgame would be one that Ukraine would be able to live with, even if it has to make some major concessions. A day later, Trump called Russian President Vladimir Putin and told him he does not want to see the war escalate, while pointedly reminding him of the United States’ sizeable military presence in Europe.

Already the outlines of a Trump “deal” have begun to emerge. Russia would keep the territories it currently occupies. There would be a “buffer area” or “demilitarized zone” patrolled by European forces. Ukraine would not join NATO for a long period of time, perhaps another quarter century. Various key sanctions on Russia would be lifted. As in all such deals, there would be some bitter pills both parties would have to swallow. Ukraine would have to accept, a least for the foreseeable future, the de facto loss of Crimea, the Zaporizhian corridor, and much of the Donetsk Basin. For his part, Putin would fail to achieve his larger twin strategic goals of breaking up NATO and turning Ukraine into a Russian satellite. Given his increasingly narrowing options, it is likely that Zelensky would accept such a deal. A much bigger question is whether Putin would do so.