At least then there may be celestial hope for President Donald Trump’s nearly two-year-old promise to end the war in Ukraine. “I’ll have that done in 24 hours,” he told a CNN town hall in May 2023.
He doubled down during a presidential debate in September 2024: “I will get it settled before I even become president.” But then the bravado behind those boastful campaign pledges lost steam this month. Trump’s nominee as special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, pushed the goalpost for peace back “100 days” in an interview, from Inauguration Day’s Jan. 20 to early May.
Whatever deadline you set, ending the war in Ukraine is the first test of the Trump administration. Unfortunately, the new president is learning that there’s no such thing as a drive-by peace deal. Whatever hope the solar system may offer, all real wars come down to hard ground truths.
The hard ground truth in Ukraine is that, as Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower once put it, “sometimes it just gets down to the dirty job of killing until one side or the other cracks.” Right now the Russians are far closer to cracking than the Ukrainians are. While the Russians can absorb more pain, they do not want to take more; the Ukrainians have more limited resources, yet are willing to take more pain because they’re fighting for their country.
Russia currently holds 18% of Ukraine’s sovereign territory (terrain the size of Ohio). Ukraine has retaken 54% of what the Russians held at one point. The fighting over three years has cost Ukraine more than 400,000 dead and injured. Russia’s toll is more than 700,000 dead and injured.
This cost is high yet sustainable on both sides. The Ukrainians have absorbed approximately 11,000 total casualties per month. The Russians, roughly 20,000 total casualties a month. The strategist Edward Luttwak has estimated, “the number of male Ukrainians that annually reach military age is at least 235,000 or 20,000 per month”; but “every month more than 100,000 Russian males reach military age.” So this war is grinding up more than half of Ukraine’s young men, and one-fifth of Russia’s (setting aside women’s considerable contribution to the war effort, particularly for Ukraine).
But that’s what war does. It trades lives for objectives. It is painful and it is awful and it is crude, but this is also the grim arithmetic by which big wars are won.
Such math is taught to every Ukrainian basic trainee, that everyone “on frontline duty must take the life of at least one Russian soldier, preferably more, before dying himself,” as recently reported. While that remarkable rate doesn’t guarantee victory, over time it can have a devastating impact. That’s why most wars are won by outlasting the other side, as the historian Cathal Nolan has pointed out.
The Russians have admitted they’re being outlasted. Last fall, they recruited North Korean troops into their ranks, alongside the convicts, mercenaries and poor kids from Siberia who make up the rest of its remaining army. Death payments alone cost the Russian government $30 billion over a recent one-year period. About 40% of Russia’s national budget now goes to the military.
Morale is with Ukraine. Their units wear patches that read “Ukraine or Death.” Their generals pronounce: “We’ll fight the Russians to the death, until the last Ukrainian.” Their soldiers, unarmed and about to be executed, smoke cigarettes and shout: “Glory to Ukraine.” And they know they’re fighting for their children against an adversary that has stolen well over 19,000 Ukrainian kids since the war began.
So how could the U.S. persuade Ukraine to end the war now? Why would Kyiv make a deal? This is the first problem for Trump and Kellogg. While the Russians may be closer to caving, it’s not clear that either side’s pain has become intolerable. That means bringing parties to the table motivated by desire, not necessity, which makes meaningful concessions near impossible.
If the U.S. could get the two nations to agree, what would the ideal peace deal look like? Twin American interests are at stake that sit in tension with one another, like a massive foreign policy seesaw. Maximizing Ukrainian independence to stand for international borders on one end, versus maximizing détente with Russia to hedge against the growing threat from China.
A durable balance is key. Giving Ukraine all it wants would provoke Russia and throw it further over to the Chinese. Giving Russia too much would embolden it to go again, this time after Moldova, Georgia, maybe at NATO’s edge.
The only real deal, then, is a balanced peace that neither emboldens or provokes. That’s probably something that freezes terrain in place with some creative, NATO-by-another-name security guarantee that ensures Ukraine’s survival and current sovereignty — perhaps stationing troops of major European nations in Ukraine to create a “human tripwire,” as America has done in South Korea for many decades.
Peace is tough because war is tough. Wars don’t end on schedule, for Inauguration Day, or when you say so. Thinking that would be like hoping to bring peace by howling at the moon.
(ML Cavanaugh is a co-founder of the Modern War Institute at West Point and author of the forthcoming book “Best Scar Wins: How You Can Be More Than You Were Before.”)
