Advisers to President-elect Donald Trump now concede that the Ukraine war will take months or even longer to resolve, a sharp reality check on his biggest foreign policy promise - to strike a peace deal on his first day in the White House,
Reuters reports.
Two Trump associates, who have discussed the war in Ukraine with the president-elect, told Reuters they were looking at a timeline of months to resolve the conflict, describing the Day One promises as a combination of campaign bluster and a lack of appreciation of the intractability of the conflict and the time it takes to staff up a new administration.
Those assessments dovetail with remarks by Trump's incoming Russia-Ukraine envoy, retired Lieutenant-General Keith Kellogg, who said in an interview with Fox News last week that he would like to have a "solution" to the war within 100 days, far beyond the president-elect's original timeline.
Yet even Kellogg's extended deadline was "way, way too optimistic," said John Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who is now at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington.
"For this to work, Trump has to persuade (Russian President Vladimir) Putin that there's a downside for being intransigent," Herbst said.
In the run-up to his Nov. 5 election victory, Trump declared dozens of times that he would have a deal in place between Ukraine and Russia on his first day in office, if not before.
In late October, however, he made a subtle shift in his rhetoric, and began saying he could solve the war "very quickly."
Since the election, Trump has walked back his rhetoric further, often simply saying that he would "solve" the conflict, without offering a timeline. And the president-elect has said ending the war in Ukraine will be harder than reaching a ceasefire in Gaza.
"I think, actually, more difficult is going to be the Russia-Ukraine situation," Trump said when asked about Gaza during a press conference in December. "I see that as more difficult."
