The U.S.-led talks to end the war in Ukraine have been placed on hold. The Trump administration’s focus on Iran might be the proximate reason, but it is not the underlying cause. In truth, the negotiations had already stalled because of a more serious problem: the way the United States has structured the peace process.
To this point, the Trump administration has centered the talks on a core bargain. In order to end the war, Ukraine will cede more of its land to Russia—specifically, the nearly 20 percent of the Donbas Kyiv still controls—in exchange for security commitments from the United States and Europe. “The Americans are prepared to finalize [security] guarantees at a high level once Ukraine is ready to withdraw from Donbas,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a March interview. Or, in U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s formulation, “the Russians want certain pieces of territory, most of which they’ve occupied but some of which they haven’t. So that is really where the meat of the negotiation is. The Ukrainians want security guarantees, the Russians want a certain amount of territory.”
The administration is right to seek a negotiated end to the fighting. The war between Russia and Ukraine has been immensely destructive, first and foremost to Ukrainians but also to regional and international security, to global economic growth, and to U.S. and allied military stockpiles. Yet structuring a peace agreement around land for security guarantees has not worked yet and is unlikely to work in the future. This approach exaggerates the significance of territory for Russia and the importance of Western assurances for Ukraine. And it neglects to address the key challenge in ending any war, which is what political scientists call the credible commitment problem: convincing a belligerent that its enemy will really commit to peace.
To overcome that obstacle, U.S. negotiators will need to take a different approach and seek a more comprehensive arrangement, one that addresses the credible commitment problem. That means an eventual deal must give Ukraine the means to defend itself and deter a possible future invasion while assuring Russia that Kyiv will not be a beachhead for NATO and will only try to restore its territorial integrity via nonmilitary means. And it means treating negotiations not as a barter of land for security guarantees but as the foundation for stable—if hostile—relations between Russia and Ukraine and, eventually, Russia and NATO.
