Trump bets personal diplomacy will break Ukraine war logjam

President Trump is betting that one more round of personal diplomacy will deliver a breakthrough in the more than three-year-long war in Ukraine after months of failed peace negotiations.

Negotiations so far have not yielded anything meaningful in the way of winding down the war between Russia and Ukraine, despite multiple meeting Trump has had with both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But we have seen another major war, between Israel and Hamas, get to a peace deal (which still has many steps to take before it is completed), after it seemed like the war was intractable.

In that war, President Trump put pressure and charmed both sides to get them to agree to a framework for peace. It looks like the President is attempting to do the same with Russia and Ukraine.

But Trump has shown that his personality, his sheer force of will, can get two opposing sides to come to the table. It’s often messy and imperfect, but making deals between two sides that hate each other always is.

The Russia-Ukraine war is of course a different dynamic than Israel-Hamas, and doing the same things he did to get a peace framework there is not necessarily going to work here.

This war could still go in many different directions, but President Trump’s personal diplomacy should give hope to those who want a lasting peace.