Will Trump’s pause of Ukrainian military aid force Zelensky to the negotiating table?

The decision couldn’t have come as a surprise to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. And if it did, then his capacity to read the room is even worse than imagined.

Last night, the Trump administration paused all US military aid to Ukraine. The move came after an extremely tumultuous few weeks, which started on February 19 when Zelensky claimed that Trump was living in a Kremlin-orchestrated disinformation bubble. Trump wasted no time howling back by calling Zelensky a dictator because he canceled elections during a time of war. The spat accelerated on Friday, when the two men, egged on by Vice President J.D. Vance, had a rhetorical MMA-style showdown in the Oval Office, with the Ukrainian president pleading with the Americans for security guarantees and Trump blasting Zelensky for not being as eager to strike a peace deal as he is. If that wasn’t enough, Trump hit Zelensky again yesterday, warning him that Washington wasn’t going to put up with him much longer.

The Ukrainians are understandably dismayed by the Trump administration’s latest decision, as is much of the foreign policy commentariat in the United States. They just can’t seem to fathom that an American president, the so-called defender of the free world, would pressure Kyiv, the victim in this war, at a time when Russian glide-bombs still drop on top of Ukrainian cities and hundreds of thousands of Russian troops try to inch forward for more ground. What on earth is Trump thinking?

While it’s always a risk to try to contemplate where Trump’s head is at, I get the sense that this case is pretty straightforward: Trump is tired of Zelensky’s haranguing , doesn’t believe the Ukrainians have the capability to win the war militarily and is convinced that a longer war will ultimately result in a weaker hand for Kyiv when negotiations do happen. There’s also a fair amount of ego and legacy at play here as well; to the extent that Trump had anything to say about foreign policy during the campaign, it was about getting Zelensky and Putin into the room to hammer out a peace deal that would end a war that has killed upwards of a million people. He clearly aims to follow those words with action. Whether the motivation is to save people’s lives or to get himself a Nobel Peace Prize, the intent is the same: bring Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War Two to a close. 

And therein lies the dispute between the US under Trump and Ukraine under Zelensky. The clash is not just about personality and character traits. It’s also about conflicting national interests and goals that are difficult to reconcile. Ultimately, both Trump and Zelensky want the war to end, but the former is far more interested in ending it as soon as possible whereas the latter intends to terminate it on his terms. Although Zelensky has softened up his position on negotiations since he tabled his first peace plan in the fall of 2022, he remains resistant to beginning talks with Putin when the Ukrainian army remains on the defensive. 

Over the previous three years, Zelensky didn’t have to concern himself with a US president who prioritized an end-of-war settlement. While President Joe Biden mouthed words about putting Ukraine in the best possible negotiating position, his policy toward the war essentially consisted of following Zelensky’s lead. Sure, Biden may have opposed sending specific weapons systems to Kyiv — only to reverse himself over time — but he was never interested in pressuring the Ukrainians into a discussion they didn’t want to have. Kyiv effectively had a veto over US foreign policy. During Biden’s time, US military support would continue for as long as the Ukrainians wanted to keep fighting.

Trump has shredded Biden’s approach. The US is no longer willing to wait for the ideal circumstances to begin a diplomatic process, and as Trump showed last night, he’s open to doing anything — even if it means placing a hold on additional US military assistance — to pressure Zelensky into cooperating. And guess what? It looks like it’s working. “None of us wants an endless war,” Zelensky wrote on X this morning. “Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace closer. Nobody wants peace more than Ukrainians.” 

Getting Ukraine to the table, however, is only half the battle. Trump will have to do the same with Russia. Secretary of state Marco Rubio’s bilateral meeting last month with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov was designed to lay the groundwork for precisely that. Yet the Russians remain inflexible, aren’t talking much about offering concessions and haven’t even given a definitive answer as to when — or if — they will formally enter the process. Moscow’s terms remain incredibly bitter for the Ukrainians to stomach: the Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson should be incorporated into Russia; Ukraine shouldn’t get security guarantees of any kind; and the Ukrainian army’s size should be capped at a low level. Moscow has gone so far as to say that Zelensky is an illegitimate president and therefore doesn’t have the power to negotiate on Ukraine’s behalf, a striking bit of irony if there ever was one (when was the last time Russia held a free and fair election?).   

There is nothing inevitable about peacemaking. Donald Trump is correct in striving to end the war. But the task before him isn’t going to be quick or easy. And at the end of the day, it might not be successful either.