By Seymour Hersh, Substack, 1/23/25

…During his campaign, Trump repeatedly vowed to end the Ukraine War even before taking office. It’s easy to mock those statements now, but in my reporting I have been told by someone with firsthand information that intense talks between Ukraine and Russia are ongoing and have moved “close to a settlement.”

Right now one of the main issues involves what I was told is “jockeying for territory.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr “Zelensky has to save face,” a knowledgeable American told me. “He never wants to kneel to the Russians.”

The war has been brutal, with enormous casualties to front-line soldiers on both sides. The issues boil down to how much territory Russia will retain in the provinces where it continues to make small gains in trench warfare against the undermanned and under-equipped Ukrainian forces. “Putin is the bully In the schoolyard,” the American said, “and we gotta say to the Russians: ‘Let’s talk about what you’re going to get.’” In some places in Ukraine, he said, a negotiating issue comes down to whether a specific smelting plant would be Russian or Ukrainian.

It was his understanding that Trump initially was on board with the negotiations, and his view was that no settlement would work unless Putin was left with “a way to make money” in return for agreeing to end the war. Trump, the American said, “knows nothing about international history,” but he does understand that Putin, whose economy is staggering under heavy sanctions and an inflation rate of 8.5 percent, is in urgent need of finding more markets for his nation’s vast gas and oil reserves.

The advanced state of the negotiations was being monitored, I was told, by senior US generals and Trump campaign aides, all to be fixtures in Trump’s government. Amid what seemed to be a path to the end of the war, came a little-noted announcement on January 8 by retired Army Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, a conservative who served in Trump’s first administration and now is Trump’s special envoy for the current peace talks between Ukraine and Russia. Kellogg, publicly contradicting the president-elect, told Fox News that the war would not end with Trump’s arrival in office but could be resolved within one hundred days of his inauguration. “This is a war that needs to end,” Kellogg said, “and I think he can do it in the near term.” (Trump had made another timeline statement for ending the Ukraine war the day before in a chaotic press conference at Mar-a-Lago, but his words were lost amid his claim that he could end the Ukraine War in six months and would not have a summit meeting with Putin until after he took office.)

I was told by a person with access to current thinking in the Trump camp that the president-elect had come to understand that he had spoken too soon about the possibility of an agreement over Ukraine with Putin. Among the reasons for delaying serious talks was the belief that NATO countries will be persuaded by Trump to increase their annual payments to NATO, in some cases more than doubling their annual 2 percent contribution of gross annual income. I was further told that Trump wants the larger European countries to raise that number to 5 percent. If that came to pass, NATO funding would be increased by billions of dollars and a better financed NATO “would be seen as a threat to Putin.” The underlying point is that some of Trump’s advisers believe Putin “wants more of Ukraine than he will get.” And without more NATO support, it is believed that “Putin will not learn the folly of attacking the West.”

The hardline view sees Putin as an inevitable aggressor who has been successful: in Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008; in the seizure of Crimea in 2014; in the 2022 war in Ukraine; and in its continuing support of Iran, whose continuing enrichment of uranium—all under the camera monitoring of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. All this is viewed with alarm by many in the Trump administration.

Another issue is Russian support for BRICs—the alternative international trade and energy group that includes Brazil, Russia, Iran, China, and South Africa that is viewed as a potential economic threat to the West’s G7 community. The ultimate fear of some in the West, and in the White House, I was told, is that “Russia and China will try to infuse BRICs with a military component” along with creating an international alternative to the dollar…