Russia rejects Trump transition team’s floated ideas to end the war in Ukraine

Russia’s foreign minister Monday rejected the peace proposal being floated around by President-elect Donald Trump’s team to end the war in Ukraine.

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Moscow was appalled over reports that Trump and his aides were considering pushing a peace deal that would keep the door open for Ukraine to join NATO.

“Judging from numerous leaks and Donald Trump’s interview with Time magazine on December 12, their idea is to suspend hostilities along the line of contact and transfer responsibility for confrontation with Russia to the Europeans,” Lavrov said at a news conference.

“We are not happy, of course, with the proposals made by members of the Trump team to postpone Ukraine’s admission to NATO for 20 years and to station British and European peacekeeping forces in Ukraine.”

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Trump refused to discuss his official plan for Ukraine in his Time interview, saying it would become “a worthless plan” if made public.

But the president-elect vowed that he would not abandon Ukraine, with reports emerging since his election victory that he was considering pushing for European troops in Ukraine while delaying Kyiv’s membership into NATO.

Retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, who Trump has tapped as his special envoy to Ukraine, has suggested cutting off aid to Kyiv and threatening Russia with surging weapons to try and get both sides to negotiate a peace deal.

Lavrov warned that Trump’s reported plan was a complete non-starter and that Moscow  “would refuse to accept Ukraine’s NATO membership regardless of the territorial factor.”

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Moscow has long claimed that it launched the 2022 invasion of Ukraine to stop the very possibility that NATO would expand eastward into the country, which Lavrov described as “aggressive absorption.”

The Russian foreign minister also said it would be up to Trump to reach out to Moscow first regarding the war, warning him that even if he “tries to relaunch bilateral ties, he will have to swim against the stream.”

The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, suggested that Lavrov’s remarks were telling of Russia’s current policy to refuse “any compromises” that would threaten President Vladimir Putin’s demands.

“These demands include forcing Ukraine to become a permanently neutral state that will never join NATO, imposing severe limitations on the size of the Ukrainian military, and removing the Ukrainian government,” the ISW wrote in an assessment.

Russia’s apparent lack of flexibility in future negotiations will be a hurdle Trump and his team will have to overcome to keep his campaign promise of ending the war in Ukraine.