He now has fifty days to reach agreement on Ukrainian neutrality
Ian Proud was a member of His Britannic Majesty’s Diplomatic Service from 1999 to 2023. He served as the Economic Counsellor at the British Embassy in Moscow from July 2014 to February 2019. Prior to Moscow, he organized the 2013 G8 Summit in Lough Erne, Northern Ireland, working out of 10 Downing Street. He recently published his memoir, “A Misfit in Moscow: How British diplomacy in Russia failed, 2014-2019.”
Cross-posted from Ian Proud’s Substack
One year after he undertook to end the Ukraine war in one day, and just past six months into his Presidency, Donald Trump has kicked the peace can down the road by fifty days. The ultimatum to President Putin to make peace or face sanctions has practically no chance to changing Russian aims in Ukraine. Backed into a corner, Trump may finally be forced to address Russia’s underlying concerns.
In televised remarks on 14 July during his meeting with NATO Secretary General, Mark Rutte, President Trump said, ‘if we don’t have a [peace] deal in fifty days, we’re going to be doing very severe tariffs, tariffs at about a hundred percent, you’d call them secondary tariffs.’
As he was in 2017, Trump also now finds himself hemmed in by beltway politics and unable to deliver a reset in US-Russia relations that he instinctively seems to want.
The Sanctioning Russia Act of 2025 would put in place so-called secondary sanctions on Russia by imposing stiff tariffs of up to 500% against countries such as China and India that inter alia import Russian energy. US lawmakers want to strong arm Trump into forcing President Putin to back down in Ukraine via the back door. But there is a yawn-inducing sense of déjà vu here.
The 2017 Countering American Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, signed into law on 2 August 2017, had no impact on Russian policy towards Ukraine, but led to a huge collapse in US-Russia relations. This was illustrated most clearly by the decision to cut US diplomatic staffing in Russia by 755 personnel, meaning among other things, that today it is practically impossible for a Russian citizen to apply for a US visa inside of Russia itself; the US Embassy simply doesn’t have enough staff.
To avoid a repeat of 2017, Trump now appears to be buying himself fifty days in DC to reach peace in Ukraine before he is forced by the Senate to impose secondary sanctions on Russia. The 14 July announcement was therefore about domestic US politics more than about foreign policy.
But what Trump has in fact done is to set a clear ultimatum on Russia to reach a peace deal with Ukraine, with no clear commitment to meeting Russia’s specific demands, the key demand being Ukraine’s neutrality and revocation of its NATO aspiration.
As an ultimatum, this won’t work, because the additional military support that the US is now offering to Ukraine, paid for by European NATO allies, won’t be sufficient to tip the military balance in Ukraine’s favour.
Additional Patriot missiles and interceptors may well reduce the overall impact of Russian drone and missile strikes on Ukrainian cities. But the military facts on the ground are that Russia continues to gain ground. At several points along the front line, around Pokrovsk, and Kupiansk, towards Konstiantynivka and Siversk, there have been significant recent Russian gains, by the slow attritional standards of this war.
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