Donald Trump's secret plan to end the war in Ukraine

Donald Trump has been elected the new President of the United States. What will his new Administration look like remains to be seen, but here are a few things we know.

There have been many questions and much peculation about how Donald Trump's second term will go. One person who is very interested in Trump's plans is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Back in July, political news website The Hill wrote that the Ukrainian leader challenged Trump to reveal exactly what would be the New York mogul’s plan to put an end to the war with Russia.

“If Trump knows how to finish this war, he should tell us today”, Zelensky said in an interview for Bloomberg Television. “If there are risks to Ukrainian independence, if we lose statehood. We want to be ready for this, we want to know”.

The Hill points out that Trump has declared on numerous occasions that he had a simple plan that would end Russia’s war in Ukraine in 24 hours.

Reuters reported that two key advisors had presented Donald Trump a plan to end Russia’s war in Ukraine during his second term.

Trump’s mastermind plan? To halt military aid to Kyiv unless Zelensky sits down with Putin to negotiate peace between the two countries.

There would also be a ceasefire between Moscow and Kyiv during the peace talks based on current battle lines, essentially respecting Russia's territorial gains in Ukrainian territory.

The few known details of this plan has been criticized by a spokesperson of the Zelensky government, arguing that allow Moscow keeping these areas would be “strange” given that Russia started the war by invading Ukrainian territory.

Trump’s modest proposal, Reuters highlights, would represent a major shift in US foreign policy and probably cause a major friction with America’s European allies at NATO.

Someone who received Trump’s comments very seriously? Russian president Vladimir Putin, who expressed his opinion on Trump’s comments about the war in Ukraine during the CNN presidential debate.

“The fact that Mr. Trump as a presidential candidate is saying that he is ready and wants to stop the war in Ukraine, we take that quite seriously,” Putin said at a press conference in Astana, as quoted by French newspaper Le Monde.

According to Le Monde, Putin affirmed that although he didn’t know the details of Trump’s proposal, he considered it was well-meaning and sincere.

“President Putin has repeatedly said that Russia has been and remains open to negotiations, taking into account the real state of affairs on the ground,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declared to Reuters.

Le Monde highlights that the Russian President has declared that he’s willing to sit and negotiate with Kyiv, but only with capitulation as a prerequisite.

It’s no secret Putin and Trump have gotten along in the past. The Republican President has expressed his admiration towards the Russian leader on several occasions, calling him a “genius”.

Later in September, the New York mogul and the Ukrainian leader met in New York City two months before the US election, in a meeting described by the BBC as meant to discuss Trump's victory plan.

Zelensky also congratulated Trump for his electoral victory in the US presidential election in a message described by Politico as “pragmatic”.

Could Putin get away keeping his territorial gains in Ukraine and get the White House on his side about it? It remains to be seen, as Trump's second term comes into shape.

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