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Trump and his team have not offered details on how a deal might be reached, but he suggested he was willing to accommodate Russia's view that Ukraine's right to self-determination could be set aside in favor of larger interests.
United States President Donald Trump and his team will sign a series of executive orders that are considered priorities.
And one of the top priorities is expected to be ending the war in Ukraine.
Trump's special envoy for Ukraine, retired US General Keith Kellogg, told Fox News on January 8 that "I would like to set a goal on a personal level, professional level, I would say set it at 100 days."
As optimistic as that sounds for a war that is entering its third year next month, 100 days represents a step back from an even more optimistic timeline. In May 2023, Trump said the conflict would be "absolutely over" within "24 hours" of him officially becoming president.
Asked how he would end the Ukraine war at a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in the US on January 7, Trump backed away from his campaign promise that he would do it within 24 hours, calling the negotiations "a difficult one."
What are Trump's red lines?
Trump's haste has unnerved Ukraine. Asked "do you want Ukraine to win this war?" during a campaign debate with US Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump replied: "I want the war to stop. I want to save lives."
Russia, on the other hand, has welcomed Trump's speed.
A day after Trump's press conference, Russian President Vladimir Putin's aide, Nikolai Patrushev, said a solution to Ukraine must be reached by the US and Russia, without Ukraine and without the European Union. Kiev and Moscow have expressed incompatible conditions for a ceasefire.
Kiev demands the complete withdrawal of Russian troops from its territory and immediate membership in NATO.
Trump and his team have not offered details on how a deal might be reached, but he suggested he was willing to accommodate Russia's view that Ukraine's right to self-determination could be set aside in favor of larger interests.
At Mar-a-Lago, he said that "Russia has someone on their doorstep and I can understand their feeling about that."
Before the war began, "the deal [with Russia] could have been made by just a mediocre broker," Trump said, suggesting he would have easily agreed to keep Ukraine out of NATO and perhaps made other concessions that outgoing US President Joe Biden made.
Kellogg has said that Trump "is not trying to give anything to Putin or the Russians... He is actually trying to save Ukraine and save their sovereignty."
Who is winning the war?
Since September 2022, when Ukraine regained large parts of its territory, the war has been largely at a standstill.
Ukraine took a few square kilometers of territory in a counteroffensive in 2023, but failed to break through Russian lines. Russia returned to the offensive last year, taking 0.69 percent of Ukrainian territory in slow advances that Ukraine says cost Moscow 430,000 casualties.
Russia claimed to have captured two more Ukrainian villages on Monday, Novoyehorivka in Luhansk and Shevchenko in Donetsk.
It also made some progress against Ukrainian positions in its Kursk region, after a surprise Ukrainian attack expanded its counter-invasion there in the first week of the year.
While the war remains largely static on the ground, experts have told Al Jazeera that control of airspace and the sustained finances of the war are more likely to determine who wins.
Ukraine has recently expressed confidence in its ability to continue to resist Russian attacks by inflicting staggering losses that it believes will exhaust the Russian military, lead to a loss of political support for the war in Russia, or overwhelm Putin's ability to help revive the Russian economy.
This year, Ukraine plans to produce record quantities of its own weapons, bypassing restrictions on the use of Western missiles and creating a $30 billion defense industry. In recent weeks, its strategic interdiction campaign in Russia has hit oil refineries and depots, weapons depots and chemical facilities essential to Russia’s war effort.
Russia's defense spending has led to high inflation and a central bank interest rate of 21 percent, some analysts believe indicating financial difficulties ahead for Putin.
“Moscow now faces a dilemma: the longer it postpones a ceasefire, the greater the risk that credit events – such as corporate and bank bailouts – will arise uncontrollably and weaken Moscow’s negotiating leverage,” says Harvard University economist Craig Kennedy.
During the campaign, Trump said he planned to contact Putin directly to broker peace.
"President Putin has repeatedly stated that he is open to engagement with international leaders, including the US president, including Donald Trump," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on January 10.
He said no date had been set for a meeting. CNN has reported that the call could take place within days. / Adapted Pamphlet /
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