Keith Kellogg, the retired lieutenant general nominated by Donald Trump as special Ukrainian peace envoy, has previously said any U.S. policy to end the war should include demanding a ceasefire and negotiated settlement.
Kellogg, 80, who served as national security adviser to former Vice President Mike Pence during the previous GOP administration, will be the key figure to end the war that the president-elect Trump has always said he could solve quickly. Newsweek has contacted the Trump team for comment.
In May, Kellogg released a plan coauthored with former Trump aide Fred Fleitz, which called for military aid to Ukraine to cease unless it agreed to hold peace negotiations with Russia. It said the conflict should be frozen along its current front lines, which as it stands, would leave Russia controlling around one-fifth of Ukrainian territory.
The document outlined how there should be a "formal U.S. policy to seek a ceasefire and negotiated settlement of the Ukraine conflict."
It said that the U.S. would continue to provide weapons and assistance to Ukraine to make sure Moscow makes "no further advances and will not attack again after a ceasefire or peace agreement." Further U.S. military aid for Kyiv would "require Ukraine to participate in peace talks with Russia."
The document says, to bring Vladimir Putin to the table, the U.S. and its NATO partners should delay Ukraine's membership in the alliance in exchange for security guarantees.
Kyiv should also realize it will take a long time to regain all its occupied territory, and the partial lifting of sanctions on Russia could push the Kremlin toward peace.
It is unclear whether Trump will use the plan cowritten by Kellogg to end the war, which the president-elect said he could do before his inauguration on January 20, 2025.
"Donald Trump promised he would fix the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, but that is impossible, and even he probably did not believe that," Cédomir Nestorovic, geopolitics professor at ESSEC Business School, told Newsweek.
"On the other hand, he would like to act quickly, and for that, he will push for an exchange of territories against peace," Nestorovic said, although "no one knows what kind of territories and what kind of peace that entails."
"As far as Putin is concerned, he would like to act quickly, too. The deadline of January 20 is appealing to him and Trump, because the American president could start his term without the Ukraine conflict," Nestorovic said.
At the start of Putin's full-scale invasion, Kellogg disparaged the Russian army as the "Vermont National Guard with nuclear weapons. We thought these guys were really 10 feet tall.' They're not. They're about 5.5," he told Fox & Friends in March 2022.
In a November 2023 paper for the America First Policy Institute, which he cochairs, Kellogg took aim at the Biden administration's incremental arming of Ukraine and failure to establish an end state. He said that they had "entrapped America in an endless war."
Kellogg added that Washington "must abandon" the idea that the war is a zero-sum game in which Putin's removal and the total defeat of Russia is the only acceptable outcome.
During an interview with Voice of America in July 2024, Kellogg reiterated his accusation that the Biden administration and the West had been too cautious in their help for Ukraine.
"Have the United States given Ukraine a support of F-16s? No. Did we provide long-range fires early for the Ukrainians to shoot in Russians? No. Did we provide permission for them to shoot deep into Russia? No," Kellogg said.
"I blame this administration and the West to a degree for not supporting Ukraine when they should have," he said, adding that "you need to give them (Russia) reasons to negotiate."
Most recently, Kellogg told Fox News on November 22 that Biden's decision to grant Ukraine permission to use longer-range ATACMS in Russian territory could help the incoming president.
"He has actually given President Trump more leverage, because now he can pull back, he can go left, he can go right, he can do something," Kellogg said.
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