CNN's Nick Paton Walsh has written a lengthy analysis of President-elect Donald Trump's decision to appoint Ret. Gen. Keith Kellogg to be his special envoy to Russia and Ukraine.
Walsh's conclusion after reviewing Kellogg's plans for ending the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is that "Putin may revel in" what's about to come from the second Trump administration.
While Kellogg in the past has criticized the Biden administration for not providing enough lethal aid to Ukraine to deter a Russian invasion, he has also been pushing for a negotiated settlement that would let the Kremlin hold onto territory it has seized from Ukraine since the start of its invasion in 2022.
"[Kellogg's plan] says future US aid - likely given as a loan - will be conditioned on Ukraine negotiating with Russia, and the US will arm Ukraine to the extent it can defend itself and stop any further Russian advances before and after any peace deal," explains Walsh. "This latter suggestion is perhaps dated by the fast Moscow advance underway in eastern Ukraine and the current high US level of aid already makes Kellogg uncomfortable."
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More disturbingly, writes Walsh, has been Kellogg's insistence that maintaining solidarity among western democracies in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine is of little strategic importance to the United States.
Walsh also believes that Kellogg's plan will make Putin believe that his decision to invade Ukraine, despite costing tens of thousands of Russian lives, will have been vindicated.
"The plan presents Ukraine with a welcome chance for an end to the violence, at a time when it is losing on all fronts, and darkly short of basic manpower - a hurdle it may never overcome, and something in which Russia will likely always outpace it," he writes. "But it begins a process in which a wily and deceitful Putin will revel. Exploiting a ceasefire and Western weakness is his forte, the moment he has been waiting nearly three years for. The plan accepts Western fatigue, that its armament production cannot keep pace, and that its values are wasteful."