The diplomatic effort led by Donald Trump to rapidly end the Ukraine war collided sharply with the entrenched realities of the conflict, revealing the profound difficulty of forcing swift solutions onto a deeply entrenched geopolitical crisis. Trump’s vow to settle the war within 24 hours—a signature claim of his campaign—met stiff resistance when his envoys, real-estate developer Steve Witkoff and former adviser Jared Kushner, traveled to Moscow to present a proposal they believed could be framed as a workable compromise.

These envoys entered the Kremlin with a belief that a carefully packaged arrangement might give both sides a path to declare progress, even if only symbolic. Instead, they encountered a Russian leadership entirely unpersuaded by the idea of urgency or mutual concessions. From the outset, Vladimir Putin made clear that time was on Russia’s side, not America’s, and that Moscow considered leverage—not speed—to be the defining force behind any potential settlement. Rather than treating the talks as a fresh opportunity to cool tensions or de-escalate violence, Putin used them as a stage upon which to reaffirm Moscow’s existing, long-publicized demands.