Retired U.S. Ambassador Daniel Fried said the Ukraine peace effort has stalled not because of Kyiv or the West but because “the Russians have not negotiated at all.” Speaking with Independence Avenue Media, the former U.S. assistant secretary of state for Europe described a diplomatic process shaped by Kremlin maximalism, uneven signals from Washington and a strategic landscape in which the West has leverage it has yet to use.
Moscow, Fried said, is deliberately “dragging out the process,” clinging to demands that no Ukrainian government could accept, in hopes that the United States will eventually pressure Kyiv rather than the Kremlin. At the same time, he noted, the Trump administration has not presented a fully unified position toward Moscow.
“Until the U.S. starts putting pressure on Russia — not Ukraine … we’re not going to get anywhere,” he said.
Fried identified two core issues at the heart of any credible deal: the location of the ceasefire line, and postwar security for Ukraine. He warned against any settlement that forces Kyiv to surrender fortified territory in Donbas and insisted that Western security guarantees must be real and durable. He also argued that Europe must do more on defense and financing, but only in partnership with a United States that treats Europe as a strategic ally, not a geopolitical irritation.
The ambassador placed these diplomatic choices in a broader historical and global context. Drawing on decades of negotiations with Moscow, he recalled the words of prominent U.S. diplomat and historian George Kennan, who warned that the Kremlin is “impervious to the logic of reason, and it is highly sensitive to the logic of force.”
What the West does next, Fried said, will shape far more than Ukraine’s future. It will affect the credibility of American power, the behavior of China and the stability of the international order.
“Don’t surrender Ukraine to the Russians,” he said. … “It will induce Putin to be more aggressive.”
The following interview, recorded on December 5, 2025, has been edited for length and clarity.
Kartlos Sharashenidze, Independence Avenue Media: There have been important diplomatic developments around the Ukraine peace efforts in recent days. How would you describe the state of the Ukraine peace process today? Are we getting any closer to a deal?
Daniel Fried, Atlantic Council fellow, former U.S. assistant secretary of state for Europe: As long as Putin maintains his maximalist demands, no, we’re not getting any closer. We are getting closer to a unified — or at least unified enough — Western position, that is, something hammered together between the U.S, Europeans and Ukraine.
But until and unless Putin starts taking this process seriously, we’re nowhere. And it’s not because the Trump administration hasn’t tried, and it’s not because the Ukrainians are being stubborn. It’s because Putin simply is dragging out negotiations, dragging out the process, hoping to attain everything he wants through either force or force plus Western disunity, which leads to a weakening of support for Ukraine.
So, we’re not as far along as we could be. I don’t know the results of the latest round of talks between [U.S. President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve] Witkoff, [Trump’s son-in-law] Jared Kushner and [Ukraine security council chief Rustem] Umerov. … But until the U.S. starts putting pressure on Russia — not Ukraine, on Russia — which is the source of the war and the reason why there’s no solution yet, we’re not going to get anywhere.
IAM: You mentioned the Moscow meeting between U.S. envoys and Vladimir Putin. President Trump said the next steps for the Ukraine talks are unclear. How do you read this, and what do you see coming next in the process?
Fried: It much depends on whether Donald Trump realizes that Putin is playing with him. Trump has tiptoed up to that realization but never stated clearly that Putin is the obstacle and that we need to put more pressure on Russia. Now, he doesn’t have to state that ¬— he can suggest it — but he needs to put more pressure on Russia. Otherwise, there won’t be any deal.
The statement you cited from President Trump was OK. That is, he did say that it takes two to tango and that the U.S. and the Ukrainians seem to be close. So that suggests he’s recognizing that the problem is Russia. But he needs to be clearer about that in words and especially in deeds.
IAM: Do you expect that we will see more pressure from the Trump administration on Russia?
Fried: That would be best. But my expectations are under control because the signals coming out of Washington are so mixed. We don’t seem to have a unified position as a government about what steps to take next. And it would be helpful if special envoy Witkoff realize that no matter how many times he goes to Moscow, he has never yet come back with anything serious.
IAM: A few days ago, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the United States wants Ukraine to be “safe” and to never again face another invasion. What does this tell you about Washington’s strategic objectives in the peace process? And do you think this reflects a unified position within the administration?
Fried: Secretary Rubio’s characterization of where we need to end up is pretty good. That is, a secure Ukraine and a durable, lasting ceasefire. Those are the elements that are needed.
The Russians are insisting on Ukraine’s withdrawal from territories that Russia does not yet control. This is a demand that Putin can hardly expect the Ukrainians will agree to. It is a demand probably intended to simply spin out the negotiations forever and put the burden on the Ukrainians and entice the Americans to put pressure on the Ukrainians to agree to an unreasonable Russian demand.
Now this is unfortunate. The Russians like negotiations. They just don’t want any conclusion to the negotiations. And we need to push through this Russian resistance, and we have tools to do so. But until the Trump administration realizes what it is dealing with, which is Kremlin stonewalling, we will not get where we need to be.
IAM: In your December 3 opinion piece for Time magazine, you wrote that “the Administration has been negotiating in public and with itself.” How do you see this dynamic inside the administration?
Fried: A lot of what the U.S. has been doing has been negotiating with its friends and not negotiating with the Russians. The negotiation with our friends the Ukrainians and the Europeans has been productive. That is, we have, albeit in a somewhat haphazard fashion, forged a reasonable position on how to end the war. At least that’s what I think we’ve forged — I haven’t seen the 19- or 20-point plan that replaced the much weaker 28-point plan. But those discussions have been useful because the Ukrainians have engaged seriously, and so the Europeans and the Americans — Secretary Rubio in Geneva and later in Florida — dealt with this rather skillfully. But the Russians have not negotiated at all. They have merely repeated their maximalist demands on the major issues, at least by all accounts. And until they are serious, we’re not going to get anywhere.
What I meant by negotiating with ourselves is that we seem to be determined to come up with constantly evolving positions, hoping that one of those new positions will attract Russia enough so they negotiate in earnest. That’s not going to work. You cannot chase after the Russians, offering new and better bouquets of flowers, throwing them at their feet, hoping that they pick one up and say thank you. The better way to negotiate with the Russians is to put more pressure on them. I’m not against negotiations, and I think it’s possible to negotiate seriously with the Russians, but you need to do so from a position of relative strength, and you need not to fool yourself about what you’re dealing with.
IAM: You’ve negotiated with Russia across multiple administrations for decades.
Fried: Sometimes with more success than others.
IAM: Right. So, based on that long experience, when you look at what’s happening now, how does this moment compare to earlier periods of U.S.–Russia negotiations?
Fried: There’s a lot of good lessons learned from the Cold War period. Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister [1957-85], said taking a maximalist position was tactically useful because you almost always ended up with something that you didn’t have before. The Russians will sit on their maximalist positions as long as they have to, until the point where it doesn’t yield any good results.
It’s not true that the Russians don’t know how to negotiate. … They know how to negotiate a limited withdrawal, as they did in Iran in 1946 or Austria in 1955. They negotiated with the United States on what could have been a framework for lasting U.S.-Russian cooperation, in the ’90s and then even in the early 2000s. It didn’t work out, because of lack of political commitment on the Russian side.
But Russian diplomats know how to not negotiate when they want not to negotiate, and they know how to negotiate. George Kennan [U.S. diplomat and architect of the Cold War “containment” policy] summed it up pretty well in 1946, when he said that the Kremlin is impervious to the logic of reason but highly sensitive to the logic of force. Which means if you push back, you can then set the stage for successful negotiations with the Russians. But you can’t do so based on an assumption of mutual goodwill or shared interests.
IAM: You mentioned the importance of Western unity. What are the key obstacles, and what political and practical steps should the U.S. and Europe take to build a more unified approach?
Fried: The United States goes back and forth about Europe. We are inconsistent. There are times we simply irritate the Europeans for no good reason and times we listen to the Europeans.
The Europeans need to do more, though. They need to figure out a way … either to use the Russian immobilized foreign exchange reserves or find some other means to help finance Ukraine’s purchase of weapons. And they need to keep working with the United States on defense issues, including by contributing more. …
But the United States needs to decide whether Europe is an irritation or a strategic ally. And it’s hard to treat them as an irritation and then turn around and ask them to behave like a strategic ally. This is a problem within the administration, and you can see this contradiction within the U.S. national security strategy that was just released. You are complaining about the Europeans and yet recognizing that Europe is our best partner. Well, OK, one or the other, but you can’t do both all the time. So that is a problem.
If we’re going to succeed in pushing back and defeating Russian aggression against Ukraine, we need to work with Europe. And that means not picking fights with Europe for no good reason. But it also means Europe is going to have to step up and, in that, the Trump administration has a point. Europe does need to do more.
IAM: From your perspective, what are the core conditions that Ukraine, the United States and Europe simply cannot compromise on in any credible peace deal?
Fried: The two biggest issues of the deal on Ukraine [are] the location of the ceasefire line, and post-ceasefire security for Ukraine. We need a ceasefire line that doesn’t force the Ukrainians to surrender territory and all of their fortifications in Donbas. We just shouldn’t give that to the Russians. President Trump said that the ceasefire line should be the current front line. President Trump was right, and we should stick to this position.
Secondly, we need security for Ukraine. The Russians hate that, but what did you expect? Of course, they hate it. An insecure Ukraine is what they’re after. So, we need to push past that resistance and make it clear that we are going to back the Ukrainians. That means that the Europeans have to step up with their coalition of the willing. … But they can’t do that without American backing. That’s a pretty good deal for us. If the Europeans are in front in providing security for Ukraine, we need to be right with them, backing them up, or else they’re not going to do it.
And we need to both be able to push past predictable Russian resistance. The Russians are going to insist that there can be no Western troops in Ukraine. Well, that’s not for them to decide. If they didn’t want Western troops in Ukraine, they shouldn’t have started the war.
But we can get to this position by stages. It starts with, I would say, air cover for the western half of Ukraine from planes stationed in Romania and Poland. But it shouldn’t stop there. There are other things that we can do, particularly with air defense. And this is based not on my own knowledge but on the advice of military people who know what they’re talking about in this area.
So, we need to push past Russian resistance. And to do that, we need to use the levers and tools we have to put pressure on Russia.
IAM: How might the different possible outcomes of this war influence the current international order?
Fried: Well, a lot. If Russia succeeds in dominating Ukraine, U.S. problems around the world all get worse. If Russia is defeated, our problems get better. Either a lot better or a little bit better, but in all cases, better.
If the U.S. and Europe succeed in turning back Russian aggression against Ukraine, our position in the Western Pacific gets better because the Chinese will learn … that we are not as weak as they supposed, but we’re not there yet. We have to get there. We have to actually succeed in turning back Russian aggression.
And what bothers me, what frustrates me, is that we have the tools to do so. I’ve faced certain foreign policy dilemmas where we [didn’t] have any good tools, and we were dealing with a mess and managing the mess. Here we have some leverage that we’re leaving on the table. We need to use it and not leave it on the table.
IAM: What would you say is the biggest strategic mistake the West must avoid as we enter 2026?
Fried: Don’t surrender Ukraine to the Russians. There is a temptation among some in Trump world to do that because they think that surrendering Ukraine to Russia will induce Putin to be more cooperative. It won’t. It will induce Putin to be more aggressive. We need to help our friends and push back against our adversaries — that’s the American interest — not reward our adversaries and display weakness around the world.
