100 days to end the war: Trump’s goalpost shift
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Welcome to The World in 10. In an increasingly uncertain world, this is The Times' daily podcast dedicated to global security. Today with me, Stuart Willey and Tom Noonan. They're dying, Russians and Ukrainians. I want to stop them dying. And I'll have that done. I'll have that done in 24 hours.

That is what Donald Trump said about the war in Ukraine back in May 2023. And ever since, ending the war in a day has been a mantra repeated again and again. He's never said how, but the president-elect has been adamant it will happen. And it's even affected the tactics of both sides, with Russia and Ukraine sprinting to be in the strongest position for possible peace talks.

But now all that appears to be changing. On Tuesday, Donald Trump suggested he's giving himself up to six months to find a peace deal. Then his new envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, took to Fox News and said this.

Well, I'm on the clock and he's on the clock as well because he wants to end it as quickly as he can. And I think they're going to come to a solvable solution in the near term. And when I say by the near term, you know, I would like to set a goal on a personal level, professional level. I would say let's set it at 100 days and move all the way back. So where does this leave us? And more crucially, where does it leave the decision makers in Moscow and in Kiev? Will their plans be changing with the shifting goalposts?

or do they just take it all with a pinch of salt? Our guest today is Philip Ingram, a former intelligence officer with the British Army. Philip just days out from Donald Trump sitting in the Oval Office, actually trying to end the war within 24 hours.

It seems like he's moving the goalposts. Just how significant is it? I think it's very significant. But reality, it was never going to be ended in 24 hours. You cannot end a conflict, even if you've got total agreement beforehand that it's going to end, get it ended in 24 hours.

Six months is more realistic to potentially get something on the table. And of course, I think 100 days is a political cry because there's always this big thing in the US press and we're starting to see it creep into the British press of what have you achieved in your first 100 days? So I think that's where that's been put into it and he can adjust it over that time.

Analysts have always said 24 hours is an unrealistic prospect, but it has affected how Russia and Ukraine have approached the war in recent months. And they've been strengthening their hand for negotiations with, well, on the Russian side, attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure, the influx of North Korean troops. And on the Ukrainian side, the use of more powerful weapons given by the West and their incursion inside Russian territory in the Kursk region.

So if Keith Kellogg is to be believed and we're looking at months more of fighting, not weeks, can both sides actually keep up the way they're currently fighting for that long?

I think the Ukrainians can. I think the Russians are in real difficulty, and in particular the Russian economy. And what this also does is it gives Trump time to put further pressure on Putin, on the Russians. And if any pressure comes in, he'll continue his military support to Ukraine, I suspect. But the real pressure will come in at a more strategic level, where it wouldn't surprise me if we see Trump trying to influence international oil prices.

to cause them to come down. Because if he does that, Putin is relying on high oil prices to help fund his conflict. His economy is close to going into freefall, and that will break the economy. This conflict is not going to be won by what happens or doesn't happen on the front line.

And everyone is judging it on who's taking more territory in the front lines. The conditions are going to be set at the operational level. So that's what Ukraine has done with its incursion into Kursk, what Ukraine is doing with attacking Russian oil refinery capability, its logistic bases, its airfields inside Russia, the long-range drones that are attacking Russian targets, etc.

And that will set the conditions for what happens strategically. So it's the support that each side will get from the international community. Russia from China, Iran and North Korea and Ukraine from the West and everyone else. And that's where this final settlement will come. And Zelensky is playing a very clever game at that strategic level. Putin isn't.

So whatever the timeline, there's still little, by the way, of flesh on the bones of just how Trump wants to end this war. In your view, how does it happen?

Warfare is diplomacy by other means. It's something that doesn't happen in isolation. It's whenever the usual sitting down and talking and the rules-based order has failed, the diplomats have failed, and countries have fallen out, and then try to set the conditions for that diplomacy to come back again. And that's when it comes to negotiating peace. This conflict is only going to end with people sitting around a table.

and negotiating peace. But you have to set the conditions for that. And the conditions, if we go back to the Second World War that was set for peace with Germany, was Germany had been defeated completely.

The UK during the Falklands War, the Argentinians had been defeated and surrendered. That's probably not going to happen in Ukraine. But what will happen is the conditions will be set so that one side or the other recognises it can't sustain its operations, not just militarily, but economically and politically. At the moment, Vladimir Putin thinks he can continue. That's what his...

That's what his military team and that's what his political support team are telling him. And he's getting support from China, North Korea and Iran. Zelensky is looking at this very carefully and he knows he relies on Western support for military, economic and his military support that's going in as well.

And that's where we will see 2025 playing out. Nobody's going to win completely and take it from there. Putin's not going to

budge one bit. So Trump will either have to come down and say, I'm going to support Putin. He will lose total global support for anything he's doing if he does that and forces Zelensky to give away territory. If he forces Zelensky to give away territory and support Russia like that, China will then go and take Taiwan by force. So it'll start a global conflict.

Trump's too smart for that. He will turn around and support Zelensky to a position and do things at a geopolitical level against Russia to try and undermine Putin's ability to continue to prosecute the war and force Putin to that negotiating table. That's where we're going to see the real politics being played out. Whether he can do that within the first hundred days, whether he can do that within the first six months...

is anybody's guess, but he's already changing his timelines. And once he's in, and once he's inaugurated, he can then change them again. Critics of Donald Trump say that his approach is erratic, that he's shooting from the hip with every whim, that the results are these different messages, some unrealistic targets. His supporters, meanwhile, say that he's got this unique and, in their view, much-needed strategy. So...

Is this all just a bunch of uncoordinated proclamations from the new American government? Or should we actually be taking all these targets very seriously, perhaps even literally? No, it's kite flying. As we're seeing with Trump's comments on Greenland, Panama, Israel,

his comments into Hamas, his comments on Ukraine, his comments across the board with everything. What Trump does is he doesn't approach things from a diplomat's perspective, from a professional politician's perspective. He approaches things from a business perspective, but a bullying business perspective. So I'm going to bully my position. I'm going to tell you what you're going to do and then I'll negotiate back to something else. This is standard Trump tactics. And it works.

Because he upsets other people. He's unpredictable. And that's the one thing that that diplomatic community around the world doesn't like is unpredictability. It'll scare all the Western leaders, but equally it'll scare Vladimir Putin, the Grand Ayatollah, Kim Jong-un and Xi Jinping.

Keith Kellogg says he wants what he calls a solid and sustainable peace. It's one thing getting Putin and Zelensky to sign on the dotted line of an agreement, but how do you actually reach an agreement that lasts? Well, that's a very difficult one. A solid and sustainable peace is a great soundbite to put out there. The reality is if Putin is allowed to keep any Ukrainian territory...

And even if it's a buffer zone, a demilitarized zone or anything else, Putin is then allowed to continue. We'll effectively see an iron curtain like we had during the Cold War across Europe. But now from the very north of Europe,

right down to the south of Turkey and every bit in between. The second scenario is if Russia is allowed to keep any of the territory, Xi Jinping's watching this. And if he thinks that if he takes Taiwan by force, he's only going to suffer the wrath of the international community for three years, he's going to go, I can afford to do that. That will worry the Americans even more and the impact will,

would make the economic shock we had after Russia's reinvasion of Ukraine almost three years ago seem minor and the global implications would be huge. So we're playing with fire through 2025. It's going to be interesting. Philip, thank you. Philip Ingram is a military analyst and a former British Army intelligence officer. That is it from us. Thank you for taking 10 minutes to stay on top of the world with the help of The Times. See you tomorrow.