OPINION:
Kudos to President-elect Donald Trump for selecting retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg for the extraordinarily complex and challenging position of special envoy to the Russia-Ukraine war.
Gen. Kellogg’s exceptional record of service includes a stint as national security adviser to Vice President Mike Pence; serving in the 101st Airborne Division in Vietnam, during which he earned the Silver Star and Bronze Star; and commanding the famed 82nd Airborne Division. He is eminently qualified to assess and advise the president on the most devastating war in Europe since World War II.
But it won’t be easy. Gen. Kellogg will face off against Russia’s merciless modern-day czar, President Vladimir Putin. Russia’s government institutions, judiciary, media and even its education system all answer to Mr. Putin, in what the Kremlin likes to call the “vertical of power.”
Mr. Trump’s Ukraine point man will meet with military, intelligence and diplomatic officials, but each of them will operate under strict orders from Mr. Putin, with no room whatsoever for independent initiative.
Mr. Putin has ruthlessly ruled the Kremlin for a quarter century with a level of repression and military aggression not seen since the Soviet “evil empire.” Adding to the challenge, Mr. Putin’s formative experience was in the KGB, where he served for 16 years before resigning in 1991 as a lieutenant colonel, and later as director of the Federal Security Service.
The KGB trained Mr. Putin in the art of manipulating people. He famously kept Germany’s then-chancellor, Angela Merkel, waiting for a Group of Eight summit she hosted in 2007, knowing full well her reputation for punctuality. During a visit to Sochi that year, Mr. Putin made sure to bring out his Labrador for a photo with Ms. Merkel, who has a well-known fear of dogs.
Mr. Putin’s negotiating tactics are a wicked spy’s brew of propaganda, obfuscation and feints designed to gain leverage over his adversaries while concealing his own country’s economic weakness and tactical military failures. He is constantly hunting for opportunities to induce his interlocutors to compromise themselves — and by extension their nation’s security, all to his advantage.
Mr. Putin and his cronies have long branded the U.S. as Russia’s “main enemy.” Mr. Putin has characterized his invasion of Ukraine as a proxy war with Washington because what scares Mr. Putin most of all are the ideas and principles enshrined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Mr. Putin wants the U.S. to be economically, diplomatically and militarily weak. He launched the most destructive land war in Europe since WWII to expand his regional sphere of influence, putting America’s $1 trillion in trade with Europe in his crosshairs.
For Mr. Putin, democracy is an existential threat, especially in the former Soviet Union, whose collapse Mr. Putin once called the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”
Nothing threatens the Russian regime’s security more than a free and prosperous Ukraine, a democratic neighbor with a bright economic future and large Russian-speaking population. Mr. Putin wants to ensure that Ukraine is so politically dismembered and territorially fractured that NATO and European Union membership are forever out of the question.
In the longer term, his objective is the destruction of Ukraine as a state. Mr. Putin does not want a successful democracy next door serving as a beacon of hope and inspiration for his own domestic opponents, who are denied basic civil liberties, including freedom of expression and assembly. Instead, he wants a Kremlin puppet like Belarus, casting Russia’s shadow over Europe.
Gen. Kellogg would do well to involve our NATO partners in negotiations because they will need to be engaged diplomatically, economically and militarily in postwar Ukraine. He knows from experience that wars end when both sides are too exhausted to fight any longer or when one side defeats the other.
Ukraine desperately wants the war to end, along with an end to Russia’s barbaric attacks on innocent civilians in their homes and neighborhoods as well as hospitals. The U.S. and our NATO allies will need to convince Mr. Putin that his chosen war of aggression is not in his interest. We might get to a ceasefire before a comprehensive deal takes shape.
Mr. Putin is a maximalist negotiator who will seek to induce the next U.S. administration to emulate the Biden White House’s chaotic and flawed Afghanistan withdrawal playbook by insisting on a neutral, demilitarized, landlocked Ukraine, which would be as vulnerable to future Kremlin attacks as Czechoslovakia was after the Munich conference gave Hitler the Sudetenland.
Godspeed, Gen. Kellogg. This just might be your most grueling mission yet, with U.S. security and the Trump administration’s legacy hanging in the balance.
• Daniel N. Hoffman is a retired clandestine services officer and former chief of station with the Central Intelligence Agency. His combined 30 years of government service included high-level overseas and domestic positions at the CIA. He has been a Fox News contributor since May 2018.
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