By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

America Needs a Maximum Pressure Strategy in Ukraine

In June 2024, Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general, and national security adviser to former President Donald Trump, presented a plan he co-authored with the former CIA analyst Fred Fleitz that proposed halting the delivery of U.S. weapons to Ukraine if Kyiv didn’t enter into peace talks with Moscow—but also warning Moscow that if it refused to negotiate with Kyiv, Washington would increase its support for Ukraine. About five months later, President-elect Trump named Kellogg as his special envoy for Ukraine and Russia. “The makeup of the war has expanded,” Kellogg said in an interview, “and it’s time to put it back in a box.”

In response to Kellogg’s nomination, Konstantin Malofeyev, a Russian oligarch with ties to the Kremlin, told a reporter for the Financial Times what he thought the likely Russian response would be. “Kellogg comes to Moscow with his plan, we take it and then tell him to screw himself, because we don’t like any of it,” Malofeyev said. “That’d be the whole negotiation.”

As Malofeyev’s blustery message makes clear, Russian President Vladimir Putin has no interest in a negotiated settlement to the war in Ukraine—which would require Moscow to compromise—because he believes Russia is winning the war. Nonetheless, if only to underscore its end goal, Russia has laid out a maximalist set of demands for Kyiv and its partners: permanent neutrality for Ukraine with no future option for NATO or EU membership, Western recognition of the Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine, the removal of all Western sanctions, and broader agreement from the West to recognize Russia’s self-defined “sphere of influence.” A deal of this kind is, of course, a nonstarter for Ukraine and its allies in Europe. It would similarly be rejected by partners in the Indo-Pacific, where countries such as Japan are well aware that allowing Putin to claim a victory in Ukraine could directly embolden China to take action regarding Taiwan. And many in the United States, including many in the Republican party, would spurn such a deal, fearing it would boost the growing authoritarian axis of China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia at the cost of U.S. global credibility and leadership.

Trump has said that he aims to pursue a deal with Putin, and he is right to want to bring a lasting and sustainable peace to a war that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and has destabilized geopolitics around the globe. But to achieve that aim, his administration will first need to get the Russians to the table with a willingness to negotiate and make meaningful compromises that will lead to more than a short-term cease-fire.

To do so and to negotiate with Moscow from a position of strength, the president will need to establish far more leverage over Russia than the United States currently has. The second Trump White House is well prepared to execute a strategy that will accomplish exactly that: a maximum pressure campaign. In his first term, Trump pursued this kind of approach against Iran. And now, to achieve peace and reestablish U.S. global leadership in the face of mounting authoritarian aggression, he should apply the same strategy to Russia.

A maximum pressure plan would force the Russians to the negotiating table—something they currently have little incentive to do—while allowing the Trump administration to set the agenda. It would also correct the Biden administration’s approach, which was overly cautious, did not have a clear strategy, and delivered too little, too late for Ukraine. Moreover, by taking advantage of Russia’s economic, political, and military vulnerabilities, the United States would be able to impose costs on U.S. adversaries such as China and Iran, which supply many of Russia’s war needs. Only through maximum pressure can the new administration turn today’s grinding war of attrition into a stable peace.

 

Tried and True

Trump’s maximum pressure campaign against Iran significantly weakened the regime in Tehran when it was first implemented in 2018. That policy used an aggressive array of economic sanctions to constrain Tehran’s ability to fund proxy groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, grow its military, and develop its nuclear program. These sanctions efforts succeeded in rapidly depleting Iran’s state coffers, forcing Iran from a trade surplus of $6.1 billion in 2019 into a trade deficit of around $3.5 billion by 2020.

Although the Biden administration did not remove the Trump-era sanctions, it also did not effectively enforce them—a failure that has allowed Iran to significantly ramp up its oil revenues over the past four years. The effects of these revenues have rippled throughout the region: using these funds, Iran has been able to provide financial support for Hamas, which attacked Israel last year, and for Hezbollah, which had attacked Israel from its base in Lebanon prior to November’s cease-fire deal. And in part because of diminishing U.S. pressure, Iran is now closer than ever to acquiring nuclear weapons.

What has succeeded in constraining Iran’s belligerent regional ambitions is a combination of aggressive, U.S.-orchestrated economic pressure and Israeli military and covert action to counter Iran’s regional proxies. It was partially as a result of this approach, which weakened and preoccupied Tehran, that rebel factions were able to overthrow the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria—Iran’s largest regional ally—after over a decade of a grueling civil war. Russia is not Iran: among other important differences, its economy is bigger and it has a large stockpile of nuclear weapons. But the Iranian case offers a lesson: economic pressure combined with robust military action and coordination with allies can work.

Moscow, moreover, is especially vulnerable at this moment, with Russia’s military becoming increasingly overextended. The Kremlin has already deployed approximately 50 percent of its armed forces to fight in Ukraine and is losing an average of 1,500 soldiers a day to the conflict. In Syria, Putin had vowed to support Assad, carrying out airstrikes as rebel forces were encroaching on Damascus. But in the end, Russia simply abandoned its ally, granting Assad asylum as he fled the besieged capital. As Trump aptly put it, the Russians were simply too weak and overextended to help the regime in Syria “because they are so tied up in Ukraine.”

On top of its military constraints, the Russian economy is reaching a breaking point after almost three years of runaway government spending on the war effort. The country’s central bank has hiked interest rates to over 20 percent in an effort to slow inflation as the ruble has tumbled to its weakest level in years. The Russian economy is now projected to grow only 0.5 to 1.5 percent in 2025, down from 3.6 percent in 2024. Much of this economic strain has to do with the government’s increased spending on defense, which has depleted state spending on other domestic industries such as healthcare and education, as well as ballooning recruitment payments to new army volunteers. But pressure is also coming from U.S. and other Western sanctions—which, as in the case of military support for Ukraine, the Biden administration has not deployed or enforced to full effect. Without further action on Washington’s part, it is likely that Russia will weather its economic headwinds through a combination of monetary policies and targeted state subsidies. The Trump administration should not let Moscow’s moment of weakness go to waste.

Ukrainian servicemembers firing a rocket toward Russian troops in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, December 2024.

 

Hit them where it Hurts

The United States has many readily available policy tools at its disposal that it should use in its maximum pressure campaign against Russia. First, Washington should beef up economic sanctions—starting with Russia’s banking and financial sector. Earlier this year, the Biden administration belatedly sanctioned Gazprombank, the country’s largest bank, along with over 50 smaller financial institutions. It also sanctioned the System for Transfer of Financial Messages, which Russia uses as an alternative to SWIFT, the global payment infrastructure many Russian banks have lost access to. These types of measures hit Russia’s ability to carry out large transactions, striking at the core of Russia’s financial and banking system, and should be expanded to cover all Russian banks.

Washington should also do more to extend the scope of secondary sanctions, which cover third parties that do business with sanctioned entities. The Trump administration, for example, could use secondary sanctions to impose costs on Chinese companies directly supplying Russia’s war effort, such as military gear manufacturers that are currently not on the sanctions list and Chinese financial institutions that provide credit to Russian banks. Such restrictions are particularly effective because they force companies outside Russia or other countries that do business with Russia to choose between Washington and Moscow—most will choose to retain access to the large U.S. market over the shrinking Russian one.

Financial sector sanctions, though, are not enough. The core of Russia’s budget revenue, used to fuel the country’s war economy, comes from oil and gas exports. Before the war in Ukraine, Europe was Russia’s largest gas export market, with Russia accounting for almost half of all European gas imports in 2019. And although that figure declined significantly in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion in 2022, hitting a low of 12 percent in the second half of 2023, it has since rebounded slightly to 18 percent. In 2024, the EU was also the largest importer of Russian liquefied natural gas (LNG).

Russian oil providers have for the most part not been subject to U.S. sanctions due to concerns over price increases for Washington’s European allies. This must change; the Trump administration should expand sanctions to cover Russian oil providers and their subsidiaries, as it did in 2020 with measures targeting subsidiaries of the state oil firm Rosneft that did business in Venezuela. The United States will have to take the lead in pushing its European allies to make a difficult choice because of the likely increases in energy costs that Europeans would be forced to pay. This measure is especially crucial given that the EU’s policy of imposing a cap on Russian oil imports has failed to prevent Russian oil from entering the European market, with Moscow having simply switched to using black market “shadow fleets” that continue to deliver oil to European countries.

As a result of these policy failures, Europe has ended up financing the very war it has claimed to be against. The solution is obvious: Europe must stop buying Russian gas or thinly veiled versions of it coming from third parties such as Azerbaijan and instead invest in building out its infrastructure to be able to buy more LNG from the United States, in particular.

As the United States deploys tougher economic sanctions to squeeze the Russian economy, it should take advantage of the Russian military’s overextension to raise the costs of the war in Ukraine. In the short term, the Trump administration should use any remaining funding from the most recent congressional supplemental legislation for Ukraine to provide Kyiv with air defense systems and long-range missile systems, such as Patriot interceptors, Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS), and High Mobility Rocket Systems (HIMARS), which Ukraine can use to defend itself against Russia’s airstrikes and to go on the offensive should the opportunity present itself. Washington should also pressure European countries to provide similar capabilities; Germany, most notably, has refused to provide Ukraine with its long-range system, the Taurus, citing concerns over escalation. These types of measures will send a clear message to Moscow that any nuclear saber rattling will not work to deter the United States from raising the costs of the war. In addition, the Trump administration should signal that further Russian escalation could trigger measures that would ultimately go against Russian interests—such as an invitation for Ukraine to join NATO.

In concert with an economic and military pressure campaign, the United States should exert political pressure on European allies to bolster their support for Ukraine’s security and economic needs. Europe holds the majority of the frozen Russian assets that were immobilized in 2022 ($260 billion out of approximately $300 billion). Washington has already passed legislation that allows it to repurpose U.S.-held Russian assets to support Ukraine. But Europe has moved only to provide Ukraine with loans that use frozen Russian assets as collateral and has so far refused to pass a law that would allow the spending of the assets, pointing to concerns about the legal basis for such a move.

The Biden administration has consistently blocked efforts by some European allies to do more for Ukraine, fearing Russian escalation. This was a mistake that ultimately projected U.S. weakness. Poland, for example, has stated its willingness to shoot down Russian missiles and drones that get near Polish territory and to defend certain parts of Ukrainian airspace to create safe zones in western sections of the country. The Biden administration has refused to allow these plans to move forward. It also reacted harshly to the suggestion by French President Emmanuel Macron that Europe should send soldiers to Ukraine. Here, Trump has an opportunity to address the Biden administration’s policy shortfalls. He can do so by supporting the plan spearheaded by France and Poland for a European-led “coalition of the willing” to send a peacekeeping force to Ukraine to ensure that any negotiated deal could ultimately be enforced.

Finally, working with allies and partners across the globe, the United States should move to choke off Russia’s defense industrial sector. Russia alone cannot produce all the components it needs to build and transport its military equipment and has deep dependencies on third-party providers in key sectors. Industrial lubricants, for instance, are critical for a variety of functions including the manufacturing and transportation of heavy machinery. After the exit of large Western companies such as Shell from the Russian market, Russian companies have had to find alternative sources of the necessary chemicals, leading to market and supply disruptions. The United States can leverage incentives or threaten sanctions on countries and companies that are stepping in to fill Russian war demands. U.S. policymakers should also work to identify additional specific vulnerabilities and dependencies in Russia’s war machine and aim to close off key supply lines in order to disrupt the Kremlin’s ability to carry out its war.

In his second term, Trump has vowed to drastically alter the global trade system and impose wide-ranging tariffs on imports to the United States. Many observers have assumed that Trump, as an adherent of the quid pro quo school of international relations, will use his tariff threat to extract concessions from friends and foes alike, betting on the idea that regaining preferential access to the U.S. market is so important that countries will be willing to cut deals with Washington on other issues. If there is genuine political will in the new Trump administration to attain a sustainable peace in Ukraine, Washington can selectively apply the carrots and sticks of global trade to maximize pressure on U.S. allies and strategic foes to do more to curtail Russia.

Russian soldiers undergoing training in Krasnodar, Russia, December 2024

 

Maximum Pressure, Maximum Success

Maximum pressure can get the Russians to the table, but that is just the first step toward a sustainable peace in Ukraine—and across Europe. Once the Russians are at the table and willing to engage, the United States will have to lay out its terms, just as the Russians have, to establish parameters for the discussion. To that end, Washington should insist on representatives from Ukraine and Europe more broadly being part of the negotiations, as the success of the deal will hinge on both Ukraine and its European partners accepting and implementing the terms of the agreement.

The United States should also set the question of NATO membership for Ukraine aside when it comes to reaching a deal to end the war. NATO is and should be a separate issue that can be discussed down the line and under different circumstances. The United States used this approach to much success when negotiating German reunification, with Washington ultimately leaving the question of East Germany’s NATO status out of the reunification agreements with the Soviet Union. And finally, the United States should refuse to officially recognize any Russian-occupied territory of Ukraine.

For now, the most urgent task is for the United States to establish a position of strength vis-à-vis Russia, which will ultimately force Moscow to compromise and also send a clear message to China, Iran, and North Korea. The Trump administration will have to drive a hard bargain that will require a long-term commitment and a conviction that preventing Russia from winning on Moscow’s terms will be of real value to the United States. A positive outcome, moreover, will reverberate far beyond Europe: amid mounting geopolitical instability, achieving lasting peace in Ukraine will send a strong signal not only to U.S. adversaries but also to the world that the United States is back.

 

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