DiCianna: "Russia Will 100% Break Any Ceasefire"

And Trump's administration will very likely respond better than Biden's, says FP expert

Trump likely thinks that Putin is a loser after his “adventures” in Ukraine

It’s almost 2025, folks. While you’re preparing for your celebration, President-elect Donald Trump is promoting a peace push in Ukraine—which Russia, to Ukraine’s great joy, is already turning down.

But before all of you pour a glass of bubbles, let me give you a snippet of my final 2024 interview with Michael C. DiCianna, a research fellow at the Center for Intermarium Studies at the Institute of World Politics and non-resident research assistant at the Yorktown Institute. It will be published via Euromaidan Press this week.

Here’s what he had to say on the peace push and its potency:

“There’s an incredibly high chance the Russians break any ceasefire negotiation quickly, and there's a 100% chance the Russians break any ceasefire in the intermediate to long term because the Russians are bastards.

The folks advising Trump are aware of this. General Keith Kellogg is not an amateur on this. Neither is Marco Rubio nor Mike Waltz. Nor are the senior advisors in the Senate and the House like Mike Rogers, Congressman Wicker, and Senators like Mitch McConnell. Foreign policy experts and think tank people will also warn him of that.

It's sort of the best hope for Ukraine in the intermediate term when the Russians show that they are: liars and deceivers.

Ideally, Trump will, and I think, based on his first administration, you can have some confidence in it, is that he'll take that not only as a national security and geopolitical threat to the United States but also as a personal offense.

There are a lot of folks who speak about “the real Trump.” He was the one who had to pull the plug on a deal with North Korea because he felt like the North Koreans weren't being honest with him. Based on the comments of several of his senior officials from his first administration, he was the deciding guy in pulling the plug on it.

He was almost certainly tough on the Iranians. Killing Qasem Soleimani in Iraq was a big blow to the Iranians, and he was on the offensive against them the entire time.

Enter Syria. Even though he implied that they were not going to follow the Obama administration's efforts to overthrow Bashar al-Assad — even though the Obama administration's Syria policy was overall garbage — he responded with a series of ballistic cruise missile strikes on Syrian air bases after the chemical weapon attack in late 2017.

So, when Trump feels like he's extended an olive branch or a sort of olive branch and it's rejected, he’ll recognize that it's a threat and be certainly aggrieved that his personal efforts were not taken seriously.

I think that's the big threat to the Russians. If they think they can cut a deal with Trump and then betray him, he might be much more prickly about it than they expect.

Plus, Trump's commentary on the collapse of the Assad regime earlier this month and others showed that although he cautioned the US should not be involved in any way, he really showed that he understood that it was a huge loss for the Iranians and the Russians.

Trump commented on how embarrassing Russian losses have been in Ukraine for such little gain.

They've lost Syria, and Putin is not looking like the tough guy he looked in 2016, 2017, 2018 when Trump seemed to express some sort of “admiration” for him.

It's unlikely that Trump sees Putin as the same intimidating peer figure now. Rather like Trump's common parlance “a loser.”

If the Russians think that everybody ought to be sneaky with it, I think they could be in for a rude awakening. Perversely, I think that it might be Ukraine's best hope.

Maybe not in the immediate sense because there's obviously apprehension when that ceasefire comes to fruition and breaks down, but the Trump administration is better poised than the Biden administration to respond, leading to a much more serious response than anything we've seen in the last almost 3 years.”

Read another great interview here: