Ending Russia-Ukraine war will take time and effort, Mike Waltz says

Incoming national security adviser Mike Waltz said he expects President-elect Donald Trump will establish relationships “in the coming months” that will lead to an end to the Russia-Ukraine war.

Speaking Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” Waltz said, “From President Trump’s perspective, you can’t enter a deal if you don’t have some type of relationship and dialog with the other side. And we will absolutely establish that in the coming months.”

On Thursday, Trump said a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin was being arranged. “He has said that even publicly and we have to get that war over with. That’s a bloody mess,” the president-elect said in remarks at Mar-a-Lago.

Host Jonathan Karl asked Waltz if the meeting would just be Trump and Putin, or whether it might also include President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine.

“We haven’t set the exact framework for it yet. We’re working on that,” Waltz said.

Trump said repeatedly during the campaign that he would be able to end the Russia-Ukraine war on his first day in office, or even earlier that that. More recently, Keith Kellogg, Trump’s pick to be a special peace envoy, set a longer timeline for ending the war.

“I would set it at 100 days,” Kellogg, a retired Army lieutenant general, told Fox News on Wednesday.

On Sunday, Waltz said it was clear Ukraine would not be able to drive Russia all the way out of its territory.

“Everybody knows that this has to end somehow diplomatically,” he said. “I just don’t think it’s realistic to say we’re going to expel every Russian from every inch of Ukrainian soil, even Crimea. President Trump has acknowledged that reality, and I think it’s been a huge step forward that the entire world is acknowledging that reality. Now let’s move forward.”

Waltz, a Republican member of Congress from Florida, said that Trump’s rhetoric has helped dispel the idea that the war was a hopeless quagmire that would just go on and on.

Waltz told Karl it was “striking” that since the election “how many people have gone from just unqualified, blank check, as long as it takes, whether that’s months, years, decades in terms of perpetuating this war, which really has bogged down to a World War I-style meat grinder of people and resources, with World War III consequences, to now even President Zelenskyy walking in the room in Paris and saying, ‘Ready to work with you to end this war.’”