Trump's Advisers Concede Ukraine Deal Is Months Away

They Admit 'Day One' Promises Were Campaign Bluster and Ignored Challenges

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Advisers to President-elect Donald Trump now concede that the Ukraine war will take months or even longer to resolve, a sharp reality check on his biggest foreign policy promise - to strike a peace deal on his first day in the White House.

Two Trump associates, who have discussed the war in Ukraine with the president-elect, told Reuters they were looking at a timeline of months to resolve the conflict, describing the Day One promises as a combination of campaign bluster and a lack of appreciation of the intractability of the conflict and the time it takes to staff up a new administration.

Those assessments dovetail with remarks by Trump's incoming Russia-Ukraine envoy, Lieutenant-General (Ret) Keith Kellogg, who said in an interview with Fox News last week that he would like to have a "solution" to the war within 100 days, far beyond the President-elect's original timeline.

Yet even Lt Gen (Ret) Kellogg's extended deadline was "way, way too optimistic", said Mr John Herbst, a former US ambassador to Ukraine who is now at the Atlantic Council think-tank in Washington. "For this to work, Trump has to persuade (Russian President Vladimir) Putin that there's a downside for being intransigent," Mr Herbst said.