“Non-Cabinet General”. What is good and what is not so good about the appointment of Kellogg to the post of special representative for Ukraine and Russia — Shelest

“We will understand whether this news is good only when he starts working directly in his new guise. Because we understand very well that the statements we heard during the election campaign will not necessarily be the policy of the new President Trump,” says Shelest.

The expert named him “a non-cabinet general”, because Kellogg was in Iraq and in other hot spots. He is a professional military man who has 26 years of service in fairly responsible positions.

“That is, he perfectly understands what war is,” said Shelest.

She also spoke about his attitude towards Russia:

“Regarding the Russian Federation, I had a very clear position that it was an aggressor, and always criticized it [чинного президента США Джо] Biden on the insufficient supply of weapons. This is all good news for us.”

However, she added that there is something more pessimistic about Ukraine in his biography:

“Sometime in the spring, his article came out, which presented a certain vision of how Trump could end this war. We don’t know yet if that’s purely his opinion, or that of the incoming administration, or whether it will be the same almost a year after this article was published. But there he predicted, as a possible compromise, the first — Ukraine’s refusal to join NATO; and the second — freezing the situation on the battlefield along the current line of contact.”

This means, according to her, that the Russian Federation still has some control over part of the Ukrainian territory:

“And this, especially the second, of course, is no longer positive for Ukraine. Because we understand very well: the longer a certain territory is under Russian occupation, the more difficult it will be to somehow return these territories to Ukraine, in accordance with that policy [РФ] – this is not just de-Ukrainization, and sometimes even genocide, which the Russian Federation is carrying out in the occupied territories.”

Trump’s “peace plan” for Ukraine – what is known

On November 6, The Wall Street Journal reported that Donald Trump’s advisers put forward different versions of the plan to actually freeze the front line in Ukraine. One of them provides for Ukraine’s refusal to join NATO for 20 years.

According to the publication, this plan involves freezing the front line and creating an 800-mile demilitarized zone (almost 1300 km). In addition, it provides for Russia to leave approximately 20% of the territory of Ukraine, which the aggressor country seized.

On November 7, it was reported that the Office of the President of Ukraine doubted the authenticity of this plan.

“In general, it can be said that the real plans of the presidents are hardly announced in the newspapers. And there are always a lot of Russian interjections in the newspapers,” Dmytro Lytvyn, adviser to the president of Ukraine on communication, commented on the publication.

The Economist reported that officials in Ukraine rely on two public formulations of Donald Trump’s “peace plan”.

For its part, The Telegraph reported that Trump’s plan may involve placing European and British troops in a 1,200-kilometer buffer zone between the Russian and Ukrainian armies.

On November 24, the British publication The Guardian reported that there are people in Trump’s circle who can persuade him to negotiate with Ukraine on the terms of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin – if the Russian Federation agrees to break its strategic partnership with China.