Headlines lit up about a possible ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine Tuesday — only to be interrupted by a massive air strike on Kyiv and Kharkiv. As more bombs rained down on Volodymyr Zelensky’s country, negotiators could only shake their heads. It was just the latest illustration of the problem facing any peace talks, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted quite candidly: “We don’t know how far apart they truly are.”

The wild card to any deal, everyone recognizes, is Vladimir Putin. “I think both sides need to come to an understanding that there’s no military solution to this situation,” Rubio said during high-stakes talks in Saudi Arabia. “The Russians can’t conquer all of Ukraine, and obviously it’ll be very difficult for Ukraine in any reasonable time period to sort of force the Russians back all the way to where they were in 2014.” Frankly, the former senator explained, “The most important thing that we have to leave here with is a strong sense that Ukraine is prepared to do difficult things, like the Russians are going to have to do difficult things to end this conflict or at least pause it in some way, shape or form,” Rubio told reporters before sitting down with Ukrainian officials.

Zelensky’s side emerged from the meetings prepared to accept a 30-day truce, a sign of goodwill that President Trump urged Russia to accept. The “ball is now in Russia’s court,” American and Ukrainian diplomats agreed. If Russia says no, Rubio added, “then we’ll unfortunately know what the impediment is to peace here.”

Even if Putin is persuaded by Trump to pause the war — or, in the best of circumstances, end it — not everyone is convinced that the Russian dictator would stick to his side of the bargain. Let’s face it, National Review’s Jim Geraghty writes, a Russian ceasefire is about as airtight as Hamas’s. “The Russian government has broken its promises and assurances in peace treaties in Chechnya, Georgia, and Syria; the Budapest Memorandum that was supposed to guarantee Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for giving up the nuclear weapons stationed on its soil; and the extension of the START treaty,” he outlined. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

The skepticism is certainly earned, as Dr. A.J. Nolte pointed out on a recent “Outstanding” podcast. “I think fundamentally [there’s] not just a disagreement about optics. … It’s a fundamental difference [of], how do we understand Vladimir Putin’s war aims? Is he an interlocutor that you can trust to keep his word? And if … he tells Donald Trump he’ll do something, then [is he] going to do it? Or should we maybe not trust Putin?”

Of course, the administration’s posture has been: “Putin was not acting up when Trump was in office the last time. It was probably that four-year period … when Putin was kind of [reeling] in his aggressive tendencies the most in really the entire history of Putin’s administration. Credit to President Trump,” Nolte agreed, because “there’s some validity in that. Trump takes that [as] ‘Well, it’s about me, and Putin respects me — and he doesn’t respect Obama, and he doesn’t respect Biden. And so, if he makes a deal with me, he’s going to keep it, because he knows what will happen if he doesn’t.’”

From Zelensky’s perspective, that’s not necessarily unique to Trump, Nolte points out. “It’s more that the Trump administration had a very good policy framework in place of providing security guarantees to Ukraine and also deterring Putin and checking his aggression with America’s energy resources.”

When he goes back to his country with this deal, Zelensky is thinking about his people, the Regent professor explained. They’re the ones who’ve “seen all these atrocities committed by the Russians, who’ve seen all this violence, who’ve been through this war, and who don’t want to keep fighting, but also they don’t want to get swallowed up by the Russians” with a deal that says, “our territory is staying in Russian hands.” If that’s what he’s presenting to his nation, Nolte reflected, then he needs “more than just the unique power of Donald Trump to protect us.” Because practically speaking, the American president is gone in four years. “And so, what they’re looking for is a longer-term commitment on the U.S. side to say, ‘If and when … Putin breaks the deal, we want to make sure that Americans are actually going to be with us and actually impose real consequences.’” And more than that, Nolte continued, “that America’s going to deter him in such a way that he doesn’t take those actions beforehand.”

FRC’s Joseph Backholm put himself in the Ukrainians’ shoes. “You don’t just want the conflict to end, you want justice. And Zelensky talks about a ‘just peace’ all the time. And I think every human can relate to what he’s dealing with.” Because the Ukrainian experience is watching their towns be reduced to rubble “for no apparent military purpose.” “They’re just terrorists. And they’ve killed a lot of innocent people, and they have taken stuff that is not theirs. … And right now, the cost of peace, it seems, is to allow Russia to keep some of what they have gotten through unquestionably unjust means.”

At this point, Nolte countered, “I think the Ukrainians understand that their national survival was a victory, because when Putin came in, his actual stated war aim wasn’t [to get] a hundred miles of the Donbas. It was [that] Ukraine shouldn’t exist.” Obviously, that’s not the victory Ukrainians are hoping for, but it is a victory, Nolte underscored. And for any deal to be successful, he continued, there needs to be “a Russian recognition of the independence and sovereignty of Ukraine.”

If the people at the table refuse to get that concession from Putin, “Then what Russia is basically saying is, ‘We fully intend to go back and do this again later,’” the professor warned. “ … [That doesn’t] make the Trump administration look good in terms of achieving a long-standing, sustainable peace if you sign a treaty — and then Putin violates it a couple of years later.”

“Here’s the thing,” Nolte said, “and this is where I would say the Trump administration should recalibrate a little bit. … This has been a disastrous war for Russia. They’ve lost hundreds of thousands of people. They’re now drawing on troops from North Korea and other provinces. … They’ve lost any ability to project power into the Middle East and Syria because they’ve focused so much on Ukraine. They’re losing their position in the Caucasus. And so, what I would say to the Trump administration is, ‘Look, you guys need to recognize that Ukraine exists as an independent, sovereign country, and they get to make certain choices. They’re not a province of Russia, period. End. And you make that commitment in international law as part of this treaty. And if you break that commitment later,” he suggested, “there are going to be severe consequences.”

And then “spell out in advance what those consequences are, and what actions the United States and other countries will take if that happens. And we know that sanctions [are] not enough.” Frankly, Nolte explained, “If you want to understand why the Biden administration failed, you need to look at what happened in the run up to the war, because deterrence happens before a war starts. The Biden administration failed to effectively deter Russia. President Trump says, ‘If I was president, Putin wouldn’t have done this.’ Okay, if you’re going to back that up, then look seriously and systematically at those failures of deterrence and put a real deterrence framework in where Russia looks at that and says, ‘The consequences of this are high enough that we don’t want to go for round two with Ukraine.’”

At the end of the day, Nolte summarized, “The question is, is Trump Chamberlain? That kind of depends on [whether] a peace agreement provide[s] a realistic mechanism for deterring future Russian aggression? Because if it doesn’t, then yeah, that’s appeasement. If it does, then it is what Trump says it is. It’s ‘Let’s end the war, stop the killing, and make sure this doesn’t happen again.’”

As the world watches with a wary eye toward Putin, the professor advised that at a “prudential level,” “Even if you get half a loaf or three-quarters of a loaf, you’ve got to make sure that you keep it. So if you can’t get everything that you want morally, at least make sure the things you did get — [like] Ukrainian survival — you can guarantee in the long run. … And so that’s what I would encourage the Trump administration to think about: what are you going to get back from the Russians in terms of guarantees that you can go to Ukraine and the Europeans and say, ‘Okay, we’ve gotten the Russians to agree to this. Now we need you guys to step up and actually make sure that you are real partners in ensuring that we’re able to make this sustainable for the long term.’”