Following his campaign promise to bring a swift end to the war in Ukraine, President Donald Trump has moved forward with brokering negotiations between Russia and Ukraine to end the war that Russian President Vladimir Putin started three years ago, signaling that Ukraine will likely have to give up territory seized by Moscow in a future peace deal.

On Wednesday, the president held an almost 90-minute phone call with Putin, describing the conversation as “lengthy and highly productive.” Trump later wrote that he and Putin “agreed we want to stop the millions of deaths taking place in the War with Russia/Ukraine. … We both believe very strongly in it. We agreed to work together, very closely, including visiting each other’s Nations.” He went on to say that the leaders of the negotiations would be Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, and Middle East Envoy Steve Witkoff. The president also stated that he had a “very good call” with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky regarding the war.

“I think we are on the way to getting peace,” Trump remarked after the calls. “I think President Putin wants peace and President Zelensky wants peace, and I want peace. I just want to see people stop getting killed.”

While accurate casualty numbers are difficult to come by, estimates put the total troop casualties at over one million, with 80,000 Ukrainian troops dead and 400,000 wounded, and 200,000 Russian troops dead and 400,000 wounded. The number of civilian casualties in Ukraine is estimated to be over 12,400 killed and over 28,000 wounded.

Trump and Putin’s call happened on the same day that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth travelled to Brussels to meet with the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, an alliance of 57 countries and the European Union, where he laid out the 47th president’s views on the Ukraine war.

“[W]e must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective,” he stated. “Chasing this illusionary goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering.”

Hegseth continued, “A durable peace for Ukraine must include robust security guarantees to ensure that the war will not begin again. … That said, the United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement. Instead, any security guarantee must be backed by capable European and non-European troops. If these troops are deployed as peacekeepers to Ukraine at any point, they should be deployed as part of a non-NATO mission, and they should not be covered under Article Five.”

The Defense Secretary went on to underscore that “there will not be U.S. troops deployed to Ukraine.”

Trump’s approach toward Russia’s war in Ukraine marks a sharp departure from former President Joe Biden’s, whose administration worked to block a peace deal at the outset of the war and encouraged vast amounts of U.S. taxpayer money for military aid be given to Ukraine. Total U.S. funding to Ukraine currently amounts to $183 billion, with $86.7 billion disbursed so far. Despite the funding, Ukraine has been unable to reclaim the territory it has lost to Russia, and the conflict has reached a stalemate.

In comments to The Washington Stand, Lt. Col. (Ret.) Bob Maginnis, senior fellow for National Security at Family Research Council, expressed support for the Trump administration’s strategy to end the conflict.

“[This is] the best course of action to quickly end the killing,” he argued. “President Trump has long signaled — starting early in his 2024 presidential campaign — what he would do to end the Russia-Ukraine war. He signaled that NATO membership for Kyiv and the return of Russian-seized Ukrainian territory were both off the table. Trump understood these were red lines for Putin and removing them improved the likelihood of a quick and peaceful resolution of the war.”

Maginnis continued, “Now, in the wake of Trump’s call with Putin and Hegseth’s statement on the issue, it’s clear these obstacles are off the table. No doubt, this was welcomed information in the Kremlin, which was most welcome by Putin and demonstrated with the release of the American prisoner Marc Fogel.”

Maginnis further argued that the war would not have happened if Trump were president. “Understand that the Ukraine war came about because of President Putin’s perception that President Biden was weak and vulnerable especially in the wake of the 2021 Afghanistan debacle. I’m persuaded that had Trump been elected in 2020, Russia would have kept its powder dry — there would not have been a war.”

During an appearance on Fox News Thursday, Maginnis predicted that a peace deal would be reached between the two countries in the coming months. “I suspect that beginning perhaps as early as next week, we’ll have our negotiators sitting down with Russians and hopefully with Ukrainians. Clearly, Zelensky is willing, and Putin appears to be willing as well, and they’ll begin to do a phased scenario [where] you begin to pull back troops. What has to be resolved is whether or not we’re going to have international forces in there to separate the two combatants. I suspect that’s the case. … And so, there are some issues that have to be resolved, but I think they’ll be resolved quickly thanks to Mr. Trump.”