The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Ukraine War Peace Talks || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: December 24, 2025

Ukraine and Russia peace talks are proceeding furiously, but going nowhere, mostly because the Trump administration is trying to make this a rush job and has neglected all the important details.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/4p3bS2R

Everybody, Peter Zion here. I think it's time we address the elephant in the room, the real problem with the United States today. Boring holiday conversations. I mean, if you want to talk about something that is more involved than somebody's new medication or surgery or who's hooking up with who, you've got to help people up their game. And the easiest way to do that is to get them a gift subscription to my Patreon page. So you can talk about what's going on in the world and global economics and democracy. and maybe even, I don't know, politics, it's all there. So, at the end of this video is all the information that you need to make your holidays just that much more interesting. A.L. Peter Zine here, company from Colorado, and today we're going to talk about the status

of the peace talks with Ukraine and the Russians to end the Ukraine war. We've had really two big problems with any meaningful negotiations so far. Number one, Donald Trump really wants a peace deal, but he really doesn't care at all about the detail. So whatever the peace deal of the moment is, it's on his desk. He's like, this is wonderful. This is the best deal ever. Let's do this. And when countries push back, he screams at them and starts to threaten them. Until this point, the country that he's been screaming at and threatening has usually been Ukraine. And that is because of the second problem, and that is the U.S. chief negotiator, who's a guy by the name of Steve Whitkoff.

Woodcoff is a real estate mogul from New York, old buddies of Donald Trump. And he has said on a number of occasions and a number of venues that he knows nothing about negotiation and nothing about foreign affairs and he's proud of that he has no intention to ever learn anything so i and others have always thought that whitkoff was just rabidly pro-russian because he doesn't meet with the ukraini's never met with zalinski who's the Ukrainian president just goes to moscow sits down tilts his head back and the russians pour a few gallons of Russian propaganda into him he comes back to the white house vomits at forth Trump says oh this is a wonderful peace idea let's do this And when the Ukrainians refused to agree to demands by them from the Russians to basically withdraw their troops and shut down their army and never seek a defensive alliance, the Ukrainians say no, and then Trump goes off the handle.

That's basically been the pattern for this year to this point. What changed in the last week is that Steve Whitkoff met with Zelensky for the first time. And guess what happened? He tilted his head back and Zelensky poured a few gallons of Ukrainian people. propaganda down his throat. Whitkoff came to the White House, vomit it forward. All of a sudden we have a Ukrainian peace plan that ignores all of the Russian demand, specifically would allow for an Article 5-style security guarantee with the United States. One of the things that the Russians have refused to even negotiate on is Ukraine ever joining NATO because they don't want the other

countries, most notably the United States, to get involved in the conflict. Remember that for the Russians, it's not just about Ukraine. It's about pushing their western periphery. back to an area that they find more defensible so that that periphery actually matches geography so that they can use mountains and seas to defend themselves. That means not just conquering all of Ukraine, but also all of Finland and Latvia and Estonia and Lithuania and Moldova and big chunks of Poland and Romania as well. So anything that involves foreign troops, the Russians will allergetically reject, but Trump, having not done the homework, think that just means NATO. So the new plan by the Ukrainians is for

for a NATO-style guarantee to not be with the alliance, but be with the United States and Germany and Poland and France. Basically, every NATO country signs a bilateral deal instead. And Trump, this is the last deal in front of him, is like, this is a wonderful idea. And so this is the peace plan. It is still a stupid peace plan. It just meets one side's point as opposed to the other side's point. What that means for me is I am now gone from thinking that Whitkoff is just rabidly pro-Russian to realizing the Wittkopf is just really fucking stupid, and Trump can't tell. So, why would an alliance of this structure with Ukraine be as horrible of an idea as every plan that's come forward to this point that's been from the Russian point of view?

Well, remember, for the Russians, Ukraine is not the end of the story. It's the beginning of the story. And so if we are now directly involved in the third Ukraine war, because that's what the next one would be, then the Russians would use all the weapon systems that they have available, including their nukes and their intercontinental ballistic missiles, because all of a sudden they are in a multi-theater war. And that means that this deal in its current form pretty much guarantees an exchange. It's going to sound horrible, but for the United States, the best outcome of these talks is something that fails. and continues with NATO and the United States supporting Ukraine and helping them build up an independent defense capacity

so they can stand up to the Russians on their own. And that means ongoing weapons transfers and ongoing assistance. The alternative is to leave the Ukrainians out to dry, in which case the Russians don't stop at Ukraine and come right into NATO countries, or to put American troops on the ground to defend the Ukrainians against the next Russian assault, in which case we get that exchange. so this deal is just as bad as everything that has come before what i do find really interesting is we actually have some talk on the specifics not just in the white house in congress but because a bilateral security alliance requires senate approval and ratification and we're already starting that process now i don't think that this will happen i don't think this should happen but you know steve whitcoff's next stop is in Moscow. So I'm sure he's going to change his mind again and come up with a new plan

that will go before Trump and then he will change his mind again and we'll be back to this cycle. But the real thing that has changed in just the last few days is now an understanding that the details don't matter to this administration at all. And unless and until we get at a minimum a new chief negotiator for Ukraine, this is just the cycle that we're in. A lot of screaming and no real change.