Keith Kellogg, President Donald Trump’s special envoy fo Ukraine, told the New York Post in an interview yesterday that Trump is ready to double down on sanctions, and other coercive measures, to get Russia to talk peace. Sanctions enforcement on Russia are “only about a three” on a scale of 1 to 10 on how painful the economic pressure can be, Kellogg said. “You could really increase the sanctions—especially the latest sanctions [targeting oil production and exports,]” he said. “It’s opened the aperture way high to do something.”
Kellogg told the Post that a week ago, Trump gathered his “whole confirmed team” of advisers and cabinet members focused on national security—from Vice President JD Vance, to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—in the Oval Office. There, Kellogg said, they discussed how to use all elements of national power to end the war. “Solving the Russia-Ukraine war is really all hands on deck for the entire administration, so a whole-of-government approach,” the general said. “We got the national security team talking about it—the president, vice president, national security adviser, secretaries of State [and] Treasury, National Security Council, working all together.”
Though Kellogg said Ukraine will need to keep up its military pressure on Russia ahead of negotiations, he lambasted former President Biden’s strategy of promising to provide Ukraine aid “as long as it takes, as much as it takes” without cranking up the pressure on other elements of national power. “That is not a strategy, it’s a bumper sticker,” he said. “At a very high level, I said, OK, [the Biden administration was] really not prosecuting the war or helping out Ukraine as well as they should have … getting Ukraine the necessary arms or strategy at the right time.
