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U.S. President Donald Trump reentered the White House in January hoping to achieve a quick peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. More than 100 days into his second term, Trump is still pushing for an agreement—and he’s beginning to concede that ending the war in Ukraine is no easy task.

“Maybe it’s not possible,” Trump said of a Ukraine-Russia peace deal during an interview with Meet the Press that aired Sunday. But in an indication of Trump’s reluctance to give up just yet, the president added, “I think we have a very good chance of doing it.”

U.S. President Donald Trump reentered the White House in January hoping to achieve a quick peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. More than 100 days into his second term, Trump is still pushing for an agreement—and he’s beginning to concede that ending the war in Ukraine is no easy task.

“Maybe it’s not possible,” Trump said of a Ukraine-Russia peace deal during an interview with Meet the Press that aired Sunday. But in an indication of Trump’s reluctance to give up just yet, the president added, “I think we have a very good chance of doing it.”

Despite promising to end the fighting within 24 hours of taking office, Trump was always unlikely to see a deal reached quickly given the complex array of factors swirling around the war, former U.S. officials and experts say. And unless he’s willing to ramp up pressure on Moscow, the U.S. president is poised to continue falling short in this ambitious diplomatic endeavor.

“The Russians have no reason at this point to actually negotiate with faith because their aim is the political control of Ukraine, and they still don’t see a clear counterforce for that,” John Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and Uzbekistan, told Foreign Policy.

Trump has put “pressure on the victim” to make concessions and “no pressure on the aggressor,” Herbst said.

“The bottom line is that this issue is very complicated, and there’s not a quick deal that leads to peace, that solves all the outstanding issues,” said Thomas Graham, who was the senior director for Russian affairs on the National Security Council staff under former President George W. Bush, in an interview with Foreign Policy.

It’s clear that Russia has been unwilling to make concessions from the beginning, Graham said, and changing that fact depends on the “dynamics on the ground” and the “political dynamics in Europe, Ukraine, and in the United States.”

The most that can be hoped for at this stage is “some sort of cease-fire along with what you might call a framework agreement that lays out the principles and parameters of a future settlement, which various parties would negotiate,” Graham said, but such discussions would “extend over a considerable period.”

The president’s handling of the peace process has frustrated supporters of Ukraine, some of whom have accused him of siding with Moscow. Trump has generally been much harder on Kyiv than Moscow, repeatedly and falsely blaming Ukraine for starting the war. He lambasted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a........

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