I agree completely.
I would add that trying to incentivize Ukraine into a negotiation now, especially with the prospect of cutting off military assistance to Ukraine, would be a grave error.
As Mr. Bergmann said, first of all, what's Russia's incentive to negotiate? Many different flavours of a possible Trump strategy for Ukraine have been floated. There was one floated by Mike Pompeo and David Urban last summer, neither of whom will be in the administration, so I'm not sure it has much purchase. However, I think it was a little more realistic a strategy in that, in an early phase, we would step up military support for Ukraine by lifting some of the restrictions to increase the pain level on the Russians and incentivize them to come to the table in good faith.
The problem with this and all versions of the Trump strategies for Ukraine is that they're a little unrealistic or even naive about the post-conflict security architecture. They talk about delaying Ukraine's NATO membership by 10 years, or just leaving that question unanswered. If you leave that question unanswered, you're only delaying the start of the war again. The war will start again as soon as Russia has rebuilt its capability. It has to give up on its objective to control all of Ukraine, or at least control enough of Ukraine to make whatever state is left unstable, with almost zero economic and military potential, and massive social and political dislocation and problems.
Increasingly, the most important question about the current stage of the Russia-Ukraine war is whether Ukraine can survive militarily long enough for the strains of the war, economically and politically, to start to have an effect in Russia. I believe there is a time coming. Russia has been a lot more resilient than we expected economically, but many of the indicators point in only one direction, and that is of Russian economic degradation over the mid-term and a possible economic collapse.
Again, these are things that are hard to predict. I'm not an economist, but all recent indicators of the Russian economy are very negative. The Russian central bank is increasingly having problems sustaining the economy and maintaining a level of economic activity, GDP growth and things like that.
Forcing Ukraine into a negotiation without incentivizing Russia to come to the table in good faith, while also leaving the post-war security architecture undefined, would be a very significant error.