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WASHINGTON — President Trump will wage a financial war on Russia to force an end to its invasion of Ukraine — after years of former President Joe Biden funding Kyiv’s military has failed to halt the bloody conflict, the commander-in-chief’s Ukraine envoy said.
“It’s not going to end kinetically. What I mean by that is it’s not going to end by killing each other,” Gen. Keith Kellogg told Fox News on Friday.
“This is going to end … not only [with] diplomacy, but economics as well,” he added. “He’s talking about stopping the killing and stopping the carnage.”
That’s because Russia, which has suffered more than 800,000 casualties among its ranks over its nearly three-year-long full-scale invasion, care little about the human sacrifices of the conflict, Kellogg said.
“When you look at Putin, you can’t just say, ‘Well, stop the killing,’ because candidly, that’s not their mentality. That’s not how they do things,” he said. “So you have to approach a different way, and the president fits into that.”
One way that Trump could target Russian President Vladimir Putin’s wallet is by going after oil prices, which the president teased during remarks to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Thursday.
“I’m also going to ask Saudi Arabia and OPEC to bring down the cost of oil. You got to bring it down, which frankly, I’m surprised they didn’t do before the election,” Trump told the global elites gathered at the yearly meeting.
“If the price came down, the Russia-Ukraine war would end immediately. Right now, the price is high enough that that war will continue. You’ve got to bring down the oil price. You’re going to end that war.”
Kellogg explained that the price of oil is roughly $70 per barrel, meaning huge cash flows for Moscow to continue funding its unjust war on Ukraine. Eliminating that surplus would constrain Putin, helping push him toward the negotiation table.
“Russia is getting billions of dollars of money from oil sales,” Kellogg said. “What if you drop that to $45 a barrel, which is basically the baseline break-even point.”
Trump’s focus on oil aligns with his “drill, baby, drill” ambitions to move the US not only back to energy self-sufficiency, but into a position to be the global leader in oil exports. The US can then have more of a say in global oil prices.
“This is where the president comes from,” the Ukraine envoy said, explaining that Trump’s approach to ending global conflicts will be centered on economics and diplomacy.
“That’s how we’re going to finish this thing off. It’s not going to be done by killing each other. That’s not going to work,” Kelloff said.
But that doesn’t mean Trump has written off supplying Ukraine with additional weapons, he added, as the president may also consider sending Ukraine more US-made military aid paid for by frozen Russian assets.
This would benefit not only Ukraine but also the American defense industry, the retired lieutenant general said.
Noting that arming Ukraine is still “an important piece” of reaching peace, Kellogg said there are “other pieces that are just as important, and I think the president understands that.
“You have all these options, and you want to present the president of the United States with multiple options, so we can pick which one he wants to go with,” he told Fox News.
“But I think we’ve always talked about it — we’ve talked about this repeatedly — of using Russian frozen assets to do that, to buy US arms,” he continued.
“That is one piece of the puzzle that needs to be discussed, and it’s going to be on the table with the president to talk about, but it’s not the piece that was going to solve this.”
Still, Moscow attempted to brush off Trump’s economic threats on Friday, slamming the Republican for being “the American president who most often resorted to sanctions methods” during his first term in office.
“We do not see any particularly new elements here,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. “And so, of course, we very closely follow all the rhetoric, all the statements. We carefully note all the nuances.”
Peskov later added that the Kremlin was waiting “for signals that have not yet been received” from Washington for Russian President Vladimir Putin to engage in an “equal and mutually respectful dialogue” with Trump.
In a Fox News interview that aired Thursday night, Trump declined to say whether he had reached out to the Kremlin to hold a discussion, but he has said previously that he would like to speak with Putin.
Other Russian officials, such as Russian Duma member Leonard Ivlev, have blasted Trump’s economic threats, asserting that “it seems that Trump does not know what to do,” The Irish Times reported Friday.
“Threatening us with ultimatums, scaring us with tariffs is empty talk, this does not work with Russia. If Trump decided to speak to Russia in the language of ultimatums, then he chose a mistaken and dead-end strategy,” he said.
But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has faith in the US president’s ideas, noting that “Putin is nobody for Trump.”
“Ending the war in Ukraine must be a victory for Trump, not for Putin. Putin is nobody for him,” he said.
“America is much stronger, Europe is much stronger, China is stronger than Russia. They are all players.”
