While the world was still raging that President Donald Trump would turn to Russia’s Vladimir Putin to try to score relief for Americans suffering from inflated diesel prices, the president’s diplomatic team led by special envoy Steve Witkoff was wheeling and dealing behind the scenes in stealth mode.

Volodymyr Zelensky, who exploded at the Trump-Putin diesel deal, was bluntly told by U.S. officials there was no value in poking the eye of the one ally whose financial and intelligence assistance was at the heart of Ukraine’s ability to stand toe-to-toe with the much larger, nuclear-armed enemy.

He also was told, despite repeated and widely reported overtures from NATO’s Mark Rutte, there were no more Patriot missiles that America could send to Ukraine at present, since they were being stockpiled for other needs, according to interviews with several Western officials.

The message was unmistakable: a war pause was the best option.

Remarkably, Zelensky changed tune and went on Trump’s favored Fox News outlet to announce he was willing to freeze the battle lines in a deal to pause the war. Such a proclamation was not only positive for prospects for a short-term ceasefire; it also sets up a longer range chance to create a lasting land-for-peace armistice.

Hostage release, trilateral negotiations and a ceasefire emerge

At the same time, Witkoff’s team had been working feverishly for weeks with Moscow to secure the release of Stephen Hubbard, a retired American teacher held captive in Russia at POW and prisoner camps since he was captured in Ukraine in 2022. The seventy-four-year-old was subjected to harsh conditions during his incarceration and paraded out on cameras as a propaganda tool.

Putin obliged, and Hubbard was reunited with his family Wednesday morning around the same time as Zelensky’s offer.

Next, Russia announced Thursday it was open to trilateral negotiations with Ukraine next month in Abu-Dhabi. And then First Lady Melania Trump announced on Friday an unprecedented deal for a ceasefire in Oleshky, located in the south of Ukraine where residents were reportedly starving. The ceasefire is scheduled to start Oct. 27,

The sequence of events led the American lawyer who worked pro-bono for Hubbard’s release to compare the Trump strategy to that of the legendary Henry Kissinger, who during America’s frustrating stalemate during the Vietnam War was able to foster better relations with Communist China and détente with the Soviet Union.

“I think it's pretty clear what's going on,” said Attorney Martin DeLuca, who played key roles in both Hubbard's and fellow American Mark Foley’s releases from Russia. “A lot of the media seems to be puzzlingly fixated on the idea that there was some secret arrangement as to why he would have been released," he said.

"As if it's inconceivable that the most obvious of all explanations, which is if you reengage, if you engage in dialog, if you make progress in repairing a relationship, and restoring dialog," DeLuca added, also saying "perhaps one of the small early dividends in the long and hard road to peace, can be human, and I think Stephen Hubbard is one of those.”

“We talk about peace dividends. This term dates back to a very skilled foreign policy president, Richard Nixon. I believe it was in 1972 or 1973, after he started re-engagement with China and détente with the Soviet Union, and that's when he began talking about peace dividends [...] So this is not something new. But it is something that people seem to have forgotten ever existed before Trump,” he said.

Real meaning of "peace dividend"

Kissinger coined the term “peace dividends” back in a 1973 memo to President Nixon after returning from a trip to China. Over the years, the term has been hijacked to mean that only if America wins a war there are dividends like less military spending that can be achieved.

But that was not meaning as Kissinger originally meant it.

The-then national security adviser suggested to Nixon that the United States could score small victories with the Chinese and Soviets – which could ease human suffering and help Americans – that incrementally could lead to peace in Vietnam.

“The progression of our relationship in the past twenty months is remarkable,” Kissinger wrote on March 2, 1873. “I believe it is one of your most striking successes in foreign policy. If we continue to handle it carefully, it should continue to pay dividends—in relaxing tensions in Asia, in furthering relations with Moscow, and generally in building a structure of peace.”

In another words, dividends can be scored on the road to peace, not just after it.

Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 and shared with North Vietnamese diplomat Lê Đức Thọ for negotiating the Paris Peace Accords to end the Vietnam War.

Those who know Trump well insist that is the framework of how he, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Witkoff have dealt with Russia in an effort to press a deal with Ukraine.

"Well, I mean, this is a very difficult situation, and we've seen this go on over the course of the last 18 months, where you've had good cop, bad cop moments,” former Deputy National Security Adviser and current Vice President of the Heritage Foundation's Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy, Victoria Coates said. 

"I think President Trump, having inherited a really horrible situation in Ukraine, is hoping to avoid major escalations and to get to a resolution to this," she said.

Coates added that one dynamic is that European nations that long applauded Zelenskyy are now suffering from “war fatigue” and dealing with internal strife like what has been seen in France, Spain and Belgium recently.

“What I was hearing from everybody who was not an EU official was the Ukrainians are exhausted. They need to regroup They need to rebuild. We need to get this resolved was really the refrain. I think that's what President Trump is trying to do,” she said,

Plodding land gains in a war of attrition

The Russia-Ukraine war is now lurching toward its fifth year, a conflict seemingly made intractable by a daily slaughter machine on the battlefield, Putin’s cunning determination to trade his own soldiers’ lives for plodding land gains in a war of attrition and Europe’s romanticism of a narrative that somehow Kyiv is a tiny David who will slay Moscow’s Goliath.

But interviews with more than a dozen security experts paint a consensus picture that Ukraine cannot win a war of attrition: it has already lost to death or injuries much of its young male population, and is now sending older men to the front lines.

“It's a stalemate. All you have are thousands of people dying over nothing. The lines on the map haven't moved significantly for years, and so it's just really kind of a senseless war,” said James S. Robbins of the Institute of World Politics. “But you have two sides that are completely dug into their position. The president's been trying his best to mediate some kind of compromise or an armistice. Maybe just get a ceasefire going, and that would be good.”

Robbins praised Trump for drawing a line with Ukraine and ending the notion there is a blank check for a war of attrition that also is driving up American energy prices.

“Even though the United States is a major supporter of Ukraine and continues to be, this whole issue is over just one aspect of Ukraine's war policy, which is targeting Russia's energy. Well, that has an impact  on us,: he said. “So it's one thing to help out the Ukrainians in their war against Russian aggression, which everybody can get behind. It's another thing if that war then begins to have negative effects on the United States. 

“So I think that's why the president said you have to moderate that, and maybe this is a way to show Ukraine  that U.S. support is not unlimited  and that they also have to come around and get to a negotiation. Hopefully, the Russians will also see that.”

Along the way, Trump will try to score some dividends for the American people when he can, such as Hubbard’s release, experts said.