Has Donald Trump finally had an epiphany about Vladimir Putin’s appetite for peace, appropriately at the Vatican? His social media post, after meeting Volodymyr Zelensky, that the Russian leader “maybe doesn’t want to stop the war” but instead is “just tapping me along, and has to be dealt with differently”, offers Ukraine some hope that he might modify the proposed deal he had previously said was “set in stone”. In the past, though, such moments of clarity have been brief and quickly forgotten, so for now Kyiv must still grapple with the implications of that ultimatum.
The deal is a terrible one, at odds with both international law and basic decency. But it may yet prove impossible for Ukraine or its other western allies to improve the terms as long as Trump remains in the White House. For all their courage, Ukrainians cannot afford to fight for another three years and nine months without America’s backing. As even Vitali Klitschko, the former world heavyweight boxing champion who is now mayor of Kyiv, admitted last week, the “painful solution” of trading land for an end to the fighting is “not fair” but may now be necessary.
The bitterest pill
The peace plan has not publicly been detailed, but its terms are clear. It envisages an immediate ceasefire and the start of direct talks between Moscow and Kyiv. Ukraine would be barred from joining Nato and would sign the planned minerals and infrastructure deal with Washington. Meanwhile, America would formally accept Russian sovereignty over annexed Crimea, and informally recognise its control over the other occupied territories. The US would also lift its sanctions on Moscow, although there may be an immediate “snap back” in case of renewed Russian aggression.
It will be immensely hard for Ukraine to accept terms so generous to the invader. Perhaps half a million dead and wounded across the military and civilian population; some 20,000 forcibly abducted children; ten million refugees, of whom seven million have fled the country; £135 billion in damage to the nation’s infrastructure. These figures represent a terrible toll that cannot be overlooked.
There are of course grounds to worry that, if accepted, this deal will only embolden Putin, just as the West’s acquiescence to Russian gains following his 2008 invasion of Georgia and his 2014 seizure of Crimea encouraged him to take the biggest gamble of his rule and mount a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It is also possible that Beijing would see the Kremlin essentially being rewarded for seizing part of another sovereign nation and regard it as licence to take Taiwan.
These are arguments against the current peace terms that it is for America and its European partners to consider. But Ukraine, locked in an existential struggle for survival, does not have the luxury of worrying about other’s countries’ fates.
Would such a deal mean the end of Zelensky’s political career? Even if many Ukrainians want peace — polls suggest that half may be willing to consider a peace-for-land swap — they may make him the scapegoat for their understandable anger. If the deal is accepted, it might well become the last service that this extraordinary wartime president undertakes for his nation.
Shifting odds
The immediate response from many Ukrainians and their supporters abroad is that the country can and must fight on. This is certainly an option: the Ukrainians have demonstrated extraordinary fortitude in this war.
However, the Trump administration has so far seemed determined to wash its hands of the whole situation if Kyiv rejects this latest version of the deal. A reported counter-proposal in which the US would provide firm security guarantees for Ukraine seems a non-starter.
“We’ve issued a very explicit proposal to both the Russians and the Ukrainians,” said JD Vance, the vice-president, “and it’s time for them to either say yes or for the United States to walk away from this process.”
Putin does not hold all the strongest cards here — Russia’s own military has also been ravaged and will take years to rebuild — but without US military backing for Kyiv the battlefield odds will start to shift.
The intelligence-sharing and targeting assistance that has been so useful to the Ukrainian war effort, especially for long-range strikes on Russia’s assets, would end immediately. The end of supplies of ammunition, systems and spare parts would take months longer to bite, but the knowledge that US military provisions were running out would still encourage the Russians before the summer
campaign season.
Europeans and other allies could try to fill some of the gaps. However, they cannot make up the entire shortfall, especially in key areas such as long-range air defence. They could try to buy what they cannot produce, such as Patriot surface-to-air missiles, but in this case they would find themselves in a queue behind other customers who are higher on Washington’s priority list, such as Israel. Ukraine needs them now.
A British officer working with the Ukrainians was downbeat. “We’re not talking about a Ukrainian collapse,” he said. “But we are likely to see Russia able to make faster, cheaper gains.” In other words, if Ukraine fights on, there is every reason to believe that at some point in the future its leaders will eventually find themselves forced to swallow even harsher terms.
Limited gains
Boris Johnson has said that Ukraine “gets nothing” from this deal but that’s not quite right: there does actually seem to have been some movement on Moscow’s part. Only last week, Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister, was reaffirming Russia’s maximalist demands, including full legal authority over the five Ukrainian regions it has partly annexed, limits on Ukraine’s military and the country’s permanent neutrality.
This deal does not include constraints on Ukraine’s capacity to defend itself. It stipulates a bar on Nato membership that was in any case very unlikely to be forthcoming in the foreseeable future — but there are no restrictions on other military alliances or even the presence of foreign troops on its soil. Potential European Union membership offers Ukraine the prospect not just of greater prosperity but also security, since the Treaty of Europe commits all members to mutual defence.
Moreover, under the terms being discussed Russia would surrender its claims to those regions it does not currently occupy and even withdraw from territories to the south to grant Ukraine free access to the Dnipro River. And while refusing to countenance the loss of Crimea has been a red line for Kyiv throughout the peace process, by distinguishing between the future status of Crimea and the other occupied territories this plan holds out the prospect of the latter returning to Kyiv’s control at some point in the future.
Winning the peace
There may still be scope for Ukraine and Europe to propose some minor changes but clearly, if this deal or something like it is pushed through, Putin is the main beneficiary. He will claim this as a victory over not just Kyiv but the West.
Nonetheless, this should still be seen as a tainted triumph. Putin had wanted all Ukraine in his sphere of influence. Instead, he gets a fifth of its territory — battle-ravaged and needing expensive reconstruction — and faces a rump Ukraine united as never before and fiercely determined to resist Moscow’s influence. Russians will greet an end to the war with relief but many will also question whether this victory was worth almost a million dead and wounded, and long-term economic and social scarring.
For Ukraine’s allies, if there is any scope to redeem this grossly unfair deal, it would be in ensuring that the mutilated country that emerges is truly sovereign, democratic and above all secure. Even if no security guarantees are included in its terms, that does not preclude them from being provided separately.
This is where the Anglo-French “coalition of the willing”, whose scale and scope has until now been shrinking steadily, must urgently provide more than just symbolic help. There will be a need to rebuild Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure — more than 13 per cent of the housing stock has been damaged or destroyed — but the immediate priority will be its defences.
This means rearming its exhausted soldiers and refilling its depleted armouries, as well as firming up new borders with minefields and defensive lines. Beyond that, it means investing in its own defence industries. Arms companies such as Germany’s Rheinmetall and Britain’s BAE Systems are already operating inside Ukraine and there is scope for a massive expansion in co-operation.
Reconstruction will be expensive: the current estimate is about £400 billion. It is possible that, as part of the deal, the £225 billion in Russian state assets frozen abroad might be seized for this purpose. A European diplomat said that “Moscow will performatively spit and shout, but in effect it will accept this as a way of paying reparations, from money it wouldn’t get back anyway”.
Beyond that, any prospect of winning back the occupied territories — and discrediting Putin’s authoritarian regime — will rest on building a successful and stable Ukraine for the long term. There will be a constant fear of a renewed invasion, but Kyiv will adopt what Taiwan calls the “hedgehog strategy”: making itself so prickly that Moscow will think very hard before restarting hostilities.
The German precedent
This deal is therefore just about “doable”, in the words of Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state. Contrary to immediate assumptions, it does not require Kyiv to give up its claims to any of the occupied territories, something that would involve rewriting its constitution, requiring a referendum. Trump has said that “nobody is asking Zelensky to recognise Crimea as Russian territory”.
The West’s creation of Kosovo in 1990, widely treated as a country even if not universally recognised as such, is a reminder that international law has ample wriggle room for a diplomatic fudge like this. Ukrainians searching for reassurance should also recall the fate of East Germany, which eventually reunited with West Germany after 41 years apart when a previous hardline regime in Moscow ossified to the point of collapse. Or they could consider Croatia, which, after losing the self-declared Republic of Serbian Krajina in 1991, reconquered it in Operation Storm four years later.
None of this is much consolation for a country which has for three years been promised support for “as long as it takes” but is now being presented with a virtual ultimatum by the country that is meant to be its most powerful ally. If it cannot capitalise on the Vatican meeting to persuade Trump to rewrite its terms, Kyiv should think hard about taking the deal anyway. Awful though it is to contemplate, this ultimatum is probably the best deal Ukraine is going to get.
Professor Mark Galeotti’s latest book, Forged in War: A Military History of Russia from its Beginnings to Today, is published by Osprey/Bloomsbury
