Humiliation on the battlefield is one of the most reliable catalysts for an ultranationalist backlash. From the Freikorps in Germany to Russian “violence merchants” — the embittered veterans of the Afghan War and the brutal conflicts of the Nineties — rage, criminality, and organised violence have a habit of spilling back into society when wars end in dishonour. Disappointed, traumatised troops return home with the conviction that only force can redeem the nation, spreading chaos and revanchist politics as they go. And, if Vladimir Putin manages to draw Donald Trump into agreeing to a one-sided peace deal that will reward his war of aggression and leave thousands of Ukrainians stranded under a brutal Russian occupation, history could yet repeat itself in Kyiv.
Today, Putin and Trump are expected to meet and, if Trump is to be taken at his word, hammer out the terms of a peace deal over Ukraine. The stakes could hardly be higher. Trump, ever the showman, hails the Alaska meeting as a decisive moment to “end the war”. Across the table, two men whose own political fortunes have been bound up with nationalist spectacle may soon decide Ukraine’s future. Regardless of what they agree, one thing is missing: Ukrainian representation. And without that representation, any deal may fuel Ukrainian veterans’ disappointment, damning its society to years of political turmoil.
The phrase doing the rounds around the proposed deal is “land swap” — a euphemism that, in practice, means no swap at all. In reality, it would involve Ukraine ceding a vast swathe of territory now under Russian occupation. Should that happen, and should Zelensky be bludgeoned into selling the deal to his own people, Ukraine’s near future could be defined less by recovery than by a smouldering, violent response to perceived defeat.
Unsurprisingly, Ukrainians across the political spectrum are furious with the outline of the deal. Zelensky himself, who is under immense pressure from the country’s political class and civil society not to hand Putin a victory, would find it all but impossible to sell any deal to the public, even if he wanted to. As he has made this clear: “Ukraine won’t cede land that could be used as a springboard for war.” He has been similarly bullish about being frozen out of the Alaska summit, warning that “they cannot decide anything about Ukraine without us”.
“Ukraine’s near future could be defined less by recovery than by a smouldering, violent response to perceived defeat.”
Ukrainians remember the failures of the Minsk I and II agreements made with Putin a decade ago, and Russia riding roughshod over the Budapest Memorandum that promised them safety in return for giving up their nuclear arms in the Nineties. Above all, they remember the images of murdered civilians in Bucha and Irpin that shocked the world in early 2022. Soldiers on the front, where the death and casualty rate soars ever higher, and where at least 50,000 Ukrainians have died, bristle at the idea of giving in to Russia. As one frontline soldier put it, fighting will continue “until Russia suffers big enough losses”.
A deal that therefore fails to grapple either with the causes or the effects of the war — which have never been limited to Nato expansion — will only ever result in backlash from the Ukrainian population. Indeed, it is important to stress that the war against Ukraine stems from the Kremlin’s increasingly paranoid, imperialist messianism, a worldview in which Ukraine’s independent existence is an existential affront. Ever since the humiliation of seeing his favoured candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, lose Ukraine’s 2004 presidential election to the Western Ukrainian Viktor Yushchenko, Putin’s state media has peddled myths about Ukrainian “nationalists” and “Nazis” plotting against Russian-speakers in Ukraine. After the Maidan Revolution of 2014, Russia’s dictator acted on those fictions, invading Crimea and parts of Donbas under the pretext of stopping an imagined “genocide” against Russian speakers.
By 2022, Putin’s language had become even more wild. After all, Ukraine’s far-Right held only a sliver of the electoral vote, and no seats in parliament. It had little following on social media and no discernible cultural sway. Indeed, the country’s president was a Russian-speaking Jewish entertainer popular on both sides of the border, elected not to build a nationalist utopia but on a promise to ease the war in the east. Putin’s war against “fascists” has always been Quixotic — a tilting at windmills in service of an imagined imperial conquest by a man who increasingly sees himself as a new Peter the Great, or even a new Stalin.
However dim the prospects of regaining territory currently occupied by Russian forces, agreeing to formally surrender it would be a deep psychic wound. Russian forces have committed war crimes on an industrial scale. They have flattened cities like Mariupol, where 85% of the housing stock was destroyed and tens of thousands of civilians killed. In place of a functioning if corrupt democracy, Russia has established a system of totalitarian torture and control that sees objectors beaten, jailed, and murdered. All the while, children are torn from their parents and sent to Russia, to be adopted and “Russified”.
Moscow taunts Ukrainians online with glossy footage of rebuilt apartment blocks and new public facilities — much of it in fact shoddy — and grotesque images of sites where Ukrainian children are put up for adoption. Toss resentment against an unjust peace into the mix and the response could be severe.
A “stab in the back” myth — built around the belief that Washington and Europe have always been slow to back Ukraine, before abandoning Kyiv when the fight became inconvenient — is already simmering in Ukrainian discourse. Trump is certainly unpopular in this regard, but his predecessor Joe Biden was the target of much ire for slow-pedalling on first providing, then giving permission to use, the ATACMS missile system.
The roots of this narrative go back to 2014, when Germany’s business-as-usual policy with Moscow brushed over the seizure of Crimea. From there, the “betrayal” of Ukraine seems set to dominate every nook and cranny of Ukrainian society over years to come, should the Trump-Putin deal become a reality. Nor is this really surprising: what was the sacrifice of tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives worth if the outcome is not merely lost land but a diminished sense of nationhood — and thousands more Ukrainians abandoned to their fates under Moscow’s thumb?
Some Ukrainians might still look to Europe for answers. The pro-Nato, pro-EU bloc, which sees them as bulwarks against Putin’s war on individual freedom, remains the largest and most powerful force in Ukrainian politics. For its part, Zelensky’s Servant of the People party still leads the polls by some distance. Yet Europe looks to many like a house divided: Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron’s “coalition of the willing” has talked up its willingness to help, but in practice has done little to prepare for a defence of either Ukraine or the European continent. Instead, leaders have gazed on as Trump’s Ukraine policy has oscillated, even as the Kremlin has conducted a hybrid war against Europe. An extraordinary 90% of Ukrainians favoured EU membership last summer. Surely that number will not hold if the stab-in-the-back narrative spreads.
The darkest scenario here is an ultra-nationalist turn, and a politics dominated by embittered, violent veterans in a demographically and economically decimated country hungry for scapegoats. And scapegoats there will be. In some corners of Ukrainian society — including pro-European and liberal factions, but especially among the armed forces — names are already circling: Western leaders are first among the villains, blamed for choosing short-term and commercial interests over saving Ukraine. But Ukrainian military leaders and politicians are not without blame. That means above all military commanders such as Oleksandr Syrskyi, the commander-in-chief blamed by ordinary soldiers for the worsening frontline situation in recent months. Should Zelensky be seen to sell his forces down the river, the reaction will be extreme, regardless of how little choice he actually had.
The optics of the Alaska summit will not help here. A camera-friendly meeting between Putin and Trump — two strongmen casually hashing out Ukraine’s future without a single Ukrainian in the room — has justifiably enraged Ukrainians across the political spectrum. If the deal is rammed through over Kyiv’s objections, nationalists will mine the “betrayal” for decades: it’ll be another Munich, when Hitler was allowed to annex the Sudetenland, with today’s Ukraine betrayed by a West that simply didn’t care. Ukrainians could thus prime themselves for another war, choosing leaders whose reputation and politics rests on war — or find themselves watching as those leaders, from among a corps of embittered veterans, force their way to power.
“Should Zelensky be seen to sell his forces down the river, the reaction will be extreme, regardless of how little choice he actually had.”
Support for nationalist factions today is still limited. The far-Right remains a minority in politics. In a June poll, the ultranationalist National Corps reached 6%, its highest ever rating. But Servant of the People did not even exist a decade ago, and Ukraine’s political scene is not dominated by entrenched parties. Especially in the wake of a devastating war, it is deeply susceptible to whirlwind forces transforming nations everywhere: online mobilisation, norm-shattering rhetoric, the rise of new parties from nowhere, and the demolition of old political truths. Not long ago, most Ukrainians opposed Nato membership. Indeed, not long ago, Zelensky was a TV comedian. There is nothing to prevent an ultra-nationalist rise in Ukraine.
The question, then, is not where public opinion stands today but where it might go in the next few years, turbocharged by disappointment, social collapse, economic devastation, and a Europe increasingly inclined to slam the door shut on a fragile and unstable Ukraine. The Ukraine that could emerge would be defined by military paranoia. Veterans alone would have “earned” the right to set the national agenda. Indeed, rumours now abound that figures like Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the popular former commander-in-chief now serving as Ukraine’s ambassador in the United Kingdom, might enter politics. Zaluzhnyi is no extremist, but others with more hardline views might explode from the ranks of the army into the public consciousness should widespread resentment take hold.
Indeed, Zelensky’s decision to welcome and thus implicitly endorse nationalist soldiers in the military, desperate for anyone willing to fight, may turn out to be a major strategic error. This Ukraine would look neither to Brussels nor to Washington but inward — rebuilding its forces, militarising society, and, as some voices around the country are already advocating for, seeking nuclear weapons to reverse the “mistake” of giving up its arsenal in the Nineties.
Putin claimed he was forced to invade Ukraine to destroy the threat of Ukrainian “fascism”. Yet in February 2022, the far-Right in Ukraine was a negligible force: indeed Russia’s neo-Nazi problem far exceeded Ukraine’s. But do a deal with Trump over his enemy’s head, and Putin could soon find that his fantasy of a fascist Ukraine becomes reality.
I am not arguing that this is the most likely scenario. Ukraine’s democracy has repeatedly resisted the pull of extremes — from Russian interference and invasion to internal politicking and corruption — since independence from Moscow in 1991. Its commitment to reinforcing democratic norms, bolstered by the EU, other nations, and a large, vocal civic block willing to take to the streets, most recently against Zelensky’s targeting of anti-corruption laws, suggests that liberal democracy may yet prevail.
But nationalists will not hesitate to use force if they see an opening. Complacent Western leaders, and Trump most of all, seem uninterested in this risk. Ironically, this was the very mistake made in Russia in the Nineties, when the West adopted a shock economic policy to “repair” post-Soviet Russia while ignoring worrying trends in the country’s culture and identity. Putin, for his part, knows all about the psychologically scarred veterans of the Afghan and Chechen wars. After all, in the early 2000s, he channelled their trauma and propensity for violence into support for his own nationalist myth. Today, his government and security services are full of these men, still willing to use any means to secure and hold power.
Reining in such forces in a post-conflict Ukraine will be a vital task. Peace can be salvaged even from the most brutal and bitter conflicts, but only with hard work, serious negotiation, mutual compromise, and above all, a focus on what comes after the ink dries. The Dayton Accords, which ended the Yugoslav wars in 1995, were the product of three months of intense talks built on years of groundwork, strong-arming from Europe and the Americans — and input from all sides. And even then, the Accords left the roots of nationalism and factionalism intact.
The mooted Alaska plan is long on promises and short on detail. A made-for-social-media deal is unlikely to last. Even those Ukrainians most inclined to peace are unlikely to be placated by a “land surrender” agreement while Russia remains unbowed. At any moment, Moscow could return to the battlefield, retooled and remanned, this time without the blunders of February 2022. Putin shows no signs of making real concessions. His propagandists continue their maximalist talk, and his army continues its scorched-earth advances.
Indeed, the further Ukraine moves towards ultranationalism to hedge against this continued threat — or in response to the disappointment of a peace deal forced down the population’s throats — the more Putin will claim he is justified in launching new aggression against his western neighbour. The peace deal, far from ending the fight, might only encourage Russia to assault the fragile remainder of a free Ukraine in a few years’ time.
Nonetheless, nobody in the White House, publicly at least, seems to be thinking beyond the next move. Signing a peace deal will not make the problem of Russian aggression disappear; it may even exacerbate the problem. As heart-rending images of burned-out Ukrainian cities and murdered Ukrainian families fade from our screens, we may be tempted to believe the problem is gone. But Moscow will still be fighting — and a resentful, traumatised Ukraine will still remember.
