Monday’s White House summit between US president Donald Trump and an assortment of European leaders was billed as a step towards peace. In truth, it amounted to little more than a well-choreographed pat on the back for all concerned, especially for The Donald.
The other leaders’ fawning over Trump was to be expected. After Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s diplomatic misstep in the Oval Office earlier this year, when he treated a meeting with Trump as a place to hash out disagreements rather than stroke egos, everyone arrived on their best behaviour this time. Perhaps precisely for that reason, the summit ducked all the hard questions on ending the war in Ukraine.
The talk of potential ‘security guarantees’ for Ukraine in any peace deal is a case in point. Ukraine seeks ironclad assurances before it can stop fighting, so it does not remain at the mercy of another Russian invasion – one potentially harder to contain than the current one. On Monday, it sounded as if such assurances could be forthcoming. European leaders gushed when Trump suggested he might back a NATO-style guarantee, treating an attack on Ukraine as an attack on its Western allies, too.
Yet any sense that the question of security guarantees had been resolved promptly evaporated on contact with reality. No sooner had Europe floated a NATO-style arrangement for Ukraine than Moscow rejected ‘unequivocally’ any role for Western troops in keeping peace.
So what does Russia actually want? Moscow’s public case for the war is that it is protecting Russians and Russian speakers from a ‘Nazi’ Ukraine, which it claims is a ‘fake’ state invented by Stalin. This all feeds into four stated war aims: demilitarisation, de-Nazification, protection of the Donbas republics, and the prevention of further NATO expansion. Taken as a whole, Russia’s aims amount to the destruction of Ukraine as a sovereign state.
Russia is also pursuing two further strategic aims. First, it wants to use the war in Ukraine to help bring about a ‘multipolar’ world order in which Russia is treated as a great power among several others – and not, as President Obama once put it, merely a ‘regional power’. Second, it wants to use any peace settlement to lever Russia back into the global system it was frozen out of after the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
The problem for Russia is that these aims pull in different directions – and this is what gives Trump leverage. If Russia wants reintegration and parity of esteem with the US, it can’t also seek the destruction of Ukraine as a ‘fake’, ‘Nazi’ state. Team Trump appears to be betting that the carrot of reintegration can tempt Putin to scale back from his maximalist demands.
But the problem for Ukraine and its allies is that the core dilemma can’t be fudged: Ukraine cannot credibly end the war without real security guarantees, yet any guarantees with teeth are rejected outright by Russia. Recall that the abandoned ‘Istanbul communiqué’, negotiated between Ukrainian and Russian diplomats in spring 2022, contained a Russian agreement to security guarantees, provided that Russia got a veto on their activation. On those terms Moscow could have invaded Ukraine again, before vetoing any military intervention on Kyiv’s behalf. So when Trump talks about US backing for security guarantees, he could well be referring to worthless guarantees like those.
Putin is even demanding the hobbling of the Ukrainian army, meaning it wouldn’t even be able to defend itself against future aggression, making even calls for a security guarantee in the form of a reinforced Ukrainian military, backed by Western weapons stocks, a supposed nonstarter.
At times, Moscow’s position seems to shift. On Tuesday this week, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said: ‘We never spoke about seizing any territories. Neither Crimea, nor Donbas, nor Novorossiya as territories have ever been our goal.’ On the face of it, that could be seen as an off-ramp for Putin to abandon his claims over supposedly annexed regions in southern and eastern Ukraine. Yet whenever a path to negotiation emerges, Russia swiftly shuts it down with renewed maximalist demands. This time was no exception.
Both the White House summit and Trump’s meeting with Putin in Alaska have underlined just how far we are from peace. The divide is stark and simple: Russia wants a subordinate, unsovereign, demilitarised Ukraine – and so Ukraine is compelled to resist.
For all the smiles and photo-ops, we remain a very long way from peace.
Jacob Reynolds is a writer based in London and Brussels.
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