THE victors of war dictate the terms of peace. Decisive German military defeat was the pre-condition to both the punitive Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and then the military occupation and reparations imposed by the Potsdam Agreement of 1945. By contrast, stalemates lead to protracted negotiations. It took two years and 17 days to settle the Korean War in July 1953 – 158 meetings in total. Similarly, the end of the Vietnam War took around five years to negotiate.
The problem Donald Trump faces in ending the Ukraine conflict is that while there is not yet a victor on the battlefield, it is the Russians who have clear military dominance, and have had for well over two years. This is the reason that the war has proved harder to end than he imagined when he first declared, partly in jest, that he could negotiate a ceasefire within a single day. Indeed, the Russians warned him before the election that no such thing would happen.
So it has happened: Trump’s ambitions have been frustrated since he assumed office in January. Talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul earlier this month were of little consequence. Then, following the much-hyped phone call between Trump and Putin on May 19, the Kremlin remarked only that it is prepared to begin building a ‘memorandum on a possible future peace agreement’. The final negotiated ceasefire is at least months away.
What shape should we expect the negotiations and eventual settlement to take? Kiev’s aim is to preserve as much Ukrainian territory as possible, and to embed within the country the strongest possible Western military presence to deter further Russian aggression. Putin, however, is expounding a set of antithetical demands, aimed at ‘removing the root causes’ of the crisis. In brief:
- That Moscow holds on to the four most eastern oblasts of Ukraine – Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhya and Kherson. Importantly, the Kremlin already controls and administrates the vast majority of these territories. The Russian delegation at Istanbul on May 16 threatened also to subsume the Suny and Kharkov oblasts.
- That Ukraine does not become a member state of Nato or the EU. The Russians cite the potential expansion of these alliances into Ukraine as the original casus belli. Moreover, Putin is demanding the broader rollback of Nato presence in Eastern Europe, to create a territorial buffer on the Russian western flank.
- That foreign military aid to Ukraine should end, including the provision of arms, the sharing of intelligence, and the training of troops.
- That the sanctions imposed on the Russian economy in 2022 be lifted.
- That Russian be accepted as one of Ukraine’s official languages. The language rights and political freedoms of ethnic Russians in the east of Ukraine are an integral strand of the conflict’s origins.
Such conditions are anathema to the old transatlantic liberal establishment, which regarded total Ukrainian victory as the default aspiration. The notion that Russia should not only keep the territory it has seized through war, but also brazenly demand the wholesale retreat of Nato, threatens to make a mockery of the entire pro-Ukrainian project, and unwind decades of Western strategic assumptions in the region.
Of course, not all of Putin’s demands will be met. As Trump knows, a savvy negotiator overstates his expectations at the outset in the hope that a favourable middle ground is eventually met. But we should not be surprised when most of these conditions are granted, in some form, in the final settlement, for it is Russia – not Ukraine or even the United States – that is positioned militarily to make bold demands. Moscow’s forces are grinding relentlessly across the eastern quadrant of Ukraine. Last month alone, Russia seized 201 square kilometres of territory. Although Kiev launches successful counter-attacks on some sectors of the front, the fundamental trend is of an attritional, continual Russian advance against a critically depleted Ukrainian line.
The active Russian combat force in Ukraine has recently swollen to 640,000 men. By contrast, the Ukrainian force is severely deprived of men, with many infantry units reporting only 20–30 per cent of full strength. Such is morale among the Ukrainian force that it lost 100,000 soldiers to desertion last year. The chronic lack of manpower is compounded by poor training, with many refusing to open fire in the heat of battle. Contrastingly, the Russian draft at the age of 18 has generated a vast pool of men already inculcated with the rigours of military discipline and fieldcraft. The imbalance in armaments and funding is also stark. Russian industry, for example, produces three times as many artillery shells as Ukraine and all its Western backers combined.
This multi-layered overmatch has been extant for most of the war, but the threat of a total Ukrainian military collapse is now openly acknowledged by officials in both Kiev and Washington. There is profound concern over the approaching summer offensive, as Moscow’s troops prepare for months of aggressive fighting across hard, dry ground against a severely weakened enemy. Having recently expelled Kiev’s forces from the Kursk region of Russia after the incursion of August 2024, a 50,000-strong force is now massed across the border from Ukraine’s Kharkov region. The precise shape of the coming offensive is unknown, but it is almost certain to entail terrible losses in Ukrainian territory, equipment and men.
It is these tragic battlefield circumstances that are dictating the course of negotiations. As such, Trump’s options are far more limited than his critics understand. He is implored to pursue two principal lines of attack against Putin. The first is to increase lethal aid to Ukraine to repel the Russian advance and create more favourable negotiating conditions. Yet this approach has already ended in failure: the Ukrainian force has been devastated despite trillions of dollars’ worth of weaponry and training. No piece of Western equipment can reverse the sheer numerical superiority of the Russian force, which is Kiev’s fundamental problem. Furthermore, Trump was elected on a mandate to end the exorbitant expense to the American taxpayer and to restore a swift peace to the region. Therefore continuing to pursue the fabled grand Ukrainian battlefield victory that so entranced the previous administration is both politically and practically untenable.
Second, there are shrill calls for punitive sanctions against Moscow. However, drastic sanctions were imposed in early 2022 which failed to stop the war and, critically, drove the Kremlin towards Beijing. Chinese goods and the yuan filled the void left by Western trade and the US dollar, causing Washington to fear a growing China-Russia axis that threatens American global power. Moreover, as the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio observed recently, economic sanctions are gradually becoming a blunt instrument as adversaries find ways around the dollar. Sanctions, indeed, actively harness de-dollarisation by encouraging states to forge exclusive, anti-Western economic partnerships.
While Trump may occasionally hold the vague threat of further sanctions over Putin, he seems to have understood that his most potent diplomatic lever is the weight of the American economy. His suggestion of large-scale investment in Russia and future trade with Moscow could prove critical in negotiations. So, too, could the innovative concept of a commercial corridor established in a future Ukrainian demilitarised zone. As the Stanford classicist Victor Davis Hanson observes, this would aim to deter future conflict by enabling massive international investment in the contested regions of Ukraine. Indeed, similar arrangements have historically been vital components of armistices: economic investment in South Korea played a substantial role in the peace process after 1953, and the Camp David Accords that ended hostilities between Israel and Egypt in 1978 provided major economic investment to both sides.
Of course, the liberal critics describe such innovation as ‘carving up Ukraine’, a claim as predictably hysterical as it is historically illiterate. Indeed, it is characteristic of those who have noisily cheer-led the tragic fuelling of the Ukraine war that they should now viscerally attack sincere efforts to bring the bloodshed to an end.
Do they ever consider, I wonder, how their own hawkish, Ahabian delusions – the frantic pursuit of endless, failed warfare over diplomacy – have advanced the terrible vortex of misery, carnage and death that has so devastated Ukraine?
A Gibson writes here.
