Peace at last? Ukraine summits debrief

Puncturing the optimistic narrative

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Greetings from London! All is right with the world; I’m on the tail end of a great vacation, my daughter is sat next to me happily watching Frozen 2, and I’m given to understand from the White House’s social media feed that a new era of peace is about to dawn on the continent.

Oh, wait, maybe that last bit is a tad more complicated.

I promised a debrief of the Trump/Putin summit over the weekend, but it seemed prudent to wait until the Trump/Zelensky/Europe summit of yesterday before wading in. I think we now have a fairly good idea of what transpired at those various summits, so here is an attempt to make sense of it all:

1. One way to look at what has happened so far is that Trump has just told both sides what they want to hear in order to keep them listening. He told Putin that Ukraine should cede land, and he told Zelensky and the Europeans that the U.S. will provide “security guarantees” (more on that later) to Kyiv. These are incredibly broad and vague commitments which may well prove to be contradictory.

2. Before these summits, a truly remarkable fact was that the Trump White House had never stated even the broad principles which it believed should form part of a Ukraine/Russia peace agreement. Trump said he was going to end the war quickly but never explained how. Now he seems to have gone into rooms with Putin and Zelensky in quick succession and then just promised them that yes he is going to meet their core demands and everything is going to be fine, so don’t worry! Unfortunately things are really not that simple.

3. I think that media coverage has mostly not reflected this. Instead, we’ve had breathless stories which treat each summit in isolation. The Trump/Putin meeting was reported as the moment when Trump embraced all of Putin’s demands, then the Trump/Zelensky meeting was called a “new dawn” which signalled renewed U.S. resolve to defend Ukraine. But both of these things can’t be true at once!

4. The more logical explanation is that Trump is winging it - consistent with the “fudge” scenario I wrote about in my last post. He doesn’t have a particular end-state in mind and has not really decided how he views the trade-offs between the two sides. He’s just trying to knock heads together until he gets a deal.

5. That could end one of two ways: either petering out because it doesn’t lead anywhere, or with Trump at some arbitrary point deciding that enough is enough and starting to apply pressure on the recalcitrant side to make concessions to the other. Fear of scenario two is what will keep Putin and Zelensky busy trying to portray the other as the intransigent one. When Trump’s merry-go round of meeting both sides and promising them the world finally comes to an end, neither wants to be the one who he thinks is standing in the way of a deal.

6. Of course, given everything we know about Trump and his views on the war, Putin has got to like his odds of coming out on top best. Trump not only seems to broadly sympathize with Putin’s view of the world, but also believes that Russia is the stronger party and so it is incumbent on Ukraine to make concessions to get a deal.

7. There’s going be a lot of focus now on whether Putin and Zelensky will have a bilateral meeting, as Trump has suggested they would. That focus reflects the media’s love of these types of summits. But even if one does happen, it will only be the beginning of a long process of negotiation, with no guarantee of success on the main sticking points.

8. Those sticking points are territory and security guarantees. The latter of these two is sometimes treated as a matter of diplomatic alchemy, as if there’s some magical verbal formula that will guarantee Kyiv’s independence and the key is just to find the right words. But all of this talk obscures the simple question of whether or not third countries with sufficient military power are willing to risk Russian nuclear attack in order to defend Ukraine. And the answer is that they are clearly not - that’s why this war is happening in the first place.

9. This doesn’t mean that some sort of fudge couldn’t be arrived at - the idea of European troops hanging about somewhere in western Ukraine is just such an example. A proposal for the U.S. to defend Ukraine with drones (what drones!?) is another. But Zelensky is likely to see through these, and so this is more a question of whether the U.S. can leverage him into accepting a poor deal than whether or not a real security guarantee formula can be arrived at.

10. I feel less qualified to comment on what sort of land cession might be acceptable to Ukrainian public opinion. But what I do know is that Putin is asking for a lot of land which his military does not actually control. That land is well-fortified and Russia is going to have to expend a lot of troops and equipment to take it, so Ukraine would need a very good reason just to hand it over. Unless, that is, war weariness in Ukraine has reached the point of just wanting peace regardless of the cost, which it doesn’t appear that it has.

11. Given all of the above, my read on the situation is that right now the most likely outcome from all of this is (a) nothing; or (b) the White House pressuring Ukraine to accept a bad deal. That’s a little different to the optimistic narrative that I’m seeing in most European media right now, but it’s unfortunately where we seem to be headed to me.

Thanks for reading America Explained! Paid subscriptions are what keeps this newsletter a going concern, so please upgrade if you’re able to spare a few dollars or euros or whatever (I’m not picky!) a month to support independent journalism and to access all of our posts.