If there was a sense of relief in Ukraine that Friday’s US-Russia summit at an Alaskan airbase did not end with Donald Trump waving a piece of paper and proclaiming “peace in our time”, then it did not last for long.
Ukraine’s biggest pre-summit fear was that Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin would clinch a swift and sweeping agreement behind closed doors and present Kyiv and the world with a done deal to end the invasion on the Kremlin’s terms.
For a very brief moment, the obvious failure of the summit to deliver a breakthrough would have raised Ukraine’s hopes that, finally, Trump might make good on repeated threats to get tough on Putin for refusing to agree to an immediate ceasefire.
Instead, having looked weary, dispirited and even deferential to Putin as he traipsed out of a brief press conference behind him without answering questions, Trump set about trying to mask his failure by pressing Ukraine to accept a potentially catastrophic deal that would, if nothing else, help America’s self-declared “president of peace” save some face.
RM Block
Trump not only backed down, yet again, from a pledge to impose “severe” sanctions on Russia and key trading partners such as China if Putin defied him, but told Ukraine and European capitals that he now favoured the Kremlin’s proposed solution – not a ceasefire but a rapid, overarching deal on Ukraine’s future, with broader implications for European security, that should be concluded while Russia’s invasion force continues to pound its neighbour.
The change of approach by the US is a clear triumph for Putin, the war crimes accused whom Trump welcomed with such warmth on the red carpet in Alaska, and threatens to place Ukraine in a double bind that could be crushing.
If Putin and Trump get their way, Ukraine would have to negotiate a peace deal to the Kremlin’s satisfaction while enduring intensified Russian attacks on the eastern battlefield, where Moscow enjoys a big quantitative advantage in terms of troops and weaponry.
At the same time, it would face pressure from the White House to do a deal as quickly as possible or face the wrath of Trump, whose desire for the Nobel Peace Prize is as notorious as his campaign-trail claim to be able to end Europe’s biggest war since 1945 in a single day.
Trump has publicly urged Ukraine to make a deal, and reportedly told its president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, that Putin wants full and permanent control the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions in exchange for freezing the front line in other areas. The Kremlin also wants Ukraine to accept other limits on its sovereignty, including a ban on ever joining Nato.
Yet any serious peace talks would have to tackle not only questions of territory, but also the return of all prisoners of war and thousands of Ukrainian children abducted by Russia, the fate of millions of displaced Ukrainians, reparations to be paid by the aggressor and a legal process to address war crimes committed by Russia’s invasion force.
These are issues of vital importance not only to Ukraine but for international law and relations between states. But they are complex and could take a very long time to resolve. Putin wants such matters to be brushed aside and knows that Trump is impatient.
The upshot is that resistance from Ukraine and Europe to a quick and dirty deal will be portrayed by the Kremlin as obstructionism, and probably taken as such by Trump, who has paused US arms supplies to Ukraine and intelligence sharing before, and could end them completely to get his way.
