Russia-Ukraine war: European leaders need to wake up to Trump's peace plan
To see European leaders in a panic over peace is not a pretty sight. As they rushed to Paris this week to talk about Donald Trump’s Ukrainian ideas with France's President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the leaders of Germany, Poland and other allies resembled nothing more dignified than a bunch of headless chickens.
They ended their meeting with no agreement on policy but expressed different views on whether European Nato members should send peacekeeping troops to Ukraine - an issue which Putin and Trump had already rejected.
The fiasco highlighted Europe’s three years of failure to think seriously about how to bring peace to the region. There have been endless talks about increasing military aid to Ukrainian forces but nothing about stopping the war through diplomacy.
In the first few weeks after Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the door was open for a negotiated settlement. Russian and Ukrainian officials met in Istanbul and produced a draft agreement, under which Ukraine would remain neutral and forgo any ambition to join Nato.
But western governments, led by the Biden administration, authorised former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to go to Kyiv to tell Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky not to sign. They had fantasies of Ukrainian forces defeating Russia, which, they further dreamed, might lead to President Vladimir Putin’s resignation, or his overthrow by Kremlin colleagues.
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Western policy settled into a proxy war. Confrontation and punishment became the name of the game: economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation for Russia, and military supplies for the Ukrainian army.
By autumn of 2022, it was clear that western military aid would never be enough to defeat the Russians. At the human level, all the military escalation would produce was more death and destruction; an ever-increasing toll of bloodshed. At least, unlike in Gaza, most victims were military instead of civilian.
Western governments refused to accept that the war had reached a stalemate. They succumbed to Zelensky’s constant pleas for more military hardware and the softening of Biden’s initial restrictions on Ukrainian targeting of cities and infrastructure inside Russia.
In short, everything led to further escalation and the ultimate risk of nuclear war.
Radical policy shift
Trump and his advisers chose an alternative route. As a presidential candidate, he boasted that he would end the war in 24 hours. Now as president, he has radically changed US policy.
His defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, told Nato allies in Brussels last week that the US wanted a sovereign and prosperous Ukraine, but efforts to try to return the country to its pre-2014 borders were an “unrealistic objective” and an “illusory goal”.
Giving Ukraine Nato membership was equally unrealistic, he said. Hegseth recognised that a peace deal with Russia might require foreign troops to patrol the ceasefire lines to forestall any revival of the war (a euphemism for a new Russian attack), but noted that this could not be a Nato mission.
Instead, any security guarantee must be backed “by capable European and non-European troops”, he said. “If these troops are deployed as peacekeepers to Ukraine at any point, they should be deployed as part of a non-Nato mission … To be clear, as part of any security guarantee, there will not be US troops deployed to Ukraine.”
The European hawks in Nato are reacting furiously to the Trump position. But they should have seen it coming: as a candidate for the presidency, he made it clear that he wanted to end the war in Ukraine. European leaders complacently felt they could soften Trump’s line once he came to power.
In the wake of the meeting in Paris, there may be a similar European effort to change Trump’s position. There are certainly numerous complications on the road to establishing ceasefire lines, or what Hegseth calls the “line of contact” between Russian and Ukrainian forces.
Putin may ask his troops to move to the borders of the four Ukrainian regions that Moscow claims belong to Russia. This could see Russian forces advancing even further than they have done already.
Such a move should be resisted. The US and Ukraine must be careful to ensure that the agreement does not describe the line of contact as a legal international border - just as the armistice lines in South Korea (from 1953) and Cyprus (from 1974) have not been turned into internationally accepted borders, after more than half a century of peace.
The path forward
Putin and his controlled Russian media will hail any deal secured by Trump as a massive victory. But that would be an exaggeration: Putin has achieved far less than he once hoped and expected.
After three years of fighting, and with a far larger army, Russian troops have only captured parts of Ukraine’s eastern regions. Putin’s troops have not defeated the Ukrainians, nor taken full control of the country. They have suffered colossal losses, and Putin has failed to topple the Ukrainian government. He has to go on living with a hostile regime in Kyiv.
The question remains: how can Trump be so wrong on Gaza and so right on Ukraine?
Globally, Putin has suffered enormous reputational damage. It is true that not as many governments publicly condemned his aggression as western leaders had hoped, but the world was shocked by Putin’s blatant lies about the invasion (or “special military operation”) and the clumsiness of Russian forces.
The war is not yet over. Trump’s 24-hour deadline was not achieved. The details of a truce agreement will be hard to negotiate. There are political forces on both sides, and among Nato’s leadership, who will want Trump’s endeavour to fail. They will try to sabotage and undermine any progress.
But European leaders should not lock themselves into fixed positions. They should recognise that under Trump, the political environment of the war has changed.
For the sake of the tens of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian troops who now face the best chance of survival that they have had for three years, western governments should help the negotiations succeed.
The question remains: how can Trump be so wrong on Gaza and so right on Ukraine? That is another story.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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