Despite the excitement about the first US-Russia summit since 2021 – and the first between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin for seven years – the meeting in Alaska was never going to produce a “deal” in the sense of a detailed treaty addressing claims of sovereignty, borders, security guarantees, prisoners, kidnapped civilians, mineral rights and much else.
That will, eventually, be required to secure something like sustainable peace in the region, albeit with the constant and well-founded suspicion that Putin is less than a man of his word – even if it is given to President Trump.
As Volodymyr Zelensky has said on occasion, “All wars end with negotiations. It’s not the soldiers in the trenches who decide when.” If Ukraine is not to be allowed into the negotiations, there can be no deal and no peace, even if a ceasefire holds.
The exclusion of President Zelensky from participating at this early stage is perhaps intended, at least on the part of President Trump, as a way to get the process moving. For Putin, it is more calculated – highlighting the superiority of his position, as leader of a superpower supposedly co-equal to the United States, over that of the president of Ukraine.
Partly for reasons to do with his own imperialist ideology, and partly for tactical purposes, Putin doesn’t accept that Ukraine has a right to exist as an independent democratic nation. Also, he cynically disputes Mr Zelensky’s position as Ukraine’s president, because his term of office has expired and there have been no new elections. This, of course, is because no free elections can be held in Ukrainian territory occupied by Putin’s forces, and a state of martial law currently prevails.
For a change – and with some useful pressure being applied by Ukraine’s European allies – Mr Trump doesn’t agree with the Russians on this, and wants bilateral (or trilateral) talks to include Mr Zelensky, and quickly. The US president tacitly acknowledges that even he, self-declared master of the art of the deal, can’t confidently redraw the borders of, say, the Kherson oblast, much less find Mariupol on a map, and that his officials shouldn’t have to do so as proxies for the Ukrainian government. Mr Zelensky and his team will have to be involved.
President Zelensky is right to demand a seat at the table, and he is also right to say that no final deal can be agreed without a referendum, as is required by the constitution of Ukraine. It is not for him to sign away millions of his citizens to a foreign power. How such a vote could be conducted in occupied territory, or whether it would only apply to “free Ukraine”, is just one of the major details that will need to be settled before this war can be declared over. As many governments have found before – including the British government during Brexit – it is axiomatic in treaty-making that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.
This is also a moment for political imagination and diplomatic innovation. If Ukraine agrees not to join the EU or Nato, could it have some kind of associate status? How could the presence of private and federal US personnel in the rare-earth and minerals mining areas help to maintain order?
More radical proposals could also be tabled. If neither the US nor Europe is prepared to back Ukraine unconditionally, then some unpalatable options must be contemplated. Successive British prime ministers, for example, had the attitude that “Ukraine can win, Ukraine must win, Ukraine will win.” That mantra is not heard now. So other alternatives – and this, shamefully, does mean appeasement – have to be explored.
The eastern provinces of Ukraine, in certain circumstances, might not have to be returned to Ukraine or absorbed into the Russian Federation if a different status as a neutral “buffer” region could be established. The Donbas and other areas would be controlled neither by Moscow nor by Kyiv, demilitarised, and “Finlandised”, in the way that Finland was during the Cold War and until last year.
Citizens might be free to choose their citizenship, or opt for both, and the various cultures, religions and language rights would be respected. In quieter times, the peoples there could be asked in an internationally supervised referendum whether they wished to join Ukraine, or Russia, or to stay independent. That would surely be preferable to simply freezing the border along the present front line. The histories of Korea since 1950, and Cyprus since 1974, shows how unstable, if long-lived, such a non-solution can turn out to be.
Both Ukraine and Russia feel that their security is threatened in some way – whether sincerely or not, and whether or not the notion is justified – and the wider international community will have to be involved in providing what Sir Keir Starmer calls a “reassurance force” in Ukraine. President Trump, an avowed “America First” isolationist, is allergic to joining such a force – but if “his” deal is ever going to stick, it is difficult to see how it can do so without the United States offering some kind of pledge to Ukraine to defend any new de facto, or de jure, frontiers with Russia.
Sadly, the “coalition of the willing” assembled by Sir Keir and Emmanuel Macron seems to be more like an alliance of the unwilling when it comes to fighting for Ukraine. Europe also wants a seat at the top table, but past proposals brokered by France and Germany have proved unsuccessful.
If Europe wants to have a say in any settlement, it will need to earn it through military and economic commitment. Indeed, it will be essential, given America’s express desire to wind down its presence on the continent and its role in Nato. A quadrilateral structure for a long period of detailed peace-conference work, in some suitable neutral location, should comprise teams from Ukraine, Russia and the US along with a joint European presence. The real hard work on the peace deal has only just begun.
As someone once put it, the Ukrainian peace process is, at best, only at the “end of the beginning” stage.
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