Peace for Ukraine?

The Ukraine war headed into slightly surreal territory this week when Donald Trump, who while weaving an erratic course has mostly sided with Russia, performed an abrupt change of front. Having previously stressed the need for Ukraine to make territorial compromises – usually understood as, at a minimum, acknowledging Russia’s control of what it currently occupies – he now says that “Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form.”

It’s worth reading the whole of Tuesday’s post, here. It’s unmistakably Trumpy, complete with unreliable grammar and weird capitalisation, but it’s also remarkably sensible. He talks about the economic pressure on ordinary Russians, points out that the war “should have taken a Real Military Power less than a week to win,” and says that Ukraine “has Great Spirit, and only getting better.”

The Russian view is simply that “Trump is influenced by the last person he has spoken to,” and that in this case that was Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky. No doubt there’s some truth in that, but he’s talked to Zelensky before without it ever producing anything like this. He has expressed impatience with Vladimir Putin in the past, but not to the extent of barracking for a Ukrainian victory. The contrast with his fawning behavior towards Putin just last month in Alaska is striking.

Some are warning that he doesn’t really mean it, and in an obvious sense that’s true: on most subjects, Trump’s thought process is not coherent enough to sustain a consistent meaning from one week to the next. But the fact that his range of attitudes on the subject now extends to embrace this very pro-Ukrainian one still seems to me to be significant.

Polish prime minister Donald Tusk argues that what Trump is really signalling is an intent to wash his hands of Ukraine altogether. He says Trump’s “surprising optimism conceals a promise of reduced U.S. involvement and a shift of responsibility for ending the war to Europe.” But to state the obvious, a situation of American benevolent neutrality is, from Ukraine’s point of view, a big improvement on American support for the Russian position – which had seemed the most likely alternative.

Trump is typically vague as to just what territorial outcome he envisages, saying on one hand that it’s possible to win “all of Ukraine back in its original form” or “maybe even go further than that,” and on the other that the option is “the original Borders from where this War started,” which presumably would not include Crimea and the parts of the Donbas behind Russia’s 2022 start line.

Wars often create the temptation to focus on territory to the exclusion of more important matters. Everyone loves drawing lines on maps, but it can sometimes be just a distraction. As I and others have been saying from the start, Putin’s aim in this war is not the acquisition of any particular piece of Ukraine, but the destruction of Ukrainian independence. Where the Russo-Ukrainian boundary runs is for him a secondary concern; the important thing is the character of the government on the other side of it.

In particular, the area of the Donbas that Russia has occupied is of minimal use. It was once an industrial powerhouse, but that was in the age of coal; environmental damage and military destruction have turned much of it into a wasteland. The unoccupied part of Donetsk province, containing the most heavily fortified Ukrainian defence lines, would be a more useful acquisition, but three years of fighting have failed to produce a breakthrough there.

Hence Putin’s resistance so far to the idea of territorial compromise. But if Trump is serious about giving NATO the green light to aid Ukraine to recover what it has lost, then things are not going to get any better for him. Russia cannot win a war against NATO; its strategy all along has been to undermine its will to fight by a combination of political propaganda and nuclear blackmail.

This wouldn’t be a bad time for Putin to try a bold diplomatic gambit – for example, offer to withdraw completely from the Donbas in return for recognition of the annexation of Crimea and a veto on Ukraine’s membership of NATO. It’s the sort of thing that might seize Trump’s imagination, with the lure of a possible Nobel, and there would be considerable pressure on Zelensky to agree. But Putin might fear facing his own public with anything that looks like less than complete victory.

More likely he will continue his offensive, both on the ground in eastern Ukraine and via political warfare in Europe. On the latter front he is hoping for big things from Sunday’s election in Moldova, where a pro-Russian majority is a distinct possibility. We’ll take a look at that on Monday.