President Donald Trump‘s effort to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine is the right thing to do. It has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and wreaked havoc on millions more. However, as the president seeks to secure peace, he should remain focused on the fundamentals required for that peace to be meaningful and lasting.
Unfortunately, theatrics have, on the surface at least, taken precedence over substance during the past week, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shares the blame for this. He deserves great credit for his courageous leadership against great odds over three years of war, but he has repeatedly been both arrogant and dismissive about the vast levels of aid his country has been given. It was not helpful, although not inaccurate, for him to accuse Trump of living in a Russian “disinformation” space. Trump did speak falsely when he blamed Ukraine for starting the war and declared Zelensky a “dictator.”
The facts are clear. Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, not because Ukraine refused to rule out joining NATO. It did so because Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to subjugate that nation under a greater Russian imperium. As with Putin’s dominance of Belarus and openly stated ambitions over NATO ally Estonia, a U.S. ally, the former KGB officer regards Ukraine as a Russian province. He would have been unsatisfied even if Ukraine pledged never to join NATO. What he arrogantly seeks is a long-term commitment that Ukraine will isolate itself from the European Union, the United States, and the entire Western democratic order.
Putin wants any future government in Kyiv to defer to his interests and ambitions. That’s a recipe for Ukrainian decline, increased corruption, and the evisceration of its democratic sovereignty. It’s a recipe for abandoning the Ukrainian people, who want to live free. After the hardships inflicted on Ukraine by the Soviet Union, especially Stalin’s program of genocidal starvation, the nation cannot be expected to put its future into the hands of an ex-KGB officer who mourns that imperial past.
This does not mean Trump’s ambition for peace is misplaced. On the contrary, a durable accord that balances Ukraine’s preserved democratic sovereignty with Russia’s de facto absorption of certain Ukrainian territories would be a hard deal worth making. For that reason, Trump was right to direct Secretary of State Marco Rubio to meet with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, in Saudi Arabia this week (perhaps after reading our editorial suggesting it).
Both sides said the engagement was useful and established a baseline from which to continue talks. Zelensky’s complaints about not being invited are misplaced. Trump administration officials have rightly and repeatedly said Ukraine will be a full participant in shaping the contours of any agreement, but it was necessary for the U.S. and Russia to establish a baseline of engagement.
To get to an agreement that both sides can live with will put Trump’s deal making skills to the test.
He must avoid falling for Kremlin duplicity. Putin has repeatedly signed then broken treaties on chemical weapons, intermediate-range ballistic missiles, and the security of diplomats. He even promised not to invade Ukraine in the Minsk accord in 2014. How did that work out? Trump has grievances with Zelensky, but he must recognize that Putin, ever the KGB officer, is trying to stoke these grievances to his own advantage.
Trump should keep focused on the key demand of placing a European peacekeeping force in Ukraine. As we editorialized last weekend, this force will require limited U.S. military intelligence and logistics support and a U.S. assurance to our British and French allies leading that force that the U.S. will defend them if Russia attacks. Russia almost certainly won’t attack because it would lose. Without this force, however, Russia would use sanctions relief and respite from any peace deal to reconstitute its forces and reinvade Ukraine in the future. Ukraine cannot accept a peace deal without a peacekeeping force. It would have to keep fighting, even without U.S. support, absent that force.
Russia has insisted such a peacekeeping force is unacceptable, so Trump will soon face a choice. Either he can walk away from peace efforts, or he can follow through on his threat to impose massive new sanctions on Russia and its trading partners to force Putin to negotiate sensibly.
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If Trump can secure rights to Ukrainian minerals in the bargain, so much the better.
However, he should consider the history books that have yet to be written. Will they tell of a U.S. president who squandered a chance for peace and scandalized the nation’s moral and strategic authority? Or will they tell of a U.S. president who put personal animus aside and used pressure and inducements on all parties to secure the most important peace deal of the 21st century?
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
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