There are many more ways in which a peace process can fail than succeed. But for either to happen, it first needs to start. And that is often the most difficult step. But after his big summit in the White House, Donald Trump seems to have pulled off the unthinkable: a summit has been organised between Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky which would kick-start peace negotiations.
What did it take to get here? While a ceasefire will not be a pre-condition, the Europeans have been granted some of the assurances they wanted on security guarantees. Whether these can be enforced is, of course, an entirely different matter — but America’s agreement, in principle, to help the Europeans meet their obligations does mark an important shift in this seemingly endless war.
Since it is now unlikely that Trump will change his mind and revert to the Biden-era policy of unconditional, if hesitant, support for Ukraine, we are now left with two possible scenarios for how the war plays out.
In the first, Ukraine and Russia will agree to a peace deal, and the US and Europe will try their best to make the post-war security arrangement work. It is our baseline scenario, but it will be hard to pull off since the question of land is a particularly difficult one. The starting point of the talks would have to be the existing military situation — not Russia’s or Ukraine’s maximal demands — and would then need to be followed by detailed negotiations.
In the second scenario, the peace talks will go ahead but fail. Trump will then blame Zelensky and actively disengage from supporting Ukraine. Beware of extrapolating yesterday’s show of support: the smiles are deceptive. Trump wants to get out. Like the real estate developer he once was, who has first put a deposit down, Trump has invested political capital into a peace process and he is not going to back down. This scenario would be very bad for Ukraine and for Europe. America would withdraw — for real this time. The Europeans would be left having to support Ukraine and build a new security infrastructure without US support.
This is not really a viable financial or military option for European leaders. After all, their engagement would have to be major. The Ukraine-Russia frontline is, at the moment, about 1,200 kilometres — around the length of the Cold War-era inner German border. Nor does this include the rest of Ukraine’s de jure border to the north and east with Russia, and with Belarus. There have been some comparisons with the situation in Korea — but the demilitarised zone there is barely 250 kilometres in length.
Adequately securing such a large border on the Ukrainian side would take a huge amount of troops — one estimate suggests as many as 150,000 European soldiers. This is a far larger deployment than anyone else has envisaged; Emmanuel Macron mentioned troop numbers in the thousands earlier in the year similar to the so-called tripwire troop deployments in the Baltic States.
And even if they wanted to, European leaders don’t have the troops needed to provide genuine assurances to Kyiv. Johann Wadephul, the German foreign minister, recently admitted that Germany probably wouldn’t have the capacity to send troops to Ukraine. And while the UK might be keen to voice its political commitment to the country, it’s doubtful that it can meaningfully back this up. A RUSI piece last year indicated that Britain does not have enough equipment to sustain a proper three-brigade armoured division. Even deploying a single brigade would use up 70-80% of the British Army’s total combat engineering capabilities.
There are other challenges too. At this stage, the easiest way to blow a deal, by either side, would be to refuse concessions on land. The Russian claim for the entirety of the Donbas region, including the parts they don’t occupy, is a maximalist one, from which Russia would have to retreat if the negotiations were to succeed. There are some commercial assets in the region of interest to Moscow — mines and industrial companies based in the Russian-occupied parts — but it has military significance for Ukraine. In any case, there is a long history of European regions being split. Karelia split into Finnish and Russian parts after the Winter War of 1939-40, and parts of the old Prussia are now in Lithuania, Russia, Poland and Germany. Negotiations, though, will be fraught.
But the big difficulty European leaders will face is how to deal with their war-crazed supporters back home. There has been a great deal of cheerleading and regime-change fanaticism in the European political and media space, with many recent headlines insisting that Russia must not be rewarded for its aggression. None of these authors, of course, has a military strategy for victory, because strategic thinking is not what educated Europeans do. They use the passive tense when they speak or write: something must be done, they intone. Rarely, if ever, do they say: “we will do this and are ready to make sacrifices to do so.”
But we do know the rest of the world does not look at Russia the way Europe does. This Eurocentric perspective no longer dominates global discourse — except, of course, in Europe. It is clear that we are living in one of those dangerous moments in history where fate could flip either way. Yet for all his arrogance, at least Trump has a strategy, whereas the Europeans do not.
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Author: Wolfgang Munchau
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