The tenant of the White House hasn’t interest in the survival of Ukraine, he prefers to do business with the head of the Kremlin
Vladimir Putin is taking advantage of the naivety and fear of Trump and his advisers. He is also relying on doubts and divisions among the European allies of Ukraine in the EU and UK.
Maybe a big factor in the discussions in this latter group is finance and the fear that if Russian frozen assets are not used to support a future Ukraine, then Europe will end up paying for the war. At least three countries–Slovakia, Hungary, and Belgium–are unwilling to fund Ukraine in the long term, and perhaps not even in the short term. Their position undermines the unified front of the EU countries in the face of Russian aggression.
On the American side, Kushner, and Witkoff are amateurish negotiators, and the latter is notably friendly toward Putin. But the Trump administration puts money ahead of everything. Most of his concerns are about American control of Ukraine’s mineral wealth. It has no interest in the survival of Ukraine per se, the mass deaths, the savagery of the Russian invasion, or whatever. The current US government has no moral standing and does not wish to lead the Europeans through NATO or elsewhere in demanding Russia remove its army from occupied territories.
The three plans (perhaps more) discussed so far all consent to Russian annexation of Ukrainian lands. The only debates are whether Russia gets Crimea and all of Donbas or just the lands it has occupied in Donbas; and the border lines in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson correlate with where the fighting armies are today. Ukraine has no security guarantees at all.
Logically, five years from now, Russia could occupy the rest of Kherson or Zaporizhzhia, and points westward. Much criticism has been levelled at the hesitance of European leaders, but they are dealing with a new situation, one in which the world’s largest military power appears to be colluding with the enemy rather than taking a neutral stance. Thus, the peace plans amount to agreement to Russian annexations and a frozen conflict.
Such situations are familiar to any observer who follows Russian politics. There is a frozen conflict in Moldova where the separatist Transnistria continues to exist after the original Russian intervention in 1992-3. A similar standoff also exists in Georgia, where Russia has recognized the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and intervened with a military invasion in 2008 to prevent then president Mikeil Saakashvili from reunifying that country.
In both these states subsequently, Russia has intervened in elections with varying success. But they are less important to Moscow than Ukraine. For the Russian leadership and Putin specifically, there is no such entity as a Ukrainian state. All the attempts by Ukraine to break free of ties to Russia incensed the Russian president, but it was the Maidan uprising of 2013-14 that was the most decisive. It removed a pro-Russian president after a violent confrontation between the protesters—some of whom were armed—and the Berkut police, made up largely of recruits from the Donbas.
Russian propagandists made much of the intrusion into the protests of far-right groups from Praviy Sektor and the presence of some US officials in Kyiv who were supporting the protests and recommending people for the new government. Others note that the extremists received negligible support in the 2014 parliamentary and presidential elections, the latter bringing the centrist businessman Petro Poroshenko to the presidency and continuing attempts to regain lands in the east occupied by Russian-backed separatists.
Russia’s annexation of Crimea in March 2014 was rapid and smooth, with minimal losses of life during a time of chaos and uncertainty in the Ukrainian capital. Russian intervention in the Donbas (battles of Ilovaisk and Debaltseve) was decisive in ending the Ukrainian campaign to regain the eastern territories from the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics.
There is no doubt that the events of 2013-14 initiated the conflicts that followed. That happened less because Ukraine was divided—though that was certainly the case—than because Russia chose this moment to reassert claims to Crimea and to intervene in the Donbas. In 2012-13, Putin had returned for a third term as president, amid mass protests against electoral fraud in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other cities, and a popular move to annex a region populated with a Russian majority, won him badly needed domestic support.
None of these intrusions paid the slightest respect to Ukrainian agency or Ukrainian statehood. No doubt, there were problems in Ukraine, including the presence of armed militants, corruption at the centre, and a failure to advance economically. Poroshenko’s unpopularity—manifest in the elections of 2019 that brought Zelensky to power—was largely because of his failure to root out corruption and end oligarchal influence.
In Russia, the actions of Putin descended to levels hitherto unseen in independent Russia. Opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was murdered within sight of the Kremlin in February 2015. The leader of the Anti-Corruption Foundation Aleksey Navalny, who had described United Russia as a party of “crooks and thieves,” experienced the whole gamut of Putin/FSB persecution, including poisoning with a Novichok nerve agent in August 2020, from which he almost died, a lengthy prison sentence once he returned to Russia from the medical centre in Berlin, and death in a remote high-security prison in Butyn in January 2021 at the age of 47.
There is no Russian opposition today. Below Putin is a Security Council made up of the president’s acolytes and cronies, most of whom are far wealthier than the average Russian citizen. They live and die with their leader. If they rebel, as Putin’s former chef and Wagner Group leader Evgenniy Prigozhin did in June 2023, capturing the city of Rostov with almost no opposition tochange the military leadership, they do not last very long. Two months later, Prigozhin and several high-ranking leaders of Wagner were victims of a plane crash in Tver region likely caused by a bomb on board the business jet in which they were travelling.
Putin’s Russia is a far cry from the Russia of Gorbachev or Yeltsin. It is one dominated by crime bosses and outspoken business people who control media and social media, while occupying top positions. The Russian Constitution has been modified several times to ensure that Putin remains in power indefinitely. He can rule in theory until 2036, assuming he wins the 2030 elections.
Ironically Putin insists that Zelensky’s legal term has ended, so new Ukrainian elections are demanded as part of the peace agreement. No one makes such assertions about the Russian president, already in office—with a brief cameo of puppet leader, Dmitry Medvedev, in 2008-12—for a quarter of a century.
Do Witkoff, Kushner, Rubio, Trump, and Hegseth, care about the lack of democracy in modern Russia? No, in fact they have many common interests, some of which were in place well before Trump was first elected president in 2016. In many ways they speak the same language. Let’s make a deal. Everything is negotiable, and that includes Ukraine.
We have come a long and unhealthy road from the heady days of 1989 and 1991.