It has taken nearly three years of fighting but the outlines of an ugly peace in Ukraine are emerging. The war’s end was never likely to affirm justice and international law. Russia remains the aggressor and Ukraine the victim but, as the fight became a war of attrition, the power differentials favoured might over right. Donald Trump’s re-election last year made an ignoble outcome in Ukraine a certainty.
And now it is before us. The Trump White House has set out a welcome mat for accused war criminals. No sooner had Binyamin Netanyahu, indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in November 2024, left Washington, DC, smiling as Trump proposed the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, than he picked up the phone and talked to another ICC indictee, Vladimir Putin, about locking in his real estate gains in Ukraine. Like so much in Trump’s career, dirty deals and sordid realities will be covered up by balderdash and bunk in gold lettering. “It’s going to be the best peace ever.”
Trump’s telephone diplomacy with Putin, however, has not received gold star reviews. The EU foreign policy chief, and Russia hawk, Kaja Kallas, complained that Trump had given Russia “everything that they want even before the negotiations”. Predictably the words appeasement and betrayal were thrown around.
It is, I have to say, surprising to me how European and Ukrainian leaders appear surprised by Trump’s actions. He has, after all, a long record of admiration for Putin. And he pointedly refused to say he wanted Ukraine to win its fight against Russian aggression during his debate with Kamala Harris.
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Americans knew who they were re-electing to the presidency. Trump was the anti-establishment candidate, the critic of neoconservatives and forever wars. Though he is instinctively authoritarian and militarist, he won as the peacemaking candidate with respect to Russia and Ukraine.
Though it may not be always apparent, Trump does have a geopolitical vision. Like many political realists, he believes in great power spheres of influence. He has strategic empathy for Putin’s argument that Russia should have a say over the security alignments of its neighbours. The principle, after all, is originally American: the Monroe Doctrine.
Trump’s position is a direct repudiation of that of George W Bush who in 2008 pushed for Nato’s expansion to Georgia and Ukraine, despite opposition not only from Russia but from his own secretary of defence.
Nato’s subsequent Bucharest Declaration stating that Ukraine and Georgia would one day become members of the alliance radicalised geopolitical competition on the European Continent. Putin, who was at the Bucharest summit as Bush’s guest, left determined to assert Russia’s security red lines. Within four months he had invaded Georgia. Six years later he invaded Ukraine in response to what he deemed a Nato orchestrated coup.
Trump’s geopolitical vision suggests that the US will retrench on the European Continent and seek to strengthen the US’s sphere of influence in the Americas. Absurdist talk about Canada becoming the 51st state of the US, and more ominous talk about seizing the Panama Canal, and Greenland, are in keeping with this vision. Violent actions against “drug lords” in Mexico or against Cuba cannot be excluded. What happens in the Pacific, with the Philippines and Taiwan, is an open question.
European outrage at Trump’s personalistic strongman-to-strongman diplomacy disguises sentiments that are widely shared but rarely expressed in public, namely that Ukraine needs to cut its losses and forge an ugly peace. Talk about territorial concessions to Russia is taboo, among mainstream European liberals at least, but three years of attritional war have generated a desire for an end to the fighting, one that enables refugees to return.
This has happened before. Between May 1992 and November 1995, war and ethnic cleansing across Bosnia-Herzegovina displaced more than a million people beyond the country. In November 1995, the US diplomat Richard Holbrooke led negotiations to end that war with its chief architect, the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic. The 51-49 percentage partition of Bosnia agreed recognised the secessionist entity that instigated the war with legitimacy. That political entity, Republika Srpska, founded by convicted war criminals Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, endures in Bosnia. Justice was not served but refugees were able to return to the country. And justice did eventually come for the instigators of the war in the form of the International Criminal Tribunal on the Former Yugoslavia, a predecessor to the ICC.
When historians write the history of the Russia-Ukraine war, they will ask whether the final settlement differs that much from the agreement initialled in Istanbul in April 2022. I suspect it will not be that different. They will ask whether thousands of lives could have been spared and billions in destruction avoided if hard material realities were not recognised then.
Let us hope that Trump’s diplomacy does initiate a negotiation process to end to this brutal and destructive war. Ordinary Ukrainians are desperate for peace but they won’t accept a dictated settlement. Ukraine should be at the negotiating table and backed up by European leaders. Lives, not territories, should be the core concern. The peace will likely be negative and unpalatable. Reconstruction will be enormously challenging. But hope will remain. Hope, as Seamus Heaney once remarked, “is not optimism which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for”. We all need this belief in these times.
Dr Gerard Toal is professor of international affairs at Virginia Tech and author of Oceans Rise Empires Fall: Why Geopolitics Hastens Climate Catastrophe
