This process has already cost the United States political capital and the trust of its partners abroad. It may yet cost the United States in strategic terms.
The scene that is being set as the United States presents the Trump administration’s “final offer” to Russia and Ukraine does not inspire confidence.
Yesterday, multilateral peace talks in London between the combatants in Russia’s war of conquest and major NATO allies was “downgraded.” Only Trump’s envoy to the conflict, Keith Kellogg, will represent America. Volodymyr Zelensky has preemptively rejected the terms and Russia’s chimerical concessions in advance of these talks, arguing instead for an “unconditional” cease-fire. For his part, Vladimir Putin insists that there are no concessions to reject because he didn’t offer any.
The optics are inauspicious. Still, the terms of the Trump administration’s deal, as we understand them, are the result of a three-month-long process that is likely to form the foundation of a future peace framework. They merit consideration.
The plan requires both Ukraine and Russia to put a halt to hostilities. Once a cease-fire across the line of contact was in place, it would compel Kyiv and Moscow to enter direct negotiations to hammer out a more durable peace.
In exchange for this opportunity, much has been asked of Ukraine. It is to accept a permanent ban on Kyiv’s accession to NATO, ceding to Russia a veto on the alliance’s composition. The Trump administration had maintained that its agreement with Ukraine to transfer the profits on the development of its mineral and hydrocarbon resources was not to be construed as retroactive reparations for U.S. military assistance under Joe Biden, but that’s what it looks like. The U.S. does not provide Kyiv with direct security guarantees or even a commitment to provide future assistance.
To compensate Russia for its generous agreement to temporarily halt its advance in Ukraine, the U.S. will lift most economic sanctions on Moscow and conclude a variety of joint economic development projects with the Kremlin. From public reporting, it doesn’t appear that Putin will commit to not invading Ukraine for a third time — an outcome that is all but certain since Russia will not abandon its territorial claims inside Ukraine.
And yet, Russia’s maximalist vision for a favorable peace accord is not reflected in this deal. Despite Witkoff’s naïve openness to the Russian ask, Ukraine will not be required to transfer territory that isn’t presently under Russian control to the invaders. Indeed, Russian forces will be required to withdraw from the tiny sliver of territory in Kharkiv Oblast where they remain entrenched (Kharkiv is not one of the four Ukrainian provinces Moscow illegally annexed in 2022). Ukraine will not be compelled to disarm or submit to a process of “Finlandization.”
There are many thorny issues yet to be worked out. The American framework (which Russia has previously rejected) allows Ukraine to seek security guarantees from European powers. Whether that would include the dispatch of European peacekeepers to Ukraine — NATO forces that could serve as a tripwire for a broader conflict if Russia violates the peace again — and whether either Moscow or Washington would accept that is an open question. The U.S. would reportedly take functional control over the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, deepening its commitments to the country and raising questions about who monitors the free navigation of the Dnipro River (which is also in the deal). But the most intractable problem with the prospective arrangement is likely to be America’s willingness to accept the legal validity of Russia’s occupation of Crimea.
The deal would call on all parties to accept the “de facto recognition” of Russia’s military occupation of most of the territories in the four oblasts it is presently invading: Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia. That’s distasteful, but understandable; Ukraine does not have the capability at present to take them back, just as Russia cannot apparently seize by force all the kilometers of Ukrainian land it has claimed for itself. But the U.S. would also offer formal “de jure” recognition of Russian sovereignty over the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia seized by force in 2014.
These terms are unacceptable to all parties to this conflict save the Kremlin and the Trump administration (Trump himself has been open to this outcome for nearly a decade). Neither this Ukrainian government nor any conceivable future government would consent to the country’s dismemberment. If it did, it wouldn’t remain the Ukrainian government for long. Europe, too, will not consent to terms that require it to lend legal legitimacy to Russia’s attempt to redraw Europe’s borders by force.
That was America’s position, too, since the end of the Second World War — it didn’t even recognize the legitimacy of Soviet domination over the “captive peoples” in the Baltic states. To countenance the validity of Russia’s claim over Crimea would radically alter the U.S. posture in both geopolitical and moral terms. It would also signal to the world’s revisionist powers that the United States was no longer an obstacle to their territorial ambitions; at least, not in the long run.
This demand may yet scuttle the agreement, but even considering Russia’s claims risks hastening the trans-Atlantic schism the Trump administration has spent its first three months in office engineering. It gives America’s adversaries hope, and it steals from its allies the same. It sacrifices America’s hard-won reputation as a power committed to liberty over tyranny and is, thus, contemptuous of the sacrifices the generations that came before us made to bequeath us that legacy.
Perhaps these negotiations are salvageable, but the administration does appear to be racing to conclude an agreement — any agreement that it can call a cease-fire — within the president’s first 100 days in office. That political objective is now running counter to America’s strategic interests. But as the Republican Party once understood, no deal is preferable to a bad deal — certainly not one that legitimizes Russia’s war of conquest and sets the stage for yet another brutal land grab in the easily foreseeable future.
This process has already cost the United States political capital and the trust of its partners abroad. It may yet cost the United States in strategic terms. It is clear what Donald Trump would get out of the conclusion of this framework. How his country benefits is another matter entirely.