Clad in a jacket natty enough for Donald Trump to be impressed by the gesture, if not the tailoring, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky showed up at the White House on Monday. He was accompanied by a retinue of European leaders, there to show both Trump and Vladimir Putin their support for Ukraine. While Trump’s moods are unpredictable (not the worst thing when dealing with Putin, as France’s President Emmanuel Macron observed later), the meeting in Washington ought to have soothed concerns that, after his encounter with the Russian leader in Alaska, the president would have been induced by either Putin’s flattery or Putin’s obduracy into pressing Zelensky to accommodate more of the Kremlin’s demands.
The meeting went well enough to yield some results that suggested that while there is a clear limit to how far Trump will go to support Ukraine, he will go further, at least in principle, than seemed possible a few weeks ago. He seems prepared to offer some undefined sort of air support (“nobody [has the] kind of stuff we have”) to buttress any peace deal, but maintains that the boots on the ground will have to be European (something that some of the Europeans are prepared to do). Whether that would ever be acceptable to Putin has yet to be seen (he has said not), and, in any event, there must be doubts as to how credible it would really be. Would the U.S. really shoot down Russian planes (drones might be another matter) or the Europeans fire at Russian troops? It is easy to envisage Russia, refreshed by a few years of peace, being tempted to find out and see. Meanwhile, talk that Ukraine might be offered some NATO-like guarantee is a pipedream. It would be unacceptable to Russia and ultimately to Western powers, who would be obligated to directly intervene on Ukraine’s behalf.
At this point, any sort of peace still seems far away. “We’re going to find out about President Putin in the next couple of weeks,” Trump commented later. “It’s possible he doesn’t want to make a deal.” He hopes that Putin will be “good,” but if not, “it’s going to be a rough situation,” a somewhat ambiguous turn of phrase from a man who has failed to impose the additional sanctions he threatened in the event that Putin had not agreed to a cease-fire by certain ignored deadlines, and now no longer seems set on insisting on a cease-fire at all (“and again I say it, in the six wars that I’ve settled, I haven’t had a cease-fire.”).
Perhaps this reluctance is out of an unwillingness to wreck a peace process that barely exists, or perhaps it is out of a reluctance to take on Beijing — the new sanctions would probably hit China, among others, for buying Russian oil — but it is hard to see what else will persuade Putin to agree to serious peace negotiations, if there can be such a thing in the absence of a cease-fire. Without one, Putin is free to continue gnawing away at Ukraine, with no obvious incentive to stop.
There is now talk of three-way talks between Trump, Zelensky, and Putin, but would they, by themselves, be enough to persuade Putin to push the pause button on a war of attrition he believes he can win? It seems unlikely.
In the end, while the closer understanding between the U.S. on the one side and Ukraine and Europe on the other is a relief, we have yet to see how it will hold up when the extent of the chasm between Russia and Ukraine again becomes apparent to an American president still chasing the will-o’-the-wisp of a quick peace.
Trump’s efforts to come to a deal are welcome, and should be pursued, but the best hope of bringing a halt to the fighting on an even remotely acceptable basis is for Putin to be convinced that victory, or even significant additional territorial gains, are beyond his grasp for now — at least at a cost that he is prepared to pay. For that to happen, sanctions will have to be tightened further, and Europe and the U.S. will have to keep supplying Ukraine with the support it needs (Trump has said that the U.S. will continue to sell arms to Ukraine). This is the right way to proceed, but it will take time, money, and patience.
The question then becomes how willing the West, in general, and President Trump, in particular, will be to stay the course.