Ukrainian soldiers carry the coffin of a Ukrainian serviceman during a funeral ceremony at the Lychakiv military cemetery in Lviv on Tuesday.SERGEI GAPON/AFP/Getty Images
The people of Ukraine are devastated, impoverished, mournful – and, polls suggest, increasingly willing to accept a humiliating compromise if it even temporarily ends the brutality. There’s reason to believe Russians feel similarly after almost four years of purposeless total war and resulting economic collapse and international isolation, even if their leader claims otherwise.
So, the chances that this week’s Washington-brokered negotiations will lead to some sort of peace deal in the coming weeks and months are probably better than even.
Canada and its allies should prepare for this possibility. That does not just mean we should be ready to accept whatever agreement leads President Vladimir Putin to put a halt, however temporary, to the slaughter of an entire generation, even if it involves allowing him to temporarily claim parts of Ukraine he invaded in 2014 and 2022.
It also means we should act as if there is no peace agreement at all. For anything emerging from the current initiative will not be a peace treaty or armistice in the way we’ve come to understand those concepts.
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Any agreement brokered by the Trump administration, however much it might reduce Mr. Putin’s immediate military threat to Ukraine and the countries of the European Union, will considerably increase the wider danger faced by the free world. In anticipation of such an agreement, we need to prepare and invest in our security and the security of the world’s institutions against an authoritarian ringleader who would be freed from his restraints and actively encouraged by a U.S. executive that explicitly wants him to prosper and expand his influence.
If the current deal succeeds, it will mark the triumph of a branch of the Republican Party that has long viewed Mr. Putin as an admirable figure and domestic-politics role model, over another branch that views him as a competitor and a threat. Secretary of State Marco Rubio may be among the latter group, but Mr. Trump and his closest advisers have long been part of the former.
That includes the real-estate billionaire Steve Witkoff and Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who have led the current round of negotiations. Mr. Witkoff made it clear in March that he sees Mr. Putin as a force for good and that he believes the Russian President’s fictitious claims that the war was somehow started by Ukraine and Europe. Mr. Kushner was the senior campaign strategist mentioned in the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election, though he faced no charges for it.
As the Wall Street Journal found in an investigation last month, their negotiations, before December, consisted almost entirely of celebratory efforts to bring Russia’s US$2-trillion economy “in from the cold” by planning the removal of sanctions and restraints and proposing energy and resource deals that benefit the United States and its allies. The Witkoff-Kushner talks, the Journal’s reporters concluded, “were the culmination of a [Kremlin] strategy, hatched before Trump’s inauguration, to bypass the traditional U.S. national security apparatus and convince the administration to view Russia not as a military threat but as a land of bountiful opportunity.”
Putin met U.S. President Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner in the Kremlin in talks that began late Tuesday as part of a renewed push by the Trump administration to broker a peace deal.
The Associated Press
Their resulting 28-point draft peace plan, leaked to the media, also reflected this outlook. Though it did provide some vague security guarantees to Kyiv and offer a path to Ukraine’s European Union membership – the aspiration that sparked Mr. Putin’s invasion 11 years ago – it was otherwise very unusually skewed toward normalizing Mr. Putin’s regime both economically and politically.
We shouldn’t forget that Mr. Trump’s movement has long viewed Mr. Putin as a model. Far-right media voices in 2015 and 2016 characterized the reality-TV star as “An American Putin,” and Mr. Trump was clear that he saw the Ukraine invasion as an unfortunate hindrance to a great alliance with the Russian autocrat. “He is really very much of a leader. I mean ... the man has very strong control over his country,” Mr. Trump declared on network TV during his 2016 election campaign, when Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine had been under way for two years. “He’s been a leader far more than our president has been a leader.”
The goal of this proposal, unlike other peace treaties, is not to reach compromises in order to restrain the aggressor. It is to empower the aggressor, in every sphere but the very narrow military one under consideration.
It is time now for democracies to provide maximum support to Ukraine, including legislation to seize and employ frozen Russian bank assets for a defence the United States is no longer financing. It’s time to build better protections against the barrage of political interference that would come from an unfettered Vladimir Putin.
As much as the killing needs to stop, this is a world in which peace is also to be feared.