Ukraine has been through an enormous amount over the past three years, with tens of thousands of people killed and entire cities destroyed by the invading Russian army. But even by those standards, the past week was a bruising one.
Three years after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine – declaring he wanted to alter the country’s borders, change the government in Kyiv and drive back the frontiers of the NATO alliance – U.S. President Donald Trump appears to be pushing for a peace deal that would give the Russian leader almost everything he’s been seeking.
The defenestration of previous U.S. policies toward Russia and Ukraine was swift and chaotic. First, it was U.S. Secretary of Defence, Pete Hegseth, telling what was supposed to be a gathering of Ukraine’s allies in Brussels on Feb. 12 that Kyiv’s main goals in any peace settlement – restoring the country’s territorial integrity and securing North Atlantic Treaty Organization protection against a future Russian attack – were “unrealistic.” This one speech from Mr. Hegseth, less than three weeks into his job, upended more than a decade of Western promises and support for Ukraine.
Pete Hegseth, top, dismisses the idea of restoring Ukraine's prewar borders. The Defence Secretary came to Brussels with a summary of a speech between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, bottom, was not invited to.Omar Havana/Getty Images; Tetiana Dzhafarova/Pool Photo via AP
Next it was Mr. Trump himself launching a stunning broadside against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, saying the leader had only 4 per cent support (even as a poll taken this week found 57 per cent of Ukrainians trusted their President). When Mr. Zelensky pushed back by suggesting Mr. Trump must have gotten his numbers from a made-in-Moscow “disinformation sphere,” Mr. Trump escalated to falsely calling Mr. Zelensky “a dictator without elections.”
Mr. Trump’s suggestion that Mr. Zelensky – who won election in 2019 with 75 per cent of the vote, but postponed a scheduled 2024 election because of the Russian invasion – was somehow an illegitimate leader could have been written by the Kremlin, which has been pushing the same theme through its propaganda outlets since Mr. Zelensky’s official term expired last April. Tellingly, Mr. Trump had no qualms dealing with Mr. Putin, despite the Kremlin not having allowed anything like a competitive election for more than two decades.
Suddenly, Ukraine, a country that for the past three years has been the largest recipient of U.S. military and economic assistance, is at odds with its biggest patron. Mr. Trump appears to want Ukraine to accept a peace deal that it will have no hand in negotiating. And the heavy suggestion is that if Mr. Zelensky doesn’t play along, Ukraine may be forced to fight on without U.S. help.
“Zelensky better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left,” Mr. Trump posted Wednesday on his Truth Social account. “In the meantime, we are successfully negotiating an end to the War with Russia.”
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, second from left, and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov, right, held talks at the Saudi capital's Diriyah Palace this week.Evelyn Hockstein/AFP/Getty Images
Those negotiations began Tuesday in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, as U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio met Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, with Ukraine not at the table but clearly on the menu.
One supposed version of the deal being contemplated, published on social media by Fox News journalists travelling with Mr. Rubio, envisions a three-stage plan that calls for an immediate ceasefire, followed by elections in Ukraine. Only then would negotiations begin toward a longer-term peace deal.
It’s the second phase – Ukrainian elections, called for not by President Zelensky, but by Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin – that had jaws dropping in Kyiv, and among Ukraine’s remaining allies in the West. Such a vote would require Ukraine to suspend martial law before the war was over, imperilling the country’s mobilization drive and igniting political infighting the Kremlin could take advantage of.
Mr. Trump’s willingness to bully Kyiv while making nice with Moscow has shocked long-standing U.S. allies, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, all of whom pushed back at Mr. Trump’s suggestion that Mr. Zelensky was anything other than Ukraine’s legitimately elected leader.
Supporters of Ukraine wonder why Mr. Trump – who claims to be a master negotiator – has already given Mr. Putin a major concession by ending three years of U.S.-led efforts to isolate Moscow, while getting nothing in return so far.
“So far, we’re seeing some sort of discussion, bilateral negotiations of some kind, playing out entirely on the terms of an autocratic state that is the main aggressor in a war of aggression against a European neighbour,” said Olga Onuch, professor of Ukrainian politics at the University of Manchester. “I would think the Kremlin is saying, ‘This new administration in the United States is a great deal weaker than we thought, they are doing exactly what we would like to see happen.’ But peace, the Russians aren’t interested in peace.”
Mr. Putin, Prof. Onuch pointed out, could end the war simply by withdrawing his army from Ukraine. Instead, Russian troops continued to push forward along the 1,000-kilometre front line this week, and Russian missiles and drones continued to target Ukrainian cities even as Mr. Trump’s special envoy, Keith Kellogg, was in Kyiv on Wednesday and Thursday to meet with Ukrainian officials, including Mr. Zelensky.
Mr. Zelensky's meeting in Kyiv with U.S. envoy Keith Kellogg was long delayed and less publicly collegial than expected.Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images
The long-awaited meeting between Mr. Kellogg and Mr. Zelensky – originally expected to take place in the first days after Mr. Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration – ended on an ominous note when a joint press conference was cancelled at the last minute on Thursday at the request of the U.S. side.
The reasons for the cancellation weren’t immediately clear, though Mr. Zelensky has repeatedly refused to sign a deal proposed by Mr. Trump that would give the U.S. access to half of Ukraine’s rare earths minerals as payment for past, and presumably future, U.S. aid.
Mr. Trump has said he was seeking to secure US$500-billion worth of Ukraine’s rare earths. The U.S. has provided Kyiv with US$182.8-billion worth of military and economic assistance over the past three years. Mr. Zelensky said Wednesday that he had refused to sign the deal because, “I cannot sell our country,” adding that the document he was presented with contained nothing in the way of security guarantees for Ukraine.
“Ukraine’s previous biggest backer, by volume, is now its most determined extortionist, with demands that have been placed on Ukraine, which are almost as savage as those of Moscow,” said Keir Giles, a Russia expert at Chatham House, a London-based think tank. “You have a situation where, like in the run up to the Second World War, in 1939 and 1940, you’ve got countries in the east of Europe that are being squeezed from two directions, with impossible demands put on them from both east and west.”
Mr. Giles isn’t the only one who sees worrying historic parallels. Alarm bells were ringing across Europe this week, a continent with a dark history of seeing countries divided up by outside powers.
The Riyadh meeting between Mr. Rubio and Mr. Lavrov was compared in Britain’s The Guardian newspaper and on France 24 television to the “peace for our time” summit in Munich in 1938, with Mr. Rubio standing in for British leader Neville Chamberlain as territory (the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia then, much of southern and eastern Ukraine now) was conceded to the aggressor (Nazi Germany then, Mr. Putin’s Russia now) in a doomed effort to secure a wider peace.
With Mr. Trump saying that he plans to meet in person with Mr. Putin “soon,” other publications, including the Independent newspaper of Britain, wondered whether the process would culminate in something akin to the 1945 post-Second World War summit in Yalta. It was at Yalta, located in what is now Russian-occupied Crimea, that the planet was divided into spheres of influence – condemning most of Eastern Europe to decades of de facto Russian occupation and launching the Cold War, once more in the name of avoiding a more immediate conflict.
Then British prime minister Winston Churchill was the third party at Yalta, granted equal status alongside U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. This time, the U.S. and Russian leaders have made it clear they plan to meet alone. Mr. Zelensky wasn’t invited to Riyadh, nor were any representatives of the European Union, Britain or NATO.
Winson Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin held their 1945 Yalta conference at the Livadia Palace, a former summer retreat of the Russian czars.The Associated Press
NATO, Mr. Giles said, looked “irrelevant” as Mr. Trump sidelined the alliance and at the same time declared that the war between Russia and Ukraine was a European problem, rather than an American one. Remarks from Mr. Trump – such as his posting on Truth Social that “we have a big, beautiful Ocean as separation” from the conflict – raise the question of whether Mr. Trump’s administration is truly committed to the defence of NATO members such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania that share borders with Russia. Old ideas about creating an “army of Europe” are once more being discussed in Paris, Brussels, Berlin and London.
“There is no point in clinging to old assurances and old realities. It is time for European countries to make their own fate,” Mr. Giles said. “The United States doesn’t have to withdraw from NATO in order to neutralize it.”
Ukraine will be looking for new allies if the Trump administration follows through on its threat to halt military assistance. A Ukrainian diplomatic push is under way to persuade the likes of Canada and the European Union to step up as the U.S. steps away.
Prof. Onuch said polling shows that even as most Ukrainians are exhausted by three years of war, they’d rather keep fighting than accept an unfair peace deal foisted on them by Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump. She recalled that Ukraine was also left to face Russian military on its own in February, 2022 – and shocked the world with its fierce resistance.
“Ukrainians, their leaders, the ordinary citizens, will keep fighting for their survival,” she said. “And Ukrainians have showed us that they are capable of fighting.”
Thomas Peter/Reuters
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