Getting ready for the Trump-Putin negotiations over Ukraine

It certainly seems that, on both Israel and the Russia-Ukraine War, the Biden Administration has operated on a kind of autopilot mode with continuing escalation taken for granted as a desirable policy.

Ann Phillips took note after the Presidential election of this piece of news:

In an intriguing flight of fancy, Washington has called upon China to use its influence on Russia and North Korea to prevent escalation of the war in Ukraine while at the same time blasting China’s military buildup in the South China Sea, sending U.S. warships to the region and imposing multiple sanctions and economic trade barriers on the country.¹

But Ukraine would be in a bad condition even if Biden’s policy were continued. We don’t know what Trump will do, and he most likely doesn’t know either. A meaningful peace settlement that leaves the non-Russian-occupied portions of the country independent and self-governing without setting the stage for likely new conflict in a relatively short time period would be an incredible achievement. One that Trump in his first Presidency showed no indication that he was capable of achieving. (Unless we count his Abraham Accords agreement with Israel and Saudi Arabia that set the stage for Israel’s current wars. And that one really didn’t turn out so well.)

The Russians are winning on the battlefield in Ukraine. And short of massive direct NATO intervention on the battlefield – which is exceptionally unlikely to happen – there is little prospect of that changing anytime soon. Russia can be expected to insist on retaining control of the occupied provinces. They will also demand some kind of commitment from NATO that Ukraine will not become a member of the alliance. They are unlikely to accept any kind of a peacekeeping force that includes NATO members. They will not provide reparations or reconstruction assistance to Ukraine.

Ukraine’s government will be in the position of having to admit defeat for the immediate future. Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government may or may not survive. Russia’s avowed goal of “den-Nazifying” Ukraine’s government is at least 99% propaganda. But they may insist on a new Ukrainian government with which to negotiate a settlement. They will insist on military restrictions on Ukraine’s military.

Negotiating a peace agreement that doesn’t guarantee a resumption of conflict in relatively short term would be a complex task for a competent team led by senior officials who had some strategic vision of what needs to be accomplished and how to implement complicated peace-settlement arrangements. All in the context that Russia sees a Ukraine aligned with the rest as a threat to its own national interests, and so will be inclined to drive a hard bargain. Especially since it’s winning on the battlefield.

None of this implies that Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukrainian territory was legal (it wasn’t) or morally justified.

The Trump II Administration will be dealing with this in the context it has created where it is calling into serious doubt its own willing to remain in NATO. And Russia has various options to offer Trump himself personal financial benefits, which his own conduct gives us no reason to believe he would refuse to accept.

How do any of these ingredients add up to produce a reasonable peace settlement that puts an end to the current conflict, minimizes the chances of a new outbreak, and doesn’t wreck America’s credibility as a security partner? Especially with the President-elect speculating aloud about going to war with Canada, Mexico, Panama, and Denmark as though he’s acting in a film portraying Oxycontin addict and professional hate-mongering clown Rush Limbaugh as President of the US.

Can a government headed by this guy work out the kind of peace settlement needed in Ukraine?

Public narratives on Ukraine

Wars always create their own information fog, made even foggier by propaganda operations. And even well-intentioned reporting is often operating with very incomplete information.

The European Union has a fact-checking site largely aimed at countering Russian propaganda narratives, EU vs. DiSiNFO. It’s reporting on the Russia-Ukraine War has had its limits. A recent article gives a roundup of the situation. Some of it is straightforwardly informative:

Russia flagrantly violated the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on security assurances where it pledged to respect Ukraine’s borders and sovereignty. The illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the orchestration of sham referendums in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine are clear breaches of international law. These actions are accompanied by relentless war propaganda falsely portraying Ukraine as a puppet state controlled by foreign powers.²

It's true that Russia violated the 1994 Budapest Memorandum by invading Ukraine. Which would have been illegal under international law even without Budapest. Ukraine was one of the countries that voluntarily agreed to give up its “weapons of mass destruction,” also including Kazakhstan, Iraq, and Libya.

The legal status of the Soviet weapons left in Kazakhstan was not formalized until March of 1994 when, under Kazakhstan-Russia agreements, the weapons were identified as the property of the Russian Federation temporarily located in Kazakhstan. In addition to weapons and delivery systems, Kazakhstan fully controlled tons of nuclear material and nuclear facilities, including the former Soviet nuclear testing site at Semipalatinsk. Kazakhstan made a strategic decision to give up not only Soviet nuclear weapons but also nuclear material and weapons-related infrastructure.³

Kazakhstan has not yet been subject to any regime-regime invasions or subversion. Sadly, the same cannot be said for Iraq, Libya, or Ukraine.

That said, one implication that drawn from the Budapest Agreement by neocons – for whom it’s always 1938 and Neville Chamberlain is always about to hand Czechoslovakia over Hitler and set off a new world war – have been talking about the security pledges made at Budapest as though they included some kind of binding defense commitment to Ukraine. “The signatories of the memorandum” - the US, Russia, and the UK – “pledged to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity and inviolability of its borders, and to refrain from the use or threat of military force.”⁴

Russia clearly violated that commitment with its invasions of 2014 and 2022. But the US and UK were not bound to direct intervention or even military support in case of an invasion of Ukraine. Although both have provided substantial amounts of military assistance to Ukraine in the current war.

From the outset, Russia’s war against Ukraine has been built on denying Ukraine’s sovereignty and its right to exist as an independent nation. The Kremlin methodically prepared the ground for its physical invasion through an extensive campaign of historical revisionism, deliberately twisting facts and rejecting responsibility for past actions while cynically invoking World War II imagery to paint itself as a victim fighting against “Nazism.”

The reference to “denying Ukraine’s sovereignty” links to a Chatham House report of July 2021⁵, in which Anaïs Marin describes a claim that Russian historians and politicians make about both Ukraine and Belarus:

The claim that the peoples of Ukraine and Belarus are sub-nations of a single community known as the ‘triune’ or all-Russian nation (триединый/общерусский народ) is an ideological construct dating back to imperial times. It builds on the idea that a pan-Russian nation with roots in the medieval Kievan Rus’, the cradle of Orthodox Christianity for Eastern Slavs, developed and flourished from the 14th century onwards around the principality of Muscovy. The problem with attributing an exclusive Kievan inheritance to the Muscovite princes – and thus giving credence to what is a founding myth of Russian statehood to this day – is that it distorts history and is used for justifying Russia’s current irredentist ambitions towards its western neighbours. [my emphasis]

This is a romantic-nationalist European narrative. But it does not amount to a rejection of the sovereignty of Ukraine and Belarus. Nor does Marin claim that it does.

Chances for a peace agreement

Über-Realist John Mearsheimer has been pointing out since the 2022 Russian invasion that Russia has not been making a claim that all of Ukraine belongs to Russia nor has it explicitly rejected Ukraine’s sovereignty. The invasion and annexation of part of Ukraine’s territory is a violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty, of course. But Mearsheimer has been reminding his readers and listeners that even in the current conflict, Russia has never said it wants to take over all of Ukraine.

Mearsheimer sees Russia’s overriding goal as keeping Ukraine out of NATO, both formally and practically, i.e., preventing a close de facto integration of Ukraine’s armed forces into NATO without formal recognition of Ukraine as a NATO alliance. Mearsheimer believes that Russia’s military actions have been consistent with the goal of establishing control over Crimea (which they already did in 2014) and some of the eastern Ukrainian provinces but leaving central and western Ukraine under the control of Ukraine’s government, with the goal of keeping Ukraine as a weak state – and a non-member of NATO – indefinitely.

He believes Russia expects that a full takeover of the central and western parts of the country would present a more difficult challenge of partisan (guerilla) warfare against Russia than even the eastern provinces do. It’s worth remembering here that a major element in the fall of the Soviet Union was that the leadership there decided that the cost of maintaining control and military defense in its Warsaw Pact allies to too much to continue doing. (Ukraine was then a republic within the Soviet Union.)

Concluding a comprehensive peace agreement that would address all those concerns of both sides of the conflict and that would have a reasonable chance of being a stable solution for some non-trivial period of time would be a spectacular diplomatic achievement. It would be unrealistic to expect such a thing from the Trump II Administration.

Whether we can even expect a very sub-par settlement during the next four years is hard to know, given the vagueness of the signals Trump and his team have set out so far. He seems to regard the war as a problem he wants to get out of his way as quickly as possible, which is not likely to be a sign of a serious and complex negotiating strategy. A quick solution would be more likely to be something like a ceasefire in place that would be at constant risk of breaking down. We’ll see relatively soon if Trump can deliver something more substantial than that.

Michael Kelly and Craig Martin recently provided a helpful graphic summarizing various issues that will be in dispute. And they noted:

Based on comments since his first term, Trump’s mindset remains highly transactional on foreign policy in general and on the Russia-Ukraine conflict in particular. This is a war he pledged to end quickly, prompting Ukraine’s president Volodymir Zelenskyy to acknowledge that it will conclude in 2025. Trump’s modus operandi has been to deal with the other “strongest” person in the room and often ignore other stakeholders. This means any peace negotiation is likely to jump the tracks and occur bilaterally between Trump and Vladimir Putin, a dynamic Putin has endorsed. While his recent meetings with Zelenskyy in New York and Paris might suggest the possibility of daylight between himself and Putin on Ukraine, Trump may simply be pre-negotiation positioning.⁶ [my emphasis]

It's also worth noting that even though Trump and some of his senior officials may be eager to accommodate Russia even at the point of ignoring basic US national-security concerns, that doesn’t mean that Putin and his diplomatic team will be eager to reach a near-meaningless settlement that Trump could call “peace” for a couple of weeks. Because Russia clearly takes NATO-Ukraine cooperation very seriously as a national-security threat. If they can convince Trump to basically just stop supporting Ukraine without any kind of formal deal, why would they bother to settle on one? In any case, the Russians are famous for their hard-nosed approach to international negotiations.

And an end to Western sanctions is obviously something that they will also want, even if their effects on Russia’s war-making ability were far less than Western hawks hoped. And, as Kelly and Martin point out, the sanctions came with a heavy bit of PR hype:

With respect to oil, President Biden banned direct import of Russian petroleum in 2022, but there was a refined products loophole which effectively allows the United States to continue importing refined Russian petroleum indirectly after it is mixed with oil from other sources. India is key to how this works. Once Western sanctions on Russian oil went into effect, India, Turkey, and China began picking up the slack, with India increasing its imports 111%, Turkey 75%, and China 21% by 2024. Formerly Russian petroleum products, which become Indian petroleum products, find their way to the U.S. via industrial installations such as the sprawling Jamnagar complex ⎯the world’s largest oil refinery.

They also note ways that Russia can offer Trump incentives to go light on his demands in the negotiations. And they remind us that, “given Trump’s notoriously unpredictable and capricious nature, it is a precarious business trying to predict how he will conduct policy making of any kind.”

DW News reported recently on something that is highly unlikely to happen⁷:

1. Phillips, Ann (2024): Trump shouldn't overestimate US influence on the world stage. Responsible Statecraft 11/18/2024. <https://responsiblestatecraft.org/us-multipolarity/> (Accessed: 2024-20-11).

2. 1000 and 4000 days of Russia weaponising information in its war against Ukraine. EU vs. DiSiNFO 12/26/2024. <https://euvsdisinfo.eu/1000-and-4000-days-of-russia-weaponising-information-in-its-war-against-ukraine/> (Accessed: 2024-26-12).

3. Kassenova, Togzhan (2024): Kazakhstan’s Irreversible Disarmament. Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament 2024:7. <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25751654.2024.2354951#abstract> (Accessed: 2024-26-12).

4. Budjeryn, Mariana, and Bunn, Matthew (2020): Budapest Memorandum at 25: Between Past and Future. Harvard Kennedy School, March 2020. <https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/budapest-memorandum-25-between-past-and-future> (Accessed: 2024-26-12).

5. Marin, Anaïs (2021): Myths and misconceptions in the debate on Russia. Chatham House 07/02/2024. <https://www.chathamhouse.org/2021/05/myths-and-misconceptions-debate-russia/myth-11-peoples-ukraine-belarus-and-russia-are-one> (Accessed: 2024-26-12).

6. Kelly, Michael & Martin, Craig (2024): Trump’s Endgame for the War in Ukraine. Just Security 12/17/2024. <https://www.justsecurity.org/105451/trumps-endgame-ukraine-war/> (Accessed: 2024-26-12).

7. Could European peacekeepers enforce a Ukraine-Russia cease-fire? DW News YouTube channel 12/23/2024. (Accessed: 2024-26-12).