There was a time, only weeks ago, when the mantra of “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine” appeared to have some meaning.
No longer. Putin and soon-to-be President Trump are preparing to meet and there is no invitation for third parties.
It’s clear that a meeting of this sort, during an all-out war, is as consequential for Ukraine’s existence as (for example) the Munich meeting was for Czechoslovakia’s in 1938. So, what is needed to avoid a bad outcome?
There are a number of results which would be damaging for Ukraine, ranging from the unsatisfactory to the disastrous.
And we’re off to a bad start. The Kremlin has long sought to resolve its war of aggression through direct talks with the US, seeing this as a recognition of Russia’s global power and as a de facto acknowledgment that Ukraine is not a “real” country.
The talks are therefore a concession to Moscow and a message to European NATO that it too must wait outside the conference chamber for news of a meeting of critical importance to the continent.
That is the bad news. There is some that’s better.
Trump’s peace envoy, retired general Keith Kellogg, told Fox News that the new president plans to end the war within 100 days of his inauguration. That is considerably longer than the 24 hours the President-elect first mentioned, and amounts to a recognition by his team that the issue is not open to a simple resolution unless the US ends all support for Ukraine (and even then, the fighting would be likely to continue.)
There are other positive signals. The Financial Times highlighted that Trump’s inner circle is beginning to grapple with the reality, and quoted European officials saying that US support to Ukraine would continue after the January 20 inauguration.
There are reportedly deep concerns in the Trump national security team that pulling the plug on Ukraine would replicate the chaos of the Biden administration’s 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal. In truth, it would likely be much worse — millions of Ukrainians would certainly flee westward in the event of a Russian victory and NATO would face an immediate military threat on a vast area of border.
Russian victory would also be a triumph for the emerging axis of authoritarianism, with China, Iran, and North Korea celebrating their contribution to the Kremlin’s success. The worldwide message of Western defeat would be unmissable.
The most dangerous demand is for Ukraine to become non-aligned. The claim that Ukraine’s NATO ambitions provoked Russia’s invasion is a post-truth assertion, and indeed Ukraine’s NATO membership was as hypothetical in 2008, when the alliance first accepted the idea, as it is today.
If the lengthening of NATO’s borders is indeed the issue, then Putin has some explaining to do. On the eve of the full-scale invasion in 2022, the alliance border with Russia spanned 754 miles across Norway, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, and Lithuania. Finland’s accession doubled this to about 1,584 miles, yet the Kremlin barely emitted a peep. Ukraine’s NATO membership would lengthen its border by another 1,000 miles.
For Ukrainians, neutrality and the power struggles that follow from a multi-polar world would mean another war. Security guarantees did not work well for Ukraine (see the wholly meaningless Budapest Memorandum) and the equally ineffective Minsk agreements.
There are really only two possible outcomes for the talks:
- The first is that Russia refuses to concede on key points (some of it smilingly explained here by the head of the RT propaganda outlet, Margarita Simonyan) and gets its wishes; or
- The US finds the Kremlin’s demands unacceptable and continues support for Ukraine.
For the West, this can be boiled down to a question of whether it wants a border with the authoritarian axis on Ukraine’s western or its eastern border?
It is obvious what a bad deal would mean for Ukrainians in the occupied territories. Russia has clearly demonstrated its approach through murder, torture, abduction, indoctrination, forced militarization, and Russification of the population. It already uses conscripts from the occupied territories to fight against their own homeland. But ceding the country would also have consequences for the West by creating a new generation of Russified Ukrainians conscripted into the Russian armed forces.
If morality and self-preservation are not persuasive, money talks in favor of Ukraine’s protection. A report from the American Enterprise Institute warns that a Russian victory would necessitate an additional $808bn in US defense spending over five years to secure the new 2,600-mile NATO-Russia border. Conversely, a free and prosperous Ukraine would bolster European stability, allowing the US to refocus on the Pacific. A victorious Ukraine would also demonstrate the resolve of the Western alliance, deterring adversaries in the Middle East and Asia.
Ukraine’s battle-hardened forces have demonstrated their skills and courage and would offer a significant military strengthening for the alliance. That’s exactly why the Russians demand a reduction of Ukraine’s military to pre-war levels of 350,000 personnel (from around a million now) and 125 combat aircraft for the rump state.
Russia will demand more, much more. It will seek the unfreezing of around $300bn in sovereign assets, mostly held in Europe, and an end to the vast web of measures that make it the most-sanctioned country in the world. All of which, of course, would amount to a reward for Russia’s crimes of aggression.
Meanwhile, international law would suffer a profound setback. For Ukraine, that would mean the final confirmation of a world where criminals prosper and ordinary people can be raped, murdered, and oppressed without any prospect of justice. That is a recipe for decades of anger and bad feeling. That’s not how peace is made.
The risk is that a new and nasty multipolar world is being built on the graves of Ukrainians. But while Ukraine may be the first victim of such a system, we know it would not be the last.
Elena Davlikanova is a Democracy Fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA.) Her work is focused on analyzing opportunities for Ukraine-Russia reconciliation with regard to fascism and totalitarianism in Russia and their effects on Russia. She is an experienced researcher, who in 2022 conducted the studies ‘The Work of the Ukrainian Parliament in Wartime’ and ‘The War of Narratives: The Image of Ukraine in Media.’
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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