This is facetious and disrespectful – but surely true. If Trump is to live up to his ludicrous world-saving self-image, he needs the broad outline of a deal with his old buddy/hero/adversary/blackmailer (delete according to preference) Putin.
This might even be a sensible approach, but it is hard to applaud it while the issues are so tangled and Trump’s priorities are so skewed.
Putin wants Ukraine to be in Russia’s sphere of influence and no more Nato encirclement. Zelensky wants the opposite: independence for the whole country and a western shield. Europe doesn’t want to see an aggressor rewarded, and Poland in particular would prefer Ukraine to be strongly west-facing.
That realpolitik, sadly, was bound to mean the ceding of some land in the east of the country. By the end of the week, we will doubtless become pub- and dinner-party experts on the competing claims of and for the Crimea, Donbas, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Luhansk and what Trump’s “some swapping, some changes to land” might mean. We will learn where the line is to be drawn, and what degree of dismemberment Zelensky in the new dawn of realism is prepared to accept, though he will have to defy his own constitution to accept any.
But would that be intended as an indefinite fix, a sophisticated fudge for the time being, or a bridge to… what? It would be an exaggeration to say the only deal worth doing would be a permanent one, and Trump deserves credit at least for picking up the phone to Putin and ostensibly caring about the killing, but we must hope that any deal would have an eye on the long-term security of both sides.
The crunch, surely, is Ukraine’s wish for Nato membership. That was at the very least the pretext for Putin’s invasion (and the West, having stoked Moscow’s paranoia in the 30 years after 1990, continues to underrate it). Membership remains an ambition for Zelensky – and for Putin, it remains a big no-no. It is here that Trump could serve a useful purpose, if he could, for once, take his mind off the mineral and real estate possibilities (though tangentially they may also have their uses).
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But then again, Putin’s record on honouring deals – on Chechnya, for example – is poor. And Trump seems barely to understand what the French call the “automaticité” required by a genuine, Article 5-type security guarantee, so why would Putin regard a deterrent pledged by Trump as credible? Or would the cost that Putin has already faced economically and in human lives be sufficient for him to settle for what he has – maybe until at least after Trump’s term is over.
That may be the best we can hope for, with the promise of further summits in the future to address the difficult bits. It’s either some variant of that, or the senseless killing and maiming – the current total is estimated at around 1.3 million – continues.
James Hanning’s new book, The Bookseller of Hay, is out next month
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