It is not hard to see why Volodymyr Zelensky will be absent when Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin meet in Alaska on Friday. Ukraine is awkward enough for the US and Russia without it constantly interrupting when the two schoolyard bullies are trying to tell it what its own interests are.
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.
Once that has been achieved, one imagines, the plan is to persuade the Ukrainian leader that he can shave off the rougher edges – presumably the diplomats will leave some inessential “nice-to-haves” – and everyone will be happy.
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.
Trump on Monday acknowledged that “Russia has occupied a big portion of Ukraine” and that he’s “going to try to get some of that territory back for Ukraine”, promising that after that he would speak to Zelenksy first “out of respect”.
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.
So why are they meeting if nothing has changed? Because although these are the issues that have prolonged the stalemate for three years, one day realpolitik was bound to dawn, born in part of Putin’s foot-dragging.
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.
If the Alaska meeting brings some sort of ceasefire, what then? Doubtless Trump would boast of ending “Biden’s war”, thanks to his magnetic personality and gifts as the Putin Whisperer. Peace would be proclaimed, lives saved, deals would be done, sanctions dropped.
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.
Zelensky won’t want to be strung along, and this is where Trump, who has hitherto seemed willing to accede to most of Putin’s demands, may come unstuck. He may lean on Zelensky, economically and by threatening to stop sending arms, but the Ukrainian needs an upside to sell his people, and one that cedes land and offers no guarantees for the future isn’t it, however exhausted his heroic people must be. He must be promised something. In the past, Russia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov has not ruled out EU membership for Ukraine, but security must come first.
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).
He could get off the fence and task his diplomats with finding a way to pledge that the US would defend Ukraine against Russian encroachment on any deal that might be reached in Alaska. It would be Nato membership in all but name, so if Trump really has a special relationship with Putin, let’s see his mastery of sugary words make that one stick with Moscow. If Putin is committed to adhering to the deal, why would he object?
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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.
Which leads to a further chilling thought. Trump’s past dealings suggest a transient view of the world. Nothing is forever, so a short-term fix is as good as any. Just think of his dopamine rush if he could claim “peace in MY time”.
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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