President-elect Donald Trump has made clear that negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine will be his top foreign policy priority upon taking office. To be successful, he will need a deal that preserves Ukraine’s sovereignty alongside Russia‘s cessation of both overt and covert military action.
It won’t be easy. But if Trump is astute to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s deceptive tendencies, he can secure viable peace.
One key challenge will rest in ensuring that Ukraine and Russia both understand any peace won’t be malleable or transient. That means ensuring Russia recognizes that it can’t use a peace accord simply to earn sanctions relief via which it can reconstitute its military and then reinvade Ukraine a few years down the road. This is rightly a preeminent concern for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his people. After all, it’s exactly the playbook Russia employed following the Minsk 2 peace agreement in 2014 and its subsequent February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Put simply, Trump will need to provide an insurance policy for peace. That means Ukraine will need an international peacekeeping force of some kind.
It can’t be a peacekeeping force under United Nations auspices. As the Lebanese Hezbollah has proved, U.N. peacekeeping forces are paper thin. Ukraine will demand a force that has credible military power. But with Trump likely to refocus the U.S. military’s attention toward the Pacific, and loathe to deploy forces into new foreign entanglements, the prospect of a significant U.S. military peacekeeping force being sent to Ukraine seems remote. Fortunately, America’s oldest ally and its closest ally are hinting they might step into the breach.
The Telegraph reported this week that United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron are contemplating deploying troops to guard a buffer zone between Ukraine and Russian-occupied territory following any peace deal. The two leaders met recently at Starmer’s country residence to discuss Ukraine and Trump’s peace ambitions. Starmer further pledged on Friday that the U.K. would take “full part” in any postwar peacekeeping efforts. Lithuania and Poland have also hinted they would be open to joining such a deployment.
This isn’t idle or blustering talk out of the blue. As first reported by the Washington Examiner, British special forces have been operating extensively very close to the Ukrainian front lines since the start of the war. And Macron has previously suggested that French troops could be deployed to Ukraine in the event that Kyiv was threatened.
To be clear, British and French military commanders will be reluctant to enjoin any major peacekeeping effort for the same reason as U.S. Army commanders. Namely, due to the stretch on resources that such an open-ended deployment would entail. Still, a multinational European military effort with some U.S. military intelligence and aviation support would be able to manage this mission.
The key would be for any ground force peacekeeping deployments to possess sufficient mobility, firepower, and flexibility to counter any Russian mass or surprise probing attack. In turn, rotations of the British Army’s 1st Deep Reconnaissance Strike Brigade Combat Team, 7th Light Mechanized Brigade Combat Team, 4th Light Brigade Combat Team, and 20th Armored Brigade Combat Team would be well suited to deterrent-defensive deployments along any buffer zone. The French Army’s 7th Armored Brigade, 6th Light Armored Brigade, and 2nd Armored Brigade would be similarly suited to this role. These elements could be supported by helicopter combat aviation and air force quick reaction forces. Assuming some European allies provided additional, if limited, military support to this effort, Ukraine’s borders would quickly become a very hard nut for even a reconstituted Russian military to crack. Especially since attempting to crack the nut would lead to war with more than just Ukraine.
That leads us to the central question here. Ensuring Ukraine’s sovereign viability after any peace agreement isn’t ultimately a question of capability. It’s a question of willpower. Will the West be willing to take the steps necessary to persuade Ukraine that it should accept painful territorial concessions because doing so will secure its longer-term sovereignty, peace, and prosperity? Will the West be willing to make clear to Putin that he can retain some territorial gains but will face Western military riposte if he reneges on the peace accord in the future?
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If the West isn’t willing to take these steps, it’s hard to see how Ukraine can agree to any peace deal. After all, any peace deal would simply delay Ukraine’s future annihilation.
Trump should thus merge his moral peace ambitions with a bolder openness to leverage U.S. power and alliances in service of those ambitions.