President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine joins the leaders of the United Kingdom, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the European Commission, and NATO at the White House on Monday. Their discussions with President Donald Trump will center on how to forge a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine to end their bloody war. Russia began that invasion in February 2022.
Following Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday, there is a new sense of momentum toward peace. Still, Zelensky and the Europeans have key questions that they’ll hope Trump can help answer on Monday.
1. Is Putin really pursuing peace?
The Europeans rightly fear that Putin is not making substantive concessions toward peace but instead playing for more time in the absence of new sanctions. Putin has skilfully employed his personal relationship with Trump to manipulate the president against taking tougher action against Russia. The Kremlin is now trying to bolster the narrative that, where Trump and Putin are close to a major detente of historic value, the Europeans are attempting to undermine Trump’s agenda.
Russian investment fund chief Kirill Dmitriev, who has forged a close working relationship with U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff, underlined this effort on Sunday by warning that “European and British warmongers/saboteurs are in full panic mode. They should not stay in the way of Peace.”
The Europeans will emphasize to Trump that if Putin is indeed serious about peace, he should be forced to prove as much by agreeing to an immediate ceasefire or by making substantive concessions such as an end to missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian cities.
2. What will any Ukrainian security guarantees look like?
The Trump administration now says that Russia has accepted that Western peacekeeping forces will need to serve as a guardrail against a future Russian invasion five, 10, or 15 years down the road. If accurate, this is a major Russian concession. Still, while the U.K. and France have said they will spearhead any guardrail force, U.S. involvement is also vital. That’s because Russia will not be truly deterred by any force that lacks American allied resolve.
The lack of an American guarantee to come to the aid of allies that might be attacked in the future poses two key challenges. First, it will fundamentally damage Ukraine’s confidence that any security guarantees are worth the paper they are written on. If Nigel Farage becomes the next U.K. prime minister and Jordan Bardella the next French president, for example, troops from those countries might quickly be withdrawn from Ukraine. Putin can then return to conquest, rearmed and resupplied by years of post-sanctions peace. Only America has the strategic credibility to be reliable here. The Europeans also know that the Russians know this, which is why they are so determined to ensure any security guarantees have teeth. Trump can get the Europeans to pay for any security guardrails and man its de facto ramparts, but America will have to be ready to step in if the Russians decide to restart any conflict.
3. What territory will Ukraine have to surrender, and on what basis?
On Sunday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio pushed back against the assertion that the United States would expect Ukraine to cede the entirety of its southeastern Donbas region. While Russia already controls a significant portion of this territory, the Ukrainians had understandably balked at the idea of being forced to withdraw from major population centers still under their control.
The most reasonable prospect for any agreement is a freeze, with minor territorial adjustments, along the current battlefield line of contact. Crucially, however, any deal must not recognize territory that Russia has seized as de jure Russian sovereign territory. That territory must only receive recognition of Russian control. For the U.S. to offer sovereign recognition would be to shred the central foundation stone of the post-1945 international order: the notion that democratic states do not have their sovereign orders redrawn by foreign aggression.
4. How will Putin be kept to his word?
Putin isn’t just a liar — he is the world’s most effective liar. Putin’s proclivity here is a tribute to the KGB’s Red Banner Institute, where he was trained in the 1980s. In turn, to hold Putin to any agreement, there must be safeguards in place to ensure he faces immediate, throttling consequences if he attempts to purge the new peace.
History matters here. Putin signed and then systematically breached the Minsk 2 accord negotiated in 2015. He has also broken major strategic treaties involving nuclear weapons (the INF treaty and the Outer Space treaty). Witkoff’s suggestion that Putin could sign legislation to pledge not to reinvade Ukraine or another European state is thus patently facile. When it comes to acts of aggression, Putin does what he wants as long as he believes he can get away with it.
Expect the Europeans to push for sanctions safeguards that will ensure any Russian breach of any future peace deal leads to major, increased sanctions across its banking, energy export, and high-value goods import sectors. The security guarantees issue also bears obvious weight here.
5. Will the U.S. maintain its partnership with Europe for a Russian detente?
The Kremlin has sought to woo Trump into a Moscow-favorable agreement by dangling the prospect of new U.S. economic deals with Russia if a deal is reached. The problem for Europe is that Putin would use any such deals to generate American political latitude for his aggressive intelligence operations in Europe, undermining NATO’s eastern flank, and to degrade the already fraying trans-Atlantic alliance. Trump would be a fool to bite at Russia’s lure.
After all, Putin will not truly help Trump on concerns such as the North Korean and Iranian nuclear programs for the same reason that he has helped those countries advance those programs in the first place. Namely, that they serve Putin’s overriding objective of weakening American global leadership. At the same time, U.S.-European economic engagement is vastly (to a ratio of many multiples) more lucrative to the U.S. economy than anything Russia could possibly offer. And for American CEOs, the risk of future FBI corruption investigations or defenestration adventures out of high-story windows is astronomically higher in Russia than in Europe.
TRUMP PUTS ISRAELI FANATIC BEFORE US INTERESTS
Where does this leave us?
With the reality that while momentum toward a peace accord is as strong as it has ever been, the key ingredients of a viable peace agreement have yet to be sourced. Without those ingredients, any Ukraine peace deal will be a Novichok stew for Ukraine and the West.