Ukraine's slim path to avoid defeat
COMMENT/ANALYSIS
The fate of a Ukraine-Russia peace deal is hanging in the balance.
We’ll probably find out in the next few days if the deal that Washington has proposed has a future, or if Donald Trump decides to give up on his role as would-be peacemaker and walk away.
Peace may sound like a good thing for Ukraine - who, after all, wants more war and more dying? But the provisions of what Washington is offering would be a disaster for Kyiv and hand Moscow an important strategic victory.
It would also invite, even incentivize, Russia to have another stab at seizing control of Ukraine a year or two or three down the line.
Amid more death in Gaza, air strikes in Kashmir, and the ongoing spat between the US and China, the war in Ukraine has all but dropped off the news agenda.
But it is likely to return as Vladimir Putin celebrates May 9th with a parade in Red Square this week to mark the 80th anniversary of victory over Nazi Germany—and as Donald Trump makes a decision on whether to walk away from a stalled peace process.
For months, like two large carnivores intent on tearing a prey animal apart, Moscow and Washington have circled a wounded Kyiv.
As the Kremlin’s forces assaulted from the air and on land, the White House—Ukraine’s erstwhile ally—belittled and humiliated its leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, and demanded repayment for more support than it had ever given.
Such was the two-pronged assault that, at times, it seemed the only question was whose stomach rump Ukraine was going to end up in.
For America, the rewards of a weak and dismembered Ukraine would be, in the Trumpian worldview, to clear the path for a rapprochement with Moscow—a partnership he has suggested could result in many billions of dollars of new resource deals.
Meanwhile, the US has also been demanding hundreds of billions of dollars’ more of rare earth minerals and other natural resources from Kyiv. (Last week, it settled for a lesser deal.)
For Putin, his renewed bromance with Trump was set to pay off even more handsomely.
It would mean legal recognition of a Russian Crimea (at least by Washington), cemented control of a large portion of four eastern Ukrainian provinces—Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia—and relief from a swath of financial sanctions. It would also, effectively, bring Russia back to the high table.
And yet, even as Ukraine’s fate seemed sealed, Moscow and Washington have apparently fallen out. Putin, it seems, has overplayed his hand.
In the last couple of weeks, Trump has snarled that Putin may be playing him along and not actually interested in peace in Ukraine—despite everything he has offered Moscow.
The Kremlin, meanwhile, has demanded that Ukraine’s army be reduced to a fraction of its current size, that the country be "denazified," and that no Western peacekeepers be deployed on its neighbour’s soil.
In some ways, the spat is bad news for Ukraine. It means the war is probably set to continue—and with it, the loss of many thousands more Ukrainian lives. But it also gives Kyiv just a slim path to avoid defeat.
For Ukraine, any deal born of a renewed American-Russian friendship was always going to be a bad one. Kyiv may have been able to swallow the effective loss of a fifth of its landmass and giving up on NATO membership.
But it was also being asked to accept the abduction of thousands of its children, as well as foregoing any financial recompense for the damage Russia has inflicted in three years of war.
Far worse it would receive no meaningful Western security guarantees, leaving it open to a renewed Russian attack at a time of Moscow’s choosing.
Predicting Trump’s next move, of course, is a fool’s game. He may yet do an about-turn and embrace Putin.
But the odds are increasing that, instead, Trump will walk away from negotiations. He has other fish to fry: American universities to tame, a fortune to be made issuing meme-coins in his name, and a prison to build in Alcatraz.
For Kyiv, much would then depend on the detail of Washington’s disengagement.
The US could simply shift its gaze elsewhere and leave its current Ukraine policy more or less in place. (It recently announced it was moving a Patriot missile battery from Israel to Ukraine.)
That would probably mean that Kyiv could continue to buy US weaponry—even though it might have to pay for it—and even use US intelligence and Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service.
Or it could decide to punish Kyiv and take all its toys home-as when Trump got upset with Ukraine the last time-and and order US companies to do likewise.
If the US doesn’t fully disengage, there may, however, be a small hope of a better outcome for Kyiv. During the next several months it will be hard-pressed to resist Moscow’s war machine. It is short of men, money, and ammunition.
But, if it can hold out until later in the year, fortunes may begin to shift.
Russia’s battlefield losses are immense, the cost of fielding such large armies unsustainable in the midterm, and its military warehouses beginning to empty of armoured vehicles.
If world oil prices remain low—an effect of Trump’s quixotic tariff policy—then come the autumn, Putin could be facing a choice between guns for his soldiers or butter for his people.
Of course, these are all boulder-sized ‘ifs’. There are many far less favourable scenarios for Kyiv.
But Putin may possibly come to rue the day that Trump slapped on the table an offer that gave him 80 cents on the dollar—and he turned it down.
The deal that Trump has proposed would be a disaster for Ukraine, even as it hands Moscow a significant strategic win. Kyiv’s best hope may be that the Kremlin fails to see that.
I am back in Canada until the end of June running my wilderness lodge and my posts will be less frequent until I return to Europe. But I will still try to jump on important events as they happen and offer commentary and insights.