Negotiations to achieve some kind of end to Russia’s war on Ukraine have reached an intensive phase. While a narrow path to a sustainable – though likely rocky — peace still exists, the deal is not done. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s willingness to give up his maximal aims — basically Ukraine’s subordination to the Kremlin — is not yet clear; nor is U.S. President Donald Trump’s willingness to use his considerable leverage to push Putin to accept a sustainable deal. Moments of truth lie immediately ahead.
The outline of a deal to end the hot phase of Russia’s war against Ukraine has been clear for some time: a ceasefire more or less along the existing front line and security for Ukraine. Such an agreement would leave a sovereign Ukraine with about 80 percent of its territory. Security arrangements, if robust enough, could deter Russia from restarting the war. That would not be a just peace — justice would require Russia to leave all of Ukraine’s territory and to pay reparations for initiating an aggressive war of conquest, both of which seems unlikely for the present. But it could be a durable peace, roughly like the Korean Armistice or the arrangements that allowed for a stable West Germany to flourish alongside Soviet-occupied Germany for 40 years.
The Ukrainian government reportedly is willing to accept a version of such an “80/20” solution, if security arrangements are sufficiently robust to mean real deterrence and if Ukraine is not required to formally abandon its legal and legitimate claim to its full territory as of the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union (borders confirmed by the Russian-Ukrainian Treaty of 2003, when Putin previously was president of Russia). The Russian government, however, at least in public, is still insisting that a settlement address what it refers to as the “root causes” of the conflict, a euphemism that seems to mean Ukraine must remain under Russia’s domination or at least in a “gray zone” outside of Europe. Russia is also maintaining its claims to Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, which is wholly occupied by Russia, and four additional Ukrainian provinces that Russian forces partially occupy. The “root causes” of the war are, in fact, Moscow’s insistence on including Ukraine in its empire and Ukraine’s determination to find a home in Europe.
Key Issues – Territory
That’s a big gap. Nevertheless, the United States has reportedly come up with an outline of a settlement, one that prompted the Ukrainian government, with European support, to come up with its own version. The key issues are territory and security.
On territory, the United States has offered to recognize, de facto, Russian control of four of the five Ukrainian provinces it fully or partially occupies. De facto is a critical qualifier: it would mean simply recognizing the reality that Russia is in physical possession of some Ukrainian territory. Such a formula, carefully worded, could be an acceptable way forward. Russia would maintain its claim of annexation but neither Ukraine, the United States, Europe, nor most countries would agree. On the contrary, they would maintain a position of non-recognition of annexation through aggression. Such a position would be consistent with nearly 100 years of U.S. foreign policy in opposition to territorial conquest through war, including the Stimson Doctrine of 1932 of non-recognition of Japanese aggression against China and the Wells Declaration of 1940 refusing to recognize the Soviet annexation of the Baltic States.
The United States, however, seems to be considering formal recognition of Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea province. That would be a different step and a major mistake: it’s one thing to recognize an unfortunate reality; it’s another to embrace it as permanent and legitimate. Formal recognition of Russia’s annexation of Crimea or any other part of Ukraine would be inconsistent with the U.S.’s own position and the position of the first Trump administration: the Pompeo Declaration of 2018 explicitly ruled out recognition of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea. Such a shift would create a precedent for further wars of aggression, e.g., Russia against Kazakhstan, and would be thrown in America’s face by other aggressors such as China. It also would be (and be seen as) an invitation for Russia to continue its aggression against Ukraine.
Formally recognizing Russian annexation of Crimea would also generate immediate practical problems for the Trump administration. If the administration tried to recognize Crimea as Russian, it would have to remove the extensive sanctions on Russia that date back to its initial invasion of Crimea in 2014. But legislation (the Countering America’s Adversaries through Sanctions Act, CAATSA) requires Congress to review removal of most Russia sanctions, including those on Crimea, and gives Congress the right to block their removal through a “resolution of disapproval.” Recognition of Crimea as Russian would almost certainly trigger such congressional action. And the administration could lose that fight, judging by recent public criticism of the administration’s handling of the peace negotiations by Republican members of Congress, including Senator John Kennedy (R-Louisiana), Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), and Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), and Rep. Don Bacon (R-Nebraska).
According to administration sources, no final decision to recognize Russian annexation of Crimea or any other part of Ukraine has been made. Hopefully, it will not be. De facto recognition, with Russia and most of the rest of the world holding different views of the status of Ukraine’s legitimate borders, is the way to go at this stage.
Key Issues – Ukraine’s Security
Making arrangements for Ukraine’s security is even more difficult and important. Russia has violated past agreements promising to respect it, most notoriously the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, under which it pledged to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty in exchange for Ukraine giving up its Soviet-era nuclear weapons. Now, the Kremlin insists on Western agreement not to arm Ukraine as a condition for peace, and the Kremlin continues to claim that Western machinations to bring Ukraine into NATO are among the ostensible “root causes” of the war. Without serious security arrangements for Ukraine, any peace agreement is a mere pause before the next Russian invasion.
The best security for Ukraine would, in fact, be its membership in NATO. NATO’s defense of Ukraine, in fact, seems more practical than it did when NATO first debated its accession at the 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest. At that time (and I was in the U.S. delegation at the Bucharest Summit), most NATO governments regarded defense of Ukraine as either difficult or even beyond NATO’s realistic capabilities. But Ukraine’s success in holding back the Russians after three years of war, without any direct involvement by NATO forces suggests that defending Ukraine is indeed practical by relying on Ukraine’s army and supplementing it with NATO air defense, air power, logistics, intelligence, among other things. Given the size, experience, and proven capacity of Ukrainian forces, with the right help from NATO, Ukraine would be able to carry the bulk of the responsibility for its own defense as well as make a major contribution to NATO.
The Trump administration appears, unfortunately, to have ruled out Ukraine’s accession to NATO. It has, however, called for robust security guarantees for Ukraine to be provided by the U.K. and France, which have formed a coalition of the willing. The details of the size and mission of this force are not clear, at least publicly. But Trump administration officials indicate that discussions with the Europeans about that force and the possibility of U.S. backup for it – logistics, intelligence, and, possibly, other support in the event of sustained Russian attacks on it – are ongoing. One report suggests that the United States is in fact prepared to make such an offer, something probably critical to such a force being deployed. In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, two colleagues and I suggested that such an ad hoc force focus on air defense and be deployed to Ukraine even in advance of a ceasefire. In any case, placing European forces inside Ukraine with U.S. backup could be a game changer, complicating and perhaps preventing future Russian aggression. It would put an end to Russia’s ambition to consign Ukraine to a gray zone of insecurity and subject it to Russian intimidation.
The Trump administration’s reported offer to the Kremlin not to advance Ukraine’s NATO accession, while unfortunate, need not be fatal to a peace agreement. The reported Ukrainian counter proposal on NATO wisely does not insist on NATO accession now but simply notes that while there is no consensus in NATO regarding Ukraine’s accession, ad hoc security guarantees could suffice. Some careful drafting could bring these two positions together.
One more element could strengthen the U.S. position on Ukraine and NATO: the United States should make clear that any provision in an agreement that forestalls Ukraine’s accession to NATO should stand or fall with the agreement as a whole. If Russia violates the agreement, as it has done with so many other agreements regarding Ukraine, all the agreement’s provisions, including limitations on Ukraine’s NATO accession, fall with it.
Land and security are only two of the issues that must be resolved. The reported U.S. position (and Ukrainian/European version) also discuss Ukraine’s reconstruction and removal of sanctions (whether that would be at once or slowly and tied to Russian adherence to the deal is yet to be determined), disposition of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the long-negotiated U.S.-Ukraine minerals deal, and more. But land and security are the core of any agreement, and the outline of a reasonable deal seems to be emerging, at least from the U.S.-European-Ukrainian side.
The ‘Logic of Reason’ – and the ‘Logic of Force’
Therein is the big problem: it doesn’t matter how reasonable and well-refined the Western position is. The Russians are still in the happy position of sitting back and waiting for more Western concessions, offering little themselves, and continuing to attack Ukraine. Most with experience negotiating with the Kremlin recognize the problem: as generations of Western diplomats and statesmen have found, and as George Kennan put it in 1946, the Kremlin is “impervious to the logic of reason.” Fortunately, Kennan also observed, the Kremlin is responsive to the “logic of force.” The United States has offered concessions — no Ukrainian accession to NATO and U.S. recognition that much of Ukraine’s territory will remain in Russian hands for the foreseeable future. Russia has offered little.
Absent Russian efforts to close the deal, the United States, with Europe, needs to turn up the heat on Russia. Trump’s belated recognition on April 26 that Putin may in fact be playing him could set the stage for such a move. Growing criticism from conservative U.S. media and Republicans in Congress of excessive solicitude for Russia’s demands could help move U.S. policy in that direction.
Options for additional pressure are abundant: with the price of oil down, Russian income from oil sales is sagging. The United States and Europe could lower the oil price cap while increasing enforcement by sanctioning the remainder of the “shadow fleet” of tankers evading the cap; they could use the threat of secondary sanctions to push third countries to reduce their purchases of Russian oil, based on a previous and successful economic sanction against Iran; and they could impose a full financial embargo, with selected exceptions. These options may have been what Trump was suggesting in his April 26 social media post.
Economic pressure must be supplemented by a U.S. commitment to continue and even increase military assistance and/or sales or “lend-lease” type arrangements to Ukraine. The point would be clear: the United States is now prepared to consolidate a common Western position and squeeze Russia until it negotiates in a more reasonable frame of mind.
A deal that brings a ceasefire roughly along the existing lines, with de facto but not formal recognition of Russian occupation of Ukrainian territory, and security arrangements for Ukraine that involve Western forces inside the country could work. The Russians won’t accept anything like this willingly. But, when the tables are turned against them, the Kremlin has been known to accept a great many things that skeptics deemed impossible. Time, therefore, to turn the tables.
