A former US ambassador has urged Donald Trump to learn the lessons of history and not force through a bad Ukraine peace deal for the sake of it.
The US president is trying to get both Kyiv and Moscow to agree an end to the war and presented Ukraine with a 28-point plan after discussing it with Russia. Subsequent talks in Geneva have resulted in an alternate 19-point framework that Ukraine largely supports – but it remains to be seen whether the Kremlin is still on board.
Ukraine’s allies in Europe have expressed concern that Trump could force Volodymyr Zelensky to accept a bad peace deal in his rush to get any kind of agreement signed. Trump had initially given Ukraine until Thanksgiving to back his plan, before rowing back from the strict deadline.
Speaking at a briefing hosted by the US think-tank the Atlantic Council, experts monitoring the negotiations cautioned that a bad deal for Ukraine was also “a strategic defeat for the free world”.
While very different circumstances, some have drawn comparisons between Trump’s eagerness to end US involvement in the Ukraine conflict with the rush to withdraw Nato forces from Afghanistan.
In February 2020, Trump signed a deal following protracted negotiations with the Taliban in Doha that he said would “bring peace” to that country under a democratic government.
Instead, after the subsequent Biden administration followed through with the deal and Nato forces were pulled out, the Taliban’s jihadist forces stormed the country and the former Nato-backed government collapsed in a matter of weeks.
The international community still does not recognise the legitimacy of the Taliban regime now installed in Kabul.
Daniel Fried, the former US ambassador to Poland who helped lead the West’s response to Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine after 2014’s illegal annexation of Crimea, said the conflict in Europe and the Afghanistan war are “not alike” – but lessons can and should be learned.
“A bad framework, such as the happily-overtaken 28 points, could presage a strategic defeat for Ukraine, for Europe, and for the free world generally,” he told The Independent. “We seem to be past that point, perhaps because some within the administration recognised that failure in Ukraine could indeed become Trump’s Big Defeat.
“The lesson to be learned? Don’t sign on to bad deals for the sake of signing something,” he said.
Trump has been criticised for trying to push Ukraine into giving up territory to Russian aggression, but the fact is that any deal to end the war will likely require difficult compromises, says Matthew Kroenig, vice president and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.
He says that with Russia occupying around 20 per cent of all Ukrainian territory, the ship of a just peace in the war has long since sailed.
Even in the “bad 28-point plan” that Russia appeared to back, Mr Kroenig says, there were elements that the negotiating teams can work with.
“It was good that it said Ukraine should maintain sovereignty, good that it permitted EU membership, good that it permitted American security guarantees, which is really the most important part of the Nato guarantee,” he said in the briefing.
He said the most important goal at this stage was to avoid a scenario that allows Putin to turn Ukraine into a puppet state. That’s critical, he says, because “Putin doesn’t respect European military power”.
“The Nato guarantee is good because it’s an American guarantee. And a bilateral US defence treaty with its allies in the Indo-Pacific works just fine. Those are the kind of elements we would need in any deal,” the former official from the Department of Defence and intelligence community from the Bush, Obama and previous Trump administration said.
Myroslava Gongadze, a journalist and foreign policy expert who is currently in Ukraine, said that while we don’t know exactly what is in the new 19-point plan, there are two major bones of contention for Zelensky.
“The American side is very concerned about possible leaks of that 19-point plan. So far we don’t really have a clear understanding of what these 19 points look like. What I can say it’s that the question of territorial guarantees and question of Nato membership is left to a Zelensky decision,” the non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council said.
The Ukrainian side has alluded to these points when it says it largely supports the US framework, but that some issues must be discussed at the level of a leaders’ summit.
The changes made between the 28-point plan and the 19-point plan were all geared towards preventing a future Russian re-invasion, she says.
“The point of this exercise [the Geneva talks] was not exactly to make an agreement but to throw out that 28-point plan,” she says.
Fried says there is still hope that these negotiations can lead to a better deal for Ukraine and Europe. “Things are swirling, things are moving fast, but the possibility of a decent outcome is there. It’s a narrow, steep, and rough path, but that path does exist,” he said.
“The bad news is the Russians will not negotiate anything decent without being pressured. And it’s still not clear whether the Trump administration is going to pressure the Russians sufficiently to get past Putin’s predictable and (Sergei) Lavrov’s predictable blocking, but they might,” the ambassador said.
“[We] don’t know where we will end up,” he added. “Things are in motion. Stay tuned.”
