As Trump talks peace, Ukraine and NATO learn their place

President Trump did not fulfill his campaign pledge to end the Ukraine war within 24 hours. Yet in just a few days, he has already accomplished more toward that ultimate result than his predecessor, Joe Biden, was able to in three years.

First, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth effectively ruled out future NATO membership for Ukraine, saying that he does not see it as a “realistic outcome” of the war. Trump then went further, telling reporters that he agrees “that a country in Russia’s position” could never allow Ukraine to join NATO, and blamed Biden for refusing to take it off the table. “I don’t see that happening,” he added.

Trump also announced that he spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin and that the two would “start negotiations immediately” to end the Ukraine war. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has done the same with Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov – a dialogue that Rubio’s predecessor, Antony Blinken, shunned throughout his tenure – ahead of a proposed Trump-Putin summit. White House officials, including Rubio and national security adviser Mike Waltz, will meet Russian counterparts in Saudi Arabia next week. The US government’s post-Biden U-turn was capped by Vice President JD Vance, whose speech at the Munich Security Conference only mentioned Ukraine in passing.

In distancing himself from NATO’s Ukraine invite and speaking to Moscow directly, Trump has drawn a stark contrast with Biden.

In January 2022, the Biden administration undermined Germany and France’s last-ditch effort to avoid a Russian invasion by insisting that “there will be no change” to NATO’s “open door,” and reneging on Biden’s apparent concession on placing offensive US weaponry inside Ukraine. After Russia invaded, Biden ensured there would be no change to the conflict by undermining all opportunities for diplomacy. This included refusing to speak with the Kremlin; sabotaging the April 2022 peace deal that Ukrainian and Russian negotiators brokered in Istanbul; and, months later, ignoring the public pleas of his top military chief, Gen. Mark Milley, who took the unprecedented step of breaking with the White House to urge diplomacy.

The Biden administration undermined the April 2022 agreement not only by advising Zelensky to reject it, but by refusing to provide the security guarantees that his government asked for in order to finalize it. As the Washington Post explained at the time, the “awkward reality” was that some NATO proxy warriors believe that “it’s better for the Ukrainians to keep fighting, and dying, than to achieve a peace that comes too early or at too high a cost.” After Ukrainians kept fighting and dying at his behest, Biden closed his presidency by refusing to grant them the NATO membership that they had sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives for.

Now that NATO’s chief patron, under new leadership, has decided that it’s ready for Ukrainians to stop dying, Kyiv and Europe are receiving a new reminder of their subordinate status.

After Trump announced his call with Putin, European states scrambled for his attention. “If there is agreement made behind our backs, it will simply not work,” E.U. foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas complained. “You need Europeans and Ukrainians to implement this deal.” German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius pleaded that Europe should not be relegated to the “kids’ table.” According to the Financial Times, “EU diplomats are increasingly nervous about the difficulties” they’ve had “securing meetings with members of the Trump administration.” A senior Ukrainian official offered a blunt assessment: “It’s clear that everyone is waiting for Trump to tell them what to do.”

As of now, the Trump team is not even telling Europe to sit at the kids’ table. Asked if the US can guarantee that European states will take part in US-led negotiations with Russia, Trump’s envoy for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg, responded: “The answer is no.” Referring to the Minsk peace process overseen by France and Germany, Kellogg added: “They failed miserably. So we’re not going to go down that path.” Kellogg declined to mention that the Minsk “failed” because the US actively undermined it, as Victoria Nuland quietly promised to do at the Munich summit ten years ago this month.

Zelensky is faring even worse. His government has also not been invited to join the US and Russia in Saudi Arabia. Asked if he sees Ukraine as an equal partner in peace talks with Russia, Trump declined to say yes, offering only that this was “an interesting question.”

Trump’s main engagement with Kyiv has been to demand that it hand the US half of Ukraine’s mineral resources. While Zelensky’s “Victory Plan” floated this offer in exchange for continued US military assistance, Trump’s proposed agreement seeks Ukraine’s resources “in exchange for past military assistance,” the Financial Times reports (emphasis added), “and did not contain any proposals for similar future assistance.”

Trump has also not offered any security guarantees for Ukraine, and Hegseth has already ruled out deploying US troops as part of one. According to one report, Trump is only seeking a security guarantee for US control of Ukraine’s mineral wealth, by proposing that US troops would safeguard it once a peace deal with Russia was reached. Trump is therefore seeking compensation from Ukraine and offering it nothing in return.

Zelensky has rejected Trump’s ultimatum. Beyond that one act of defiance, he has turned to his traditional tactics of NATO fearmongering and Trump flattery. If the US pulls out of NATO, Zelensky told NBC News, there is a “100 percent” chance Russia will invade the post-Soviet states of Europe and likely beyond. Meanwhile, after Trump told him that he believes Putin is “ready for these negotiations”, Zelensky says he replied: “No, he’s a liar. He doesn’t want any peace”, and that Putin is merely just “scared about the President Trump.”

Yet it is Zelensky who is scared of US-Russia peace talks, and for good reason. After subordinating his country’s future to Biden’s goal of bleeding Russia, he understands that his own political future is doomed without continued US military support.

“We will have low chance — low chance to survive without support of the United States,” Zelensky told NBC. “I think it’s very important, critical.” In another act of desperation, Zelensky has proposed making Ukraine the backbone of a new European military force. Yet as he acknowledged shortly before the Munich conference, both Ukraine and Europe’s NATO members are toothless without the US military watching over them. “There are voices which say that Europe could offer security guarantees without the Americans, and I always say no,” he said. “Security guarantees without America are not real security guarantees.”

Zelensky may have one ray of hope. Whereas Trump seems inclined to discard Ukraine and Europe, that does not mean that he is prepared to meet Russia’s security demands. While the Kremlin would clearly welcome Trump’s apparent decision to rule out NATO for Ukraine, it went to war three years ago this month for far more than that. Moscow also wants a rollback of NATO’s military presence on Russia’s borders, including the United States’ so-called “missile defense” sites in Poland and Romania, as well as a resumption of the arms control agreements that Trump nixed in his first term.

This week, Trump also floated the possibility of an agreement in which the US, Russia, and China, all cut their military expenditures by half. But as Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov warned, Russia will “defend its interests so as not to be seduced by any false promises” during its upcoming talks with Washington, a reference to broken pledges of years past.

Until Trump provides specifics on how he plans to negotiate with Moscow, any declarations of imminent peace are therefore premature. What is clear is that the US is no longer pretending to care about Ukrainian agency, and openly flaunting the decisive leverage that could have ended this conflict long ago.

No one illustrates this more than the increasingly desperate Zelensky. After signing an October 2022 presidential decree ruling out talks with Moscow so long as Putin is in power – thereby enshrining the neoconservative goal of regime change – Zelensky has now suddenly reversed himself and declared that the only Russian he would speak to is Putin.

By reversing his own signed order in a flailing bid for Trump’s approval, Zelensky is newly underscoring that only one decree has governed Ukraine throughout its catastrophic proxy war with Russia: Washington’s decree, at Ukraine’s expense.