Don’t Write Off The Ukraine Peace Process

But then it all came crashing down, with Israel launching new attacks on Gaza in the absence of any new hostage releases, and a second long phone call from Trump to Putin resulting in little more than, according to one version, agreement in principle to hold a Ukraine-Russia hockey match. Now, you have the most powerful – and most ambitiously powerful – man in the world, a man who boasted of ending the Ukraine war within 24 hours of entering the White House, and settling conflicts around the world, exposed for the showman and property speculator that he fundamentally remains; his bluster about peace-making having failed to survive its first contacts with reality.

As if this were not failure enough, detractors have been citing North Korea and Afghanistan from his first term as precedents for failure. Well, not so fast.

The idea that even the limited ceasefire agreed by Putin in Wednesday’s phone call – a halt to attacks on energy infrastructure – could come into effect immediately was unlikely in the extreme. There was no formal Russia-Ukraine agreement even on this partial limit to hostilities. Russia’s response had to be communicated back to Ukraine, with Zelenskiy saying, at a press conference in Finland, that Russia had yet to show it wanted peace. Both sides – both Russia and Ukraine – continued attacks overnight. There will need to be formal undertakings by both Ukraine and Russia, and clear definitions of what is included, before there is any signal change. Even then, an actual ceasefire might not be immediate. 

What did happen yesterday was one of the biggest prisoner exchanges since the start of the war. That may not be the landmark change in the course of the war that Trump had hoped for – such exchanges have happened periodically – but it is not nothing, either for the two countries or the people involved and their families.

The lopsided nature of the “unconditional ceasefire” agreed by Ukraine and the United States could never – despite the way it was sometimes presented – be more than an opening bid. Russia had to play ball – which it did (contrary to some expectations): it has remained engaged with the US through two lengthy phone-calls But there were several aspects that it would not accept (and Ukraine and the US would know that).

The timing greatly favoured Ukraine, which was facing an enforced withdrawal from the sliver of Russian territory it held. As reported, Russia offered safe passage to withdrawing troops, but not a halt to its operation – and why would it? And what price an “unconditional ceasefire” that allows replenishments of foreign weapons? Russia’s repeated claim has been that Ukraine would use a pause in fighting to reequip and regroup – as, it now transpires, the 2014-15 Minsk accords were envisaged, and used. Any ceasefire will have to incorporate some guarantee – a reciprocal guarantee that could include Iran and North Korean for Russia – that neither side receives weapons for the duration of a ceasefire.

This should not be impossible. Neither should another aspect of a ceasefire covered in the second Trump-Putin phone-call, relating to shipping in the Black Sea. As with an undertaking about refraining from attacks on energy infrastructure, this was something on an earlier Ukraine wish-list. Again, this might take more time to come into effect than an impatient Trump, and a Ukraine at risk of defeat, would want, but it would be feasible, and desirable. An immediate, unconditional ceasefire held out by one side always had the appearance of a ploy, but agreeing individual elements would be a start that could lead to more.

Another of Russia’s strictures needs to be clarified, if only because – so it seems to me – it has been scurrilously misrepresented by so many in recent days. When Putin says that a durable peace can only be reached by addressing the basic causes of the war – or, as the Kremlin read-out on the Trump phone-call put it, by taking “into account the essential need to eliminate the root causes of the crisis, as well as Russia’s legitimate security interests” – he is not, repeat not, demanding the evisceration or conquest of Ukraine.

Russia lived peaceably alongside an independent, sovereign – and constitutionally neutral – Ukraine, from 1991 (when the Soviet Union broke up) until 2014, when Ukraine was courted by a “now or never, all or nothing” offer of an association agreement with the EU and started edging towards Nato. Ukraine’s return to neutrality is Russia’s deepest “red line”, and there will be no lasting peace without that – as the United States, if not the Europeans, understand.

Lack of agreement on this, however, does not mean that hostilities cannot be suspended, or even brought to an end. What it does mean is that a truce that leaves Nato membership for Ukraine in play will not be the prelude to the durable peace both Russia and Ukraine say, in their different ways, that they want. Suspending the Nato question for a while, on the other hand, might make it possible to negotiate a ceasefire and open the way for Trump to declare a longer-term end to the fighting. There are gradations of success – as there are of failure.

So far at least, suggestions that Putin has outplayed Trump, or “called his bluff” are simply wrong. So long as Putin is still picking up the phone (or logging in) when Trump calls, and both leaders insist that they want to continue the talking, a positive, or reasonably positive, outcome should not be ruled out.

Which is where it might be worth looking back at the Trump foreign policy initiatives dismissed by his critics as abject failures in the context of the first two months of Trump 2.0.

Was Trump’s first-term diplomacy with North Korea the humiliating disaster some are presenting it as now? I would say not. Trump deliberately engaged with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, understanding that the isolation he faced from the outside world and what North Korea saw as the aggressive manoeuvres mounted by the US with South Korea spurred Kim’s nuclear ambitions and threatened to destabilise the whole region. After the first meeting, and for the rest of Trump’s term, North Korea was to an extent tamed. It ceased to be the hugely unpredictable danger it had been – although it started to become that again when the Biden Administration reverted to more conventional US policy, of isolation and military flights skimming North Korea’s coast.

As for Afghanistan, the disaster that was the US and allied withdrawal from Kabul happened well into Biden’s watch. Yes, Trump had authorised talks with the Taliban – evidence that he anticipated, correctly, which way the wind was blowing. But might the withdrawal have been better prepared and executed, and less costly in lives, if Trump had been President? To which the answer surely has to be that it could hardly have been worse – and keeping contacts with the Taliban as they advanced, might have avoided at least some nasty surprises. 

Also worthy of mention are the Abraham Accords, which began a process of normalisation between Israel and the Gulf States, and represented the first real advance in Middle East diplomacy for many years – an advance which the Hamas massacres of 7 October, 2023, brought to such a tragic end. As with North Korea and Afghanistan, this was not a failure of Trump’s making or one that occurred on his watch. It offers neither precedent, nor pointer, for the success or failure of the initiatives that the Trump Administration is engaged in now, and that includes Ukraine.

Mary Dejevsky is an Independent columnist on foreign affairs, having previously been the title’s foreign correspondent in Moscow, Paris and Washington.