For all the rightful rage and fear millions across the globe feel over Donald Trump’s return to power, it’s time to recognize one grim but straightforward truth: He’s more right than wrong about Russia and Ukraine. Liberals in America and Europe still can’t accept this, in part because Trump is so incendiary and prone to falsehoods. Yes, it’s absurd to brand Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator” for suspending elections during wartime but say nothing about Vladimir Putin, an autocrat who has presided over rigged elections in Russia for a quarter-century. Yes, it was Russia that invaded Ukraine, precipitating a war that has, collectively, killed hundreds of thousands of troops on both sides. Putin, if he had his druthers, would have subsumed all of Ukraine.
But peace must come, and it must come soon. The new minerals agreement between the U.S. and Ukraine is a beginning. It is less exploitative than it seemed at first blush and includes a reconstruction fund and some kind of security guarantee. The American government should take the lead because it has heavily funded and effectively guided the Ukrainian military throughout the three horrific years of war, and it should play a direct role in reaching an accord that can guarantee an end to all hostilities, a preservation of Ukrainian civilian life, and the winding down of tensions between the U.S. and Russia, the two great nuclear powers on the planet. As early as 2022, the United States could have spearheaded a serious peace effort, but it never did; the Biden administration mistakenly believed, along with the Western European powers, that Ukraine could actually win the war against Russia, driving Putin’s troops fully out of the territories they newly seized and even Crimea itself, which Russia occupied a decade ago.
The Realpolitik of all of this never made much sense, and it was why a few prominent dissenting voices, including the late Henry Kissinger and the leftist icon Noam Chomsky, reached a similar conclusion: Europe and the Biden administration were deluding themselves. It was a form of crackpot realism, an insistence on full-scale victory against all available evidence.
Early in the war, it became clear that Russia could not, in fact, conquer all of Ukraine and march onward into Poland and the rest of Europe, as Adolf Hitler did at the start of World War II. This was thanks, in part, to U.S. military aid but also to the realities of modern warfare. Today’s military technology — including drones and surveillance — makes blitzkrieg-style land invasions exceedingly difficult. Just as Ukraine could not achieve any long promised “breakthroughs” in the war — every ballyhooed counteroffensive failed — Russia could not penetrate very deeply beyond a few regions of Ukraine.
By the summer of 2022, it was growing obvious to anyone who wasn’t blinkered by military propaganda that this clash would not at all resemble what took place in World War II. A much better analogy was the First World War, when rapid technological advances begat brutal trench warfare, the battle lines barely shifting over multiple years as millions were slaughtered. In three years of fighting, neither Ukraine nor Russia can claim huge progress. All the old Biden hands and Western European leaders managed to accomplish is buying a bit more time, through tremendous bloodshed, for a negotiated end to a war that could have ended sooner.
If the Trump administration was too fast to broadcast its bargaining aims to Russia before the sides formally entered into peace talks — Ukraine should be involved, but the U.S. needs to lead — the goals, despite the outrage of liberal internationalists, are sensible: no NATO membership for Ukraine, no American troops in Ukraine, and no American military guarantee for European Union troops in Ukraine. No American president is willing to deploy American troops into combat with Russia — and no Congress in the near term will support it — so NATO membership will be untenable. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s statement that Ukraine could not reconquer its lost territories recognized a reality that has been obvious to all cogent military analysts for more than a year, since the utter failure of the Ukrainian military offensive in 2023, as Anatole Lieven has argued.
Greater security issues, as they were during the Cold War, can be hashed out only between Washington and Moscow. NATO membership for Ukraine is up to the existing members of NATO, not Ukraine, and each member has a veto. It will be extraordinarily challenging for Zelensky to accept a compromise agreement unless he tells the hard-liners in his own country he has no choice but to do what the Americans say. British and European suggestions of support for Ukraine’s military sans the United States — with European troops guaranteeing a cease-fire — are nonsensical and potentially destructive, making it harder for Zelensky to sell a peace deal.
Now the negotiations can commence. The United States made the first move, and it is up to Russia to reasonably counter. The contours of an agreement will rest on American willingness to accommodate Russian security concerns, like the deployment of U.S. troops on Russia’s borders, in return for specific Ukrainian demands. Some are more viable than others, and this will be part of the negotiation. None of this is straightforward — there will be inevitable setbacks, and none of the negotiating parties is terribly reliable — but it is all better than endless warfare. Russia hawks describe an enemy as threatening as the old Soviet empire, but three years of de facto trench warfare have not validated their worldview. Putin has hesitated to launch a mass-conscription campaign within Russia that could, in theory, completely overwhelm the Ukrainian military, an indicator that he is wary of alienating Russian citizens (hence the North Korean soldiers dying for Russia).
Ukraine, of course, will have to accept that total victory is not possible and never really was. Zelensky will have to hold elections again. Democrats should pressure Trump to strike a better deal for Ukraine, but they shouldn’t try to scuttle a peace agreement or rattle the sabers for a new war as they contest the 2028 nomination. This has been a terrible chapter of world history that needs to be closed as soon as possible. The most direct path to averting a new world war is represented in these negotiations. The guns, soon, must fall silent.
