‘I believe he wants peace’ said US president Donald Trump of his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. That was in mid-February. A few weeks later, Trump reiterated his claim. ‘You know, he wants to end the war’ he told reporters, before adding that ‘he’s going to be more generous than he has to be’.
Team Trump’s presentation of Putin as some sort of munificent peacemaker has gone hand in hand with a characterisation of Ukraine and its leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, as intransigent troublemakers. You could be forgiven for thinking that Ukraine is the problem here. That it is standing in the way of a peaceful resolution to Russia’s invasion, because instead of just giving in to Putin’s act of neo-imperial aggression, the pesky Ukrainians keep standing up for themselves and their nation.
According to one pundit, Zelensky is ‘too consumed by rage to care’ about the costs of war. Exasperated by Kyiv’s unwillingness to give in to Russia’s demands, Trump even claimed earlier this month that, ‘I’m finding it more difficult, frankly, to deal with Ukraine’.
Well, yesterday, reality finally intruded upon the myth of Putin the noble war-ender and Zelensky the hate-filled blockage to peace. Russia has now officially rejected a 30-day ceasefire agreement with Ukraine, which Ukraine had, for its part, signed up to.
The Trump administration, labouring under the illusion that Putin is eager to end the invasion as soon as possible, clearly had high hopes for some sort of deal. His officials had already forced Zelensky – on pain of losing all US military aid and intelligence – into accepting the ceasefire agreement last week. All Moscow had to do was sign it off.
But that didn’t happen. During yesterday’s two-and-a-half-hour-long phone call with Trump, Putin did agree to a cessation of attacks on energy infrastructure, a limited prisoner exchange and, er, transnational ice-hockey matches. Yet he refused to halt his military’s ongoing assault on Ukrainian cities, towns and villages. Given the chance to make peace, Putin has opted to continue waging war.
The White House is not presenting it as such, of course. Trump boasted that his chat with Putin was a ‘very good and productive one’ and that ‘we will be working quickly to have a complete ceasefire and, ultimately, an end to this very horrible war’. US-Russia talks over Ukraine are now set to continue at the weekend, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
Yet there has been very little to suggest that Moscow intends to end its invasion anytime soon, certainly not without something that could be dressed up as a Russian victory. Even the energy-infrastructure ceasefire is not quite the peace-seeking move it appears to be. It will help Ukrainians begin to rebuild their ruined power grid, and restore electricity and other critical infrastructure. But it arguably benefits Russia more, preventing Ukraine from staging long-range drone attacks on vital Russian oil infrastructure – one of Kyiv’s few recent strategic successes.
So Putin is no peacemaker, no pragmatic leader seeking a resolution to a nasty conflict. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t looking for an out from the horrendous mess he has made for himself. No doubt, the Kremlin does want to end the fighting in Ukraine – a conflict, after all, that was meant to be a walk-over, but has now cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers.
But Putin wants to do so entirely on his own terms, in ceasefires and peace treaties that enable and amount to Ukraine’s humiliation. He is using the peace talks with the US to wage war on Ukraine by other means.
Indeed, there are reports that Moscow is demanding that Ukraine accepts the loss of four regions, including land that the Russian military doesn’t even hold. And crucially, the Kremlin is insisting, as a condition of any ceasefire and peace, that Ukraine is ‘demilitarised’. That it is deprived, in effect, of the capacity to defend itself. Given Moscow’s actions over the past decade – from the annexation of Crimea in 2014 to the interventions in Donetsk and Luhansk in the mid-2010s to the full-scale invasion of 2022 – that doesn’t seem like a very good idea.
These may well be ‘maximalist’ starting points for negotiations – positions to be bargained over in the course of future discussions. But that is where we come to the most worrying aspect of these US-led ‘peace’ talks. Ukraine doesn’t appear to be allowed to haggle, to counter Moscow’s ‘maximalist’ demands. It doesn’t have any cards, as Trump keeps saying. And so it’s effectively being excluded from these discussions over its own future, reduced to looking on as Putin and Trump disappear behind closed doors to carve up Ukraine – to discuss, in Trump’s words, ‘land… power plants… and dividing up certain assets’.
After yesterday’s phone call, the Kremlin underlined Ukraine’s ongoing exclusion, stating that Trump and Putin had ‘confirmed their intention to continue efforts to achieve a Ukrainian settlement in a bilateral mode’.
Ukraine’s opponents have often dismissed the Russian invasion, and Ukrainian resistance, as a proxy war – a war in which Western powers have supposedly been using Ukrainians to strike blows against Russia. This was always nonsense, as shown by Western nations’ initial and periodic reluctance to supply Ukraine militarily. But what we could now be witnessing is a proxy peace – a negotiating process in which the US and Russia are both using Ukraine to pursue their own ends.
It seems that in peace talks as in war rooms, Moscow menaces Ukrainian sovereignty.
Tim Black is a spiked columnist.
