Nothing says “peace talks” like a barrage of Russian missiles. Seventy have just hit Kyiv — alongside 145 drones — even as Donald Trump can do little but post in response. After absurdly blaming Volodymyr Zelensky for holding up a ceasefire, setting him up as the scapegoat for the imminent collapse of his beloved peace process, he’s now switched his guns to his Russian counterpart. “Vladimir, STOP!” Trump begged, in the aftermath of the deadliest assault on the Ukrainian capital since the summer of 2024. So dire are the negotiations that Nato’s Secretary General Mark Rutte has jetted off to Washington to meet with high-ranking members of the Trump administration, in a desperate attempt to bring the talks back from the brink.
But unfortunately for Rutte, it is likely too late. In the two months since the last major blow-up between Trump and Zelensky, that infamous Oval Office fight, almost no progress has been made in the Trump administration’s talks to end the Ukraine war. And though the contours of the current standoff are slightly different than they were in February, the crux of the problems remains the same. The only terms Russia is willing to accept amount to the neutering of Ukraine as a sovereign state, something Kyiv is unlikely to ever accept.
For Trump, that leaves just one alternative: abandoning Ukraine to its fate and rushing ahead to reconfigure the geopolitical map with Putin unilaterally. The real question, then, is what’s next for Kyiv’s hapless European partners — whether they’re ruthless enough to finally take the continent’s defence into their own hands, and whether they’ll even be able to focus on Ukraine now that other new threats emerge much closer to home.
Spirits had been high going into last week’s talks, where European leaders were finally given a seat at the negotiating table. But shortly before flying back from Paris, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted the truth: that if no significant progress is made in the coming days, the Trump administration may walk away from the talks altogether. A week later, the funeral dirge duly sounded. The Ukrainians have rejected Trump’s “final offer”, which apart from handing Crimea to Moscow, included a “de facto” acceptance of Russia’s occupation of 20% of Ukrainian territory, a pledge that Kyiv would never join Nato, and the lifting of all sanctions imposed on Russia since 2014.
Given these concessions would effectively extinguish Ukraine as an independent state, and leave it deeply vulnerable to future Russian aggression, it’s little wonder that Kyiv promptly dismissed them. It’s also unsurprising that, after Rubio refused to attend, planned talks in London were hastily downgraded to meetings between minor diplomats, and that the European leaders who were beaming in Paris are now panicking.
Of course, understanding the failure of the talks goes far beyond the Ukrainians themselves. Trump’s entire approach was coloured by domestic political concerns, a warped understanding of the nature of the conflict, and his own personal agenda. Certainly, the President misunderstood his counterpart in the Kremlin. One mistake was imagining Putin would accept a post-war European peacekeeping force in Ukraine. Another involved dispatching separate envoys to Kyiv and Moscow, which not only led to contradictory messages being sent to both sides, but also made it easier for Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Russia envoy, to buy Putin’s narrative on the war hook, line, and sinker.
That all hints at a broader strategic failure. By jumping haphazardly from preliminary ceasefire agreements to an overarching peace deal, both were doomed to fail, as fundamental disagreements between the Russians and Ukrainians on issues large and small never had space to be resolved. Despite its frequent and determined shuttle diplomacy, the Trump team was never willing to undertake the subtle, painstaking work that conflict resolution of this sort requires, attempting instead to force through particular outcomes rather than figuring out if they actually made sense.
Putin himself also underestimated the role of Trump’s narcissism in the negotiation process. Though he succeeded in getting Trump and his clique to swallow much Kremlin propaganda on Ukraine, Trump’s willingness to regurgitate Russian talking points was superseded only by his desire to feel in control. Zelensky, with few other options, was forced to bend to Trump’s will, while Putin, negotiating from a position of strength, never felt compelled to offer Trump anything more than diplomatic flattery.
Even so, the Russian leader has on several occasions made gestures to appeal to Trump’s ego, including most recently offering to “give up” his aim to annex the parts of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts that Russian troops don’t currently occupy — a performative “concession” that European diplomats believe may be just another ruse. Putin knows that any negotiated settlement would have likely ended with a freeze of the conflict along existing frontlines anyway, making it hard to read his offer as a genuine attempt at compromise. That’s especially given he has continued to refuse to budge on every other major issue at play in the peace talks.
Nevertheless, the move was a retreat from Putin’s most maximalist aims, and clearly signalled that he would prefer to reach a deal on Ukraine under Trump’s auspices if at all possible. All the while, the Russian president is clearly aware he has other, less elegant, ways of reaching his goals, as Russian forces have so brutally demonstrated throughout three years of war. Unlike Trump and Zelensky, then, Putin not only has no incentive to end the conflict. He also has the added luxury of time. Failing to understand both of these facts has been Trump’s mistake from the start.
“Putin not only has no incentive to end the conflict. He also has the added luxury of time.”
So if the talks have failed, what next? What the Americans want is clear: unilaterally normalising ties with Russia. Both Trump and Putin would have much preferred to settle the issue of Ukraine diplomatically before moving on to the grand bargain on Europe’s future, something that the Russian leader has wanted to pursue for years. Putin has long seen Trump as the ideal partner through whom he might finally be able to end Russia’s international isolation from the West, establish new rules of play between Russia and the US in Europe, and at last clarify what sort of relationship Moscow will have with Washington on the world stage. Ever the businessman, Trump’s goals are slightly less lofty — opening up trade and gaining access to Russia’s wealth of rare earth metals top his agenda, as does driving a wedge between Moscow and Beijing.
Yet without the easy end to the war that Trump had promised, he’s characteristically likely to sidestep the problem instead, moving to remake the US-Russia relationship and establish the limits of American involvement in European affairs — leaving Ukraine and its neighbours to deal with Russia alone.
Based on progress so far, that’ll be challenging. For one thing, the continent has struggled to develop a comprehensive plan to support Ukraine. In summit after summit, well-intentioned proposals have fallen flat on their face. That’s most stunningly last month when, during a session of the European Council, a €40 million aid plan for Ukraine was whittled down to just an eighth of that, before further divisions led the idea being abandoned altogether. The Europeans have equally found it hard to develop their own defence industries since Trump’s election. Though they’ve taken several notable steps here, for instance exempting defence spending from EU budget caps, creating a unified security industry across the continent is difficult precisely because the bloc continues to be an amalgamation of different governments and economies. Whatever the EU’s detractors may say about Brussels overreach, the truth is that Europe is still far too disunited to build a single defence sector — without significant bureaucratic hand-wringing anyway. Even so, as hope for any additional American weapons shipments is effectively nil, the long-running pressure on Europe to fill at least some of that void is only growing.
To be fair, there are bright spots amid the litany of failed summits. One is the Danish model of using frozen Russian assets and other sources to fund domestic weapons production in Ukraine. That might make it easier for Ukraine to get desperately needed ammunition and artillery to the frontlines, while European militaries are increasingly moving away from American suppliers to domestic ones. Giving Ukraine the cash it needs to arm itself might also prevent a looming EU schism, with countries like Hungary increasingly unwilling to fund the Ukraine war. By funnelling aid for Ukraine’s domestic arms production through individual EU states, rather than the bloc itself, European countries can let Hungary have its cake and eat it too.
Even so, there are only so many ways that European military aid can replace America’s. The US, after all, has the power to dictate life and death on the Ukrainian battlefield beyond merely cutting off weapons shipments, as it so cynically demonstrated in March when it turned off the targeting systems of the Ukrainian army’s HIMARS, Patriots, and other missile batteries. Without such basic capabilities, which Europe would hardly be able to replicate, it is very possible that Ukraine’s ability to resist Russian advances, even in its current limited capacity, would be greatly jeopardised.
Not that Ukraine is the only calculation here. There’s already an unspoken logic taking hold among some states in Nato’s east that, if push comes to shove, they too may have to abandon Ukraine to protect themselves. The departure of American troops from a key base in Poland only heightens these worries, as do Pentagon proposals to withdraw up to 10,000 soldiers from right across Eastern Europe. Despite working with its regional partners to build a wall of fortifications along Russia’s border, and strengthen itself militarily, Lithuania for one is not taking any chances — its capital city Vilnius has just unveiled a sweeping plan to evacuate its entire population in the event of a Russian invasion.
Regardless of how unified Europe ultimately becomes on defence in the years to come, countries with the most to lose from an unrestrained Russia — from Poland to the Baltics — are already coming to the conclusion that acting unilaterally will be the only way to protect themselves. Latvia’s recent exit from the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel mine deployment is only one example, with more European states likely to take matters into their own hands as Brussels keeps prevaricating. With competing agendas weakening the EU and Nato at this pivotal moment of crisis, regional alliances that act independently of both are likely to arise. There are already clear precedents for this. In 2020, after all, Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine created an alliance called the Lublin Triangle, which has remained active throughout Russia’s war against Ukraine. Though its function is currently diplomatic, it isn’t hard to imagine the Lublin Triangle, or alliances like it, taking on security functions too.
Nor can you blame the Europeans for such frantic action. After all, they may soon find themselves facing a resurgent Moscow — for the first time able to act with impunity on the continent with the tacit blessing of the world’s premier power. Another D-Day is obviously unlikely anytime soon, indeed, but the Europeans may eventually need to consider the US itself as a rival power. And just as the US has increasingly abandoned them, the Europeans may need to face the fact that there may come a day when they too might have to abandon Ukraine — not out of selfishness, but out of cold, hard necessity.
