Owen Matthews
Some wars end in victory. Others conclude with a negotiated peace. But no war in history has ever ended with justice. As the endgame of Putin’s war on Ukraine approaches, it is becoming clear that the final settlement Kyiv will be asked to accept will be both painful and extremely unjust.
In Washington in late August, US President Donald Trump was caught on a hot mic telling visiting European leaders that ‘I think Putin wants to make a deal. You understand? As crazy as it sounds!’. Trump is correct that Putin wants to make a deal to end the war. But he is wrong to say that it’s crazy. What Trump does not seem to have understood is that Putin remains laser-focused on ending the war on his own terms. In practice, this means sticking to most if not all of the war aims with which he began his invasion.
The atmospherics of Trump’s August meeting with Europe’s leaders, plus Keir Starmer and Volodymyr Zelensky, were positive. All agreed that a step had been taken towards peace, and all welcomed Trump’s initiative in opening talks with the Kremlin – though they themselves had shunned Putin for three years. But, in truth, the path to a negotiated peace winds through thickets of thorny detail inhabited by devils by the dozen. It’s worth taking a detailed look at what Putin is likely to demand of Ukraine and its allies, and examine which of them Zelensky can plausibly accept and which are out of the question.
Trump, perhaps understandably given his career in real estate, seems to believe that Putin’s core demand is Ukrainian territory. That’s mistaken. In truth, as France’s President Emmanuel Macron remarked in Washington, what Putin really wants is Ukraine’s political subjugation. That’s what Putin was referring to when he said after his meeting with Trump in Alaska that ‘we need to eliminate all the primary root causes of the conflict’. That is a clear reference to Putin’s familiar historical thesis that Ukraine is an invented country that has been used for centuries by Russia’s enemies as a base from which to attack Moscow – and, in his view, remains so today.
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